Since 2015, about 6.8 million asylum-seekers have come to Europe. Over 3.6 million of them have been ordered to leave, but only 1 million have actually left. Ten graphics show which countries are particularly attractive for certain groups of migrants, where migrants are most frequently ordered to leave and who actually leaves.
Illustration Joana Kelén / NZZ
In the years since 2015’s surge in refugee arrivals, the issue of migration has continued to trouble European policymakers and voters. After the record years of 2015 and 2016, the number of asylum-seekers fell. However, in 2023, EU and European Free Trade Agreement countries recorded nearly as many asylum applications as nine years previously. By the end of April 2024, around 317,000 applications had been received, an increase of 2% compared to the same period the year before.
Around three-quarters of all asylum applications in Europe are submitted in Germany, France, Spain or Italy – countries that have been among the main destinations for migrants coming to Europe over the last 10 years. But smaller countries such as Austria, Switzerland and Sweden have also taken in hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers.
Strikingly, Bulgaria is the only Eastern European state that numbers among the top destination countries for asylum-seekers in Europe. However, since 2022, Eastern European countries have offered shelter to around 1.8 million of the more than 4 million Ukrainian refugees who have come to Europe. These refugees are not considered traditional asylum-seekers, as they benefit from special regulations that grant them temporary protection as a result of the outbreak of war. They do not have to undergo a regular asylum procedure.
Arriving despite slim chances of asylum
Migrants from many countries other than Ukraine seek refugee status in EU and EFTA states. At the end of 2023, the top destination countries for migrants had received asylum-seekers from more than 20 different countries across five different regions of the world.
For most European destination countries, Syrians, Afghans and Turks are among the largest migrant groups. The exceptions in this regard are Spain, Italy and Ireland, which draw greater numbers of asylum-seekers from Venezuela, Colombia, Bangladesh and Nigeria.
Since 2015, applicants from war-torn Syria have had the best chances of obtaining a residence permit in Europe. With the exception of a few months during the COVID-19 pandemic, the protection rate – that is, the rate at which applications were approved – was consistently above 80% for Syrians across Europe. Recently, only Afghans and Venezuelans have had similar prospects of success.
The protection rate for Afghans increased significantly after the Taliban took power in August 2021. The odds that Venezuelans would be granted asylum rose after President Nicolás Maduro led that country into a severe economic and political crisis. The crisis deepened after Maduro’s controversial reelection as president in 2019, which in turn led to massive protests against his government across the country.
The picture is different for other migrant groups from the most common countries of origin. Many continue to come to Europe even though their prospects of being allowed to stay are slim. Last year, for example, almost 100,000 Turks applied for asylum. But across Europe as a whole, only around 20% of these applications were granted initial approval.
Many of those ordered to leave remain
Around Europe, more than 1.2 million asylum applications currently remain open. More than half of these applicants have been waiting for a decision for more than six months. However, in hundreds of thousands of cases each year, authorities reject the applications for asylum and order the migrants to leave the country. Among migrants from countries outside the EU and EFTA – the group of so-called third countries – nearly 500,000 people were ordered to leave after rejection of their applications in 2023. By spring 2024, more than 100,000 additional people had been added to this list. However, only around one-quarter of these third-country nationals had actually left by this time.
France has the largest discrepancy between the number of migrants who have legally been required to leave the country and the number of those who have actually left. The number of migrants asked to leave is by far the largest in this country – in 2023 alone, almost 140,000 people from third countries were ordered to depart. But only around 11,000 actually left France.
In other European countries, too, only a small proportion of migrants whose asylum applications have been rejected have abided by the request to leave the country. Only Sweden, Poland and Lithuania succeeded in expelling more than half of those ordered to leave.
The people who are most frequently ordered to leave the country in which they have submitted an asylum application are mainly migrants from Morocco, Algeria, Afghanistan and Syria.
However, the majority of those who actually leave the country are citizens of Georgia, Albania or Turkey. The EU has readmission agreements with these countries. The situation is different for Afghans, Syrians and Bangladeshis who are required to leave the country, as a majority of these individuals wind up remaining in Europe. Security conditions in Syria and Afghanistan are considered to be too unstable for repatriations. There is no legally binding readmission agreement with Bangladesh.
Dublin procedures regularly fail
The return of migrants whose asylum applications have been rejected is not the only process going slowly. The EU and EFTA states that make up the Schengen Area also have difficulties in implementing their own asylum rules consistently. These rules stipulate that people seeking protection can be transferred to the country in which they first entered the Schengen Area. As part of the so-called Dublin procedure, a country submits a readmission application to the state deemed to hold responsibility for the individual’s case.
Last year, European countries submitted almost 200,000 such applications to each other, with the majority coming from Germany and France. However, the majority of these requests were not acted on. Only around 19,000 Dublin procedures actually resulted in the migrant’s transfer to the country in which he or she first arrived.
Transfers of this kind often fail because the individuals affected file appeals or evade the deportation process, or the countries deemed to hold responsibility refuse to accept them. Italy in particular has been refusing to take back migrants from other European countries for more than a year. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government has said that the country has no capacity to take in refugees.
Bulgaria and Austria, which also turn down many Dublin readmittance requests, have been arguing along similar lines for some time. Germany is also increasingly questioning the Schengen Area rules. For example, Berlin recently expanded its controls at all national borders.
The aim of this initiative is ostensibly to reduce irregular migration and to identify and stop Islamists before they enter the country, according to the government. This has in part been a reaction to the Aug. 23 knife attack in Solingen, in which three people were killed. The suspect was an asylum-seeker who was meant to have been deported to Bulgaria as part of a Dublin procedure. This transfer was never carried out. However, experience in Austria, for example, suggests that border controls of this kind do not ultimately have an impact on the number of asylum applications submitted.
Contribution: Jonas Oesch and Joana Kelén
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Publish date : 2024-09-23 07:39:00
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