BERLIN — Nearly 1.1 million people were registered as asylum seekers in Germany last year, more than 400,000 of them from Syria, the government said Wednesday.
The Interior Ministry said 1,091,894 people were registered between last January and December. Syrians were by far the biggest single group, accounting for 428,468 people.
They were followed by Afghans, 154,046 of whom were registered, and 121,662 Iraqis.
Germany has seen more refugees and other migrants arrive than any other European country. In the early part of 2015, that included large numbers of people from Balkan countries who have very little chance of winning asylum. The fourth- and fifth-biggest groups of asylum seekers last year came from Albania and Kosovo.
The influx was slower in December than in previous months, with 127,320 people arriving — down from 206,101 in November. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said that was largely because of stormy weather in the Mediterranean Sea.
The tally of registered asylum seekers includes an as-yet-undetermined number of people who were registered twice at different locations or continued to Scandinavia or elsewhere, de Maiziere said. He added that the number of people who actually sought asylum will become clear only as applications come in — “it is under 1 million, but how far under 1 million can only be said in the course of 2016.”
Actual asylum applications have lagged behind arrivals. The government said 476,649 people formally applied last year — the highest number on record and more than double the previous year’s figure of 202,834.
“We think the level of refugees and asylum seekers who have come to Germany is too high and are working so that it isn’t repeated on this scale in 2016,” de Maiziere said.
There’s widespread agreement on that in Germany but disagreement on how to go about it.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has emphasized the importance of diplomacy and getting other European countries to share the burden, but her conservative allies in Bavaria advocate setting a cap on the number of refugees Germany can take. Horst Seehofer, governor of Bavaria, has suggested 200,000.
“International efforts haven’t yet won through,” Seehofer said Wednesday. “We must wait and see what happens in this field in January and February … and then evaluate what we need in addition.”
Seehofer said that if arrivals continue at the pace they did in December, “we would have this year … more refugees than in the whole of 2015.”
Merkel played down the differences as she arrived at an Alpine retreat of Seehofer’s Christian Social Union, insisting that her party and his have much more in common than they have divisions.
She said it was very important both to “achieve an appreciable reduction of the refugees” — by tackling the reasons people are fleeing and sending home rejected asylum seekers — and to preserve freedom of movement within the European Union.
Meanwhile, the biggest political party in Denmark’s ruling bloc said the government needs to go much further than mere ID checks on the German border.
The Danish People’s Party said that significantly more border guards need to be posted around the country to ensure only people who pass identity checks are allowed in. It also wants to suspend the Schengen accord, which allows passport-free travel across much of Europe.
“Schengen has de facto collapsed,” Peter Kofod Poulsen, the party’s justice affairs speaker, said in an interview. “The premise of Schengen was being able to protect” Europe’s external border. Since this is not “working at all,” there will need to be “border controls for several years to come.”
Denmark on Monday introduced temporary spot-checks on its southern border with Germany, 12 hours after systematic ID controls on visitors from abroad went into force in nearby Sweden. Germany’s Foreign Ministry expressed concern that Schengen is “in danger,” after the Danish border checks were announced.
The EU commissioner in charge of migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, convened an emergency meeting with Danish, Swedish and German officials to tell them that passport checks should be kept at “a minimum.”
All had agreed that the principle of freedom of movement for businesses and citizens should be safeguarded, Avramopoulos said.
The Danish People’s Party was founded in 1995 with a declared goal of “preserving Danish heritage.” The People’s Party enjoys the support of about one-fifth of the electorate.
Information for this article was contributed by Geir Moulson of The Associated Press and by Peter Levring of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 01/07/2016