Europe Migrant Crisis

The European migrant crisis also called the European refugee crisis  began in the year 2015, when an increasing number of refugees and migrants  made their voyage to the European Union (EU) to seek asylum by traveling across the Mediterranean Sea or through Southeast Europe. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the top three nationalities of the over one million Mediterranean Sea arrivals in 2015 include Syrian (49%), Afghan (21%) and Iraqi (8%). Of the refugees and migrants arriving in EU by sea in 2015, 58% were men, 17% women and 25% children.  

 In the first six months of 2015, Greece overtook Italy as the first EU country of influx, becoming, the starting point of a flow of refugees and migrants moving through Balkan countries to northern European countries, mainly Germany and Sweden. Since April 2015, the European Union  strived to cope with the crisis, increasing funding for border patrol operations in the Mediterranean, devising plans to fight migrant smuggling, launching Operation Sophia ,proposing a new quota system to relocate ,resettling asylum seekers among EU states and alleviating the burden on countries on the external borders of the Union. Individual countries have at times re-launched border controls within the Schengen area, and cracks have emerged between countries willing to accept asylum seekers and others trying to discourage their arrival.

According to Eurostat, European Union member states have received over 1.2 million first time asylum applications in 2015, a number more than double that of the previous year. Four states  including Germany, Hungary, Sweden, and Austria received around two-thirds of the EU's asylum applications in 2015, with Hungary, Sweden, and Austria being the top recipients of asylum applications per capita. The major countries of citizenship of asylum seekers, accounting for more than half of the total, were Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Thomas George