New statistics have revealed that France is now tied with Germany for new asylum applications this year, with over 90,000 migrants attempting to claim asylum in France.

A document from the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) claims that France has seen a total of 91,372 asylum applications so far in 2019, just 767 less than Germany over the same period, French newspaper Le Bien Publique reports.

France and Germany combined have taken in roughly 40 per cent of all asylum seekers in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland in 2019.

In 2018, Germany saw 184,000 asylum applications, while France saw a record 123,000, a number which beat the previous record set just one year before in 2017.

Didier Leschi, Director-General of the French Office for Immigration and Integration, explained the increase of asylum applications in France, saying: “France is not less protective than other countries, it is the opposite: this partly explains the attractiveness of our country and the fact that the asylum application continues to increase.”

Underage Migrants Cost France Two Billion Euros Per Year https://t.co/OWzoxMDRpk — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) September 8, 2019

“We are seeing a very large influx of people from safe countries of origin in Eastern Europe who prefer to come to France because they are less protected in Germany,” Leschi added.

“We are also seeing the arrival in France of those who have been rejected in other European countries, such as in Northern Europe and Germany, particularly the Afghans because the assessment of the situation in Afghanistan is different according to the asylum systems of European countries. France is a rebound country, ” he said.

New asylum seekers have cost French taxpayers billions of euros, with underage migrants alone estimated to cost two billion euros per year according to figures released by the Assembly of French Departments (ADF) earlier this month.

A report released last July claimed that as many as 400,000 illegal immigrants currently live in the troubled northern suburbs of Paris, with illegals making up as much as 20 perc ent of the population of the seine-Saint-Denis area.

Even as More Migrant Boats Land, 40,000 Un-Deported Failed Asylum Seekers Remain in UK https://t.co/GdpczhVa5p — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 27, 2019