Figures show dramatic drop between 2016 and 2017 in the EU.
The number of new asylum seekers in Europe dropped by about 50 percent between 2016 and 2017, new figures released on Tuesday by Eurostat show.
Last year, nearly 650,000 people applied for asylum for the first time in EU countries, compared with 1.21 million the year before. Eurostat said this means the number of applicants had dropped back down to a comparable level to 2014, before the height of the refugee crisis in 2015.
Since 2013, the largest group of asylum seekers each year has come from Syria. About 16 percent of first-time applicants in 2017 came from Syria, while asylum seekers from Iraq were the second-largest group at 7.3 percent. Afghan applicants were the third-largest group at 6.7 percent.
Germany processed the most applications in the EU — nearly a third of all asylum seekers registered there. Italy received the second-highest amount of asylum applications at 20 percent of the total, followed by France (14 percent) and Greece (9 percent). But when compared to its population, Greece took in the highest number of applicants per capita, receiving more than 57,000 first-time asylum seekers.
Slovakia registered the lowest number of applications overall at just 150 asylum seekers.
At the end of last year, there were 927,300 pending asylum applications, down from about 1.1 million at the end of 2016.
SOURCE: Politico
