In recent decades, international and civil society organizations, as well as researchers from several fields, have highlighted the growing vulnerability of many international migrants and the significance and pervasiveness of the multiple risks they face. Indeed, although people often decide to migrate in order to improve their living standards, the spaces they travel through and arrive in are risky.
The notion of risk can be understood in different ways: being at risk or taking risks. On the one hand, the study of being at risk relies on the observation of vulnerabilities in a natural, political, or social environment, through the study of living and working conditions in general and by focusing on particular subgroups. Social sciences have approached this topic by focusing, for example, on the society’s capacity to respond to a precarious situation — resilience — or to protect its members in a homogeneous or non-homogeneous way (integration, social protection), and thus to be a society (“faire société”). In the particular case of migrants, a substantial share of them faces vulnerabilities: travel trauma, poor material and immaterial conditions in the destination country, loss of landmarks or social ties with relatives, lack of access to the healthcare system (Berchet and Jusot, 2009; Cognet et al., 2012; Zimmerman et al., 2011). This favors accidents and health deterioration that imply high risks of death in a migratory context, either during the journey to or while in the host country (Canu…