Refugees and migration: Is Europe closing its doorways?
The “Global Refugee Crisis 2026” report, published Monday in Berlin, is intended to be a wake-up call, according to its co-editor Petra Bendel from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Bavaria). At its presentation, she expressed concern about the impact of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), a legal framework adopted in 2024 that will become legally binding across all EU member states on June 12: “We fear a further expansion of detention-like accommodation for asylum seekers at the external borders,” Bendel said.
She was especially critical of the plan to concentrate refugees found to have no prospect of asylum in “return hubs,” repatriation centers located in third countries outside of the European Union (EU). These are a central feature of tougher migration policy, that Germany’s Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) party has described as “innovative.”
To set up such centers, however, the EU would be dependent on “cooperation partners,” which it hopes to find in Africa. Tunisia and Egypt have been mentioned as options, as they are separated from Europe only by the Mediterranean Sea. But more remote countries, such as Rwanda and Uganda, are reportedly being considered too.
Abandoning the resettlement program for Afghanistan
In future, people seeking protection will face even greater difficulties than they do already, said Brendel: “We foresee further marginalization of particularly vulnerable groups and individuals.”
For Brendel, the resettlement programs for people from Afghanistan are a case in point. Since the German government halted them, more individuals have been put in danger of being persecuted by the fundamentalist Taliban and many refugees have been left stranded in Pakistan. “That is what I mean when I say the German state should live up to its responsibility to provide protection,” Brendel argued.
Germany has seen reduction in numbers
Franck Düvell, a migration researcher at the University of Osnabrück, described the EU reform as “poorly crafted.” At worst, he says, it could lead to overlapping structures and result in a rollback of refugee rights, as well as those of children, women and families more generally.
Düvell said that there had been a significant decline in the number of refugees arriving in Germany: In 2023, 330,000 people had applied for asylum in the country; two years later, the number stood at only 113,000. And the trend continues: In the first quarter of 2026, around 22,000 asylum applications were registered; extrapolated to the full year, the total could ultimately be fewer than 90,000.
According to the 2026 report, more than 117 million people worldwide are currently displaced. The figure has doubled over the past decade. Most of these are internally displaced persons (IDP), who have sought refuge from war in their home regions or from the effects of climate change, including droughts and floods. Only a fraction of the world’s IDPs ended up in Europe and North America, the report found.
The numbers were declining not only in Germany. The report shows there are between 1.5 and 2 million fewer refugees across Turkey, Iran, and Sudan. And although Russia’s war against Ukraine continued with undiminished intensity, Düvell said that 4 million Ukrainians, who had fled to other parts of Ukraine or to EU countries, had returned to their home towns and villages.
Syria: Is a return completely unrealistic?
What is at least partially possible in Ukraine is completely unrealistic for Syria according to the report’s authors: “It is a completely devastated country; the entire infrastructure is in ruins, and economically, hardly anything is functioning” said Benjamin Etzold of the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (bicc).
There is hunger and extreme poverty everywhere, he added, “But above all, ethnic and religious minorities will not find any protection under the new regime in the country,” he warned. Thus he considered it unrealistic to expect a mass return to Syria anytime soon.
Etzold said that Germany should continue to work to strengthen the United Nations and refugee organizations. “But we are also seeing a decline in Germany,” he pointed out, saying that humanitarian aid had been halved and there had been renewed cuts to the German development cooperation budget.
This article was originally published in German.
