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Statistics on asylum applications have been used in a highly selective way in the debates on refugees and asylum policies in Western Europe, to justify restrictive measures. This paper provides a more systematic analysis of these statistics. It focuses on the pattern of origins and destinations for asylum seekers in the European Union in the period 1985–1994. Asylum seekers from a particular country of origin often tend to go to a particular country within the European Union. Most of these cases can be attributed to historical ties between the sending and receiving country. When the patterns of origin and destinations are compared for separate years, it becomes clear that the destinations of asylum movements have been constantly changing. Though some of the more remarkable shifts were clearly related to policy measures in the relevant countries, many measures produced only limited effects or failed to have any effect at all.
Böcker et al. (Thu,) studied this question.