TIRANA, July 15 – The coronavirus measures seem to have had a significant effect on immigration as fewer Albanians applied for asylum in European Union member countries during May.
According to statistics from the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), a total of 90 citizens from Albania applied for asylum during May, 24 of whom were repeating applicants. This marks a 94 percent drop compared to the same month a year ago, when there were a total of 1,532 applications.
Throughout the first 5 months of 2020, the total asylum applications amounted to about 3000, with a decrease of almost 70 percenton an annual basis.
Although the decline began mainly March, when travel restrictions were imposed and borders with Europe closed, there was a halving of asylum applications in January and February as well, thus when the pandemic had not yet been declared.
During 2019, asylum applications from Albania totaled 22.9 thousand, with a slight increase of 2 percent compared to the previous year, according to EASO,while in total there are a number of about 15 thousand pending cases. In general, over 90 percent of the decisions taken for the first time for Albanian asylum seekers are negative, as Albania is considered a safe country.
As previously, Syrians (1 900) and Afghans (965) continued to lodge the most applications in the EU+, accounting for 28 % of all applications. Both lodged more applications compared to April. Iraqi was the third nationality lodging the most applications (600) in May, down by 14 % compared to a month earlier. Moroccans lodged almost three times as many applications (393) as in April, the largest increase in absolute terms among all nationalities.
Other citizenships applying for asylum in significant numbers also included Nigerians, Turks, Pakistanis, Iranians, Eritreans, and Somalis; of these, only Turks (- 24 %) and Iranians (- 15 %) lodged fewer applications than in April. However, overall the number of applications lodged by all the above-mentioned nationalities remained below the levels of March 2020 or earlier this year. Citizens of Venezuela and Colombia – who were among the top four countries of origin at the beginning of this year (January – March) – lodged only 131 and 87 applications, respectively.
