21 March 2016, 07:32 GMT
BERLIN (Sputnik) – A record-setting two million foreigners have been registered in Germany in 2015, nearly twice as many as recorded the year before that, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) said in a press release Monday.
"Based on provisional results of a flash estimation of migration statistics, the Federal Statistical Office reports that the arrival of just under 2 million foreign people was registered by the end of 2015," Destatis said.
Net migration amounted to 1.14 million, with around 860,000 foreigners leaving Germany, the governmental body under the German Interior Ministry added.
"This is the highest net immigration of foreigners ever recorded in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany," it stressed.
By comparison, net migration in 2014 totaled 577,000 people with 1.34 million arrivals and 766,000 departures, or 49 percent less than in 2015.
The latest data does not account for the estimated 1.1 million migrants granted refugee status in Germany last year as Europe experiences the greatest refugee crisis in decades that saw nearly two million people cross EU borders in 2015.
