"We have increasingly got to grips with immigration -- we have created order and clear rules that are being enforced," he told reporters. This graphic shows the number of asylum applications in Germany from 2009 to 2018. The bar on the right shows the nationalities of asylum seekers in 2018. He said that was also why he had defended a goal of bringing asylum applications in Germany down to around 200,000. "Whenever we had numbers below 200,000, there was hardly a (political) debate in Germany," he said.

Source: The Local January 23, 2019 14:05 UTC