Migration by Sea

The sea is one of the most dangerous routes for migration. For 2015, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees records 950,469 arrivals by sea in the Mediterranean region alone as at 16 December 2015. Of that number, 3,605 were reported dead or missing. Elsewhere, approximately 94,000 migrants are estimated to have departed by sea from Bangladesh and Myanmar in early 2014, and 31,000 departures by sea were recorded in the first half of 2015.

Senior Researcher Ninna Nyberg Sørensen contributes to assessing migration by land, air and sea at the World Maritime University's Symposium 'Migration by Sea', April 26-27 in Malmö, Sweden. Her intervention points to the contentious and contested nature of the way we currently conceptualize and talk about the migration drama played out at the EU's external borders and in high seas. Much debate is centered on the risks involved in irregular migration, human smugling and trafficking. But the assumption that migrants are exploited because of the interference of human smugglers is not always well founded. While human smuglers often exploit migrants, they do not create migrant vulnerability in the first place.