The migrant crisis has left Berlin grappling with a staggering €500 million hole in its budget, forcing the city to consider emergency loans to stay afloat.
Despite lofty claims that migration would bolster the economy and secure pensions with tax revenue, reality paints a grimmer picture. Refugee costs have skyrocketed, straining public resources at a time when essential services like schools are already facing cuts.
Under Berlin’s Christian Democrat (CDU) Mayor Kai Wegner, little has changed from the city’s previous left-leaning administration. Finance Senator Stefan Evers, also of the CDU, is working to secure an emergency loan to manage the mounting costs. However, Berlin’s “debt brake” law restricts new borrowing, requiring legal exceptions to navigate the fiscal crisis.
In 2025, accommodating migrants is projected to cost the city another €500 million. This figure mirrors the €500 million Berlin spent in 2023—equivalent to a jaw-dropping €1.5 million daily—on housing migrants. To cope, Berlin has been eyeing the conversion of massive buildings into refugee housing, which would cost hundreds of millions more over the next decade for just a single facility.
Alarmingly, this €500 million doesn’t even account for additional expenses like education, integration programs, and policing. School budgets were frozen in 2024, but even those cuts haven’t been enough to plug the fiscal gap. A CDU report, prepared with coalition partners from the Social Democrats (SPD), remains unpublished, but details emerging from Tagesspiegel reveal the depth of the crisis.
Berlin housed 41,000 people in accommodations managed by the State Office for Refugee Affairs as of 2023. Although the city took in 21,000 fewer refugees last year than in 2022, when 32,752 arrived, the shortage of housing has become a bottleneck. Still, Berlin appears poised to take on more debt and declare a state of emergency to address the shortfalls.
On a federal level, the situation is even more severe. Germany spent nearly €50 billion on migrants in 2023, exacerbating a nationwide debt crisis and contributing to soaring housing prices. Beyond migration, foreign investors buying up property across Western nations have also driven housing markets into overdrive. The crisis has become so severe that leaders from opposite political camps, like Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and former Czech PM Andrej Babiš, are advocating hefty taxes on foreign property buyers to alleviate the problem.
Berlin’s struggle highlights the unsustainable financial and societal burdens of unchecked migration, with no clear solution in sight. As costs mount, the city and the nation find themselves in a precarious balancing act between humanitarian obligations and economic reality.
