More than 38,000 people submitted a first asylum application in the Netherlands in 2023. The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported this on Thursday. That is eight percent more than the year before, when there were 35,500 applications. The CBS figures are based on the asylum figures of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
Naturalization Service (IND). Growth leveled off compared to 2022, when the number of applications increased by 44 percent. The number of follow-up travelers, family members of people who have received a residence permit in the Netherlands, decreased by seven percent last year.
Three quarters of asylum seekers who submitted a first application were male, and three in ten were under the age of 18. Follow-up travelers were predominantly women (six in ten) and minors (just over half). Figures from Statistics Netherlands show that the number of subsequent travelers has remained slightly above ten thousand since 2021. As in previous years, refugees from Syria are the largest group of asylum seekers: more than a third of the people who submitted a first application in 2023 came from there. There are according to data from the UN refugee agency Currently, more than five million Syrians are fleeing due to a civil war that has been going on for years.
Other large groups of asylum seekers come from Turkey and Eritrea. The group of Eritrean asylum seekers will grow by 72 percent in 2023. In Eritrea, a 2022 conflict in the Tigray region caused a humanitarian crisis. Six hundred requests came from people in Ukraine, 460 fewer than in 2022. By the European Temporary Protection Directive Ukrainians do not have to formally apply for asylum in the Netherlands.
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