Crossings, routes and regular pathways: evidence for safer and more orderly mobility in the Mediterranean region

1. Context and why it matters now

Three developments make a review of Mediterranean mobility timely in late 2026. First, the European Union's Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted by the Council on 14 May 2024 as ten legislative acts [14], entered into application on 12 June 2026 [15]. Second, recorded irregular crossings into the EU have fallen: Frontex counted almost 178,000 detections in 2025, 26% fewer than in 2024 and the lowest level since 2021 [3], and preliminary data for the first nine months of 2026 show a further fall of about 32% [16]. Third, the pattern beneath those totals has changed. Departure points, nationalities and corridors have shifted, and the protection concerns documented by United Nations bodies have persisted [1, 12].

For the thirteen countries where TIPCS has offices (Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Türkiye, Jordan, Iraq, Kenya and Italy), the Mediterranean is not only a sea crossing. It is a set of overlapping systems: departure and interception on the southern shore, reception and asylum procedures in Italy, large-scale hosting of refugees in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, labour migration towards Europe and the Gulf, and remittance flows that are macroeconomically significant in several countries. Policy debates often treat these systems separately. This report treats them together because the evidence suggests that decisions in one part (for example enforcement on one coast or a change to a quota) affect the others.

The report is a desk review of public sources. It is written for governments, donors, municipalities, civil society organisations and researchers. It separates three kinds of statement: documented facts, attributed to their source; interpretations offered by institutions or researchers, which are labelled as such; and the proposal in Section 7, which describes what TIPCS would do and is not evidence. Terminology follows United Nations usage. Figures are quoted as the source gives them, with year and geography, and 'n/a' means that no comparable figure was verified.

2. What the evidence says

Enforcement changes routes and mechanics more clearly than it changes overall movement

The strongest cross-national evidence comes from long-run policy datasets. Using a database of more than 6,500 migration policy changes in 45 countries, de Haas, Natter and Vezzoli found that policies since 1945 have been dominated by less restrictive changes, which challenges the assumption of steadily rising restriction [17]. A later synthesis by de Haas and colleagues concluded that migration policies are generally effective in the direct sense but that 'substitution effects' can limit or reverse their results, by redirecting movement to other routes or countries, disrupting circular migration, encouraging unauthorised entry or triggering 'now or never' surges. The same synthesis stresses that economic, social and political trends shape migration in ways that largely lie beyond policy control [18].

Mediterranean-specific studies are fewer and some remain working papers. A study of monthly flows from Libya to Italy between 2014 and October 2019 found no relationship between the presence of search and rescue NGOs at sea and the number of departures, which casts doubt on the claim that NGO rescue acts as a 'pull factor' [19]. An economic study presented in 2020, using weather and tidal conditions as sources of variation, reports that the expansion of European search and rescue operations after 2013 was followed by smugglers shifting from wooden boats to less seaworthy inflatable rafts and by an increase in crossings, so that part of the safety benefit was offset [20]. Both findings relate to specific periods and should not be generalised to the present without testing. They illustrate a common mechanism: actors on the route adapt to policy, and the adaptation can change risk even where it does not change volume.

Regular pathways and irregular movement

A review for the UK Government's K4D programme described the links between regular pathways and irregular migration as complex, noted that two assumptions run through the literature (that restriction pushes people towards irregularity and that expanding legal routes would reduce irregular movement), and recorded the counter-possibility that expanded pathways could raise irregular movement and smuggling along specific corridors [21]. A European Commission Joint Research Centre study of EU data for 2008 to 2018 found 'no single, general, over-arching pattern of categorical substitution', and described the relationship between forms of migration as not zero-sum; where substitution appears in case studies (for example Morocco to Spain) it is context-specific and cannot be confirmed as causal [7]. A CEPS analysis reached a similar conclusion for Africa and the Mediterranean: expanding legal migration alone would have only a limited effect on the number of people attempting irregular crossings, and substitution is plausible only if pathways are tailored to labour-market needs and combined with enforcement of employment rules and streamlined recruitment [8].

Development does not mechanically reduce emigration either. Clemens, using global data for 1960 to 2019 and for 1850 to 1914, finds that emigration tends to rise as poor countries grow richer, with the rise slowing after roughly US$5,000 GDP per capita (PPP) and reversing after roughly US$10,000, and attributes this mainly to demographic transition, education and structural change [22]. The implication for policy design is that programmes presented as reducing departures through short-term development spending have weak theoretical support, while programmes designed around labour and skills needs can be assessed on their own merits.

Hosting and displacement at global level

UNHCR estimates that 117.8 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2025, 5.4 million fewer than a year earlier, including 41.6 million refugees (including Palestine refugees under the UNRWA mandate) and 68.7 million internally displaced people. Resettlement and sponsorship arrivals fell to 81,800 in 2025 from 188,800 in 2024, and UNHCR estimated that 2.9 million refugees needed resettlement [5]. Returns rose in some large crises, among them Syria, where about 1.3 million refugees returned in 2025 [5]. These figures matter for the Mediterranean because they show where most displaced people actually are, and because the narrowing of formal protection pathways is itself a documented feature of the current environment [1, 5].

3. The regional picture across the 13 countries

Recorded movement and loss of life

Table 1 gives annual deaths and disappearances recorded by the IOM Missing Migrants Project in the Mediterranean and on the Central Mediterranean route, and sea arrivals recorded by UNHCR. The IOM figures are calculated by TIPCS from the incident-level file downloaded on 26 October 2026. They are minimum estimates, because many deaths at sea are unwitnessed, and they are revised over time. For example, Frontex cited an IOM estimate of at least 1,878 deaths in the Mediterranean in 2025 in January 2026 [3], while the file now gives 2,185 for the same year [2]. A joint UNSMIL and OHCHR report cites 33,348 deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean from 2014 to 2025 and notes that the actual figure is likely to be much higher [12]; the file now sums to 33,621 for those years [2].

Two points of interpretation follow. First, the deaths series does not track arrivals closely: 2023 had both the highest recent arrivals and the highest recent deaths, but deaths in 2025 (2,185) were only about 9% below their 2022 level (2,411) while recorded sea arrivals were lower than in 2023 by about 43% [2, 6]. Deaths per crossing attempt cannot be computed reliably from these sources, because attempts, arrivals and deaths are recorded by different systems and attempts may include repeat attempts by the same person [1]. Second, the geography has moved. On the UNHCR time series, arrivals on the Northwest African maritime route to Spain's Atlantic islands fell from 46,843 in 2024 to 17,788 in 2025 [6], and Frontex attributes the steep decline on the Western Africa route to reduced departures from Mauritania, Morocco and Senegal while reporting increases on the Western Mediterranean route, mainly from Algeria [3].

Central Mediterranean: Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Italy

The UNHCR and IOM Joint Annual Overview for 2025 estimates 82,104 attempted crossings from Libya (an 18% increase on 2024) and 16,861 from Tunisia, where 4,861 people arrived in Italy and more than 12,000 were intercepted or rescued and disembarked in Tunisia, a figure the Overview draws from estimates by the World Organisation Against Torture and describes as likely to be an underestimate [1]. Algeria accounted for about 2% of recorded attempts but its departures increased [1]. Italy received 65,081 arrivals by sea along this route, 75% of them at Lampedusa; the leading nationalities among arrivals were Bangladeshi (31%), Egyptian (14%), Eritrean (12%), Pakistani (7%) and Sudanese (7%) [1]. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime reports that sea arrivals to Italy from Tunisia fell to 4,861 in 2025, around 5% of the 2023 peak, with 1,074 recorded in the first half of 2026 [23].

Frontex data for the first half of 2026 show about 14,300 arrivals on the Central Mediterranean route, less than half the same period of 2025, with Libya remaining the main departure point [24]; preliminary figures for the first nine months put the route at about 22,500, a fall of 56% [16]. These are detections at EU borders and are not directly comparable with the UNHCR and IOM attempts series.

Country roles

Table 2 summarises the main role of each of the thirteen countries and one verified headline figure. Roles overlap (for example Egypt is at once a host country, a transit country and an origin of migrants and remittances), and the figures are not comparable across rows because they measure different things. Where no verified comparable figure was found, the cell says so.

Remittances illustrate the economic stakes of mobility. In 2025 the World Bank series records US$41.5 billion of personal remittances received by Egypt, up from US$29.6 billion in 2024; US$3.88 billion by Tunisia; and US$5.11 billion by Kenya [28]. Egypt's share of GDP rose from 7.6% in 2024 to 11.37% in 2025, and Tunisia's was 6.74% [25]. For Jordan (7.56% in 2024) and Lebanon (33.35% in 2023) the latest year in the extract is earlier [25]. The series does not distinguish remittances from Europe, the Gulf or elsewhere, and short-term jumps can reflect changes in exchange-rate regimes and recording rather than changes in migrant behaviour; the sources reviewed here do not allow that to be tested.

Kenya as an East African hub

Kenya combines refugee hosting and labour emigration. UNHCR records 617,125 refugees and 218,646 asylum-seekers in Kenya at the end of 2025, mainly from Somalia (319,471 refugees and 139,660 asylum-seekers) and South Sudan (202,772 refugees) [26]. UNHCR Kenya's factsheet gave 408,985 people in Dadaab and about 295,152 in Kakuma and the Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement in October 2024, and describes a multi-year Shirika Plan to move from camps towards integrated settlements [29]. On labour migration, the Saudi census of 2022 counted 91,802 Kenyan nationals, while a Kenyan official estimate from mid-2023 cited by Amnesty International put documented Kenyans in Saudi Arabia at up to 200,000, including at least 151,000 domestic workers [30]. Amnesty interviewed 72 returnee women in 2024 and concluded that all had experienced forced labour; the sample is small and not representative, and the report notes that a 2022 bilateral labour agreement had not been disclosed to it [30]. An older Migration Policy Institute study described the gap between Kenya's recruitment regulation and its capacity to protect workers abroad [31]. IOM data cited in press coverage of an ICMPD study indicate that departures from sub-Saharan Africa to Gulf countries rose by 34% between 2024 and 2025 [4].

4. Analysis: drivers, mechanisms and openings for cooperation

The cooperation architecture

The EU has built a series of partnerships with countries on the southern shore. The EU-Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding was signed on 16 July 2023 and covers five pillars: macroeconomic stability, economy and trade, green energy transition, people-to-people contacts, and migration and mobility [32]. The Mixed Migration Centre describes a migration-management component of 105 million euros [33]. The EU-Egypt joint declaration of 17 March 2024 was accompanied by a proposed financial package of 7.4 billion euros for 2024 to 2027, including 200 million euros for migration management, and refers to legal pathways, Talent Partnerships, border management, return and reintegration, support for Egypt's hosting of refugees, and a commitment to the protection of the rights of migrants and refugees [34]. The Mixed Migration Centre breaks the package into 5 billion euros of loans, 1.8 billion euros of investment support and 600 million euros of grants [33]. The EU-Mauritania joint declaration, signed on 7 March 2024 [35], follows the announcement of 210 million euros and rests on five pillars that include job creation and training, asylum and reception capacity, legal migration, and cooperation to prevent irregular migration [36].

The Pact itself treats partnerships as one of four policy areas, under the heading 'embedding migration in international partnerships': preventing irregular departures, fighting migrant smuggling, cooperation on readmission and promoting legal pathways through an EU Talent Pool and Talent Partnerships [37]. The Commission lists Talent Partnerships with Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh and Pakistan, with a stated dual objective of boosting labour mobility and improving cooperation on return and readmission [38]. Within the EU, the Pact introduces mandatory screening within seven days at external borders and three days inside the territory, mandatory border procedures for certain applicants, free legal counselling at all stages of the asylum procedure, and a permanent solidarity framework in which member states choose between relocations, financial contributions and operational support [15, 37].

What the data say about the effect of cooperation on departures

The temporal pattern is clear for some routes. Departures from Tunisia to Italy fell sharply after 2023 [1, 23], and Frontex reports that departures on the Western Africa route fell by about two-thirds in 2025, crediting preventive measures by Mauritania and, more recently, Senegal and The Gambia in cooperation with Spain and the EU [3, 24]. Frontex's Executive Director interprets the fall as showing 'that cooperation can deliver results' [3]. Attribution is harder. Several things changed at the same time: enforcement within Tunisia, including dismantling of informal settlements and expulsions to remote border areas [23]; displacement of departures towards Libya and Algeria [1, 24]; and the end of the 2023 surge conditions. Frontex itself notes that stricter controls in Morocco and on neighbouring routes pushed more departures towards Algeria [24], and that eastern Libya to Crete corridor arrivals more than tripled in 2025 [3]. The Joint Annual Overview records 19,775 arrivals in Greece from Libya in 2025 against 4,895 in 2024 [1].

Analysts working on the ground add a caution on durability. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime describes the current situation in Tunisia as 'suppressed mobility under high enforcement rather than a durable reduction in underlying pressure', estimating 16,000 to 18,000 attempted sea crossings in 2025 and at least 3,602 in the first quarter of 2026, and noting that smuggling networks adapted to enforcement [23]. The ICMPD study reported by Euronews concludes that tighter controls 'do not necessarily reduce overall mobility' and push movement onto longer and riskier routes, and that they do not address drivers such as conflict, limited employment, climate shocks and cuts in humanitarian aid [4]. The ICMPD Mediterranean outlook for 2025 anticipated that asylum-seeker numbers in Africa would keep growing and that tensions between local and migrant populations could increase in some partner countries [39].

Protection environment and accountability

The costs and safeguards attached to cooperation are documented by United Nations and EU bodies. UNSMIL and OHCHR conclude that systematic and widespread violations and abuses against migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees persist with impunity in Libya, including arbitrary detention, trafficking, forced labour and extortion; that interception at sea has been followed by disembarkation in a country that United Nations entities consider unsafe; and that international support to Libyan authorities has often been provided with inadequate human rights risk assessment, safeguards or monitoring [12]. The report also records that the UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya stated it had grounds to believe that the EU and its member states provided support used in interception and detention, a finding the report quotes [12]. In Tunisia, the European Ombudsman found in October 2024 that the Commission had carried out a risk assessment instead of a formal human rights impact assessment, observed that the Memorandum mentions human rights only in general terms, and asked the Commission to publish criteria for suspending funding in cases of violations [13]. The Joint Annual Overview notes that in December 2025 the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern about reported collective expulsions of more than 11,000 sub-Saharan migrants and asylum-seekers from Tunisia between February 2023 and May 2025 [1].

Regular pathways in practice: Italy and the Talent Partnerships

Italy's programming decrees show a growing formal channel for labour entry. The decree for 2023 to 2025 set a quota of 452,000 foreign workers for seasonal, non-seasonal and self-employed work [40]. The decree published in October 2025 admits 497,550 third-country nationals for 2026 to 2028, divided into 164,850 for 2026, 165,850 for 2027 and 166,850 for 2028 [27]. The ICMPD outlook notes an Italy-Tunisia agreement to facilitate the entry of Tunisian workers over three years and a Greece-Egypt arrangement for seasonal agricultural workers [39]. The sources reviewed give quotas, not outcomes: no verified public data were found here on the share of quota places filled, on applicants' costs and waiting times, or on whether entrants came from countries of departure on the Mediterranean routes. This is the main evidence gap for the pathway argument.

Resettlement, by contrast, is narrowing. UNHCR recorded 81,800 resettlement and sponsorship arrivals worldwide in 2025, less than half the 188,800 of 2024, against estimated needs of 2.9 million [5], and the Joint Annual Overview lists declining safe and regular pathways, including resettlement, among the protection concerns along the Central Mediterranean route [1].

Known and unknown

Counter-evidence and competing interpretations

Reasonable readers interpret the same data differently. One reading, advanced in Frontex's public statements, is that sustained cooperation with transit and origin countries reduces pressure on EU borders [3]. A second reading, supported by the ICMPD and GI-TOC analyses, is that enforcement suppresses and redirects movement without removing its drivers, and may increase abuse [4, 23]. A third reading, supported by the research on migration transitions, is that structural drivers such as demography, education and economic change dominate over the time horizon of any single agreement [18, 22]. The evidence does not allow these readings to be separated cleanly, and the report does not take a side between governments or between policy positions. It identifies what would be needed to test them: route-level data over time, comparable measures of risk, and independent evaluations with a credible counterfactual.

5. Legal framework: non-refoulement and search and rescue

Three sets of obligations apply to all discussion of enforcement and cooperation. They are legal facts and do not depend on views about migration policy.

• Non-refoulement. Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention provides that no contracting state shall expel or return ('refouler') a refugee in any manner whatsoever to a territory where life or freedom would be threatened on protected grounds, subject to the exceptions in paragraph 2 [9]. UNSMIL and OHCHR state that Libya is not a party to the 1951 Convention but that the prohibition of refoulement binds it as customary international law and through human rights treaties it has ratified [12].
• Duty to render assistance at sea. Article 98 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea requires every state to require masters of ships flying its flag to render assistance to any person found at sea in danger of being lost and to proceed with all possible speed to the rescue of persons in distress, so far as this can be done without serious danger to the ship, crew or passengers [10].
• Extraterritorial responsibility. In Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy (23 February 2012) the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found that Italy had violated Article 3 of the European Convention and Article 4 of Protocol No. 4 by returning people intercepted on the high seas to Libya without individual assessment, holding that jurisdiction attached once people were taken aboard Italian vessels [11].

These obligations frame the questions that cooperation agreements raise: how disembarkation and interception arrangements are assessed against non-refoulement, what monitoring exists, and how funding can be conditioned on respect for rights. The European Ombudsman's recommendation on published suspension criteria in the Tunisia case is one example of how these questions have been put to EU institutions [13].

6. Implications for policy and practice

The following implications follow from the evidence above. They are addressed to named kinds of actors and are framed as options for consideration, not as positions on contested political questions.

• Governments and EU institutions: publish human rights risk or impact assessments and monitoring frameworks for cooperation agreements before or at signature, as the Ombudsman's findings suggest [13]; report route-level data on interceptions, disembarkations and returns in a form that allows independent analysis [1]; and evaluate agreements against a counterfactual.
• Italy and EU member states: publish quota-use data (applications, permits, entry, retention), costs and waiting times for the 2026 to 2028 decree [27]; design Talent Partnerships around skills recognition and fair recruitment [38]; and avoid presenting labour pathways solely as a tool for reducing irregular arrivals, given the weak evidence for substitution [7, 8].
• Donors: fund independent evaluation and data collection alongside programmes, and consider multi-year funding for hosting countries, since refugee hosting is concentrated in Türkiye, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Libya and Kenya [5, 26], and since reductions in humanitarian funding are identified as a pressure factor along the route [1].
• Municipalities and host towns: local authorities in transit and host towns carry service pressures that national agreements do not always address; early research on Lebanon and Jordan identified access to services and livelihoods and economic competition as the main drivers of tension, which suggests local data on service use and perceptions would help target support [41].
• Civil society organisations: document access barriers to regular pathways and to asylum, share monitoring data under agreed ethical protocols, and engage employers and recruitment agencies in fair recruitment.
• Researchers: test substitution and displacement effects with route-level time series; report uncertainty and revisions in deaths and arrivals data as the IOM series changes over time [2]; and publish methods for estimating attempts and interceptions [1].

7. What TIPCS proposes

TIPCS is an independent, nonpartisan research, dialogue and training institute headquartered in Monastir, with offices in the thirteen countries covered by this report and working in English, French and Arabic. It has seven policies in force (code of conduct, safeguarding and PSEA, anti-fraud and anti-corruption, conflict of interest, whistleblowing and complaints, sanctions and due diligence, and research ethics and editorial independence) and publishes its funding. TIPCS proposes three linked workstreams, designed to address the evidence gaps identified in Table 3.

Workstream 1: research on safe and regular pathways

TIPCS would test the hypothesis that access barriers, rather than the absence of quotas alone, limit the use of regular labour pathways in selected origin countries. It would examine documentation, recruitment costs, recognition of qualifications, information gaps and employer demand in origin countries (starting with Tunisia, Egypt and Mauritania) and in Italy. Methods would combine a review of published quota and permit data, structured interviews with employers, recruitment agencies, municipalities and applicants who consent to participate, and comparison of administrative timelines. Findings would be published with the data and instruments, subject to privacy safeguards.

Workstream 2: community-level cohesion in transit and host towns

TIPCS would compare cohesion outcomes across a small set of transit and host towns in the countries covered, selected to include both high and low service pressure. Methods would include periodic perception surveys with comparison groups, mapping of municipal service capacity, and documentation of local mechanisms for dialogue. The aim would be to identify which local practices are associated with better outcomes, while recognising that association does not establish cause. Work would be coordinated with municipal authorities and civil society, and would not collect information that could identify people in an irregular situation.

Workstream 3: language and skills partnerships

TIPCS would design and, subject to funding, pilot language and skills courses linked to labour demand identified in Workstream 1, with partner training institutions, employers and municipalities. A pilot would be evaluated independently, using a waiting-list or matched comparison where ethically feasible. Participation would be voluntary, free of recruitment fees, and would not be linked to returns or enforcement.

Safeguarding and do-no-harm

• Safeguarding and PSEA, research ethics and editorial independence policies would apply to all staff, partners and consultants, and complaints and whistleblowing channels would be available in English, French and Arabic.
• Data minimisation: no collection of data that could identify a person's migration status to authorities; consent obtained in the participant's language; the right to withdraw at any time; storage of any sensitive data under access controls.
• Local ethical review in each country of fieldwork, plus an independent advisory group including migration and legal-protection specialists, and a documented 'stop rule' if the research or a pilot appears to be creating risk for participants or communities.
• Independence: TIPCS would not carry out functions linked to border enforcement, detention or returns, and would publish funding sources and any conflicts of interest.
• Referral: field teams would carry updated referral lists to legal, medical and protection services, and would not promise outcomes they cannot deliver.

Partnership model and measurement

TIPCS would seek partnerships with universities and research institutes, municipalities, employers' associations, training institutions, civil society organisations and international agencies, with partner roles agreed in writing and shared data governance. Results would be measured against the indicators in Table 4 at baseline, mid-term and end-line, with an external evaluator, and published in English, French and Arabic, including findings that do not support the proposal's assumptions.

8. Risks, limitations and what we do not know

• Data quality. Deaths at sea are recorded from incomplete reports and revised over time [2, 3]; attempts are estimated by combining sources and may include repeat attempts [1]. Annual totals for 2026 are partial.
• Attribution. Falls in departures coincide with several simultaneous changes, and the sources reviewed do not allow the effect of any single agreement to be isolated [23, 24].
• Comparability. Figures in Table 2 measure different things (flows, stocks, shares of GDP) and refer to different years. UNHCR figures for 2025 reflect large returns to Syria and large new displacement from Sudan, so stocks can change quickly [5].
• Source mix. Some figures are reported through secondary sources (for example nine-month Frontex data, the ICMPD 2026 study and the Ombudsman findings) and should be checked against primary releases [4, 13, 16].
• Gaps. No verified, comparable public data were found on quota use under Italy's decrees, on Talent Partnership outcomes, on migration flows from or within Palestine and Syria, or on deaths along land routes within North Africa.
• Proposal risks. Research with people in irregular situations carries risks of exposure and retaliation, and cohesion work can be misread locally; the safeguarding measures above are designed to reduce, not remove, these risks.

9. Conclusion

The public evidence supports a measured conclusion. Recorded irregular crossings into the EU have fallen since 2023, while deaths remain at levels that UN agencies describe as high, departures have shifted between countries and corridors, and documented abuses continue along parts of the route [1, 3, 12]. The research literature does not support the expectation that either enforcement or legal pathways alone will determine the scale of movement, and it identifies adaptation by smugglers and migrants as a recurring mechanism [7, 8, 18]. What is missing is not opinion but independent, comparable evidence: route-level data, published human rights assessments and monitoring, quota-use outcomes and evaluations with a credible counterfactual. The proposal in Section 7 is intended to contribute to that evidence base from within the region, with safeguards that match the sensitivity of the subject.

Method and limits of this brief

This report is a desk review of public sources accessed on 26 October 2026; it does not draw on primary fieldwork, interviews or non-public data. Several figures are calculated by TIPCS from public datasets (IOM Missing Migrants Project incident file, UNHCR Operational Data Portal time series, UNHCR Refugee Data Finder, World Bank indicators), and these datasets are revised over time, so later downloads may differ. Some sources are secondary reports of primary documents, and several cited studies are working papers or older than five years, which is noted where it matters. Attribution of changes in flows to specific policies is not possible with the evidence reviewed. Statements about TIPCS are limited to its institutional profile and to the proposal in Section 7, which describes intended work and not results.

References

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How to cite

Tunisian Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (TIPCS) (2026). Crossings, routes and regular pathways: evidence for safer and more orderly mobility in the Mediterranean region. Monastir: TIPCS. www.tipcs.org/publications/migration-mobility-mediterranean