The European migrant and refugee crisis

Date

2015

Category

Social & demographic

Region

Europe / Mediterranean

Era

Contemporary

Significance

During 2015 more than one million refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, three to four times the previous year's total, in the continent's largest movement of displaced people since the Second World War.

Around 80 percent were fleeing war and persecution, roughly half from Syria, alongside Afghans and Iraqis; most reached Greece via Turkey or Italy via North Africa. The journey was deadly, with thousands drowning at sea. The photograph of the drowned Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015, became a global symbol of the crisis. Germany's decision to admit large numbers of asylum-seekers, Hungary's border fence, and the temporary reimposition of frontier controls strained the EU's open-border Schengen system and exposed deep divisions over burden-sharing. A March 2016 EU–Turkey agreement curtailed the main route. The crisis reshaped European politics, fuelling the rise of nationalist and anti-immigration movements and shaping debates that fed into events such as the United Kingdom's Brexit vote.

Related social & demographic events

• The COVID-19 pandemic
  11 March 2020
• The AIDS Epidemic Is First Identified
  1981
• The Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine
  1958–1962
• Obergefell v. Hodges legalises same-sex marriage across the US
  26 June 2015
• The #MeToo movement goes viral
  October 2017 onward
• George Floyd's murder and global Black Lives Matter protests
  May–June 2020

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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