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The asylum-seeker crisis in Brussels is increasing, with more people living in the streets for months as they wait to be registered in the country’s immigration system.
There are nearly 250 migrants sleeping nearby the canal in the city, where they have set up camp in the low temperatures at the country’s arrival centre, with the majority of arrivals coming from Afghanistan, Syria, and sub-Saharan Africa, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
These people have very limited access to food and clean showers and save for the charities in Brussels that offer food, like Doctors Without Borders, enabling them also have drinkable water. Many people have been waiting for months to be registered with the country’s immigration authorities.
According to Fedasil, the government agency that accepts asylum seekers in Belgium, the housing network of 33,000 places has already been full since 2021.
Dr. Jean-Paul Mangion from Doctors Without Borders Belgian Mission says that the problem includes more than lack of proper housing, with the organisation also adding that not a vote-winner wants to provide assistance to asylum seekers and politicians aren’t willing to help.
“It’s not a simple, and it’s not an easy problem to solve because even if you created new places, they would quickly get filled up by the new incoming persons. There are a number of bottlenecks within the asylum system, which need to be taken care of,” Mangion told Euronews.
On the other hand, the office of Belgium’s Immigration Minister Nicole de Moor says that politicians are working as hard to address and offer a solution to the issue.
A record number of 100,000 people applied for protection in Belgium last year, with 37,000 of those seeking international protection, which is 40 per cent more than in the previous year.
Currently, there are 3,000 people waiting to be registered in the asylum seeker system, enabling them to house and work, as the majority of them are living on Brussels’ streets.
According to data by Statista, the number of asylum applications filed had reached 36,871, about 21 per cent below 2015 levels when 44,760 applications were submitted. This indicates that the requests for asylum are increasing in Belgium, almost reaching the high record of 2015 levels when the EU was dealing with a so-called migration crisis.
While in 2021, there were a total of 25,971 applications filed, in 2020, those stood even lower – to 16,910, with the pandemic years and restrictions due to COVID-19 having an impact. However, compared to 2019 levels, the number of applications has surged by 32.9 per cent.
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