The number of people trying to migrate through the central Mediterranean route does not increase when governments or oenages carry out search and rescue operations, contrary to what is thought. The number of migrants trying to reach Europe varies depending on other variables, such as the intensity of war conflicts, natural disasters or the economic situation of their countries, but not the likelihood that they will be rescued.

The stretch of sea that separates North Africa and Turkey from Italy and Malta is one of the busiest and most dangerous migration routes. The Missing Migrants Project, which is part of the UN, has counted more than 20,000 deaths in these waters since 2014. In the first quarter of this year, 441 people lost their lives in this crossing.

Various initiatives, both public and private, have tried to limit deaths on the route in recent years, with search and rescue operations in which lifeboats try to help people at risk at sea. Despite this, several European Union countries have denounced that these actions promote irregular migration, criminalize the gangs that carry them out and accuse them of contributing to the death of thousands of people.

The data, however, do not ratify these criticisms. This is the conclusion of a study between three German and one American universities, published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. “Search and rescue operations first of all save lives and do not attract migration”, summed up Ramona Rischke, researcher at the German Center for Research on Integration and Migration, and one of the authors of the work, at a press conference. The research compares the number of people who would have tried to migrate if rescue operations had not taken place and the final number. The work found no difference between the two situations, something Rischke doesn’t find surprising, since previous, less detailed research had suggested that such a relationship wasn’t likely.

To estimate the flow of migrants expected if rescue operations had not been carried out, the team has based the figures of the years prior to these actions and on the social, economic and climatological factors that existed in the countries of respective origin. Among these factors are changes in the intensity of conflicts, natural disasters or the price of basic goods, for example, phenomena that do influence the migratory flow.

“The search and rescue operations didn’t alter anything, they were simply a response to the problem”, says the head of the study, Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez, PhD in Sociology and researcher at the University of Potsdam. “The flow of migration would have been the same”, he concludes.

The team also used the model to analyze whether the migration flow had changed since 2017, when the EU-backed Libyan Coast Guard redoubled efforts to intercept and return boats and dinghies to starting costs In this case, the authors point out, the effect is clear: the intervention has reduced the number of trips.

However, this reduction has coincided with reports “of human rights violations in , and of potential increases in the mortality ratio on the Mediterranean route, as a potential consequence of the intervention of the coast guard”, warns the study. The research calls for more in-depth research on this issue to clarify whether these kinds of policies contribute to the deterioration of human rights.