Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed close over 280,000 migrants in 2016.

In July German Chancellor Angela Merkel shut down the idea of creating upper limits on refugees entering Germany.

Angela Merkel has single-handedly managed to change Germany forever.

The Jerusalem Post reported:

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The number of people with an immigrant background in Germany rose 8.5 percent to a record 18.6 million in 2016, largely due to an increase in refugees, the Federal Statistics Office said on Tuesday.

Just over a fifth of the population – 22.5 percent – were first or second generation immigrants with at least one parent born without German citizenship, the office said.

The figures come in the build-up to national elections in September, with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Social Democrat challenger warning against a repeat of 2015 when she opened the borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants.

Around 2.3 million people in Germany have family links to the Middle East, a rise of almost 51 percent since 2011, and around 740,000 people have African origins, an increase of 46 percent since 2011, the figures showed.