Missing Migrants Graphic

Tallying the costs of irregular international migration

Since 2014, the Missing Migrants Project has been tallying the deaths and disappearances of migrants in the act of international migration. They consult various sources including administrative data and news reports, but due to the nature of such things, their tallies are very likely undercounts. For their ten year anniversary, I developed an interactive graphic for them that presents the grim reality of irregular migration. A version of this is reproduced below.

Notes

Graphic was created using D3 while data wrangling was done in R. Map data are from a TopoJSON redistribution of Natural Earth data. The script for rendering spikes on a globe was adapted from a Washington Post graphic. Data was downloaded from the Missing Migrants Project website on 10 March 2025.