Europe and the recent influx of asylum seekers: the EU Member States capability to grant international protection

Asylum applications in European Union (EU) Member States have had a nonhomogeneous tendency over the past decade, with an unequal distribution of refugee burdens within the EU, a solidarity deficit, and a lack of uniformity in the EU Member States’ refugee protection systems. By using Eurostat data on 26 EU Member States and considering the period 2010–2021, divided into three sub-periods (2010–2013, 2014–2017, 2018–2021), the paper aims to describe the State’s capability to grant international protection and to detect some factors significantly associated with the rate of international protection (RIP). It is an original measure that scales the recognition of protection status to the destination country’s population size. The RIP can be decomposed into three multiplying indicators related to the impact of protection applications, to the administrative effectiveness, and to the willingness of States to grant international protection. We conducted symmetric multivariate analyses, identifying groups of countries with similar granting asylum patterns among EU Member States and assessing the changing approaches of these States during the 2015–2016 refugee crisis, which falls within the second sub-period considered in our analysis. In the 2014 -017 sub-period, more than half of the countries were characterised by administrative ineffectiveness and/or closure in the processing of asylum applications. Conversely, Sweden, Germany, Austria and Malta were largely committed to refugee protection. The adopted regression model confirms the association of selected destination country factors with the State capability to grant international protection to asylum seekers, together with the negative role played by distance.