Detections of illegal border crossings in the EU in 2019

There are roughly a dozen non-EU countries through which the vast majority of irregular migrants pass before being detected at an external EU border, namely Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia, Morocco, Albania, Russia, Libya, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tunisia, Algeria, Moldova, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Senegal. These countries are located on the main migratory routes that migrants and their smugglers use to get into the EU:
Figure 1 – Migration routes and illegal crossings to the EU
Eastern Mediterranean route, for sea and land crossings from Turkey;
Western Mediterranean route, for crossings from Morocco and Algeria to Spain or the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla;
Western Balkan route, for land crossings from Greece to central and western Europe;
Central Mediterranean route, for sea crossings to Italy and Malta from Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Turkey and Greece;
Western African route, for sea crossings from Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal to the Canary Islands;
Circular route, between Albania and Greece;
Eastern borders route, for land crossings from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova.