Last year witnessed a dramatic decrease in the number of migrants who reached Germany.
From nearly 900,000 in 2015, the number tumbled to 280,000 in 2016, according to statistics released by the country’s Interior Ministry this week.This represents a drop of 70%.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said the drop showed “that the measures taken by Germany and Europe have been effective”.
Chief among those measures were the closure in March of the overland Balkan route which stretched from Greece up to Germany and the EU agreement forged with Turkey, also in March, which stayed the influx of refugees, particularly from Syria, into Europe.
At the same time, the German government also declared that some western Balkan nations were “safe”, thus decreasing the likelihood that their citizens would ever be granted refugee status.
The number of migrants applying for asylum in Germany in 2016 rose to more than 745,000. A good number of these refugees had arrived in 2015, but the application system had been too overwhelmed by the sudden arrivals to formally evaluate everyone.
The largest group of asylum seekers, more than one-third, were fleeing the violent conflict in Syria. They were followed by people from Afghanistan (17%) and Iraq (13%)
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