A woman walks into a German government immigration office. She's Black. The official sitting across from her says, and this is a real quote from a real study, "You're not in Africa, where you can behave like animals." This happened inside a German government building. And a major new study says it's far from the only case.
A three-year investigation into racism across German government authorities has found that discriminatory attitudes and practices are deeply embedded in the government offices that millions of people in Germany depend on every day, from job centres and immigration offices to hospitals, courts, and the police.
The study examined authorities at federal, state, and municipal level, including immigration offices, job centres, employment agencies, social welfare offices, youth welfare offices, health departments, order and regulatory offices, courts, police, and customs.
The study's central finding is that racism in German government authorities is not primarily a matter of individual bad actors. While deliberate and intentional racist discrimination by individual staff members is the exception, deeply rooted stereotypes, prejudices, and discriminatory practices have become embedded in the everyday routines and cultures of public institutions.
When such behaviour by staff in positions of institutional power goes unchallenged, it accumulates into what the study calls institutional racism, a structural problem, not just a personal one. The study also highlights the inherently unequal power dynamic at play: people who approach public authorities are dependent on the decisions of those authorities, often with no alternative. Racism reinforces this power imbalance further.
One of the study's most striking findings comes from a controlled experiment conducted across 60 job centres. Caseworkers were shown different newspaper articles alongside fictional Bürgergeld applications in which the names and nationalities of the applicants were randomly varied. The study found that negative media coverage about benefits fraud attributed to Romanian migrants directly caused caseworkers to treat Romanian applicants more sceptically, viewing their applications as less credible even when all required documents and evidence were present.
Moroccan applicants, by contrast, received more support after the same negative coverage of Romanians. The study concludes that anti-immigration media narratives feed directly into discriminatory decision-making at the counter.
People from racialised groups, including Roma and Sinti people, Muslims, Black people, people of Asian origin, and other people of colour, faced unequal treatment across the range of authorities examined. Roma people faced the most severe disadvantages across all areas including housing, social services, healthcare, and documentation.
Muslim applicants and people from Romania, Bulgaria, Vietnam, Syria, and African countries were subjected to explicit stereotyping by caseworkers, including derogatory remarks and assumptions about fraud, low education levels, and unwillingness to integrate. In a separate open-access survey of 400 Muslim respondents, a quarter said they had been stared at by staff specifically in immigration offices or job centres, and more than half said they had been treated rudely in a public authority.
The study found a stark disparity in how different refugee groups were treated. The EU's Temporary Protection Directive, activated following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, legally granted Ukrainian refugees faster access to the labour market and better social benefits, bypassing the standard asylum procedure. In practice, this created a visible two-tier system.
Official documents were prioritised for translation into Ukrainian while equivalent documents remained unavailable in Arabic, Farsi, or other languages. Case processing ran faster, and access to housing and employment was granted to Ukrainian refugees from the white majority population considerably more quickly than to refugees from other countries.
The study describes the treatment of Roma people fleeing Ukraine as a direct form of institutional discrimination. Within the Ukrainian refugee population, Roma faced the most severe disadvantages at every stage, from initial reception and housing placement to access to social services, healthcare, and interpreting. Discriminatory beliefs about Roma were documented all the way up to management level in some municipal authorities.
The study found that the individual political views of caseworkers influenced how they treated applicants. Staff with social networks where right-leaning attitudes were more prevalent showed significantly higher levels of ethnically discriminatory attitudes. In contrast, staff with more diverse social networks showed lower levels of such attitudes. An anti-immigration atmosphere in certain federal states also had a measurable effect on how public authorities handled cases.
The study identifies language barriers as a significant and under addressed structural risk. People who arrived at appointments without German skills and without an interpreter were treated particularly harshly. The lack of translated materials in languages such as Arabic and Farsi, at a time when Ukrainian-language resources were being rapidly produced, compounded the disadvantage faced by non-Ukrainian migrants and refugees.
The study documents how bureaucratic processing delays caused serious harm to affected individuals. Delayed renewal of residency documents caused people to lose their jobs. Delays in welfare payment processing left families without housing. In health care, limited entitlements and slow processing led to the chronification of illnesses. The study notes that these consequences fall disproportionately on racialised people.
Racialised employees working within public authorities also reported significantly higher rates of professional disadvantage compared to their non-racialised colleagues. Between 12% and 29% of racialised employees who experienced discrimination cited ethnic origin as the cause, depending on the institution. At the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) and the Federal Employment Agency (BA), ethnic origin was the most frequently cited reason for discrimination among affected racialised staff. At the Federal Police (BPOL) and Customs, it was the third most common reason after age and gender.
Racist behaviour among colleagues was frequently dismissed as a joke, and affected employees often chose not to report it for fear of social exclusion within their team. The study found a pronounced internal culture of defensiveness and avoidance when institutional discrimination was raised.
The study explicitly notes that Germany has one of the weakest anti-discrimination laws in Europe by European comparison. The General Equal Treatment Act (AGG) currently applies primarily to civil law relationships, meaning it does not cover the relationship between citizens and state authorities. People have less legal protection against discrimination by a public official than against discrimination by a private business. Berlin's state anti-discrimination law (LADG) is cited as a rare exception and held up as a model for other states.
The study calls for a legally binding, science-based definition of racism to be adopted across all public authorities, along with mandatory anti-racism and diversity strategies that include monitoring and accountability mechanisms.
It also calls for the AGG to be extended to cover the relationship between the state and citizens, the establishment of anti-discrimination offices at federal and state level, anonymous reporting channels for both members of the public and staff, and stronger independent external complaints bodies including ombudspersons. A follow-up project is recommended to translate the findings into practical organisational reform.
Despite the scale and significance of the findings, the Federal Ministry of the Interior published the study online without any accompanying press events. The low-profile release prompted a sharp public response from Federal Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Ferda Ataman, who accused Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) of "sweeping under the table" a study commissioned and funded by his own ministry. Ataman called on Dobrindt to end his "public silence" on the findings.
Ataman noted that one in five enquiries received by the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency relates to discrimination by state bodies. "A democracy lives on the trust of its citizens in their institutions," she said. "When parts of the population feel they are being structurally disadvantaged, that trust erodes."
Study lead Prof. Gert Pickel also made a public call for the federal government to issue its own institutional framework on racism, warning that inaction at the top sets the tone for everything below. "If racism is not addressed at federal level and corresponding measures are not introduced there, then nothing will probably happen further down either," Pickel said. He also called for public authorities to be legally classified as service providers, a step that would significantly increase their accountability under anti-discrimination law.
Die Linke co-leader Ines Schwerdtner called for better staff training across public authorities, warning that appointing anti-discrimination commissioners alone is not sufficient. "It is not enough to simply put commissioners in place," she said.
The InRa study "Institutionen & Rassismus" (Institutions & Racism) is the first large-scale empirical study into racism within German state authorities and public administration. Conducted between early 2022 and end of 2024, it comprised 23 sub-projects at ten research institutions across Germany. The research surveyed 12,833 federal authority employees, alongside a separate open-access study of 400 Muslim respondents.
The study was led by Prof. Dr. Gert Pickel and scientifically coordinated by Dr. Anne-Linda Amira Augustin, both from the Forschungsinstitut Gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt (FGZ). It was commissioned and funded by the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) on the basis of a Bundestag resolution and a cabinet action plan against right-wing extremism and racism adopted in December 2020.
From breaking news to thought-provoking opinion pieces, our newsletter keeps you informed & engaged.
