Every year, almost 100,000 Europeans seek asylum in EU countries, and the number of applications continues to grow. Yet this is a phenomenon which remains at the margins of the debate on asylum – and that on EU enlargement
All the arguments that have broken out in Europe on the right of asylum in recent years – and the accompanying racism – are based on the idea that asylum seekers are those arriving from across the Mediterranean or Turkey, originating in Africa and Asia. In reality, among those who applied for asylum in EU countries last year there were almost 100,000 European citizens: Albanians, Turks, Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, etc.