Asylum applications in Italy dropped by 50 percent in the first quarter of 2018, compared with the previous year. The decrease was mainly due to a 75 percent drop in migrant landings in Italy, compared with the same period in 2017.
A sharp drop in migrant landings in Italy in the first part of 2018, some 75 percent less than the same period the previous year, has led to asylum requests being halved in the first quarter of 2018 compared with 2017.
The Italian foundation, ISMU, published the figures, which presented a graph with data on the number of requests for international protection filed by migrants in Italy.
Half the number of requests filed
According to ISMU, which cited interior ministry data, the first quarter of 2018 shows the continuation of a downward trend seen in asylum requests that began last year. Asylum requests in 2018 were half of what they had been the previous year: 19,000 compared with 38,000. They were also lower than numbers in the first quarter of 2016.
The drop is presumably linked to a continued decrease in migrant landings, which from January 1 to May 2, 2018, brought to Italy a total of 9,467 migrants, 75 percent less than the same period in 2017.
Nigerians continued to account for the largest number of asylum seekers in the first quarter of 2018, but there was a significant drop both in absolute terms (2,500 applied compared with 8,200 in the first quarter of 2017) and in relative ones. This year so far, Nigerians accounted for 13 percent of asylum seekers compared with over a fifth of the total in the same period the previous year.
A steady rise has been seen in asylum seekers from Bangladesh, followed by Pakistan at 10 percent.
Larger number of minors and rejections
In the first quarter of 2018, over 1,800 unaccompanied minors requested asylum in Italy, accounting for 9.7 percent of the total compared with 6 percent in the same period of the previous year and 5 percent in 2016. Comparing data on the first quarter of the years from 2016 to 2018, it can be seen that the number of requests examined continued to be around 22-23,000, but that in the first three months of 2018 the percentage of rejections rose to 61.4 percent. A drop in the number of those granted refugee status was seen from 9.4 percent to 6.3 percent.