Status: 25.12.2021 8:51 a.m.
After fewer asylum seekers came to the EU in 2020 due to the corona pandemic, the number of initial applications rose again this year. A particularly large number of people wanted to go to Germany – there were disproportionately high numbers of applications.
The number of asylum applications in the EU has risen again – particularly strongly in Germany. As the newspapers of the Funke Mediengruppe report, citing data from the EU statistical agency Eurostat, 355,955 first-time asylum applications were registered in the EU in the first nine months of the year, an increase of 15 percent compared to the same period of the previous year. In Germany, the number of applications rose more than twice as much from January to the end of September – by 33 percent to 100,240 cases.
According to the data, Germany accounted for 28.4 percent of all first-time asylum applications in the EU in the first nine months. That is more than in any other EU country. In the same period of the previous year, the German share 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.
Most asylum seekers come from Syria and Afghanistan
According to statistics, the largest group of asylum seekers in the EU were migrants from Afghanistan and Syria. Together they made up a third of all applicants, followed by migrants from Pakistan and Iraq.
In 2020, the number of asylum seekers across Europe fell significantly, mainly due to the corona pandemic. The decline in Germany (minus 28 percent initial applications) and in the EU (minus 31 percent) was roughly the same last year. Before the 2019 pandemic, 612,000 migrants had applied for asylum in the EU.