Asylum claims from Turkey soar by nearly 80 percent with more arrivals predicted

Jon Austin

London: The numbers of asylum seekers coming to the UK from Turkey is soaring latest Home Office figures show, with more expected to arrive, according to academics.

Home Office statistics for asylum claims in the year ending March 2024 show the number of arrivals from Turkey grew by 78 percent on the previous year.

Just around 2,000 Turkish nationals came from the country to the UK illegally before claiming asylum in the year to the end March 2023, but the figure for the following 12 months was 3,730.

According to a UK-based academic, it is likely to continue to rise due to a perfect storm of factors, including Turkey being a world migrant hub, oppression of Kurds, economic instability and the re-election of President Erdoğan.

He said mistreatment of Kurds continues in Turkey and the there are already 3.6 million refugees based in the country, many of whom are trying to get to Europe and the UK.

Across the EU last year, more than 100,000 Turkish citizens applied for asylum, an 82 percent rise on the previous year, making them the third largest nationality seeking protection in the EU after Syrians and Afghans.

There are around 3.6 million refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey, mostly those who fled the war in neighbouring Syria.

Bahar Baser, an academic at Durham University, who studies Turkish migration said the outflow of Turkish citizens to the EU, onwards to the UK, and separately to the US, was driven by several factors, including the re-election of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has dominated politics there for the last two decades.

He said minorities such as the Kurds faced persecution in Turkey, but others were leaving as the country has also experienced an economic crisis for the last six years.

He told the New Humanitarian: “I call the recent migration a perpetual exodus. Maybe the seeds were already planted in the 2013 Gezi protests or later, in the many elections won by Erdoğan. People have been thinking about leaving, and slowly but surely, they do it.”

Other countries seeing big increases were Pakistan with the number growing by 72 percent over the same period from around 2,600 to 4,480.

Vietnamese nationals also trebled, from 1,046 in the year ending March 2023 to 3,219 in the year ending March 2024.

The most asylum applications came from Afghanistan at 7,669, but this had fallen by 22 percent on the previous year.

In the year ending March 2023, there were 14,347 Albanian applications, linked to the high volumes of Albanian small boat arrivals in the summer of 2022.

The number of Albanian small boat arrivals has fallen substantially in the latest year, and asylum applications from Albanians have therefore decreased as well to just 2,836 – an 80 percent fall – meaning that this nationality has now dropped out of the top ten most common nationalities for asylum applications.

Several other common nationalities also saw a decrease in claims in the latest year, including Iran, down 29 percent to 5,769, and Bangladesh, down 14 percent to 3,384, although this could also rise with the recent ousting of the Government there.

Immigration campaigners have called for greater transparency from the Government on how asylum seekers are entering the country after it emerged that only a third had crossed the Channel in small boats in the same period.

There are fears the common travel area (with Ireland) has become a major new route for illegal immigration after the Home Office refused to release details of how many asylum seekers have taken this route.

The same Home Office figures showed that in the year to March 2024, only 34 per cent of asylum claims were made by migrants who made the perilous crossing of the Channel.

The Home Office report said: “The majority of small boat arrivals claim asylum, but small boat arrivals accounted for just 34 per cent of the total number of people claiming asylum in the UK in the year ending March 2024.

“Asylum seekers use a variety of routes to travel to the UK, including arrival on a legal visa route (i.e. with valid leave to enter), arrival on regular routes, but using fraudulent documents, arrival via clandestine routes, such as small boats, lorries or shipping containers, and arrival through the common travel area without valid permission to enter.”