A Decade of Deaths and Disappearances During Migration Worldwide

Causes of deaths during migration documented by IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, 2014-2023

_{Disclaimer: The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the International Organization for Migration. Data represent minimum estimates and locations are approximate. Data sourced from IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, last updated on 14 March 2024.}

Deaths during migration can be largely categorized into six groups, as illustrated in the graphic above, including many deaths that occur for unknown reasons. These causes of death are those most immediate, and do not reflect the structural causes of deaths during migration linked to the lack of safe, legal pathways, increased securitization of borders, and shrinking humanitarian space for those on the move.

Drowning is the most prevalent cause of death for people on the move since 2014, with more than 36,000 deaths recorded on migration routes in the last decade. The vast majority of drowning deaths occurred in the Mediterranean, with more than 28,000 total recorded, but thousands have also died attempting the Atlantic route (4,126), the United States-Mexico border crossing (5,213), the Gulf of Aden crossing between the Horn of Africa and Yemen (1,031) and on routes from the Caribbean to the United States (539). Of all drowning deaths, more than 23,000 people are missing and presumed dead at sea, many of whom disappeared in mass casualty shipwrecks¹, meaning their bodies were never recovered. This total of “missing” drowned persons is best understood as a low estimate of the true number of lives lost, as MMP’s methodology always uses the minimum number of persons onboard in large shipwrecks, which comprised more than two-thirds of all drowning deaths documented in the past decade.

Deaths due to violence are on the rise, with 2,322 killings documented between 2021 and 2023 totaling more than the 2,040 recorded in the seven years prior between 2014 and 2020. The rise in violent deaths is due in large part to the increasing reports of deaths at the Yemen-Saudi Arabia border since 2022 (1,267), but also include many killings in the Sahara Desert (712) and at the borders between Afghanistan and Iran (287), Syria and Türkiye (208), and the United States and Mexico (170).

It is notable that more than one in seven deaths in the MMP database are recorded with an unknown cause of death. This is often due to remains being found well after a death has occurred, rendering forensic investigation of the cause of death, let alone identifying the deceased person, extremely difficult. An unknown cause of death is particularly common in remote desert regions, with 26 per cent of cases recorded on the United States-Mexico border and at least 23 per cent in the Sahara Desert.

The causes of deaths recorded from 2014-2023 are also quite disparate from region to region, as shown in the table below. The vast majority of deaths recorded in the Mediterranean are, intuitively, drownings, but drowning deaths are also common in Africa – due to overseas routes such as the Atlantic route to the Canary Islands and the Horn of Africa-Yemen crossing – and in the Americas, where many people die in the Rio Grande or canals on the United States-Mexico border. A disproportionate number of deaths in Asia are caused by violence, most often at border crossing points in Western Asia. Deaths due to harsh environmental conditions are also high in Africa and the Americas, due in large part to dangerous movements through inhospitable desert regions. Deaths in the desert also may contribute to the large number of deaths due to unknown cause in these regions, as the cause of deaths of bodies found after weeks or months of exposure to the elements in such areas is extremely difficult to determine. 

This page is an excerpt from the report “A decade of documenting migrant deaths: Data analysis and reflection on deaths during migration documented by IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, 2014-2023”. The full report and data annex will be released on 26 March 2024 at missingmigrants.iom.int/publications. You can sign up to be notified for the report's release here.

_{¹ “Large shipwrecks” are here defined as those involving 50 or more lives lost in a single shipwreck.}