Exactly 23,158 people were naturalized in the Free State of Bavaria last year – according to the Ministry of the Interior, that is 14.7 percent more than in 2020. The corona pandemic had temporarily led to a decline in the number. The naturalizations are a sign of successful integration, said Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) on Friday in Munich at the presentation of the statistics.
The minister criticized the federal government’s plans for multiple nationalities. Expanding this and shortening the residence time required for naturalization “I think it sends the wrong signal,” said Herrmann. This could lead to conflicts of loyalty and full integration may not yet have taken place.
In the case of third-country nationals – i.e. those foreigners who do not come from the area of the European Union or the European Economic Area (EEA) – the proportion of multiple nationalities in 2021 was 55.5 percent according to the statistics. According to the minister, this is partly due to the increase in naturalizations from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – i.e. from countries whose citizenship can “almost never” be relinquished.
Most naturalized people come from Romania
Most naturalized people in 2021 – namely 2418 people – came from Romania. In terms of naturalizations from countries of origin outside the EU, Syria with 2,033 people replaced Turkey (1,901 naturalized persons), which had been the leader for years. Among the EU countries, Italy (1096), Poland (815), Hungary (718) and Greece (682) followed. Great Britain has been one of the non-EU countries since Brexit, 576 people were naturalized from the United Kingdom, which means a significant decrease: in 2020 there were 905 people and in 2019 there were still 2087 naturalized Britons.
Representing the naturalized, four people “who have integrated excellently in Bavaria” received their naturalization certificates including the text of the Bavarian constitution from the minister: a Romanian who lives in Nuremberg and works as an architect in Erlangen; a Syrian national who graduated from secondary school in Munich and is now completing a commercial apprenticeship with the city of Munich; a Spaniard who studied philology and English in her home country and works in the language center at the Technical University of Nuremberg Georg Simon Ohm, and an Italian citizen from the Kelheim district who studied vehicle technology and engineering acoustics at the Munich University of Applied Sciences and works as a test engineer.