Because of the crisis in Belarus and the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the number of refugees is increasing: According to the EU asylum authority, 40 percent more applications for admission were made in August this year than in 2020, a good 100,000 of them in Germany.
According to the EU Asylum Authority, the number of asylum seekers in Europe has increased significantly. The reasons are a high among Afghan asylum seekers and refugees smuggled into Eastern Europe via Belarus, said Nina Gregori, director of the agency, the Funke media group. In August 2021, around 40 percent more asylum applications were made than at the same time in the previous year.
“We are almost at the level of the time before Corona in Europe in terms of the number of asylum applications.” People from Afghanistan alone have made around 10,000 asylum applications in the EU since August. Some of them came over the Kabul airlift.
The figures from the EU asylum authority show that Germany is the country in the EU where most people sought protection in the first three quarters. In no other EU country had so many asylum applications been submitted by the end of September, namely 100,278 000 applications).
The number of first-time asylum applications in Germany has exceeded the 100,000 mark for the ninth year in a row. During the corona pandemic, significantly fewer refugees and migrants came to the Federal Republic. Last year around 102,500 people submitted an initial application, including 26,500 applications from children who were already born in Germany.
Gregori told the Funke newspapers that the countries bordering Belarus are one of the hotspots of migration this year, especially in Latvia and Lithuania. The situation there is very serious. Lithuania normally registers a total of 500 asylum applications per year, since the beginning of this summer there have been more than 2500 from Belarus alone. The EU must draw attention to the aid to the Eastern European countries in order to provide them with better support in future on asylum issues.