UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, counted 108.4 million people forcibly displaced worldwide at the end of 2022, 35.3 million of them refugees, and the routes they take follow a clear geography: most cross only the nearest border, and a minority travel on along a handful of long corridors. The main routes of the past decade and a half are Syria to Turkey and on across the Aegean and the Balkans (peaking in 2015), Libya and Tunisia to the Italian island of Lampedusa across the Central Mediterranean, the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, Myanmar’s Rakhine State to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh (2017), Ukraine to Poland (2022), and Sudan’s Darfur region to eastern Chad (since 2023). This guide follows each one stop by stop, with the figures UN agencies and governments have recorded.
The 1951 Refugee Convention and the Nearest Safe Border
A refugee, in law, is someone outside their own country who cannot return because of a well-founded fear of persecution, a definition set by the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed in Geneva on 28 July 1951. UNHCR itself was created by a UN General Assembly resolution in December 1949 and began work in January 1951. People displaced inside their own country, often the larger group, are internally displaced persons, and many people on the routes below travel for mixed reasons, so agencies usually speak of “refugees and migrants” together.
Distance and cost shape almost every journey. Walking or taking a bus to a neighbouring country is possible for most families; a sea crossing or a jungle trek requires money for smugglers and carries a high risk of death. That is why neighbouring states such as Turkey, Bangladesh, Poland and Chad host far more people than the distant countries that dominate news coverage, a pattern set out in our ranking of the countries hosting the most refugees.
Syria to Turkey: The First Stop, 2011 Onward
The Syrian civil war began after protests in March 2011, and by May 2011 the first refugee camps had opened in Turkey. By October 2025 more than 13.4 million Syrians had been forcibly displaced, of whom at least 6.7 million had left the country, more than half of them to Turkey. Turkey hosted 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees in 2019, 3.3 million in 2023 and almost 3 million when the Assad government fell in December 2024. When Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt stopped accepting Syrian asylum seekers, more people began to look further afield, one of the triggers of the movement towards Europe in 2015.
Across the Aegean to Lesbos and Up the Balkan Route, 2015–2016
In 2015 more than one million refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean, most of them over the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, and about 1.3 million people applied for asylum in Europe, the most in one year since the Second World War. Around 85% of sea arrivals landed in Greece. Several Greek islands, including Lesbos, Chios, Kos and Leros, lie less than 6 km from the Turkish coast, and a fence built in 2012 had closed most of Turkey’s land border with Greece. Syrians made up the largest group, alongside Afghans, Iraqis and Eritreans. The year before, in 2014, most had still crossed the Mediterranean from Libya, and EU states had counted 626,065 asylum applications, already the highest total since 1992.
From the islands people took ferries to the Greek mainland, then crossed North Macedonia and Serbia towards Hungary, Austria and Germany. In September 2015 Hungary sealed its border with Serbia with a fence, diverting the flow through Croatia; when Hungary closed its Croatian border in October, Slovenia became the only route to Austria and limited entries to 2,500 people a day. Germany suspended the Dublin rules that return asylum seekers to their first EU country and received over 440,000 asylum applications in 2015; Sweden received 156,000 and Austria 88,000. The EU–Turkey agreement that took effect on 20 March 2016, under which Turkey took back new irregular arrivals in return for €6 billion, cut crossings to Greece by about 90% within a month.
Libya to Lampedusa: The Central Mediterranean
Lampedusa, a 20.2 km² Italian island of about 6,000 people, is the southernmost part of Italy: 113 km from Tunisia, 176 km from Malta and 205 km from Sicily. Since the early 2000s it has been one of Europe’s main entry points for boats setting out from Libya and Tunisia, and in 2015 about 150,000 people made the sea crossing from North Africa to Italy, most of them from Eritrea, Nigeria and Somalia. Eritreans in particular flee a national service that can last indefinitely.
It has also been the deadliest. On 3 October 2013 a boat that had sailed from Misrata in Libya, carrying people mainly from Eritrea, Somalia and Ghana, sank off Lampedusa; 155 were rescued and more than 360 died. Eight days later, on 11 October, a second boat, reportedly carrying people from Syria, sank about 120 km from Lampedusa inside Malta’s search-and-rescue zone. Italy responded with Operation Mare Nostrum, a naval search-and-rescue mission that ran from 18 October 2013 to 31 October 2014 and rescued at least 150,000 people before the EU border agency Frontex’s Operation Triton, with a smaller search-and-rescue role, replaced it. Between January and April 2015 about 1,600 people died on the route from Libya to Lampedusa, at the time the deadliest migrant route in the world, and at least 2,889 died on the crossing to Italy over the whole of 2015.
Turbo to Yaviza: The Darién Gap Between Colombia and Panama
The Darién Gap is the roadless stretch of rainforest, swamp and mountains on the Colombia–Panama border where the Pan-American Highway breaks for about 106 km, between Turbo in Colombia and Yaviza in Panama. The walk runs north from the Colombian side, where Turbo and Necoclí are the nearest towns, into Panama’s Darién Province, a trek that once took a week and by 2024 had been organised into about two and a half days. Haitians predominated in the 2010s and Venezuelans in the 2020s; of the 334,000 people who crossed in the first eight months of 2023, 60% were Venezuelan. Most were heading for the Mexico–United States border.
River crossings flood without warning, and robbery and sexual violence by criminal groups are common. In 2024 there were 55 known deaths, almost certainly an undercount, and 180 unaccompanied children were taken into care in Panama, some because relatives had died or been separated from them on the trail.
Rakhine to Cox’s Bazar: The Rohingya Exodus of 2017
The Rohingya, a Muslim minority from Rakhine State in western Myanmar, have been denied citizenship by Myanmar and have fled in waves for decades. The largest began after attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on 25 August 2017, when Myanmar’s security forces and Buddhist militias launched what were called “clearance operations”. UN reports put the number who fled Rakhine State for Bangladesh at more than 700,000 by September 2018, most settling in Cox’s Bazar District. UN investigators and human rights groups have described the violence as ethnic cleansing and genocide; Myanmar denies persecuting the Rohingya and says the crackdown targeted terrorism. By September 2018 Bangladesh’s prime minister put the total Rohingya population in the country at 1.1 million.
Two official camps lie in the sub-districts of Ukhia and Teknaf, and makeshift settlements grew up around them in late 2017. Kutupalong, with more than 650,000 residents, is described as the largest refugee camp in the world and would rank as the sixth most populous urban area in Bangladesh. Overcrowding, exposure to natural disasters and infectious disease remain constant risks; a single varicella outbreak in 2018 recorded more than 82,000 cases.
Lviv to Medyka and Przemyśl: Ukraine to Poland, 2022
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 caused the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War. Because Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 were barred from leaving under martial law, about 90% of those who fled were women and children. In the first weeks up to 100,000 people a day arrived in Lviv, in western Ukraine, from where trains ran to border crossings such as Medyka in Poland; from Medyka most continued to the nearby city of Przemyśl and on across Europe. The full list of frontier states is in our guide to the countries that border Ukraine.
Poland relaxed border formalities and recorded more than 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees by 25 July 2022. The EU activated its Temporary Protection Directive, giving Ukrainians the right to live, work and study in any member state. By September 2025 UNHCR counted 5.7 million Ukrainian refugees worldwide, and in May 2025 the largest numbers with protection status were in Germany (1.2 million), Poland (almost 1 million) and the Czech Republic (0.4 million). The arrivals raised the population of Rzeszów, the largest city in south-eastern Poland, by about 50%; in Wrocław, Ukrainians went from about 10% of the population before the war to about 23% by April 2022.
Darfur to Adré: Sudan’s Refugees in Chad, 2023 Onward
Fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces broke out on 15 April 2023. By November 2025 more than 11.7 million people had been forced from their homes, about 7.26 million of them inside Sudan and 4.25 million who had crossed into neighbouring countries or returned to their countries of origin, making it the largest displacement crisis in the world. Most of those who left Darfur crossed west into Chad, where some 400,000 Sudanese refugees from earlier Darfur conflicts were already living. Most of those fleeing El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, went to Adré, a town in Chad’s Ouaddaï Region just 400 m from the border.
More than 160,000 of the new arrivals in Chad were Masalit, fleeing attacks on their community by the RSF and allied militias in West Darfur, and most were women and children. Others went north to Egypt (500,000–550,000 by May 2024) or south to South Sudan (at least 675,000). How these flows compare with economic and family migration is discussed in our overview of modern migration patterns.