Today, by far the largest group of Arabs living in Germany is from Syria, with 1,281,000 people with a Syrian immigrant background alone in 2023.

[4] To a lesser extent, there has been Arab immigration before, most notably by Moroccans during the guest worker movement or by Palestinian and Lebanese refugees who moved to Germany, especially West Berlin, in the 1980s.

The first notable Arab-German was Emily Ruete, born 1844, originally Salama bint Said, a Princess of Zanzibar who became pregnant by a German man who was her neighbor.

Other significant centres of Arab populations in Germany can be found in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, Frankfurt, Munich, Hanover and Hamburg.

[9] Among the German districts with the highest shares of Arab migrants in 2011 were especially cities in the Frankfurt Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region (Frankfurt, Offenbach) and the Rhineland (Bonn, Düsseldorf) with large groups of Moroccan migrants.