The number of asylum seekers in Europe has dropped sharply.
In 2018, the number of migrants applying for asylum in the European Union fell sharply, reaching the level of five years ago, before the 2015 refugee wave.
The European Union's statistics office (Eurostat) announced in Luxembourg on Thursday, March 14, that 580,800 people applied for asylum for the first time last year. This is 11 percent less than in 2017 and almost at the level of five years ago.
A quarter of all asylum applications in the European Union have been received by German authorities, which amounts to 161,900 applications. This makes Germany the country that receives the most asylum applications in the European Union. However, if we compare the number of asylum seekers in Germany to its population, we see that Germany is not at the top of the list of countries where asylum seekers have applied for asylum.
For example, Cyprus had 8,805 asylum seekers per million people, while Greece had 6,051 asylum seekers per million people. In Germany, 1,954 people applied for asylum per million people.
The ratio in Slovakia was 28 asylum seekers per million people last year. Poland, with 63, and Hungary, with 65, are among the countries that have not seen many asylum seekers.
In 2018, the number of people applying for asylum in Germany fell by 18 percent compared to 2017. A total of 36,000 people applied for asylum in Germany for the first time. This was compared with a 70 percent increase in Cyprus and a 60 percent increase in Spain.
Syrians have been the largest group of asylum seekers in Germany since 2013. Last year, 80,900 Syrians applied for asylum in the European Union, half of whom were registered in Germany. The next largest group of asylum seekers were Afghans with 41,000, followed by Iraqis with 39,600.
Source: DW
