From Cologne to Chaos: How Mass Migration Broke Germany

Germany’s government has finally admitted what its political class spent a decade denying: the Merkel-era experiment in effectively open-ended mass migration has backfired, and the bill—social, financial, and human—is now impossible to hide.

That admission is coming from the very top. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has declared that Syrian refugees no longer have grounds for asylum in Germany, insisting the civil war is over and signalling that more than a million Syrians who arrived since 2015 should begin to return and help rebuild their homeland. It is a complete reversal of Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to open Germany’s borders, and a tacit confession that critics of uncontrolled migration—including Donald Trump—were right about where this path would lead.

In 2015 alone, hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers entered Germany; many more followed in 2016, the bulk of them from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Today, roughly a million Syrians live in Germany, most of them admitted during the 2015–16 wave. The economic burden has been enormous. The federal government quickly found itself spending tens of billions of euros on refugee-related costs: welfare payments, housing, health care, schooling, and a sprawling integration bureaucracy. Year after year, Berlin has poured vast sums into this project, even as other parts of the budget are squeezed. Municipalities warn that the money they receive from the federal government is nowhere near enough, and that the real per-head cost of housing and servicing asylum seekers is far higher than official figures admit.

The symbolic birth of “Welcome Culture” was Merkel’s open-border decision. Its symbolic death came on New Year’s Eve 2015–16 in Cologne. That night, Germany saw a wave of sexual assaults, robberies, and harassment on a scale the country had never experienced. Around Cologne Cathedral and the central train station, groups of men—overwhelmingly described by victims and police as of Arab or North African appearance—surrounded and attacked women in the crowd. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of complaints poured in, including reports of rape. Nationally, well over a thousand women reported being assaulted or robbed that night; in Cologne alone, the number of sexual offenses ran into the hundreds.

Authorities initially downplayed the events, describing a “relaxed” New Year’s, and only slowly acknowledged the scale of the attacks as the public outcry became impossible to ignore. When the truth finally broke through, Cologne became a turning point. For many ordinary Germans, it was the moment they understood what it meant to invite in hundreds of thousands of young men from failed states with little screening, limited integration capacity, and no willingness by the political class to speak honestly about cultural conflicts.

Cologne was not an isolated episode. It was a flashpoint in a broader pattern of crime and insecurity linked to migration. In the years after 2015, German police began issuing special reports on crime “in the context of migration.” They recorded hundreds of thousands of offenses involving asylum seekers and other migrants as suspects, and a clear rise in certain categories of violent and sexual crime. While migrants do not commit every crime in Germany, they are heavily overrepresented in some of the most shocking offenses, including group sexual assaults and gang rapes—forms of violence that were comparatively rare in Germany just a generation ago.

At the same time, non-German nationals account for a far larger share of criminal suspects than their proportion of the population would suggest. Official crime statistics in recent years repeatedly show that foreigners make up a minority of residents but a very large share of suspects in serious crimes, particularly robbery, bodily injury, and sexual offenses. Pro-migration researchers sometimes respond that, at the district level, there is no simple linear relationship between the share of foreigners and overall crime rates, but this misses the point. Germans live with the everyday reality that a small but highly visible subset of young male migrants are driving a disproportionate amount of serious crime, and that these cases are often downplayed or buried until public outrage forces acknowledgement.

The social consequences go beyond crime. The attempt to integrate huge numbers of people from war-torn, patriarchal societies has strained schools, welfare offices, hospitals, and housing markets. Teachers report classrooms where basic instruction is impossible. Local councils complain about being forced to convert sports halls and community centers into permanent refugee housing. Ordinary Germans face rising rents and housing shortages while watching the state prioritize accommodation for newcomers. The promise that the refugees would quickly become a boon to the labor market has proven hollow in many cases, with long-term dependence on welfare becoming the norm for large groups.

At the political level, all of this has produced an earthquake. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), once a fringe protest party, now ranks near the top in national polls and dominates in several eastern states. Migration and crime are central to its rise. Under pressure from this revolt, the old parties have tried to contain the damage by copying parts of AfD’s platform. Merz’s Christian Democrats have already broken their supposed taboo on cooperating with AfD positions, backing hardline immigration measures that call for permanent border controls, fast-track deportations, and a return to strict national control over asylum policy.

Merz’s government is now going further. Berlin is moving to declare that Syria is safe enough for refugees to return, opening the door to large-scale repatriations. It is working on agreements with the Syrian government to deport Syrians convicted of crimes. Funding for NGO sea-rescue operations in the Mediterranean is being cut off, with Berlin signaling that it no longer wants to incentivize boats heading toward Europe. Citizenship rules are being tightened again, and family reunification for those with only limited protection status is being scaled back or frozen. These steps are not the actions of a confident “humanitarian” superpower. They are the moves of a government that knows the system is breaking.

The contrast with the United States under Donald Trump is striking. For years, European leaders and their media allies laughed at Trump’s insistence on border walls, safe-third-country arrangements, and strict asylum enforcement. Yet after his return to the White House, an aggressive enforcement strategy and new regional agreements drove illegal crossings at the southern U.S. border down to levels not seen in decades. The United States, after a period of chaos, chose enforcement and regained control. Germany, by contrast, chose moral posturing and denial—and got Cologne, grim gang-rape statistics, overburdened welfare systems, and a far-right party on the brink of national power.

Germany is not literally destroyed. It remains a wealthy country with functioning institutions and millions of law-abiding citizens, including many immigrants who have integrated successfully. Tens of thousands of Syrians and other newcomers have learned German, found jobs, and even become citizens. But these success stories do not erase the broader damage. Unchecked immigration has overloaded welfare systems and local budgets, eroded public safety, fuelled radicalization on both the Islamist and far-right fringe, and shattered trust in institutions that lied about the scale of the problem for years.

This is what people mean when they say mass, uncontrolled immigration is “destroying” Germany. They mean that the social fabric, sense of security, and fiscal stability of the country have been steadily undermined by a political class that refused to perform its most basic duty: controlling who enters and who stays. For a decade, Germany’s leaders chose to protect their own image as moral visionaries rather than protect their borders and their citizens. Now, with Chancellor Merz reversing course and admitting that vast numbers of Syrians must eventually go home, Germany is conceding—however reluctantly—that Trump was right on the fundamentals. A state that cannot control its borders cannot control its future.

Germany ignored that warning. It is paying the price now. And the rest of Europe would be foolish not to learn from its mistake before the same experiment destroys their own societies in the same slow, avoidable way.

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