308 Agata Szwed, Statelessness in the Context of the Migration Crisis in Europe: A Growing... ple).18 Countries with the most beneficial economic conditions seem to be the focus of these large-scale asylum flows. Over the last two years, the number of applications for international protection in EU countries has ranged from around 600,000 to 700,000 annually − more than a half fewer than at the beginning of the migration crisis. The lower number of people seeking refuge is mainly due to the fact that the wars have been continuing for several years and most of the victims have already left the territory of their own countries. In some countries, including Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, the situation is still very unstable (often even worse than from 2010 to 2015) and does not seem likely to improve in the coming years. The large variety of migration routes, countries of origin and underlying motives for migration make the current migration crisis particularly difficult to address.19 Besides, a significant number of unaccompanied minors (children without a responsible adult to care for them) have been coming as part of the migration crisis since 2015. These facts characterise the specific position of refugees who have come to Europe during the migration flows. Even though most of them intend to return to their home countries, the vast majority cannot imagine doing so in the near future.20 This is why they prefer to stay in centres for foreigners in Europe, where they hope someday to have relatively better conditions and future prospects than in their ruined homelands and neighbouring places. The vision of a future in Europe is even stronger than the thought of being on the margins of the host society as a result of statelessness. It is difficult to fi nd statistics indicating the exact number of stateless persons in Europe, but it is estimated that there are at least 600,000.21 This is official data, but if de facto stateless persons are added to them, as well as those who, due to differences in national procedures, were not qualified as stateless persons, but whose origin is in fact not known,22 Europe will have to face in the next several years over a million people on the margins of society. Legal steps should be taken to minimise the instance of statelessness and contribute to the social integration of sta18 Asylum statistics, available at <https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/ index.php?title=Asylum_statistics#Citizenship_of_first-time_applicants:_largest_numbers_ from_Syria.2C_Afghanistan_and_Venezuela> accessed 8 August 2020. 19 OECD, ‘Is this Humanitarian Migration Crisis Different?’ (2015) 7 Migration Policy Debates 6. 20 Nasser Yassin, 101 Facts & Figures on the Syrian Refugee Crisis, vol 2 (Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs American University of Beirut 2019) 126. For more on characterising asylum seekers arriving in the EU, see European Commission, ‘An Economic Take on the Refugee Crisis. A Macroeconomic Assessment for the EU’ (2016) 33 European Economy Institutional Paper 9. 21 See European Network on Statelessness, available at <www.statelessness.eu> accessed 23 May 2020. 22 Those persons are treated under specific regimes for ‘non-citizens’ or ‘undefined citizens’.