In 2023 there were over 350,000 illegal border crossing detecting on the borders of the European Union, the most crossings recorded since 2017 when there were over 204,000. Illegal border crossings peaked in 2015 at the height of the European migrant crisis, when over 1.8 million illegal border crossing were detected.

In 2022, there were approximately 331,000 illegal border crossings made at borders of the European Union, with Syrian's being the most common nationality, at 98,360.

In 2024, the European country registering the largest number of migrants' arrivals was Italy. As of October 2024, 53,000 immigrants reached the Italian peninsula by sea. Spain had the second-largest number of arrivals by sea, 42,000 immigrants, both from the Wester Mediterranean route and the Wester African Atlantic route. Bulgaria was the country registering the largest number of arrivals by land 6,340.

This statistic shows the total number of illegal stays detected in the European Union (EU) in 2018, by country of origin. In 2018, over 36 thousand Ukrainians were detected staying in the EU illegally.

information on the number of persons and means of transport legally crossing the external border by direction, by border crossing point; information on the number of valid stays for foreigners, the number of valid stays for third-country nationals by type of residence, by nationality, by region of residence; information on the number of valid stays for EU citizens; information on the number of valid stays for third-country nationals per purpose of stay; information on the number of visa applications and issued visas according to the type of visa at the representative offices of the Slovak Republic; an overview of illegal migration on the territory of the Slovak Republic; information on expulsions carried out from the Slovak Republic; information on illegal stay by nationality; information on unauthorised transport of cigarettes at the external border

FRAN Quarterly reports are prepared by the Frontex Risk Analysis Unit (RAU) and provide a regular overview of irregular migration at the EU external borders, based on the irregular- migration data exchanged among Member State border-control authorities within the cooperative framework of the Frontex Risk Analysis Network (FRAN) and its subsidiary, the European Union Document-Fraud Risk Analysis Network (EDF-RAN). This report is a comparative analysis of FRAN data collected between April and June 2012, based on data and information provided by 30 Member State border-control authorities within the framework of the FRAN. The report presents results of statistical analysis of quarterly variations in eight irregular-migration indicators and one asylum indicator, aggregated at the level of the event. Indicators include: detections of illegal border-crossing between BCPs; detections of illegal border-crossing at BCPs; detections of suspected facilitators; detections of illegal stay; refusals of entry; asylum applications; document fraud (EDF); return decisions for illegally-staying third-country nationals; returns of illegally-staying third-country nationals. Bi-monthly analytical reports were also used for interpretative purposes and to provide qualitative information, as were other available sources of information such as Frontex Joint Operations.

In 2023, 253,000 immigrants arrived in Italy, Spain, Malta, Greece, Cyprus, and Bulgaria. Italy recorded the largest number of immigrant arrivals, with 60 percent of the total arrivals.

The EU Profiler is a Voting Advice Application (VAA) running during the European Elections of 2009. Respondents are situated in a political spectrum, according to their positioning with regard to 30 statements on: (a) Welfare, family and health: welfare programmes maintained even if taxes increase, privatization of healthcare services, increase in subsidies for childcare; (b) Migration and immigration: encourage immigration of skilled workers, restrict immigration; (c) Society, religion and culture: legalisation of same sex marriages, greater respect for religious values in politics, decriminalisation of soft drugs, legalisation of euthanasia; (d) Finances and taxes: reduction of government spending, tax-raising powers for EU, bail out failing banks with public money; (e) Economy and work: reduction of workers´ protection regulation, reduction of EU subsidies to farmers; (f) Environment, transport and energy: support for renewable sources of energy, promotion of public transport, fighting global warming; (g) Law and order: restrictions of civil liberties, more severe punishment for criminals; (h) Foreign policy: EU should speak with one voice, EU should strengthen security and defence policy; (i) European integration; EU integration is good, Malta is better off in the EU, accession of Turkey, more power to EP, less veto power for individual member states, referendum on treaty in Malta; (j) Country specific items: hosting of Maltas illegal immigrants by member states, the EU should be more involved in preserving Maltas countryside. Respondents could rate subjective salience for all issues.

An additional questionnaire asks about: quality of results from EU-Profiler; help to decide about vote; change of vote decision; increase interest in EP election; increase interest in politics; increase motivation to participate in EP election; refrains from participating in EP election; no change of intention to vote; left indifferent; compass useful; previous use of profiler; media use for political information; political information before EP election; political efficacy; political interest; vote intention EP elections; vote at last election EP; vote intention national parliament; importance for democracy: equal chances to access courts, free and fair elections, referenda, governments do what is right, new technologies for participation; satisfaction with national democracy; satisfaction with european democracy; attitude towards further integration of EU; trust in: national parliament, European parliament, national Government, European Commission, political parties; national government of experts; european government of experts; approval of national government´s record; participation to elections; self-placement on a left-right continuum.

Demography: gender; place of birth; nationality; country of residence; marital status; highest level of education; occupational status; sector of employment; place of residence; duration of residence; denomination; church attendance; self-assessment of religiousness; number of children; number of people in household; household income.

Also encoded was: language user selected; spectrum position x-axis; spectrum position y-axis; nearest party in country spectrum; furthest party in country spectrum; nearest party in EU spectrum; furthest party in EU spectrum; scores on liberal society, expanded welfare axis, economic liberalisation axis, restrictive financial policy axis, law and order axis, immigration policy axis, environmental protection axis.

Since the early 1970s the European Commission´s Standard & Special Eurobarometer are regularly monitoring the public opinion in the European Union member countries. Principal investigators are the Directorate-General Communication and on occasion other departments of the European Commission or the European Parliament. Over time, candidate and accession countries were included in the Standard Eurobarometer Series. Selected questions or modules may not have been surveyed in each sample. Please consult the basic questionnaire for more information on country filter instructions or other questionnaire routing filters. In this study all question modules are in the standard Eurobarometer context: 1. Standard EU and trend questions, 2. Europe 2020 strategy, 3. Financial and economic crisis, 4. European citizenship, 5. EU budget, 6. Knowledge and opinion about statistics.
Topics: 1. Attitudes towards the EU (standard EU and trend questions): life satisfaction; frequency of political discussions about local, national, and European matters with friends and relatives; assessment of the current situation in the following areas: national economy, European economy, personal job situation, financial situation of the own household, national employment situation, quality of life in the own country, quality of life in the EU; expectations for the next twelve months regarding: personal life in general, national economic situation, financial situation of the own household, national employment situation, personal job situation, economic situation in the EU; most important problems in the own country, personally, and in the EU; assessment of the own country’s assumed membership in the EU as a good thing; expectations of benefit from an assumed membership of the own country; assessment of the development in the own country and in the European Union as positive; trust in selected institutions: national legal system, police, army, political parties, regional or local public authorities, national government, national parliament, European Union, and the United Nations; image of the EU; assessment of the immigration of people from other EU member states and from outside the EU as positive; attitude towards additional measures to be taken to fight illegal immigration from outside the EU on EU level, on national level, or on both levels; meaning of the EU to the respondent; right for EU citizens to live or to work in every member state of EU as a good thing; approval of the following statements on the EU: creates conditions for more jobs in Europe, is responsible for austerity in Europe, makes doing business easier in Europe, generates too much bureaucracy, will emerge fairer from the crisis, makes the financial sector behave more responsibly, makes the cost of living cheaper in Europe, makes quality of life better in Europe, helps tackle global threats and challenges, helps protect its citizens, needs a clearer message, is working for its citizens; knowledge of and trust in selected institutions: European Parliament, European Commission, European Central Bank; knowledge test on the EU: number of member states, direct election of the members of the European Parliament by the citizens of each member state, Switzerland is a member of the EU; attitude towards the following issues: European economic and monetary union with one single currency, common foreign policy of all member states, further enlargement, common defence and security policy, free trade and investment agreement between the EU and the USA, common migration policy, common energy policy; attitude towards the creation of an EU army; satisfaction with the democracy in the own country and in the EU; approval of the following statements: respondent understands how the EU works, recognition of the own country’s interests in the EU, EU’s voice counts in the world, globalisation as an opportunity for economic growth, better development of the own country outside the EU, more decisions to be taken at EU level; optimism regarding the future of the EU.

1. Europe 2020 strategy: likelihood to reach the following objectives by 2020: three quarters of people between 20 and 64 years of age having a job, share of funds invested in research and development reaching 3% of the wealth produced in the EU each year, reduction of EU greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20% (compared to 1990), increase of the share of renewable energy in the EU by 20%, increase of energy efficiency in the EU by 20%, reduction of the share of young people leaving school without qualifications to 10%, at least 40% of the people aged 30 to 34 having a higher education degree or diploma, reduction of the number of people living below the poverty line by a quarter, increase of industry’s contribution to the economy to 20% of GDP; EU is going in the right direction to exit the crisis and face new global challenges.

2. Financial and economic crisis: impact of the economic crisis on the job market has already reached...

Data are transcripts based on focus groups and qualitative interviews with social care practitioners, and interviews with members of migrant families living in the UK. Practitioner data relates to focus groups, and some interviews, conducted at the start of the study which then informed the content of one-to-one ‘mid-point’ interviews with other practitioners. Professional groups represented are linked to anonymised collaborating organisations, including: educators, family support workers, social workers and youth and community workers. Further data is based on interviews conducted with practitioners ‘external’ to the collaborating organisation, most of whom were qualified social workers. Data generated via work with migrant families include transcripts from interviews with members of migrant families. Some were interviewed separately, and others in pairs, or as a group of three. Prior to the interviews, participants completed creative diaries. However, these included names, photographs and highly personal accounts. As such, they cannot be anonymised and have not been used as data but, rather an elicitation tool in the interviews. For this reason, the content of the diaries is not shared here. All transcripts have been anonymised. Names have been replaced with pseudonyms and other identifying characteristics have been removed, including the names of identifying collaborating organisations. The study was conducted across two cities that are identified: Hull and Sheffield. For this reason, the cities and the names of some organisations and areas of the city that are referenced have not been changed.
The ‘Everyday Bordering in the UK: the impact of everyday bordering on social care practitioners and the migrant families with whom they work’, was a 30-month project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, 2020-2022. The project sought to understand if and how the UK’s increasingly hostile environment towards immigration impacts on social care practitioners and the families that they support. The aims of the project were therefore: to work with social care professionals, (with and without statutory immigration control and/or social care duties), and the migrant families supported by them to understand whether, and to what extent, practices of ‘everyday bordering’ permeate across social care professions working with a range of migrant families (refugees, asylum seekers, EU migrants and third country nationals); and to examine if and how the requirement to enact immigration control in ‘everyday’ professional practice impacts on the support migrant families receive. More broadly, the objectives of the study were: to compare whether and to what extent different social care professionals enact and/or resist ‘everyday’ bordering’ practices in their work with migrant family members, and the forms these practices take; and to understand how migrant individuals identify and experience the performance of these practices.

In order to achieve these aims and objectives, the study took a collaborative approach. Through a range of ethnographic activities, we worked with collaborating organisations and their partners to identify participants (practitioner and migrant family members) and to inform and refine the research questions. This included using semi-structed focus groups and interviews with practitioners, and interviews supported by elicitation techniques with members of migrant families. As part of the project, we also conducted creative art workshops to enable migrant family members to identify the ways in which they wanted to represent their experiences of everyday bordering. A group of young family migrant family members that we worked with in Sheffield chose to use photography, and this was exhibited as 'A Tale of Two Sheffields', in partnership with ‘City of Sanctuary – Sheffield’ at the 2022 Migrant Matters Festival. In Hull, family members chose to work with local community artists to create short films of interviews that they curated. These are included as resource in the project output, ‘Working with Migrant Communities: a resource for practitioners’. These activities and creative outputs, underpinned by the findings of the study, gave voice to members of migrant families that told us that they often feel unheard. They have also contributed to addressing a gap in training and resources for practitioners working with migrant family members.

The global movement of people is a growing feature of contemporary life. In the UK, policy and the media focus on the need to control all types of immigration and/or the possible 'illegality' of migrants. In 2012, for example, Theresa May stated that the Conservative-led Government aimed to deliberately create a 'hostile environment' by denying illegal immigrants access to work, housing, services and bank accounts. Subsequently, whilst some public servants, such as health care professionals, were already responsible for checking a person's immigration...

In 2024, the net migration rate in France reached 152,000. In recent years Europe and France have seen more people arrive than depart. The net migration rate is the difference between the number of immigrants (people coming into an area) and the number of emigrants (people leaving an area) throughout the year. France's highest net migration rate was reached in 2018 when it amounted to 201,000. Armed conflicts and economic migration are some of the reasons for immigration in Europe. The refugee crisis Studies have shown that there were 331,000 immigrant arrivals in France in 2022, which has risen since 2014. The migrant crisis, which began in 2015 in Europe, had an impact on the migration entry flows not only in France but in all European countries. The number of illegal border crossings to the EU over the Eastern Mediterranean route reached a record number of 885,386 crossings in 2015. Immigration in France Since the middle of the 19th century, France has attracted immigrants, first from European countries (like Poland, Spain, and Italy), and then from the former French colonies. In 2023, there were approximately 8.9 million people foreign-born in France. Most of them were living in the Ile-de-France region, which contains Paris, and in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in the Southeastern part of the country. In 2022, the majority of immigrants arriving in France were from Africa and Europe.

From January to September 2020, the highest number of illegal immigrants that arrived in Spain via land and sea came from Algeria, with approximately 7,600 people. The immigrants from Morocco and Mali were the second and third most numerous group, with 3,900 and 2,400 people leaving their country of residence, respectively. While more than 41,000 illegal immigrants reached the Iberian country in 2020, this figure represents merely eight percent of all immigrants that arrived in Spain that year.

A risky journey Spain, together with Italy and Greece, are the main points of entry to Europe for illegal migration. Most arrivals happen through the Mediterranean Sea, which is a very dangerous journey for migrants. Only in 2020, 1,717 people died or went missing while trying to reach the Spanish shores, more than in any of the last ten years. The Canary Islands is the area where the most people lost their lives. While active since 2006, the migration route from the coasts of West Africa to the Canary Islands (the closest territory of the European Union) has become particularly popular in recent years, even though so many people lost their lives there.

Undocumented minors

Among those reaching the Spanish territory are undocumented and unaccompanied minors, known in Spanish as "menas” (Menores Extranjeros No Acompañados). In 2018, the number of unaccompanied and separated children that arrived by sea exceeded seven thousand, which represented the largest figure since at least 2014. This number decreased by approximately 3,700 cases in 2020. Nearly half of them came from Morocco, separated from Spain by merely 13 kilometres of water at the Gibraltar Strait's narrowest point.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the majority of documented migration to the United States of American came from European countries. Between 1820 and 1957, of the approximate 41 million migrants to the US, over 34 million of these came from Europe. The most commonly documented countries of origin during this time were Germany (6.6 million), Italy (4.9 million), Ireland (4.6 million), Great Britain (4.5 million), and Russia (3.4 million). The first wave of mass migration came in the 1850s, as the Great famine crippled Ireland's population, and many in rural areas of mainland Europe struggled to adapt to industrialization, and economic opportunities attracted many in the 1870s, following the American Civil War. The 1880s saw another wave, as steam powered ships and lower fares made trans-Atlantic journeys much more affordable. The first wave of mass migration from Eastern and Southern Europe also arrived at this time, as industrialization and agricultural advancements led to high unemployment in these regions.

The majority of migrants to the United States settled in major urban centers, which allowed the expansion of industry, leading to the United States' emergence as one of the leading global economies at the turn of the twentieth century. The largest wave of migration to the United states during this period came in the first fifteen years of the 1900s. The influx of migrants from Northern and Western Europe had now been replaced by an influx from Eastern and Southern Europe (although migration from the British Isles was still quite high during this time). European migration fell to it's lowest levels in eighty years during the First World War, before fluctuating again in the interwar period, due to the Great Depression. As the twentieth century progressed, the continent with the highest levels of migration to the US gradually changed from Europe to Latin America, as economic opportunities in Western Europe improved, and the US' relationship with the Soviet Union and other Eastern, communist states became complicated.

This statistic shows the total number of individuals using Apulia and Calabria (Italy) to enter the European Union (EU) illegally from 2009 to 2013. In 2013, approximately 5 thousand illegal immigrants used Apulia and Calabria to reach the EU.

In 2021 there were approximately 13,630 facilitators of illegal immigration detected in the European Union, the highest number detected in this time period.

In a survey conducted among African migrants in Europe in 2018, Libya and Morocco were the most common departing countries to reach Europe. In particular, 57 percent of respondents declared they were in Libya before they arrived in Europe. Furthermore, 26 percent of interviewees declared that Morocco was the country they left to migrate to Europe.

In 2023, almost 90 percent of migrants who arrived illegally through Spain's southern border were male adults. Undocumented arrivals of minors accounted for approximately five percent of all cases, whereas women accounted another five percent of the total number of irregular immigrants.

The largest number of immigrants in Germany were from Ukraine, as of 2023. The top three origin countries were rounded up by Romania and Turkey. Immigrants are defined as having left a country, which may be their home country, to permanently reside in another. Upon arriving, immigrants do not hold the citizenship of the country they move to. Immigration in the EU All three aforementioned countries are members of the European Union, which means their citizens have freedom of movement between EU member states. In practice, this means that citizens of any EU member country may relocate between them to live and work there. Unrestricted by visas or residence permits, the search for university courses, jobs, retirement options, and places to live seems to be defined by an enormous amount of choice. However, even in this freedom of movement scheme, immigration may be hampered by bureaucratic hurdles or financial challenges. Prosperity with a question mark While Germany continues to be an attractive destination for foreigners both in and outside the European Union, as well as asylum applicants, it remains to be seen how current events might influence these patterns, whether the number of immigrants arriving from certain countries will shift. Europe’s largest economy is suffering. Climbing inflation levels in the last few months, as well as remaining difficulties from the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic are affecting global economic development. Ultimately, future immigrants may face the fact of moving from one struggling economy to another.

This statistic shows the total number of individuals illegally entering the European Union (EU) between border-crossing points (BCPs) from Kosovo from 2010 to 2016. In 2016, approximately 930 Kosovans were detected illegally crossing borders to reach the EU.

In 2023, Italy counted almost 195,000 people illegally present on the national territory. Specifically, 190,000 people were charged for entering the country without valid documents. In Europe, the largest number of illegal migrants was found in Germany, with Italy ranking at the second place. The same year, 3490 asylum requests submitted to the Italian authorities were denied.