Mapping Forced Migration
The people states push back across borders, and why the world's migration statistics barely see them.
In January 1983 Nigeria gave undocumented foreigners two weeks to leave. Hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians took the coastal road west through Benin and Togo and crossed home. None of them were refugees: they were Ghanaian citizens returning to Ghana, and once over the border they stopped being anyone's international concern. This project collects moves like that one, in which people who had already migrated once, for work, for safety or for a better life, were forced to move again.
A blind spot in the numbers
Migration statistics follow legal categories. UNHCR counts refugees, asylum seekers, the internally displaced and the stateless; most other migration is counted where people settle, as foreign-born residents. Unless they had been recognised as refugees, people forced back into the country whose passport they hold fit none of these. They are not refugees, because they are in their own country, and not internally displaced, because they crossed a border; most were born where they arrive, so even counts of the foreign-born miss them. The state that pushed them out rarely publishes a figure, and the state that takes them in has no category to count them in. Anyone estimating a country's population has to rebuild these moves from scholarship, NGO reports and the press, one account at a time, which is how this collection was made.
What counts as force
Force comes in many forms. Some removals are a decree with a deadline, like Ghana's in 1969 or Nigeria's in 1983. Some are round-ups and border drops, as when Algeria drives migrants to the Niger border and leaves them in the desert. Some are withdrawn permits, harassment, or a war that makes staying impossible, and some are return programmes with a bus ticket, a cash grant and a date after which staying becomes illegal. Where coercion ends and choice begins is rarely written down, and two accounts of the same event often disagree about which it was.
Deported or expelled, the same arithmetic
Richer states tend to deport: one person at a time, through a court or an administrative order, on a scheduled flight. Poorer states, and states in crisis, more often expel: a whole group at once, by decree. The first reads as routine administration and the second as an emergency, and only the second makes the news. As a demographic intervention they do the same thing: a state takes people out of its population and adds them to another country's. Spread over a decade, routine deportations can move as many people as the expulsions everyone remembers.
The words are political
No law or convention says which policy makes a forced move an expulsion and which makes it a repatriation. The same people crossing the same border are expelled in the words of the country that receives them, repatriated in the words of the country that sends them, voluntarily returned in the report of the agency that paid for the trip, and deported in the court record. The label tells you more about who is speaking, and to whom, than about what happened. The tool keeps four words, expulsion, deportation, repatriation and escape, because its sources use them, and reads them as the source's framing rather than as a finding.
Counting each move once
The large expulsions are told by many sources at once, each with its own total, its own years and its own breakdown by destination. Added up, they would count the most notorious events several times over. The tool counts each move once: where sources give figures for the same flow in the same year it takes their median, and where they describe an event differently it uses one source and says which. Every account it counts is listed with its source, and every correction is documented, so each number leads back to a page someone published.
Reading the tool
Choose the kinds of move and the years at the top. The map draws the largest flows, the corridors view every flow between countries grouped by region, the time series people per year, and the cases list every account with its source. Click a country to see it as a place people were forced out of, a place they were sent to, and a stop for people from elsewhere. Every view can be shared as a link or downloaded as CSV.