More and more refugees are heading to Europe, but their number in Germany has decreased
As "Russkaya Germaniya" notes, in 2018 the drop in the number of applications compared to 2017 reached 16 percent. Germany, nevertheless, remains one of the main EU countries for filing applications: 23 percent of asylum seekers in the EU – almost every fourth refugee – chose this country. In previous years, this figure was 28 and 31 percent.
Across the European Union as a whole, the number of applicants increased by 8.6 percent – from 435,610 to 473,215 people, which marked a change in the trend that had emerged in recent years: after the record year 2015 with 1.2 million registered refugees, their number had been steadily declining. In 2019, the EU countries with the largest increase in applications were France and Spain. Eurostat lists Syria, Afghanistan, and Venezuela as the main countries of origin.
The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BaMF) indicates that approximately 22 percent of applications filed in Germany concern children under the age of 1 born in Germany to refugee parents. 35 of the 133,000 applications were filed by people from Syria, 14,700 from Iraq, and third place with about 9,000 applications is Turkey.
In turn, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex recorded a noticeably reduced number of illegal crossings compared to 2018 – about 120,000. The decrease reached 10 percent, said the agency's director Fabrice Leggeri in an interview with Die Welt. The record in the past decade is considered 2015 with 1.2 million unauthorized crossings of the EU's external borders.
"Quantitative indicators are declining, but the pressure of migration flows on Europe remains significant," Leggeri points out. Due to the lack of border controls within the EU, most people who have illegally entered its territory continue moving within the community, which contradicts current legislation – in particular, the Dublin Agreement, which provides for filing an asylum application in the country of arrival, but is far from always actually observed.
The head of Frontex notes significant problems arising in most EU states in connection with sending back to their homeland persons who have not found asylum and have lost the right to stay. In addition, not all applicants register immediately after crossing the external border, taking advantage of opportunities to bypass controls and move to the desired country.
With the overall decrease in the influx of refugees into the European Union, there are two "hot spots" where an increase in border crossings is observed – Greece and the Canary Islands: in both places, the EU borders were crossed by 50 percent more people in 2019 than in 2018. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), last year alone, 2,200 illegal immigrants from African countries arrived in the Canary Islands.
The flow of refugees crossing the border between Turkey and Greece has its own reason: in recent years, Turkey has been persistently assigning places of residence to refugees who have entered its territory, usually far from major centers. Many asylum seekers are not satisfied with this, and they continue their journey to more prosperous places.
The head of Frontex separately notes the increased number of illegal border crossings of the European Union by immigrants from Afghanistan: "We are not only talking about those fleeing directly from that country. The agency has observed many Afghans who worked in Iran. The loss of jobs due to the economic crisis triggered their movement to Turkey with the aim of later entering Europe." In Iran, according to UNHCR, there are currently about one million registered immigrants from Afghanistan alone, and another approximately 2 million people are refugees who bypassed registration.
As of 2019, the protection of the EU's external borders at Frontex was provided by about one and a half thousand employees. In the coming years, a significant increase in staff numbers is planned – up to 10,000 people.