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Germany is moving towards a wider use of artificial intelligence in asylum, visa and residence procedures, with the federal government arguing that the technology could make migration administration faster and more consistent. But the proposed rules are already raising concerns about privacy, discrimination and the risk of allowing algorithms to influence decisions about people’s lives.
The federal cabinet approved a draft law called the KI-Migrationsverwaltungsgesetz — the AI Migration Administration Act or KIMVG on 29 July. It’s not yet in force. Before it can become law, it still needs approval from the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, and the government’s stated target for it to take effect is 1 January 2027.
The bill creates a legal and data-protection framework allowing the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), local foreigners’ offices (Ausländerbehörden) and the Foreign Office to build and use AI tools in their day-to-day casework. According to the government’s own announcement, the goal is to make procedures faster, more consistent across the country, and more secure — while stressing that “individual reviews and decisions remain entirely the responsibility of the relevant staff.”
In practice, this could mean several things for someone with a pending case:
- Your application data, along with data from thousands of already-completed cases, could be used to train and test AI systems designed to spot patterns, inconsistencies or processing delays.
- Case officers may increasingly have AI-generated summaries or flags at their side as they work through your file.
- If officials have well-founded doubts about something you’ve stated — for instance, details about your background or circumstances — the law would allow them to cross-check this against publicly available information on the internet.
- These powers wouldn’t stop at asylum cases. They’re designed to extend across visa processing and residence-permit administration too, meaning the tools could eventually touch a much wider group of applicants than just asylum seekers.
The proposed system would extend beyond Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), potentially affecting other migration authorities involved in visa, residence and asylum procedures.
Germany is not starting from scratch. BAMF has already used an AI-based language and dialect recognition system known as DIAS to help assess applicants’ possible country or region of origin. According to a European Parliament briefing, DIAS has been used for certain Arabic dialects since 2017 and for Dari-Persian, Farsi and Pashto since 2022. BAMF describes its findings as supplementary rather than an automated credibility or asylum decision.
Not entirely new territory
Germany has, in fact, already been using algorithmic tools in this space for years, just less visibly. Since 2017, BAMF has used a system called DIAS to analyse voice recordings and estimate the likely dialect — and therefore possible region of origin — of Arabic-speaking applicants, later extended in 2022 to Dari-Persian, Farsi and Pashto speakers. Officials have always described DIAS as a supplementary tool that produces a probability, not a verdict, on someone’s origin. The KIMVG would build a much broader legal foundation around tools like this one, rather than introducing the concept of AI in migration administration from scratch.
Why civil-society groups are worried
The reaction from technology and rights organisations has been sharply critical. The Gesellschaft für Informatik, Germany’s main computer science association, has warned that the draft leaves too many open questions about how these systems will actually be built, and cautioned against bias, false positives, and “automation bias” — the tendency of human officials to defer to a machine’s suggestion rather than scrutinise it independently. Given that lives and futures are at stake, the group argues, even a small error rate is one too many.
AlgorithmWatch, a Berlin-based watchdog on algorithmic decision-making, has gone further, arguing that the bill hands authorities broad powers to use highly sensitive personal migration data for AI development without enough transparency, oversight or protection against discrimination.
The core worry from both groups is the same: even if a human technically signs off on every decision, a recommendation generated by an algorithm — trained partly on the outcomes of past cases — could subtly steer that decision, especially in a system already under pressure to process cases quickly.
The European Parliament has similarly warned that AI in asylum systems can bring efficiency benefits but may also reinforce discrimination, undermine procedural fairness and create privacy risks if systems are inaccurate or biased.
The proposed law is therefore likely to become part of a wider debate about how far Germany should go in using AI when decisions concern asylum, residence and the future of migrants. The draft still has to pass through the legislative process before it can take effect.
Collins Obi
