Despite efforts by individual nations and the European Union to get to grips with the migrant crisis, nearly 100,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in the first half of 2017.

While the significant figure is down on the same period in 2016 and shows the migrant deal with Turkey has been partially successful, the latest figures reported by the UN Migration Agency (IOM) show the problem is slowly shifting West.

Recording the total 95,768 migrants arriving in Europe by sea from January through to the end of June, the number entering Greece fell considerably in Greece but rose steadily in Italy and Spain, which has recently been reported as a “new migrant route”.

Of those 95,768, some 11,639 migrants had been “rescued at sea” between Saturday and Wednesday, the 24th to 28th of June.

Not all were so lucky. Many migrants are taken advantage of by ruthless people smugglers, who as well as raping and beating their “customers” also knowingly put them to sea on dangerous boats, knowing the majority will be picked up mid-voyage by European migration charities.

Some 2,196 people are known to have drowned in the Mediterranean in 2017 so far.

The new figures come just days after Italy threatened to close their sea ports to the migrant ferries operated by charities and NGOs, as the numbers arriving were overwhelming the country.

Although these numbers migrating to Europe may seem significant, taking the people smuggler’s boats across the Mediterranean is just one way to access Europe — and new figures reveal the enormous scale of migration worldwide. Breitbart London reported on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) latest statistics, which show five million migrants flowed into industrialised nations worldwide last year.

One of the most open to these migrants was Germany — of the 1.6 million people who applied for asylum in developed nations in 2016, 675,000 of them applied in Germany.

According to a leaked German security report that became public in February the supply of would-be migrants ready to follow the hundreds of thousands of their own countrymen who have already made the journey is not set to dry up. According to the secret paper, there are over six million migrants hoping to come to Europe in countries around the Mediterranean.

A similar report by the Austrian army has predicted Europe would see 15 million newcomers by 2020.