BERLIN, Sept. 16 (Xinhua) -- About 411,000 people in Germany received standard benefits at the end of 2018 in accordance with the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act (AsylbLG), the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) announced on Monday.
According to Destatis, the number of beneficiaries decreased by 12 percent compared to the year 2017. It's the third time in a row the number of refugees in Germany declined. In the year 2015, the number of asylum seekers had peaked. Back then, 975,000 asylum seekers were entitled for benefits.
Last week, Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) said that "we have seen a significant decline in asylum applications" during a Bundestag debate about the budget of the ministry. He was confident that the number of newly arriving asylum seekers at the end of the year would be below the "upper limit" as agreed in the coalition agreement.
The agreement between the CDU/CSU and the SPD states that "based on the experience of the last 20 years, the agreed measures and the directly controllable part of the immigration, we have established that the immigration figures will not exceed the range of 180,000 to 220,000 per year".
In 2018, the German government spent 4.9 billion euros (5.4 billion U.S. dollars) gross, according to Destatis. Compared to the previous year, the expenses for asylum seekers increased by 17 percent.
Although the number of asylum seekers in Germany has been declining, reservations against asylum seekers have been growing among the German population, according to a study published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation earlier this year.
In 2019, 54.1 percent of Germans expressed negative opinions about asylum seekers, "the highest figure ever measured" in the studies since opinions on asylum seekers were first collected in 2011, according to the study.
