More than 13,000 husbands and wives of asylum seekers in Germany failed their bid to join their spouses in 2022 -- due to a lack of sufficient language skills. Critics say that the language requirements set by the government are too stringent to be in line with EU law.
According to figures published by Germany’s Foreign Office, 13,607 people hoping to come to Germany as spouses of recognized asylum seekers failed to pass the language requirement test last year.
Meanwhile, a total of 40,165 people passed their exams successfully, meaning that about one-third failed the test.
The total number of failed tests in previous years used to be around 10,000, marking roughly a 35% growth of the failure rate for last year.
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Passing the test at a Goethe Institute abroad -- Germany's non-profit cultural association supported by the government -- is necessary for subsequent immigration purposes in order to join spouses already in Germany from abroad.
According to the Foreign Office, a total of 71,127 people received a visa for spousal reunification in 2022, including people who had passed their tests in previous years. Most of them came from India (8,930 people), followed by Turkey (8,778 people) and Lebanon (5,006 people).
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Contravention of EU law
The failure rate was the highest among Ethiopian nationals, with around 61% not succeeding with their exams; however, the number of those sitting the German language exam in Ethiopia was low overall, with 310 out of a total of 507 people in the East African country writing the test last year.
Failure rates were also above average in Ghana and Senegal, with 55.5% and 52.4% of people failing the test, respectively. Senegal, in particular, continues to deliver poor pass rates, with more than one in two people taking the test also failing the previous year.
Gökay Akbulut, a member of the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, told the press that in his view, the language requirements for spousal reunification visas were "socially selective."
The MP, who has a so-called migration background herself, noted that the rate of failure was unacceptably high especially in African countries, stating that this made the execution of the EU-wide right to family reunification "unreasonably difficult."
The latest number of failure rates of German-language tests had been revealed in response to a written question submitted to the federal government by Akbulut.
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with EPD