Nearly 8,000 migrants died or disappeared on routes in 2025

The world’s migration routes remained lethal in 2025, with at least 7,904 people dead or missing, even as the count fell from 9,197 the year before. The International Organization for Migration said the apparent improvement was blunted by a harder truth: roughly 1,500 suspected cases could not be verified because aid cuts thinned the reporting network, leaving a likely gap between the tally and the reality.

That gap matters because the deadliest paths are still the ones people are being driven toward. More than four in every 10 fatalities and disappearances happened on sea routes to Europe, where the agency has long warned of “invisible shipwrecks” in which entire boats are lost without a trace. The West African route northward accounted for about 1,200 deaths, a reminder that pressure on border crossings does not stop movement so much as redirect it toward more dangerous water and desert corridors. Maria Moita, who leads the agency’s humanitarian and response department, said the figures “bear witness to our collective failure to prevent these tragedies”.

Asia also posted a grim milestone. The agency said the region recorded a record number of migration fatalities in 2025, with more than 3,000 deaths during the year and more than 2,722 people from the Asia-Pacific region dead or missing on migration routes worldwide. About 1,540 Afghans were reported dead, and hundreds of Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in Myanmar or hardship in crowded camps in Bangladesh remained at risk, including about 250 feared dead or missing after an April 15 Andaman Sea capsizing. The pattern shows how conflict, climate pressure and policy shifts can reroute people into narrower and deadlier channels.

The Americas told a different story, but not a reassuring one. The IOM said 414 migrants died or went missing there in 2025, the lowest total it has recorded since 2014, yet it stressed that reporting gaps still obscure the full scale of the toll. Globally, the agency estimates more than 82,000 migrants have died or gone missing since 2014, and around 340,000 family members have been directly affected.

Amy Pope, the IOM’s director general, said, “Behind these numbers are people taking dangerous journeys and families left waiting for news that may never come.” The agency’s Missing Migrants Project, created after the 2013 Lampedusa shipwrecks that killed at least 368 people, remains the only open-access global database for deaths during migration, but it says its counts are minimum estimates. Its latest recorded incident was April 20, 2026, underscoring how the toll has continued into this year even as donor cuts have strained the ability to track it.