More British people applying for German citizenship
The number of British people seeking German citizenship has dramatically increased following last year’s vote to leave the European Union.
Britons have made over 1,000 applications in various German metropolitan areas since last June, when 52 percent of them voted to end the UK’s decades-long EU membership, the Local news outlet reported Friday.
According to the report, at least 280 applications were made in Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city, last year. The number stood at 52 in 2012.
A total of 521 applications were sent to the Darmstadt regional government, which has Frankfurt and Wiesbaden within its borders. That is five times more than the total cases in 2015.
The southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg received 386 applications last year, up from the 68 in 2015. While the report said there were an estimated 100,000 Britons living in Germany, it did not clarify how many applications were made across the country in total.
“Even though the reasons for naturalization applications are not collected statistically, for us there is a clear connection” to the referendum to leave the EU, said a Hamburg city spokesman.
Earlier this year, the Irish Foreign Ministry said nationality applications from Britons had increased by 40 percent after the EU vote.
It has been more or less the same story with other EU countries such as Poland, where anybody with one Polish parent is entitled to apply for a passport.
It was announced in October 2016 that over 2,800 Britons had applied for foreign citizenship across 18 European countries in the first eight months of the year, more than two-and-a-half times that of 2015.
The numbers rose almost tenfold in Denmark (from 30 to around 300) and about fourfold in Sweden (from 300 to around 1,100), according to The Guardian. Italy also saw a hike in citizenship requests coming from the UK.
Not all countries saw an increase in citizenship applications, as Eastern European countries with relatively small British communities only recorded a few or no requests at all.
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