Irregular arrivals rose sharply in 2022, marking a notable rebound after the pandemic slowdown. The latest balance sheet released this week shows a 64% year-on-year increase, reaching the highest level since 2016. The European border agency Frontex reports a total of about 330,000 irregular entries in the year through preliminary calculations. The trend describes a second consecutive year of strong growth after a nadir in 2020, according to the Warsaw-based agency.
Analysis confirms that the Western Balkans route became the main entry channel into EU territory. Roughly half of all irregular entries, about 145,600 people, arrived via this corridor. These figures represent a 136% leap from 2021, the largest on this route since 2015. The majority of travelers on this path originate from Syria, Afghanistan, and Turkey, with Tunisia, India, and Burundi also appearing among the entry origins.
The middle Mediterranean corridor is another heavily used route, with around 102,500 entrants in 2022, a 51% increase from 2021. The routes include crossings from Egypt, Tunisia, and Bangladesh. This tally marks the highest number of arrivals on this pathway since 2017. The east Mediterranean route remains active as well, with Frontex noting 42,800 irregular entries last year, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. Although that total more than doubled since the previous year, it is still below levels seen in 2019.
On the western side, the Mediterranean corridor toward the Iberian Peninsula, Ceuta and Melilla, and the Atlantic route to the Canary Islands continued to influence movement patterns. Frontex highlights that for the Mediterranean route, border authorities registered around one-fifth of the 2021 figure, with about 80% of entrants coming from Northwest African states such as Algeria and Morocco, as well as Syria. For the Atlantic route, arrivals declined by 31%, totaling 15,460 detections. Two-thirds of those detected originated in Morocco, with other significant sources including Senegal, Guinea, and Ivory Coast.
english channel
Frontex also tracks attempts to cross via the English Channel. In 2022, about 71,000 people from 50 nationalities tried to enter the United Kingdom irregularly. The report notes that the largest share of these entrants came from Middle Eastern countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Albania and nations in the Horn of Africa.
The European agency reported around 20 border operations across the EU’s external frontiers during the year and deployed an average of about 2,000 agents. On a global scale, Syria remained the leading source of irregular entries, doubling the prior year, followed by Afghanistan and Tunisia. Together these three accounted for a substantial share of arrivals. The data also indicates that most people attempting irregular entry are men, while women accounted for less than one in ten detections. The share of minors identified in these attempts declined slightly to roughly 9%.