Germany’s family reunification clampdown that still let 53,598 people in

The story is less about a border being closed than about a promise being trimmed until it fit the law. Friedrich Merz had announced before taking office that irregular immigration would be brought under control and family reunification suspended. Yet the figures now available from the German Federal Foreign Office show that 53,598 people were granted family reunification visas in the first half of 2026 alone.

That is not a trivial number, unless one has become so accustomed to political slogans that arithmetic no longer matters. It is also only a modest decline from previous years: 63,637 visas were issued in the first six months of 2024, and about 57,000 in the first half of 2025. The trend points downward, but only slightly. A system that still admits more than 53,000 people in six months has not been suspended; it has been adjusted.

The confusion was political, not statistical. In the run-up to the federal election, Union politicians increasingly spoke as if the whole family reunification route for asylum-related cases would be shut down. Markus Söder reinforced that impression in April 2025 on ARD’s Bericht aus Berlin, where he described the family reunification as being suspended and framed the move as a return to pre-2015 order in matters of law and order. The language was strong. The law, as so often in Germany, was less ambitious than the campaign rhetoric.

What actually took effect in July 2025 was only the suspension of family reunification for beneficiaries of subsidiary protection. That group is only one segment of the wider regime. These are people who were neither granted asylum nor refugee status, but received a separate protection status because return to their country of origin could pose risks. The measure therefore did not touch family reunification as a whole, only a narrower category within it.

That distinction matters, because it explains why the numbers did not collapse when the political class declared victory. The law was real, but limited. The performance was broader than the policy. Berlin once again sold control in general terms and then implemented a partial restriction in legal ones. In the German migration debate, that is almost a tradition: the grand gesture first, the footnote later.

The suspension of family reunification for subsidiary protection beneficiaries is set to run for two years from July 2025. If the second half of 2026 follows the first at roughly the same pace, the year would again end with more than 100,000 family reunification visas. That would leave the government with a familiar problem: a hard line announced in public, a softer line in law, and figures that quietly expose the difference.

Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com