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International borders have become deadly barriers, rivaled only by war and major natural disasters in the number of fatalities they produce. The consortium ‘The Migrants’ Files’ has recorded more than 3,000 deadly incidents between 2000 and early 2016, during which an estimated 32,000 men, women, and children died or went missing while trying to reach Europe.
In Australia the ‘Border Deaths database’, maintained by the Border Crossing Observatory at Monash University, has counted almost 2,000 deaths in the same period. Still more migrants have died in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, and in the jungles of southeast Asia. Nobody knows exactly how many people have died, because many deaths are unseen or undocumented.
