Last year, over a million people applied for asylum in Europe, not counting citizens of Ukraine who are automatically granted the right to temporary residence.
The exact figure is 1,14 million asylum requests submitted in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland, the EU Asylum Agency announced in its annual report.
That is 18 percent more requests than last year, when the number of asylum seekers remained below the psychological limit of one million.
Most of the Syrians go to Germany
There are no surprises in where people mostly come from or where they go. Again, immigrants from devastated countries such as Syria (181.000) and Afghanistan (114.000) are at the top, followed by Turkey (101.000). Since the end of the year, there have been more and more Palestinians (11.600 in total).
Almost a third of all claims (334.000) were filed in Germany. Admittedly, if you look per capita, then Cyprus is at the top, where there is one asylum seeker for every 78 citizens. In Germany, there is one for every 252 inhabitants.
Thus, last year approaches the figures from the peak of this refugee crisis, when in 2015 there were 1,4 million requests for asylum, and in 2016 1,3 million.
And maybe those numbers will be exceeded, because Great Britain will independently announce at the end of the week how many people sought asylum last year.
Ukrainians do not count
As for the total number of people seeking protection, the situation is actually more severe now.
Because the statistics of asylum seekers do not include 4,4 million Ukrainians who arrived in the EU since the beginning of the Russian aggression, although it is not known how many of them have since returned.
The reason is the decision of the EU member states that these people are automatically granted temporary protection and are therefore not treated as asylum seekers or asylum seekers.
Another novelty in this report - the quota of accepted asylum requests jumped to 43 percent, the highest in the last seven years.
In December, EU members finalized the reform of the asylum system, in an attempt to reduce the number of arrivals.
In the future, people judged to have no high chance of asylum will be held at the EU's external borders, where they will undergo an accelerated procedure and, possibly, be sent back to where they came from.
