 Going back 20 or 30 years, one of the major challenges for analysts and researchers was data availability. That's not really the challenge in 2020. You can have a lot of data from one source and a lot of data from another, but the value is really magnified when you can find ways of joining that together. Can big data be used to generate quantitative measures for potential drivers of migration, such as economy, conflict or governance, often referred to as the push factors in countries of origin. The data sources we use included big data on negative and disruptive events extracted from media reports in more than 100 languages globally, as well as administrative data on applications for asylum in Italy and registrations of regular arrivals in the central Mediterranean route. The frequency of disruptive events aggregated into the composite push factor index do correlate with data on regular arrivals from the central Mediterranean route and asylum applications lodged in Italy. We found that push factors in Libya are tightly coupled with asylum applications lodged in Italy by several nationalities with a time lap of one month. This relationship is not present following the closure of the central Mediterranean route in 2018 and 2019. The results are important for two reasons. Firstly, we've shown that it is possible to download vast amounts of big data to say something meaningful about conflict and disruptive events that are taking place around the world. Secondly, this is important because it will allow IASO and IOM to design much more effective operational responses to displacement and migration events. We strongly believe that anyone who arrives in Europe in need of international protection should be able to have a fair and efficient asylum process.