I want to be honest with you about why this exists. For years I watched people argue about migration, refugees and border spending — louder every year — while the facts underneath quietly slipped out of reach. The numbers were scattered across dozens of institutions, buried in PDFs, wrapped in jargon, and often contradicted from one headline to the next. It bothered me that ordinary people were asked to have strong opinions about numbers almost nobody could actually find. So I decided to build the honest, calm place I kept wishing already existed.
I did not do this alone, and I do not want to pretend I did. A small team gave more than nine months of patient, unglamorous work to this — cross-checking official releases, reconciling clashing definitions, cleaning broken records, and turning raw tables into something a normal human being can read over a cup of coffee. Hundreds of volunteers around the world checked figures, flagged mistakes and translated pages in their own free time. To every one of you: thank you. This is genuinely yours as much as mine, and I am grateful for every late night and every “wait, that number looks wrong” message you sent me.
Everything here is reported, never invented. We do not make up estimates to fill an awkward gap — when the data does not exist, we simply say so. That rule is the whole point. I would rather show you an honest blank than a confident guess.
Why does this matter so much to me? Because behind every one of these figures is a real person who left home, and real communities trying to make sense of it. People deserve to argue from the same honest starting point, in a way that respects them. That is all I ever wanted BorderStat to be: clear, open to everyone, and built to last. Thank you for being here, and for caring enough to look at the real numbers.
With gratitude, the BorderStat Team
Founder · Idea & Project Manager