1A migratory flow often comes down to a line or an arrow on a map. This is a very simplistic vision of reality, as attested by the variety of migrants’ accounts collected during a field study conducted on Trans-Saharan routes. There must be a way to grasp the diversity of migration situations and reveal the different experiences of migrants, experiences which alter the course of their lives and often make them vulnerable. Reflection was initiated to develop a new representation of migration patterns, notably by visualising the resources consumed by migrants and changes in their status according to the national and international regulations applicable to the countries they pass through.

Truck full of migrants returning to Niger.

2A partnership was subsequently established with a team of computer scientists to determine how to use the migrants’ individual stories to shed light on migration patterns. Extracting a migration pattern from textual data is a major scientific challenge. This information was mined by a number of IT tools and modelled in the form of graphs which notably represent the space, time and resources of the migration pattern. By doing so, the team highlighted points of convergence, i.e. the pitfalls and opportunities which mark migration patterns.

3This representation of migration sites and stakeholders, based on the IT ontology model, reflects the actual complexity of migration patterns and shows the diversity of social, political and economic processes involved. It confirms, among other things, that  the outsourcing of border control by Global North countries to the border points of the countries of origin and transit is what propels migrants into illegality on southern routes.