The number of refugees who have entered Europe by sea and land this year has passed 1 million, the International Organization for Migration said Tuesday.
It said that as of Monday, taking into account the latest updates, there were 1,005,504 “irregular arrivals” into Europe in 2015.
The figures show that the vast majority — 971,289 — have come by sea. Another 34,215 have traveled over land.
Among those traveling by sea, 3,695 are known to have drowned or remain missing as they attempted to cross the sea on unseaworthy boats, according to IOM figures.
Deadliest route
IOM Director General William Lacy Swing has called the Mediterranean “the deadliest route for migrants on our planet.” The 3,279 people who lost their lives attempting to cross it in 2014 accounted for 65% of all migrant deaths that year.
By contrast, there have been 6,029 deaths between 1998 and 2013 along the second-deadliest border: the one between the United States and Mexico, the organization said.
Deaths are also commonplace along land routes into Europe. In August, Austrian authorities found the bodies of 71 migrants, believed to be from Syria, who had suffocated in a truck abandoned along a highway.
Soaring migration
The numbers of migrants into Europe have exploded in 2015 as an unprecedented surge of people have fled wars, persecution and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.
More than 970,000 migrants have entered Europe by crossing the Mediterranean so far this year, dwarfing the 219,000 who made the same crossing in 2014, according to the United Nations.
More than 4 million Syrians have fled four years of civil war, creating the worst refugee crisis seen in 25 years, according to the United Nations. More than 7 million have also been displaced within the country.
The overwhelming majority of migrants — 821,008, or 81.6% — arrived in Europe in Greece, the International Organization for Migration says. The second-highest number of arrivals — 150,317 — were in Italy, with the remainder in Bulgaria, Spain, Cyprus and Malta, in that order.
According to an IOM statement released this month, the top five nationalities arriving in Greece were from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Albania.
The top five nationalities arriving in Italy were Eritrean, Nigerian, Somalian, Sudanese and Syrian, the IOM said, citing figures from the Italian Interior Ministry.
Eritreans are running from a life of repression and abject poverty, fleeing “one of the poorest countries in the world and a closed and highly securitized state under an authoritarian government,” according to a report by the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat in Nairobi last year.
European response
The startling tide of migrants has presented European leaders, already grappling with the Eurozone debt crisis, with a fresh challenge — one that has thrown the European goal of border-free travel into question.
Germany, the most economically powerful country in the European Union, led the way in extending a welcome to migrants, becoming the destination of choice for many entering Europe.
The country is set to take in more than a million asylum seekers this year, more than any other country in the European Union by far, and has set aside more than $6 billion to help feed and house the new arrivals. But other leaders in the bloc have demonstrated far less eagerness to welcome the new arrivals.
A photograph of a drowned 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy on a Turkish beach triggered an international wave of public sympathy for migrants. But subsequent events, such as the revelation that one of the Paris attackers entered Europe alongside Syrian migrants landing in Greece, have helped cool such sentiment and have boosted the fortunes of far-right political movements.
France’s anti-immigration National Front party won an unprecedented 27% in a nationwide vote in regional elections this month.