True toll still not known

An Associated Press tally has documented more than 56,800 migrants dead or missing worldwide since 2014 — almost double the number found in the world’s only official attempt to try to count them, by the United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration.

The IOM toll as of October 1 was more than 28,500.

The AP came up with almost 28,300 additional dead or missing migrants by compiling information from other international groups, forensic records, missing persons reports, death records, and examining data from thousands of interviews with migrants.

The AP’s tally is also certainly an undercount. Bodies lie undiscovered in desert sands or at the bottom of the sea. And families don’t always report loved ones as missing because they are illegal, or because they left home without saying exactly where they were headed.

Instead, families are caught between hope and mourning.

The official UN toll extensively documents deaths in the Mediterranean and Europe, but even there cases fall through the cracks. The political tide is turning against migrants in Europe just as in the United States, where the Government is cracking down heavily on caravans of Central Americans trying to get in. One result is that money is drying up for projects to track migration and its costs.

Beyond Europe, information is even more scarce.

In the US, there is no routine effort to figure out where migrants may disappear or die, nor a policy on identifying bodies and notifying families.

And little is known about the toll in South America, where the Venezuelan migration is among the world’s biggest today, and in Asia, the top region for numbers of migrants.

The result is that governments vastly underestimate the true toll of migration, a major political and social issue in most of the world today.