Saturday, December 25, 2021
33 percent increase
Germany is the main destination for asylum seekers in Europe
People from Afghanistan and Syria are fleeing persecution, civil war or political unrest. Your goal: Europe. The number of asylum seekers will increase again in 2021. Germany remains the most desirable destination country within the EU.
More refugees are coming to the EU again – especially to Germany. The newspapers of the Funke media group reported, citing new data from the EU statistical authority Eurostat, that a total of 355,955 first-time asylum applications were registered in the EU in the first nine months of this year. This corresponds to an increase of 15 percent compared to the same period of the previous year. In Germany, the number of asylum applications rose from January to the end of September by 33 percent to 100,240 cases – twice as large as the EU average.
Germany was again the main destination for asylum seekers: 28.4 percent of all first-time asylum applications in the EU were made in Germany. In the same period last year it was 24.3 percent. Other important destination countries for asylum seekers were France with a share of 20 percent of the applications (73,255), Spain with eleven percent (39,755) and Italy with eight percent (28,645). This means that around two thirds of all asylum applications in the 27 EU countries concern the four most populous countries. Hungary brings up the rear: According to EU data, the authorities in the small country with a right-wing populist government only accepted 30 initial asylum applications in the first three quarters.
According to statistics, migrants from Afghanistan and Syria make up the largest groups among asylum seekers in the EU – together they made up a third of all applicants, followed by migrants from Pakistan and Iraq.
Last year, the number of asylum seekers across Europe fell significantly, primarily due to the corona pandemic: the decline in Germany (minus 28 percent fewer initial applications) and in the EU (minus 31 percent) was roughly the same in 2020. The level of 2019, when 612,000 migrants applied in the EU, is unlikely to be reached this year.