Crimes may be committed both against and by immigrants in Germany. Several studies carried out since the s have suggested that the collection of accurate and meaningful statistics makes it difficult to obtain an overall picture of the effect of immigration on crime in Germany.
For example, second or third generation immigrants may be classified as "foreigners" whilst recent immigrants may be classified as German. These are compiled state by state and are sometimes released only after a parliamentary request.
During the s and s, a group known as Gastarbeiter participated in an organised immigration programme to the former West Germany because of labour shortages in the country. The former East Germany also had labour shortages but their "guest worker" programme tended to encourage immigration from other socialist and communist countries. Although the German government did not plan the program as a permanent method of keeping the "guest workers", [ 9 ] after unification and the reform of German Naturalization Laws of the s, former "guest workers" increasingly became German citizens.
A Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich study covering the preceding two decades found that crime rates were higher among immigrants with a strongly different cultural background from Germans. Under the guest worker programme, Turks and Yugoslavs had far higher crime rates than Spaniards and Portuguese, while the highest crime rates were recorded among individuals from third world countries. For third world countries, the immigrants were first generation.
Studies in the early s tended to show little correlation between migrants and crime in Germany. From the start of to the end of , 1,, asylum seekers were registered in total. In November , a report 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.
