A growing number of asylum seekers are making their way to Europe. In several countries, Switzerland included, there have been calls to close the borders. In this summary, swissinfo.ch shows what countries are in fact most affected by the crisis.

Never before have so many people risked their lives to get to Europe by sea. In the first six months of this year, 137,000 migrants disembarked on the EU’s Mediterranean coasts, 83% more than a year ago. According to the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, they are usually people looking for safe haven, fleeing wars in Syria and Afghanistan or the Eritrean regime.

At a European level, the number of applications for asylum last year was over 660,000, which is almost as much as in the peak period during the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. But the situation varies a great deal from one country to the next. It can be seen from the chart below that in Switzerland, for example, asylum requests in 1991 and 1999 topped 40,000, compared with 23,770 last year.

In recent months, several European countries have announced their intention to step up checks at borders. Hungary is going to build a 175km wall at the border with Serbia, while Bulgaria is extending its wall by 130km.

France has stopped hundreds of people trying to cross from Italy at Ventimiglia on the Riviera. In Switzerland, the conservative right Swiss People’s Party has proposed that the army should man the borders, while the local populist party Lega dei Ticinesi in canton Ticino has said it intends to close the border with Italy.

These proposals, denounced by human rights campaigners, do not always come from the countries most affected by the influx of migrants, as the animation below reveals.

(swissinfo.ch)

To cope with increasing numbers of people applying for asylum, the EU member states have been looking for a common humane solution to the migration issue.

While Italy and Greece have hundreds arriving every day, the preferred destinations are still Germany and Sweden. Intending to continue their journey, these migrants often dodge the requirement to register where they first arrive, as laid down by the Dublin Convention, with the tacit approval of the frontline states, who are already submerged in refugees.

At its June summit, the EU finally decided on a redistribution of 40,000 migrants among the member states. The agreement provides for this to be done on a voluntary basis, not fixed quotas depending on GDP, population and unemployment rate as the European Commission had requested. Opposing this way of tackling the problem were Britain, Hungary, Poland and France.

Depending on their profile and country of origin, but also the interpretation of the different countries, migrants do not always have the same chance of having their request for safe haven accepted, as the following chart shows. Last year, just about half of the cases processed (47%) ended in a positive determination, 12 percentage points more than in 2013*.

While some countries are finding it hard to deal with the influx of migrants and are facing a growing mood of hostility to the newcomers among their own citizens, UNHCR figures indicate that 86% of refugees live in a developing country (12.4 million by the end of 2014). Four million Syrians have found safe haven in neighbouring countries. In Lebanon, for example, refugees and asylum seekers now make up a quarter of the population – this is the world’s highest rate per million inhabitants, 12 times higher than Sweden’s.

The map shows the total number of asylum seekers and refugees registered by the UNHCR per million inhabitants or per dollar of GDP***.

Notes on these statistics

* The increase in the rate of acceptance is due in part to the profile of asylum seekers, but also a change in the method of counting used by Eurostat. Since 2014 the so-called Dublin cases (persons already registered in other European countries) have been excluded from the basis of calculation because it is likely that a person might be counted in two different countries.

** Officially, Switzerland talks of a “protection rate” of 58.3% in 2014. This includes both refugees and people not accepted as refugees but granted temporary residence. Eurostat, on the other hand, records an acceptance rate of 70.5%. The reason for the discrepancy is simple: unlike Eurostat, Switzerland continues to include in its calculation the Dublin cases and other cases of people whose request for asylum has not even been examined.

Again unlike the EU, Switzerland uses the term “positive determinations” to mean grants of asylum (25.6% in 2015) and nothing else. Grants of temporary residence are counted under “negative determinations”.

*** The statistics of the UNHCR used in this map are different from those of Eurostat, which were used for the other charts. Eurostat takes solely into consideration the number of asylum requests per reference period, whereas the UNHCR counts the total of asylum requests not yet processed (including some made prior to 2014).
Translated from Italian by Terence MacNamee, swissinfo.ch

SOURCE:

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/refugee-crisis_making-sense-of-migration–facts-and-figures/41560118