“When safe pathways are out of reach, people are forced into dangerous journeys and into the hands of smugglers and traffickers,” IOM Director General Amy Pope said in a statement, adding migrant deaths are “not inevitable” and are “a global failure we cannot accept as normal.”
The EU has been taking steps to reduce migration to the continent, including plans to remove failed asylum seekers faster and measures that allow countries to cut deals to set up migration processing hubs in other nations, regardless of whether the people being moved there have a connection with those countries.
The EU’s priority now is “about bringing illegal arrivals to a minimum and keeping those numbers there,” Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner said when presenting the bloc’s migration strategy in January.
That’s “not as an end in itself,” he said, but reduces pressure on EU countries, prevents abuse, reinforces people’s trust in the EU, and helps save lives. “Any smuggling trip prevented is potentially a life which we save.”
As a next step, the EU “must address migration along the whole route,” including by ensuring protection for people in need “closer to the point of departure,” Brunner said.
The spike in fatalities shows the continued dangers of the Mediterranean migration route, despite registered arrivals in Italy dropping sharply — from 6,358 in the first two months of 2025 to 2,465 in the same period this year.