Milan – The crisis in Ceuta has put the issue of immigration back on the European agenda. For Italy, the situation is becoming more complicated: following the diplomatic crisis with Spain, a new front has now opened up with Germany. At the heart of the clash between Giorgia Meloni and Friedrich Merz lies the issue of the so-called “Dublin cases”: asylum seekers who have landed on Italian shores but, instead of remaining on the peninsula, have crossed the Alps to reach Germany. The phenomenon of “secondary movements” (the term used to describe the transfer of migrants who originally arrived in one EUcountry to another, known as “Dublin cases” under the 2003 Dublin Regulation) has for years been a key issue for the German centre-right. Under the Dublin Regulation, in fact, an asylum application must be examined by the country of first arrival, and more recent agreements have also confirmed this approach.
Essentially, when the authorities of one country consider that jurisdiction lies with another country, they send a transfer request: for the sender, it is an “outgoing” request; for the recipient, it is an “incoming” one. The same figure, viewed from two opposite perspectives. This is the mechanism that enables us to obtain Eurostat data: incoming and outgoing transfer requests, as well as actual transfers, are counted.
As can be seen from the graph, Germany and France are the main final destinations for migrants seeking asylum: in 2025, Germany processed 35,933 outbound applications and France 30,084. The actual transfers numbered just over 5,000 in the former case and just under 4,000 in the latter.
In 2025, Italy was by far the country that received the most asylum applications within the EU, 24,152, ahead of Germany (16,519) and Croatia (12,358). As it is often the first country of arrival, Italy is designated as the responsible Member State when an asylum seeker continues their journey to another Member State and lodges an application there. The gap between incoming and outgoing requests tells the same story: Italy sent just 5,279 requests, a fifth of those received. The opposite is true of Germany, which in 2025 submitted 35,933 requests compared with 16,519 received—making it the country that submits the most requests to other Member States.
At European level, in 2025, nineteen countries received more requests than they sent, while eight, including Germany and France, sent more than they received. Twelve Member States received fewer than 1,000 requests, with Estonia (88) and Ireland (133) on the fringes of the system. Not all transfer requests are the same: of the 115,625 received in total by the EU, 39.4 per cent are “take-charge requests”—where one country considers that another should deal with the application from scratch—while 60.6 per cent are “take-back requests”, i.e. cases where the person has already applied elsewhere.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
