 Distribution of Somali citizens in Germany (2021) | |
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 33,900 [1] | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Berlin · Kassel · Frankfurt | |
| Languages | |
| Somali, German | |
| Religion | |
| Islam |
Somalis in Germany are citizens and residents of Germany who are of Somali descent. According to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, as of 2020, there are a total 47,495 Somalia-born immigrants living in Germany. [1]
Between 1969 and 1991, the flow of Somali refugees to Germany was steady, but it increased quickly after 1991. Many of these later arrivals subsequently moved on to other countries, including the United Kingdom. [2] UNHCR data suggests that 15,000 people from Somalia claimed asylum in Germany between 1990 and 1999. [3] In March 2019, together with the International Organization for Migration, Germany started to run a resettlement programme for refugees in Ethiopia. A first group of 154 Somali refugees were resettled in Germany under the programme in October 2019. [4] According to German Census data, Kassel has the highest share of Somali migrant and has a Somali cultural association. Other cities like Berlin and Frankfurt have also few numbers of Somali population.
In a BKA report on statistics from 2017, migrants to Germany from Somalia constituted 1.7% of all migrants and 2.9% of all migrant crime suspects. [5]
According to the BMFSFJ, of the 5,797 women from Somalia living in Germany in May 2016 without German citizenship, 5,681 (98%) were victims of female genital mutilation. [6]
According to research with 20 Somali refugee women living in shared reception facilities in Germany, many travelled to the country alone, with fear of sexual violence, forced marriage, honor killings or FGM being cited as gender-specific reasons for having fled Somalia. [7]
In the 2010-2012 Somalia became one of the main jihadi destinations for German foreign terrorist fighters. A significant portion of these Somalis belonged to a group of al-Shabaab sympathizers in Bonn, along with German converts to Islam. [8] Andreas Martin Muller, who has the alias Abu Nusaybah, is alleged to be one of the gunmen who attacked a military base in Lamu county Kenya from Somalia.
There were also several mass stabbings made by Somali migrants, including the mass stabbing in Würzburg (2021) where 3 women were killed and few others were injured and other mass stabbing in Ludwigshafen (2022) where 2 men were killed. Both stabbings were rumoured that these incidents were motivated to radicalized religious background.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with over 18,879 staff working in 138 countries as of 2020.
A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a person who has lost the protection of their country of origin and who cannot or is unwilling to return there due to well-founded fear of persecution. Such a person may be called an asylum seeker until granted refugee status by the contracting state or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) if they formally make a claim for asylum.
Since 1945, immigration to the United Kingdom, controlled by British immigration law and to an extent by British nationality law, has been significant, in particular from the Republic of Ireland and from the former British Empire, especially India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Caribbean, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Hong Kong. Since the accession of the UK to the European Communities in the 1970s and the creation of the EU in the early 1990s, immigrants relocated from member states of the European Union, exercising one of the European Union's Four Freedoms. In 2021, since Brexit came into effect, previous EU citizenship's right to newly move to and reside in the UK on a permanent basis does not apply anymore. A smaller number have come as asylum seekers seeking protection as refugees under the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention.
Somalis in the United Kingdom include British citizens and residents born in or with ancestors from Somalia. The United Kingdom (UK) is home to the largest Somali community in Europe, with an estimated 108,000 Somali-born immigrants residing in the UK in 2018 according to the Office for National Statistics. The majority of these live in England, with the largest number found in London. Smaller Somali communities exist in Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Sheffield and Cardiff.
The Somali diaspora or Qurbajoogta refers to Somalis who were born in Greater Somalia and reside in areas of the world that they were not born in. The civil war in Somalia greatly increased the size of the Somali diaspora, as many Somalis moved from Greater Somalia primarily to Europe, North America, Southern Africa and Australia. There are also small Somali populations in other pockets of Europe and Asia. The UN estimates that in 2015, approximately 2 million people from Somalia were living outside of the country's borders.
Immigration and crime refers to the relationship between criminal activity and the phenomenon of immigration. The academic literature and official statistics provide mixed findings for the relationship between immigration and crime. Research in the United States tends to suggest that immigration either has no impact on the crime rate or even that immigrants are less prone to crime. A meta-analysis of 51 studies from 1994–2014 on the relationship between immigration and crime in the United States found that, overall, the immigration-crime association is negative, but the relationship is very weak and there is significant variation in findings across studies. This is in line with a 2009 review of high-quality studies conducted in the United States that also found a negative relationship.
Refugee women face gender-specific challenges in navigating daily life at every stage of their migration experience. Common challenges for all refugee women, regardless of other demographic data, are access to healthcare and physical abuse and instances of discrimination, sexual violence, and human trafficking are the most common ones. But even if women don't become victims of such actions, they often face abuse and disregard for their specific needs and experiences, which leads to complex consequences including demoralization, stigmatization, and mental and physical health decay. The lack of access to appropriate resources from international humanitarian aid organizations is compounded by the prevailing gender assumptions around the world, though recent shifts in gender mainstreaming are aiming to combat these commonalities.
Sudanese refugees are persons originating from the country of Sudan, but seeking refuge outside the borders of their native country. In recent history, Sudan has been the stage for prolonged conflicts and civil wars, as well as environmental changes, namely desertification. These forces have resulted not only in violence and famine but also the forced migration of large numbers of the Sudanese population, both inside and outside the country's borders. Given the expansive geographic territory of Sudan, and the regional and ethnic tensions and conflicts, much of the forced migration in Sudan has been internal. Yet, these populations are not immune to similar issues that typically accompany refugeedom, including economic hardship and providing themselves and their families with sustenance and basic needs. With the creation of a South Sudanese state, questions surrounding southern Sudanese IDPs may become questions of South Sudanese refugees.
Djibouti is a transit and, to a lesser extent, a source and destination country for men, women, and children who are subjected to trafficking in people, specifically conditions of forced labor and forced prostitution. There is little verifiable data on the human trafficking situation in Djibouti. An estimated 150 000 voluntary economic migrants from Ethiopia and Somalia passed illegally through Djibouti en route to Yemen and other locations in the Middle East in 2022; among this group, a small number of women and girls may fall victim to involuntary domestic servitude or forced commercial sexual exploitation after reaching Djibouti City or the Ethiopia-Djibouti trucking corridor. An unknown number of migrants – men, women, and children – are subjected to conditions of forced labor and forced prostitution after reaching Yemen and other destinations in the Middle East. Djibouti's large refugee population – consisting of Somalis, Ethiopians, and Eritreans – as well as foreign street children remain vulnerable to various forms of exploitation within the country, including human trafficking. Older street children reportedly act, at times, as pimps for younger children. A small number of girls from impoverished Djiboutian families may engage in prostitution with the encouragement of family members or other people in prostitution. Members of foreign militaries stationed in Djibouti contribute to the demand for women and girls in prostitution, including trafficking victims.
Refugees of the Syrian civil war are citizens and permanent residents of Syria who have fled the country throughout the Syrian civil war. The pre-war population of the Syrian Arab Republic was estimated at 22 million (2017), including permanent residents. Of that number, the United Nations (UN) identified 13.5 million (2016) as displaced persons, requiring humanitarian assistance. Of these, since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011 more than six million (2016) were internally displaced, and around five million (2016) had crossed into other countries, seeking asylum or placed in Syrian refugee camps worldwide. It is often described as one of the largest refugee crises in history.
LGBT migration is the movement of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people around the world or within one country. LGBT individuals choose to migrate so as to escape discrimination, bad treatment and negative attitudes due to their sexuality, including homophobia and transphobia. These people are inclined to be marginalized and face socio-economic challenges in their home countries. Globally and domestically, many LGBT people attempt to leave discriminatory regions in search of more tolerant ones.
During 2015, there was a period of significantly increased movement of refugees and migrants into Europe. 1.3 million people came to the continent to request asylum, the most in a single year since World War II. They were mostly Syrians, but also included significant numbers from Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and the Balkans. The increase in asylum seekers has been attributed to factors such as the escalation of various wars in the Middle East and ISIL's territorial and military dominance in the region due to the Arab Winter, as well as Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt ceasing to accept Syrian asylum seekers.
A refugee crisis can refer to difficulties and dangerous situations in the reception of large groups of forcibly displaced persons. These could be either internally displaced, refugees, asylum seekers or any other huge groups of migrants.
The Fatal stabbing of Alexandra Mezher occurred on 25 January 2016. Mezher, a 22-year-old worker at an asylum center, of Lebanese Christian origin, was stabbed by a male asylum seeker at a refuge for unaccompanied minors in Mölndal, Sweden. The attacker, a Somali male, was posing as an underage unaccompanied refugee claiming to be 15, but, after the attack, medical examination determined that he was at least 18 years old.
This is a timeline of the European migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016.
Crimes may be committed both against and by immigrants in Germany. Crimes involving foreigners have been a longstanding theme in public debates in Germany. In November 2015, a report that was released by the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) stated that "While the number of refugees is rising very dynamically, the development of crime does not increase to the same extent." Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) noted that "refugees are on average as little or often delinquent as comparison groups of the local population." A 2018 statistical study by researchers at the University of Magdeburg using 2009-2015 data argued that, where analysis is restricted to crimes involving at least one German victim and one refugee suspect and crimes by immigrants against other immigrants are excluded, there is no relationship between the scale of refugee inflow and the crime rate. In 2018 the interior ministry under Horst Seehofer (CSU) published, for the first time, an analysis of the Federal Police Statistic, which includes all those who came via the asylum system to Germany. The report found that the immigrant group, which makes up about 2% of the overall population, contains 8.5% of all suspects, after violations against Germany's alien law are excluded.
Somalis in Norway are citizens and residents of Norway who are of Somali descent. They are the biggest African migration group in Norway. 36.5% of Somalis in Norway live in the capital Oslo. Almost all Somali in Norway have come to Norway as refugees from the Somali Civil War. In 2016, Somalis were the largest non-European migrant group in Norway.
The migration and asylum policy of the European Union is within the area of freedom, security and justice, established to develop and harmonise principles and measures used by member countries of the European Union to regulate migration processes and to manage issues concerning asylum and refugee status in the European Union.
The 2021 Würzburg stabbing occurred on 25 June 2021 in Würzburg, Germany. Abdirahman Jibril, a 24-year-old homeless man of Somalian nationality killed three civilians with a kitchen knife in a Woolworth store and wounded seven others. Minutes later, the police shot the suspect into his leg and arrested him. He had a history of several violent altrications since his 2015 arrival as an asylum seeker in Germany and one day involuntary commitment into a psychiatric hospital a month before the attack. Islamist motives were suspected; he himself said the attack was 'his jihad'. Another refugee accused him to be an al-Shabaab member, who had killed civilians, journalist and police officers in Somalia, which German authorities could not confirm.
The European Union response to the 2015 migrant crisis focused on how the countries organized the efforts in response to the 2015 European migrant crisis at the EU level. The European Commission in May 2015 proposed distributing the incoming refugees based on GDP and population. This proposal was divisive with Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic refusing any refugees. Some nation states then called on the EU to reduce funding for member countries who did not want to share burdens and didn't share "values...need to start asking themselves questions about their place in the European Union". This attempt to coalition build failed, the European Commission proceeded to strengthen existing systems such as the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), reforming the Dublin Regulation and centralizing the asylum process. There was also challenges to the European borders which came from the Mediterranean Sea; as a response the European Border and Coast Guard Agency engaged in a new operation called Operation Triton.
| Africa | |
|---|---|
| Americas | |
| Middle East | |
| Asia | |
| Europe | |
| Oceania | |
