Bamf reports: Almost 500 asylum seekers of unknown origin

For more than 470 asylum seekers, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) was unable to determine the origin of the applicants last year.

This emerges from a list of the authority, which goes back to a request from the parliamentary room.

In the asylum statistics for 2020, an “unexplained” origin is given for a total of 4535 foreigners. According to Bamf, the origin of the majority of these applicants is not really unknown. Instead, they are Kurds or Arabs - predominantly Palestinians who can be proven or “credibly resided in a state without having the relevant nationality,” shared a spokeswoman Request with. Most affected are Kurds and Palestinians, for example from Syria. In these cases, the situation in the respective country - for example Syria - is decisive for the asylum decision. For example, Palestinians who live as refugees in Syria can exercise almost all civil rights there. As a rule, however, they do not receive Syrian citizenship.

"Obviously unfounded"

The nationality “unclear” is also entered for “persons whose information on the country of origin is refuted by the Federal Office or assessed as unbelievable without a different nationality being able to be determined at the same time”.

In such cases, “a rejection is intended to be manifestly unfounded”.

Those who do not have identification papers with them, on the other hand, do not automatically count as persons seeking protection with an unclear identity.

The number of asylum seekers with “unresolved” citizenship has been constant for years at around 4,000 cases per year.

Since the number of those seeking protection has been decreasing every year since 2017, their share of the total number of applicants is growing.

In the list of the most common nationalities in April of this year, “Uncleared” was in fourth place behind Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

A total of 102,581 foreigners applied for asylum in Germany for the first time in 2020.

These included 26,520 applications for protection relating to children born in Germany under the age of one year.