Germany will extend its controversial border controls for another six months after turning 46,000 people away and seeing a dramatic drop in asylum applications.

Since border checks within the Schengen Area – the free-movement zone in Europe – are only permitted in exceptional circumstances, Germany must formally notify the EU Commission of its plans.

While the measures were due to expire March 15, they will now be extended until at least September 2026 due to security concerns.

‘We are extending border controls at the borders with our neighboring countries,’ Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told German newspaper Bild, which first reported the extension.

‘Border controls are an element of our reorganisation of migration policy in Germany.’

The measures mean tourists will continue to face security checks and possible delays at border crossings between Germany and its nine neighbouring countries.

Between September 2024 and December 2025, when the checks were in place, the German Federal Police registered 67,918 unauthorised entries through stationary checks at all nine land borders.

Some 46,426 people were turned back directly at the border or deported in connection with an illegal border crossing, while 2,513 were subject to a re-entry ban.

German police carry out border checks on the French border, December 2025

An officer of the German Federal Police (Bundespolizei) escorts a group of migrants near Forst, eastern Germany on October 11, 2023, during a patrol near the border with Poland

Germany will extend its controversial border controls for another six months until September 2026, according to Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt

Some 1,763 people from extremist groups – including the hard-left, hard-right, and Islamist organisations – were identified, while 11,348 people with outstanding arrest warrants were arrested.

The number of first-time asylum applications has sharply declined, with 7,649 people submitting an application to Germany in January, compared with 14,920 at the same time last year.

In September 2024, the temporary controls were extended to Germany’s land borders with France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark.

The temporary measures had already been introduced at its other land borders with Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland. 

In January, illegal immigration in Germany dropped to its lowest level in more than a decade, barring the first year of the pandemic.

From January to November 2025, 106,298 first-time asylum applications were recorded by the national migration agency Bamf, putting Germany on course for its smallest annual total since 2013.

In 2024, number was over double, at 229,751.

Last year, the federal police, responsible for controlling the border, registered 62,526 illegal entries by land, air and sea – half as many as in 2023 when the number was 127,549.

While Merz’s government claims responsibility for the decrease – which began to take hold two years ago – it is difficult to determine the exact cause of the decline. 

The amount of migrants entering the European Union via Belarus, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean has also fell sharply for various reasons – including geopolitical shifts in the Middle East and Poland’s extensive policing measures on its eastern border. 

At the same time as the drop in immigration, a mild but protracted recession has rendered the German economy less attractive than its neighbours. 

‘This kind of political rhetoric or game where they say: ‘Okay, we’ve got refugee and migration flows under control and our restrictions are responsible’ is really very dubious’, Marcus Engler, a social scientist at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research in Berlin, told The Times.

Chancellor Merz has decided to grapple with migration head on, declaring the issue a ‘national emergency’. 

He has ordered German police to turn back virtually all undocumented migrants at the border and has temporarily suspended family reunification.

As a result, the foreign ministry issued only two visas for relatives of asylum seekers between July 31 and December 31, despite 2,586 applications registered by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

On top of this, Merz has also reversed many of Germany’s migration policies, which previously made the country a popular destination for asylum seekers. 

These include the abandoning of voluntary humanitarian refugee intake schemes while also replacing cash benefits with prepaid debit cards that can only be used in physical shops.

Mr Engler added that Merz’s ominous rhetoric about migrants changing Germany’s ‘urban landscape’ has helped create a hostile environment to deter more arrivals. 

But some members of Merz’s coalition want the government to go even further.

Members of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, which controls the national interior ministry, are calling for most of Germany’s 950,000 remaining Syrians to be sent back and for regular deportation flights to Taliban-governed Afghanistan. 

The policies have led the government to loggerheads with the German judiciary.

In the summer, the administrative court in Berlin ruled that three men from Somalia had been turned back illegally at the border with Poland, claiming there was no justification for the ‘state of emergency’ underpinning the order and it thereby violated EU law. 

Other legal experts have claimed that attempts to stop migrants crossing the land border might also go against the European Convention on Human Rights, although these claims have yet to escalate to Strasbourg. 

According to Mr Engler, Berlin has ‘absolutely no evidence at all’ to prove its border controls are working. 

‘Look at the borders: there are hundreds of kilometres of forests and mountains and meadows. These controls will be easy to circumvent for people who really want to,’ he said.

‘But to put it clearly, there is no serious study that shows these border controls result in people [who are fleeing persecution] no longer coming to Germany.’

Politically, Merz hardline anti-migration stance appears to have done little to stop the rise of the hard-right Alternative for German (AFD) party, which are now neck and neck with Merz’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) in the polls.

There is some evidence that the government’s relentless focus on the topic is only driving more voters towards the AfD. 

Concerns have also been raised that the removal of migrants could only exacerbate the strain on an already tight labour market.

Economists have estimated that Germany needs a total of roughly 1.5 million migrants a year – or a net figure of 400,000 once emigration has been factored in – to sustain its workforce at the present level.

And because many of the Syrians who have called Germany home for the past decade are now employed in a lot of key industries, there have been calls for a ‘great deal of pragmatism’ when it comes to deportations.