Immigration / Flows · live + curated · 2026-04-30
Migration flows — a decade in figures
Frontex annual detections of irregular border crossings, broken down by route, from 2014 onwards. Each year-route figure is transcribed verbatim from Frontex's annual press release.
EU external borders · 2024
236,963 irregular crossings detected.
That's -87% of the 2015 peak (1,813,335). Frontex's published annual figure. The route mix varies year to year as conditions on the ground shift — Eastern Mediterranean dominated 2015, Western Balkans peaked in 2022–23, and the Central Med has remained a structural channel.
2024 total
236,963
Cumulative 2014-2024
4,343,255
§A · Detections vs documented deaths · 2014–2024
The two parallel series.
Frontex's detections of irregular crossings, alongside IOM-documented fatalities and missing persons on European-bound routes. Two different sources, two different methodologies, presented side-by-side.
§B · Detections by route, every year
The route mix is dynamic.
Stacked bars: each year's total split by Frontex's six classified routes. The Western Balkans peak in 2022 and the Eastern Med dominance of 2015 are visually distinct. 2024 is the first year where the Western African (Atlantic to Canary Islands) route ranks among the top three.
§C · A second source — Eurostat external-border apprehensions
Different methodology, similar shape.
Eurostat's migr_eipre records "third-country
nationals found to be illegally present" — a different concept from Frontex
detections (it captures individual people apprehended within member states, including
at the external border area). The published series only covers 2021–2024
consistently with the current methodology.
Method
Frontex figures are transcribed from each annual
press release. URLs are listed on
/sources
and embedded in borders.json. The values are
Frontex's own counts; we do not derive or estimate them.
IOM figures are pulled live from the Missing Migrants Project (HDX mirror), summed across European-bound routes (Mediterranean, Atlantic to Canary Islands, North & West Africa, Middle East).
Frontex and IOM figures are not directly comparable. Frontex counts detection events; the same person may be detected more than once. IOM counts deaths and missing persons. They are presented in parallel because both reflect different aspects of the same overall phenomenon.