The European Union's statistics agency, Eurostat, said Tuesday that about 650,000 people applied for asylum in European Union countries for the first time in 2017. That is around half the number of first-time applicants in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people came to Europe, according to AP.

Of the applicants in 2017, the highest percentage of people were Syrians. More than 102,000 first-time asylum applicants in 2017 came from Syria, followed by 47,500 Iraqis and 43,600 Afghans. Together, the three countries made for 30 percent of all asylum requests. 

Nearly one in three attempted to seek asylum in Germany, while one in five tried in Italy, and 14 percent filed the paperwork in France.

Few asylum seekers filed requests in Slovakia, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Estonia. In Slovakia, there were just 27 asylum applications filled per 1 million inhabitants in 2017.

Nearly 1 million applications (old and new) were still being considered by the different national authorities at the end of 2017. That's slightly less than the year before when close to 1.1 million applications were pending.