MigrationWatchdog

Turkey: what the official figures show

Detected arrivals by illegal entry routes, and the asylum outcomes published for Turkey. Every figure is as its publisher recorded it.

1,158 people recorded as Turkey were detected arriving by illegal entry routes in 2025, and 1,452 asylum claims were made, with 15% of decisions granting protection.

What this page is not

It is a page about figures published for a nationality, not about the people who hold it. Nationality here is as recorded by the publisher, sometimes at the point of encounter and sometimes self-reported.

There is no prison figure on this page, deliberately. This site holds the foreign-national prison population by nationality and publishes it on the index page with the caveat it needs — that prison nationality is not immigration status and includes people living here entirely lawfully. A country-headed page carrying a prison count is the one thing on this site most likely to be screenshotted without that caveat, so the figure is not here at all.

Nothing here is divided by any population. No official count of UK residents of a given nationality exists, so no rate can be constructed and none is — the rule in full.

1,158
detected arrivals, 2025
calendar year 2025 · source
1,452
asylum claims
Year ending June 2026 · source
15%
of decisions granted protection
Year ending June 2026 · source
678
awaiting a decision
Year ending June 2026 · source

Detected arrivals, year by year

3.1k0201820252018 — 02019 — 22020 — 102021 — 692022 — 1,1272023 — 3,0582024 — 1,9442025 — 1,158
People detected arriving by illegal entry routes and recorded as Turkey. Illegal entry routes to the UK summary tables, year ending June 2026 (Home Office).

The highest year in this series is 2023 with 3,058, against 1,158 in 2025. The series covers 2018 to 2025 only. A zero is a zero in the published table — it means none were detected and recorded under this nationality that year, not that none arrived.

calendar year 2025 · source

Asylum outcomes

Claims, decisions and the grant rate as published. Decisions in a period are not decisions on the claims made in that period — a claim can take years, so the two columns describe different groups of people.

Asylum claims, decisions, grant rate and people awaiting a decision for Turkey
MeasureFigure
Asylum claims1,452
Initial decisions2,941
Of those decisions, granted protection15%
Awaiting an initial decision678
Small-boat claims decided1,931
Of those, granted protection12%
Year ending June 2026 · source

The small-boat rows come from a separate published table covering claims by people who arrived on small boats, over its own period — Year ending June 2026. They are a subset of the claims above, not an addition to them.

Other nationalities

Pages exist where both the arrivals series and the asylum outcomes are published.

EritreaAfghanistanIranSudanSomaliaEthiopiaIraqSyriaVietnamYemenPakistanBangladeshIndiaNigeriaBrazilAlbania

All nationalities, compared →

Data as of

Cite this page

Turkey: arrivals, asylum claims and outcomes. Migration Watchdog, data as of 2026-09-03.
https://migrationwatchdog.com/nationalities/turkey
Underlying figures: UK official statistics, re-published under OGL v3.0 — every figure links to its source on the page.

Sources for this page