The asylum situation in Europe in figures

Since the refugee crisis in 2015, Europe has been preoccupied with the issue of migration. Although the number of asylum seekers initially fell after the record years of 2015 and 2016, last year the EU and EFTA countries registered almost as many asylum applications as they did nine years ago. By the end of April this year, around 317,000 applications had been received, which corresponds to an increase of 2 percent compared to the same period last year.

Around three quarters of all asylum applications in Europe were submitted in Germany, France, Spain and Italy – countries that have been among the main destinations for migrants in Europe over the past ten years. But smaller countries such as Austria, Switzerland and Sweden also took in hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.

It is striking that Bulgaria is the only Eastern European country that is one of the main destination countries for asylum seekers in Europe. However, since 2022, Eastern European states have been offering protection to around 1.8 million of the more than 4 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe. However, these refugees are not considered conventional asylum seekers because they benefit from special guidelines that grant them temporary protection as a result of the outbreak of war without them having to go through a regular asylum procedure.

Many migrants come despite little chance of asylum

Apart from Ukrainians, migrants from many other countries are seeking refuge in EU and EFTA countries. At the end of 2023, asylum seekers from 25 different countries, originating from five different regions of the world, arrived in the main destination countries for migrants.

Syrians, Afghans and Turks are among the largest migrant groups. The exceptions are Spain, Italy and Ireland, where asylum seekers from Venezuela, Colombia, Bangladesh and Nigeria arrive more frequently.

Since 2015, applicants from war-torn Syria have had the best chances of obtaining a residence permit in Europe. With the exception of a few months during the coronavirus pandemic, the protection rate for Syrians has consistently been above 80 percent across Europe. Only Afghans and Venezuelans have had similar prospects of success recently.

For Afghans, the protection rate increased significantly after the Taliban seized power in August 2021. The chances of asylum for Venezuelans increased after President Nicolás Maduro led the country into a severe economic and political crisis. The crisis deepened after Maduro’s controversial re-election as president in 2019 and led to massive protests against his government across the country.

The picture is different for other migrant groups from the most common countries of origin. Many continue to come to Europe, although their prospects of staying are slim. Last year, for example, almost 100,000 Turks applied for asylum, but across Europe only around 20 percent received a positive decision in the first instance.

Many rejected asylum seekers remain in Europe

More than 1.2 million asylum applications are currently still open, with more than half of the applicants waiting for a decision for more than six months. In hundreds of thousands of cases each year, however, the authorities reject the asylum applications and ask the migrants to leave the country. Among migrants from countries outside the EU and EFTA alone, the so-called third countries, almost 500,000 people were required to leave the country at the end of 2023. By spring 2024, more than 100,000 more had been added. However, only about a quarter of the third-country nationals actually left.

France has the greatest discrepancy between migrants who are required to leave the country and those who have actually left: the country wants to deport by far the most migrants – in 2023 alone, almost 140,000 people from third countries were expelled from the country. But only about 11,000 actually left France.

In other European countries, too, only a small proportion of the rejected migrants complied with the request to leave the country. Only Sweden, Poland and Lithuania managed to deport more than half of those rejected.

Among those most frequently asked to leave the country are migrants from Morocco, Algeria, Afghanistan and Syria.

However, those who actually leave the country are primarily citizens from Georgia, Albania and Turkey. The EU has readmission agreements with these countries. The situation is different for Afghans, Syrians and Bangladeshis who are required to leave the country – the majority of them remain in Europe. The security situation in Syria and Afghanistan is considered too unstable for repatriation. There is no legally binding readmission agreement with Bangladesh.

Dublin procedures regularly fail

It is not just the return of rejected migrants to third countries that is going badly. The EU and EFTA states that make up the Schengen area are having difficulty consistently implementing their own asylum rules. These rules stipulate that people seeking protection can be transferred to the state in which they first entered the Schengen area. As part of the so-called Dublin procedure, a country submits a request for readmission to the responsible state.

Last year, European countries submitted almost 200,000 requests to each other, with most of them coming from Germany and France. However, the majority of these requests were not processed. Only around 19,000 Dublin procedures actually led to transfers to the first receiving country.

Returns often fail because those affected file a lawsuit, evade deportation or the responsible states refuse to take them back. Italy in particular has refused to take back migrants from other European countries for over a year. The country has no capacity to take them back, according to Giorgia Meloni’s government.

Bulgaria and Austria have been making similar arguments for some time, where many Dublin requests also come to nothing. Germany is also increasingly turning its back on the Schengen area. Most recently, for example, Berlin expanded border controls at all national borders.

The aim of the measure is to push back irregular migration and to identify and stop Islamists at an early stage, according to the government. It is also a reaction to the terrorist attack in Solingen. The suspect was an asylum seeker who was supposed to be deported to Bulgaria under a Dublin procedure. The transfer failed. However, experience in Austria, for example, suggests that these controls do not have an influence on the number of asylum applications.