Wergosum's Random Blog

Summer 2025: two heavyweights of contemporary European intellectual life and politics have just agreed to protect their respective countries from dangerous migrants invading them. They celebrate by taking a selfie for Victoria and Brigitte. The new math-based scheme is known as “one in – one out“: 1 – 1 = 0. Source of image: Infomigrants. Source of emoji: emojigit. The featured image is modified from ndtv.

In 2021, I published a post entitled Refugees which included a map showing the locations of migrants’ death based on data up to 2019 from the mostly Swiss and EC funded Missing Migrants Project (MMP). Since 2019, there have been several changes in the number structure of the migrant fluxes. All data in this post were collected and re-assembled/processed after downloading from the MMP.

1. Where do migrants come from

**Figure 1: number of deaths and missing migrants in major geographic areas since 2014.** Af Africa, Am America, AS Asia, Carib Caribbean, Eur Europe, Medit Mediterranean. N, S, W, E indicate North, South, West and East, respectively. “Others” lumps together AS-SE South-eastern Asia, Af-S Southern Africa, Af-W Western Africa and AS-W, Western Asia.

Figure 1 and Table 1 show basically the same information in graphical and table forms, highlighting the areas where 78386 migrants lost their lives between 2014 and 2025. Both indicate the relative decrease of activity over the Mediterranean since the mid 2010s and the development of new migrant origins in southern and western Asia. The most dangerous place on earth for migrants has long been the Mediterranean sea where 33000 people perished. There is, however some improvement as the number of deaths has been decreasing by 170 people per year on average since the mid 2010s. Altogether, the decrease in the Mediterranean was almost offset by an increase in southern and western Asia (+145 and + 54 people/annum, respectively) resulting from the situation in Myanmar, Iran and Afghanistan. Although there was a relative low of casualties during the COVID year (2020) this was followed by a marked increase in 2023 and 2024.

**Table 1: Number of ascertained and presumed deaths by region between 2014 and 2025. The ” trend” is the linear trend (persons/year) based on 2014-2025 data.** **Refer to Figure 1 for the definition of the origins**.

2. Recent geographical trends

**Figure 2: Locations of migrants’ deaths in 2014 (yellow circles) and 2024 (red dots). Click this link for a zoomed version of this figure 2.**

Figure 2 shows the most active areas in 2014 and about 10 years later, in 2023. It is clear that there has been a decrease in eastern and southern Africa, with a increase over southern and western Asia. The Mediterranean remains active, and so does the southern US. Several zoomed maps have been prepared to show additional detail. They are available by clicking here for North America, the Mexico-US border, Europe, showing the very active areas of western Turkyie, NW Lybia and S Tunisia, as well as southern and western Asia. Possibly in relation with Tr*mp policies, central America and the Caribbean appear as relatively quiet.

3. Causes of death

**Figure 3: Main causes of migrant deaths.**

Figure 3 illustrates the main causes of death of migrants. Harsh environmental conditions include starvation, lack of water and shelter.

4. Concusion

If it is difficult to draw sensible, calm and rational conclusions from this post, it is because it does not seem that the most people are still interested in calm, sensible and rational subjects. Enemies are seen everywhere. Real or presumed enemies have become the focus of ongoing and future electoral battles. The enemies include the migrants who come to wash up, literally and figuratively, on the British, Texan or European shores of their dreams? Poor people! They would not have left home if they had not suffered in their own countries… They suffered on their way to ” the west”, and many never made it. Still, the hope of a better life may have brightened their last days… As for those who did arrive, I am happy they got here. I hope that from now on, they will be treated like human beings.