Protection status

It must be stated that refugees in the EU have, in general, more opportunities to change their legal status over time (e.g. to become legal migrants or citizens) than do refugees in some other parts of the world – which reduces the number of refugees in the EU. To illustrate this point, one can look at the number of acquisitions of citizenship in the Member States by nationals of countries with a high number of recognised refugees. For example, about five years after more than half a million Syrian nationals received positive decisions on their applications for international protection in the EU (in 2015 and 2016), we notice a significant increase in the number of Syrian nationals acquiring citizenship in EU Member States (see Figure 20). We can assume a link between the two trends, although we cannot know for certain how many recognised refugees acquire citizenship in a Member State.