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In 2024, member states of the European Union received in total 754,020 applications for asylum, of which almost half were rejected. Asylum seekers are people who have left their home countries due to a fear of persecution or violations of their human rights, often for political reasons. An asylum seeker becomes a refugee upon being granted asylum, with a number of rights such as being allowed to stay in the country of asylum for an extended period of time then being granted. 

In spite of the large numbers of refugees from fleeing from Ukraine into the European Union due to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, these refugees are mostly not recorded in the data on asylum seekers in Europe, as most EU countries opted to grant refugee status to all Ukranian nationals fleeing the country immediately upon entry, therefore bypassing the need to make an asylum case.

As of 2024, the country that received the greatest number of asylum applications (and which also granted the greatest number of applications) was Germany, which received 250,255 applications. A small number of countries in the EU take on the vast majority of asylum seekers, with these countries - Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Greece, Belgium, and Sweden - exclusively coming from the older members of the EU, who joined before the 2004 enlargements.