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Faculty of Law, Oxford | 08.03.2017

Guest post by Elias Steinhilper and Rob Gruijters. Elias is a lecturer in political science at the University of Freiburg and PhD candidate in Political Science and Sociology at Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. While drafting this blog post, Elias was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Societal Issues at UC Berkeley. Rob is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford.

The term ‘refugee crisis’ is almost exclusively used to refer to the number of arrivals and EU’s (in)ability to accommodate them, rather than the risks and suffering faced by people fleeing war and deprivation. According to the dominant portrayal, the ‘refugee crisis’ has started around spring 2015, reached its climax in summer and autumn 2015 and has been gradually fading out since the closure of the Balkan route and the implementation of the Turkey-EU deal in March 2016. The dominant crisis narrative has obscured the very real humanitarian crisis, which continues unabated at Europe’s Mediterranean Sea borders. The annual number of border deaths has increased continuously over the past three years, reaching more than 5,000 in 2016 alone, a number never recorded before. Yet, the highly polarised and politicised debate on migration and migrant deaths is often devoid of a deeper understanding of migrant mortality. Both policymakers and public opinion react to incidents, and empirical data is often absent or presented in a selective and misleading way. In this post, we present analyses from a number of new and recent data sources on migrant arrivals and migrant deaths, covering the period between 2010 and 2016. We seek to address three questions:

• How does the number of deaths vary between routes and over time?
• How does the risk involved in crossing vary between routes and over time?
• Do Search and Rescue (SAR) operations encourage more and riskier crossings (‘pull factor hypothesis’)?

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