This year there was an increase of 15 percent in first-time asylum applications in the EU compared to the previous year. In Germany they rose by 33%.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin In 2021, Germany has become the main destination for asylum seekers in the European Union to a greater extent than before. This is reported by the newspapers of the Funke media group, citing new data from the EU statistical authority Eurostat, according to a preliminary report. According to this, a total of 355,955 first-time asylum applications were registered in the European Union in the first nine months of this year, which corresponds to an increase of 15 percent compared to the same period in the previous year.
In Germany, the number of asylum applications from January to the end of September rose more than twice as much, according to Eurostat – by 33 percent to 100,240 cases. This means that 28.4 percent of all first-time asylum applications in the EU came from Germany, more than in any other EU country. In the same period of the previous year, the German share was 24.3 percent.
According to Eurostat, other important destination countries for asylum seekers were France with 20 percent of applications (73,255), Spain with 11 percent (39,755) and Italy with 8 percent (28,645). Hungary brings up the rear: According to EU data, the authorities there only accepted 30 initial applications for asylum 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, mainly due to the corona pandemic. Before the 2019 pandemic, 612,000 migrants had applied for asylum in the EU.
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