Methodology

The categories stay separate

Irregular arrivals, asylum applications, people granted protection, regular immigration, foreign residents, returns and emigration are distinct indicators. One person can appear in several of them: someone who lands and then applies for asylum is counted in both. That is why indicators are placed side by side and never added together.

People or crossings

Frontex counts border crossings, not people: someone crossing several times is counted several times. The Italian Ministry of the Interior and UNHCR count people. These are different quantities and never appear in the same chart.

Every figure carries its own date

A single file can hold several different dates. In the Italian Ministry of the Interior's daily dashboard, landings are current to 8:00 that morning, unaccompanied minors to the previous Monday, and reception places to the last day of the previous month. The site shows each indicator with its own date, not the file's.

Why we keep the files

The Italian Ministry of the Interior removes its PDFs after roughly two weeks, and its historical archive keeps only two a month. Without a copy of our own, a figure published today could not be checked a month from now. Every downloaded file is therefore kept, and references point to the stored copy.

Absence and zero

In nationality breakdowns, a missing row means zero: the Frontex table crosses routes, border types and 162 nationalities over 211 months, and is empty for eighty per cent of its cells. Totals always keep their zeros, because there a zero is something you read off the chart.

Country names

The sources do not share a vocabulary: Eurostat uses two-letter ISO codes and calls Greece EL, UNHCR uses codes of its own, Frontex uses English names, the Italian Ministry of the Interior uses Italian ones. Every observation keeps the vocabulary it came from, so two different lists are never matched by mistake.

Revisions and corrections

Sources revise past figures: the Italian Ministry of the Interior prints on every page that its data are subject to consolidation, and Frontex flags periods still under review in its notes. When a value changes, the previous one is kept along with the date it was replaced.

What these figures do not say

• Malta is not covered by UNHCR's sea arrivals: the situation covers Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Spain.
• Only the current format of the Italian Ministry of the Interior's dashboard is supported. The format used until 2024 is not read, and the historical daily series comes from UNHCR.
• Eurostat's breakdown by citizenship covers the last three years; country totals go back to 2014.
• Eurostat rounds values to multiples of five: the sum of citizenships may not exactly match the published total.
• Nationalities are declared on arrival and not verified.
• Flows drawn on the map have real origins, routes and figures, but the path between the two points is indicative: no source publishes actual itineraries.