Asylum applications in the EU hit 996,000 in 2022, the highest level in six years, according to an annual report from the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) published on Tuesday.
The largest groups of people seeking protection in Europe were from Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Venezuela and Colombia.
Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war in their homeland were counted apart. Some 4 million of them are living in the EU with a special temporary protection status.
Taken together, the numbers were putting “acute pressure on already strained reception places in many countries,” the EUAA said.
Several of the EU’s 27 member countries, among them Italy, Poland and Sweden, are taking increasingly hardline stances against irregular migration.
That trend could deepen as the bloc’s economic growth stalls on the back of hiked interest rates, imposed in a bid to address persistently high inflation.
The EU saw a peak in irregular migration in 2015 and 2016, when 2.5 million asylum-seekers arrived, many of them Syrians escaping the conflict in their country.
The EUAA’s data covers the EU’s 27 countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. The four are members of the borderless Schengen area alongside most of the EU states.
The report was published at a time when the EU is negotiating a reform of its asylum and migration rules.
The overhaul seeks to share the burden of hosting asylum-seekers across all member states, to accelerate vetting of asylum demands at the EU’s external border to weed out ones least likely to have viable grounds, and to speed up the return of denied asylum-seekers to their country of origin or transit.
According to the EUAA, the five principal EU countries receiving asylum applications were Germany, France, Spain, Austria and Italy.
Of all the applications, 39 percent received a positive response — the highest recognition rate since 2017.
All but a small fraction of those lodged by Syrians, Ukrainians and Eritreans succeeded.
Across the bloc, 71 percent of applications were lodged by men.
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