With more than 400,000 immigrants, the first of January is recorded as the birthday in the Central Register of Foreigners. According to an inquiry by the AfD member of parliament René Springer, which has been published in the daily newspaper Die Welt, the majority of them come from Syria, Turkey and Afghanistan.

According to the report, a quarter of the 416,420 people with a birthday on the first of January arrived in 2015. Thirteen of the 47 minors recently welcomed from the Greek camps also have a date of birth on the first of January. The first of January is recorded as the date of birth if immigrants do not know when they were born. “With regard to the date of birth, the registration of personal data necessarily provides for an exact date of birth, but not all countries and cultures register birth dates to the day and month,” the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees told the newspaper. The scholar of Islamic Studies Susanne Schröter, on the other hand, assumes that most immigrants know their birthday very well. There are pragmatic reasons for giving a fictitious date. Minors are “in many ways privileged over adults”, so that there is a great incentive “to appear younger than one actually is”.

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