 I was younger than him. He was my favorite brother. I always looked up to him. I'm still searching for him. He left when he was 14 with my dad. If he is alive today, he is about to 46. We just want to know what happened to him. Mohammed's brother went missing 20 years ago on his journey from Morocco to Spain. He is among 8600 people estimated to have disappeared or lost their lives on irregular migration routes to Spain since 1988. Like Mohammed's brother, each person who disappears or dies in search of a better life carries with them a story. Every one of them has family and friends who miss them, who wonder where they are, and who set out on a search for answers that can go on for years or even a lifetime. This painful situation is very common. Tens of thousands of families of missing migrants remain in a state of uncertainty. Without answers and without knowing the fate of their loved ones. In this episode of Living Without Them Stories of Families Left Behind, we talk about the experiences of families of missing migrants in Spain. Spain is one of the main destinations and transit countries among migrants seeking to reach Europe from north and west Africa. People undertake dangerous sea crossings towards Spain through the Strait of Gibraltar or the Alboran Sea, or they cross the land borders separating Morocco from Ceuta and Melilla. Many people also travel across the Atlantic Ocean from the northwestern coast of Africa towards the Canary Islands. During 2020 and until the first February of this year, almost 45,000 migrants were reported to have reached Spain by sea and land routes. From the total number of arrivals to Spain during the reporting period, the sea arrivals constitute 95% while the land arrivals constitute 5%. This is Osama Albarudi. Osama has been working at IOM for the past six years, first for its mission in Morocco and now for the IOM office in Spain. Osama is joining us in this episode to tell us more about the journeys of migrants traveling irregularly to Spain. We also speak to Dr. Gabriela Sánchez, senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Last year, Gabriela and I spent time with migrant families and community activists in southern Spain to document their experiences of searching for their missing loved ones. And as part of this research, what we did was to work and to visit families who had lost a loved one in the context of migration on the journey to primarily to Spain. We worked with local advocates known to the missing migrants project in southern Spain, so that we could identify families who had lost loved ones in the context of their migration. They were people who primarily lived, primarily what is known as Europe's fruit basket, non-media. And they worked totally in the agricultural fields that people spent throughout the year, you know, across the continent. According to the available data provided by the Spanish Ministry of Interior, the most common nationality among the arrivals by sea until mid-October of last year, 2020, where Morocco, Mali, Algeria, Guinea or Conakry, Ivory Coast, Senegal and other countries from sub-Saharan Africa. Most of them come from the macro from North Africa and West Africa. Many of them are women, young people and children who lack immigration status and or who despite having some sort of immigration status or recognition have been able to secure employment outside of the agricultural fields. So they tend to have low income, very limited access to any kind of health or social services and again to be facing this kind of challenging work conditions. Despite all of these challenges or on top of all of these challenges, rather, we have to add the fact that they are looking for their missing work points. The conditions that they face make it difficult, make it very hard for them to pursue these searches. However, this doesn't mean that this has to stop them or prevent them from engaging in the search. These difficult circumstances do not stop families' demands for information on their missing relatives. Families actively pursue every path available to them and use several strategies in their search, often simultaneously. Migrant families rely on multiple sources of information. Families usually reach out to friends and family members or to the family of people who have probably marked on the same boat or who has traveled with their loved one. Besides reaching out to family and friends, families interact with several other actors in the process of searching for a missing relative. Many families reach out to grassroots and community activists, people in local communities in Spain who may not have a particular affiliation with a specific group, but participate very actively in the search and in supporting families. So these are people who probably have a completely different job during the day, but then at night time they are taking calls, visiting hospitals, reaching out to their colleagues and in a fashion that allows them to identify or to collect some information they can share with family members who are looking for their loved ones. This is primarily voluntary work that is carried out once again by very engaged advocates who many times are migrants themselves. Many times they are also women who have to balance a lot of obligations that are related to their households and their families, but that still find the time to support the search of missing migrants out there. Another actor that families may reach out to during their search are the smugglers who facilitate journeys on irregular migration routes. This may sound confusing to many, especially because we have this perception of the migrant smuggler as being a male and also being somebody who is inherently or naturally violent or aggressive. Smuggling facilitators have most of the time have some sort of social reputation that they want to maintain, that they want to keep. And so many times they are actually the source of very important information for families. And we need to, as researchers, also recognize their value, their importance to families as they carry out their research. As part of their search process, families may reach out to authorities in different countries. However, they often struggle to find ways to report their relatives' disappearances because there is no centralized body or agency addressing missing migrant cases. Often, their efforts to engage with authorities are met with indifference and inaction, or are ineffective due to language barriers. Family members who don't have regular migration status do not want to make themselves visible to authorities for fear of detention or even deportation. Families also tend to reach out to authorities and to more institutionalized bodies. However, there's a lot of mistrust that comes with reaching out to them. And this is because people felt quite often, and this came out during the interviews, people quite often feel intimidated, disrespected, or not understood, or are unable to communicate what they need. There's also, of course, the very fact that many of them lack immigration status. There is not a single identifiable, clearly accessible mechanism for them to file a report concerning an emissive migrant. People many times have to file multiple reports or go from one agency or one government entity to the next to report a missing person. And at many of these locations, as we already mentioned, they encounter challenges that are related to language. They cannot, many times they cannot communicate. Also, the fear of being discriminated on the basis of their place of origin or their nationality or their ethnicity. We called and called his phone until it stopped ringing, and then we started looking. First, we looked for him in the hospitals, then we filed a complaint at the police station. The mother of the brother's friend, who disappeared with him, has also tried with the Spanish embassy in Morocco, but they told her nothing, that they had no information. This is Laila. Her brother went missing in 2018 when crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Spain. Laila has been searching for him from Morocco, where she lives. Families who, like Laila, have lost relatives on the way to Spain but are not based in the country, face specific challenges when searching from abroad. Many don't know where to start the search, as there are no clear and accessible mechanisms to report the disappearance of a loved one from another country. Most families are unable to travel to Spain for the purposes of the search due to complex visa requirements, and because they may be unable to cover the cost of traveling. Another very critical element, a critical aspect of the experience in Spain is the fact that according to Spanish law, if you want to file a report of somebody who was missing, you have to do it in person. You have to present yourself at a specific jurisdiction of Spanish police, Spanish government, and file your claim at this location. You cannot file from abroad. So imagine what this means to families who know that their loved one disappeared in transit, or maybe that he or she died in transit or in Spain. These families are practically unable to start the search or to initiate any kind of process that would allow them to recover the remains of their loved ones. And this is also, this is very much connected to the fact that while this may not sound too difficult from us who are recording this within Europe, it is extremely hard for families in countries of origin to obtain a passport. It's also cost prohibitive. Then requirements that are associated or affiliated with obtaining a visa, for example, having to show proof that you have a specific level of income, constitute barriers to families. So in other words, families cannot easily have access to visas or or passports that would allow them to enter the EU to file a request for or to file a missing person's case or or to try to find out what happened to the loved one. Because of the lack of options to safely report the disappearance of a loved one to authorities, families turned to informal channels for their search. Besides reaching out to family members, neighbors, friends and other migrants, families also use social media to search for information and trace their family members online. Families consistently reported specifically in the case of Spain, how they rely on social networks like Facebook. So they go to web pages from migrant organizations or that are set up by groups of people within Spain or maybe in other countries where their loved one might have gone to. However, publishing information about the disappearance on social media can place families at risk of scams or fraud. There are risks that are affiliated or associated with people carrying out searches on social media. One is the very fact that very personal, very private information has been disseminated with the entire world or, you know, with anyone who would have access to these groups. There were several cases that the research team was able to document concerning families who had paid significant amounts of money to people to produce some sort of information or evidence that their loved one was alive. And this again generates not only financial losses, but also increases the levels of anxiety the families may be facing when they realize that this was not true, that somebody was just trying to take advantage of them. Searches are eventful, difficult processes. Within the family, there may be different ways of dealing with the absence and the search. And sometimes gendered norms and perceptions may shape how family members are involved in search processes. Our conversations with families in Spain revealed how gender creates barriers and challenges for carrying out the search, which often put women at a disadvantage. When it comes to the actual search process, the research in Spain also showed that many times perceptions related to gender shape the direction and the dissemination of information. What I mean by this is, for example, that many times male relatives may withhold information concerning a search from female relatives claiming that they are too emotional or even irrational to grasp the the magnitude of the issue. They also may want to quote unquote protect women from suffering more and that in a sense limits the exchange of information or dissemination of information within family members. The disappearance of a loved one also has an impact on children in the family. The loss of a loved one is perceived by children as a defining moment of their lives. The feeling of loss accompanies them throughout their life, especially if they also decide to migrate themselves. When Gabriela and I were conducting fieldwork in Spain, some participants shared a few memories of their repercussions and the significance of losing a loved one during childhood. Most of the literature, most of the research has looked at how adults are impacted by the loss, but we know again very little about how children cope with the loss. Several of the people that we interviewed were children or teenagers when their loved ones disappeared or went missing. One of the cases that resonated the most with us was the one involving American family. They had three sons. The oldest had already died in the context of his migration. The second oldest decided to embark and leave Morocco behind and come to Europe. He went missing for several days. During this time, his family had no information concerning him. His phone was turned off. In fact, he didn't have access to his phone at this point, and the family was really just not, it was completely unaware of what had happened to him. The disappearance was especially difficult for the youngest of the children, the family, the youngest son, and that they've been finally the middle child, the one who had embarked on the journey, was finally able to reach back home. His little brother picked up the phone and he fainted. The impression of he listening to his brother's voice was so strong that he fainted. It is apparent of my old brother had a great impact on the family. It changed the whole way of life. My mother cries at any time. On important holidays, she remembers him a lot. My mother, when she sees a nightbar getting married for example, guess it, thinking that she will not be able to live those moments in my brother's life. He left a very big hole. This is Omar. His brother disappeared years ago on his journey to Spain. Like Omar, many family members in Spain, but also abroad do not know the fate of their loved ones. But they are not silent nor passive victims. In the absence of official channels, families themselves are pushing their cases forward and developing their own networks and support structures to search for the missing. All efforts to assist families of missing migrants should recognize the expertise and knowledge of families and put them at the center. In order to have a proper insight of the situation, we must first voice migrants' experiences across their journey and advance evidence-based figures, especially within a context where fake news became unfortunately a common feature. The families of missing migrants are strong, are resourceful, are resilient despite the incredible losses that they have experienced. What came across the interviews and what I really enjoy now that we are looking at the transcripts and we're looking at all of the data is how families appear and stand as strong and determined despite the fact that they have gone through incredible amounts of pain. And that's what I think this project captures really well. And I think that should be part of our commitment as researchers, not going to the field, having specific questions or going in with specific notions of what we're going to be finding, but allowing people to take control of their research and to dictate what actually has to be, what actually matters to them. Living without them, stories of families left behind is a podcast series produced by IOM's Data Analysis Center in Berlin. This podcast was based on failed research carried out in the UK, Ethiopia and Spain. You can read more about the research on the Miss Immigrants Project website www.missimmigrants.ioam.int. Thank you for listening.