Asylum applications in the Netherlands fell by 46 percent in 2016 from 2015, the IND Immigration Service announced. The decrease is largely a consequence of the EU-Turkey deal from March 2016, which drastically reduced the influx of Syrian asylum seekers. The asylum seekers in the Netherlands are primarily coming from Syria (34 percent), Eritrea (9 percent) and Albania (5 percent). Last year, 18,000 new applications were made, 12,000 of them for family reunification. The Dutch statistics are in line with the recently announced figures from Germany, where applications decreased by a third.