€400 Billion: Germany's Official Migration Bill Leaves Out Health, Police and Courts
October 17, 2026 · Frisian News
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Germany has spent at least €400 billion on migration since 2016, according to Welt journalist Björn Harms, but the figure excludes healthcare, policing, courts and prisons, making the true total substantially higher.
Four hundred billion euros. That is the minimum the German state has spent on migration since 2016, according to calculations by Welt journalist Björn Harms, published in his book 'The Refugee Complex - When Tax Money Becomes Loot.' The number is large. It is also incomplete.
The federal government alone recorded €242.5 billion in refugee-related expenditures from 2016 to 2025, per Bundestag reports and Federal Ministry of Finance data compiled by Harms. That sum equals roughly 5.8 percent of total federal budget outlays over the period. Annual spending started at €20.1 billion in 2016, peaked at €29.6 billion in 2023, then eased to €24.8 billion in 2025. Germany's 16 state governments added more than €100 billion from their own budgets. Municipalities contributed further billions. Independent reconstructions place the consolidated figure at around €340 billion on a central estimate, with other calculations reaching €450 billion.
The €400 billion label is a floor, not a ceiling, because it strips out whole categories of cost. Germany spends between €9 billion and €20 billion a year on criminal justice, according to figures cited by Harms, who notes that foreigners account for a disproportionate share of that caseload. One illustration from Harms's reporting: the custom-built high-security court erected to try Saudi national Taleb A., who killed six people and injured more than 300 at the Magdeburg Christmas market, cost €4.5 million on its own.
Policing adds further uncounted billions. Germany's Federal Police force has expanded to between 55,000 and 60,000 total employees, including around 41,000 active frontline officers, as it took on wider mandates across borders, transportation hubs and airports, per Harms. Education costs are absent from the tally too. In Berlin, taxpayers fund the daycare system at €2.5 billion a year, and 57.4 percent of kindergarten-age children there have a migration background, Harms reports.
Housing the asylum population has become a sizeable industry. Harms contacted all 401 German districts and independent cities; 320 responded. As of March 2026, those authorities reported 4,437 communal accommodation centres housing around 295,000 people, meaning roughly one person in every 227 in Germany lives in a taxpayer-financed facility. Hamburg's municipal accommodation company, Fördern & Wohnen, saw its turnover climb from €60 million in 2013 to €747 million in 2025 and its headcount from 948 to 2,228 staff, per the company's annual report cited by Harms. A former managing director who served fewer than five months in 2025 received total payments of €453,000, including severance.
Berlin is reportedly considering higher voluntary return payments. The current programme offers €1,000 per adult and up to €4,000 per family, according to meinbavaria.de. Between January and October 2025, only 2,869 Syrians accepted the offer, while more than 20,700 new asylum applications were filed in the same period. As of mid-2025, 225,000 migrants were officially required to leave, but 82 percent held a temporary suspension blocking their removal.
The excluded items are not trivial. Since 2015, the number of social workers and social educators in Germany has grown from 278,000 to 351,000, per figures in Harms's book, and the federal government spent around €1.3 billion on integration courses in 2025 alone, with six in ten participants leaving without completing the course. Prof. Bernd Raffelhüschen of the University of Freiburg published a study in 2024 estimating that mass immigration has already cost Germany €5.8 trillion in long-run fiscal terms, with a projected total of €19.2 trillion.
Four hundred billion is the figure Harms assembled from official German data. The number those sources exclude is larger.
Published October 17, 2026 · Frisian News