Hidden toll of lost migrants

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.

“No matter where you stand on the whole migration management debate these are still human beings on the move,” said Bram Frouws, the head of the Mixed Migration Centre, which has done surveys of more than 20,000 migrants in its 4Mi project since 2014.

The missing include children. Some 2,773 children have been reported to the Red Cross as missing en route to Europe, and 2,097 adults reported missing by children.

Almass and his brother, both migrants from Khost, Afghanistan, are not on the list. He was just 14 when his widowed mother reluctantly sent him and his 11-year-old brother from their home into the unknown. The payment for their trip was supposed to get them away from the Taliban and all the way to Germany via a chain of smugglers.

But when the Iranian border police fired on their group, Almass lost hold of his brother’s hand and went unconscious as he tumbled down a ravine. He never saw his brother again. When he next spoke to his mother, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her; instead, he lied that his brother couldn’t come to the phone.

The family phone number in Afghanistan no longer works, their village is overrun with Taliban, and he has no idea how to find them.

“I don’t know now where they are,” he said, his face anguished as he sat on a sundappled bench in rural France. “They also don’t know where I am.”