Germany has received nearly one in two of all asylum applications made by Syrians in EU member states this year. New figures released by the ministry of the interior on Thursday put the total number of asylum applications filed in Germany so far this year at 362,153, up 130% on January to October 2014. Nearly 104,000 of these applications were made by Syrians. This corresponds to about 47.5% of all requests for asylum submitted by Syrians in EU member states this year.
Together with Germany, the countries that have received the most asylum applications from Syrians relative to their population sizes are Austria, Sweden and Hungary, with 1.3, 1.5, 2.7 and 4.7 applications per 1,000 people respectively.
Europe’s next two biggest economies, France and Britain, on the other hand, have received only 0.03 and 0.02 applications from Syrians per 1,000 people respectively, according to Eurostat data. Germany received 54,877 asylum applications in October alone, an increase of nearly 160% compared with the same month last year, according to the same figures.
But the figure for formal asylum applications doesn’t reveal the full scale of the number of people Germany is absorbing. Filing the required paperwork takes time. The German interior ministry notes that the country registered 181,166 asylum seeker arrivals in October alone. Of these, 88,640 were from Syria, 31,051 from Afghanistan and 21,875 from Iraq.
Between January and October, Germany registered the arrival of 758,473 asylum seekers, about a third of which (243,721) were from Syria.
The country expects to receive more than a million asylum seekers this year. So far this year, 81,547 people have been granted refugee status in Germany, which represents just under 40% of all asylum decisions taken from January to October 2015.
