Asylum seekers in Europe: the "preferred" destination is Germany

What this work is about

The Dublin Treaty allows for asylum seekers to be transferred from one country to another, particularly to countries of first arrival. The Treaty, in force since 1997 and much criticized, aims to avoid asylum seekers to fill applications in several countries and therefore implies the transfer of asylum seekers from one country to another.  

Matteo Villa, researcher at the Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI ), has analyzed the Eurostat data on the transfers of the so-called Dublinati in 2017 for the business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore , to reconstruct the size of the issue.

The first country to which asylum seekers are transferred is Germany, closely followed by Italy. In the last three years , the countries that have received the most applications are Germany, which has had 1.4 million asylum applications, against about 330,000 in Italy and 220,000 in Sweden.

Why we liked it

This work puts the movements of asylum seekers back into a European dimension, highlighting on the one hand the limits of the system in force (Dublin) and showing on the other hand how, despite these limits, EU countries involved in the management of the phenomenon have different policies.