Over 63,000 dead or missing while migrating over last decade
IOM data shows deadliest year for migrants was 2023, when it recorded 8,541 deaths
At least 63,285 people have perished or disappeared on migration routes around the world between 2014 and 2023, with most deaths caused by drowning, the UN migration agency said on Tuesday.
A report published by the International Organization for Migration on its Missing Migrants Project showed that the majority of deaths and disappearances — 28,854 — occurred in the Mediterranean, followed by Africa and Asia.
Nearly 60 percent of deaths documented were linked to drowning, and more than one third of those identified were from countries in conflict, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria and Ethiopia.
IOM’s data showed that the deadliest year for migrants in the last decade was 2023, when it recorded 8,541 deaths in part due to a sharp increase of fatalities in the Mediterranean.
“The increase in deaths is likely linked to the increase in departures and, correspondingly, shipwrecks, off the coast of Tunisia,” the report said, adding that at least 729 people died off the Tunisian coast in 2023, compared to 462 in 2022.
“In all prior years, most deaths in the Central Mediterranean were documented off the coast of Libya.” With anti-immigration parties steadily gaining influence across Europe for years, governments have attempted to curb migration flows to their countries by pledging funds to countries across the Mediterranean such as Tunisia and Egypt.
Earlier this month, the EU pledged a 7.4 billion euro ($8 billion) funding package to Egypt that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described as “the best way to address migratory flows.”
The governments of several European countries, including Italy, Hungary and Britain, have made curbing immigration a top priority, while elsewhere far-right parties like France’s National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, have gained popularity.
Religious leaders are among those who have called for greater compassion toward migrants. Pope Francis has called for a pan-European response to migration to stop the Mediterranean from becoming “a sea of death.” More than a decade ago, the death of 600 migrants and refugees in two Mediterranean shipwrecks near Italian shores shocked the world and prompted the UN migration agency to start recording the number of people who died or went missing as they fled conflict, persecution or poverty to other countries.
Governments around the world have repeatedly pledged to save migrants’ lives and fight smugglers while tightening borders.
“The figures are quite alarming,” Jorge Galindo, a spokesperson at IOM’s Global Data Institute, said. “We see that 10 years on, people continue to lose their lives in search of a better one.”
The IOM report says the deaths are “likely only a fraction of the actual number of lives lost worldwide” because of the difficulty in obtaining and verifying information. For example, on the Atlantic route from Africa’s west coast to Spain’s Canary Islands, entire boats have reportedly vanished in what are known as “invisible shipwrecks.” Similarly, countless deaths in the Sahara desert are believed to go unreported.
Even when deaths are recorded, more than two-thirds of the victims remain unidentified. That can be due to lack of information and resources, or simply because identifying dead migrants is not considered a priority.
Experts have called the growing number of unidentified migrants around the world a crisis comparable to mass casualties in wartime. Behind each nameless death is a family facing “the psychological, social, economic and legal impacts of unresolved disappearances,” a painful phenomenon known as “ambiguous loss,” the report says.