The figures released by the United Nations' refugee agency to mark World Refugee Day are truly staggering. The total number of refugees and internally displaced people worldwide to a record 65.3 million at the end of last year.
On average, 24 people had been displaced every minute of every day last year - or 34,000 people a day - up from six every minute in 2005. Global displacement has roughly doubled since 1997, and risen by 50 percent since 2011 alone - when the Syria war began. More than half of all refugees came from three countries: Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia.
While Europe fell into a political crisis with the arrival of more than a million refugees last year, the amount of refugees taken by non-EU countries in the Middle East is vastly higher. Turkey, for example, has for the second year running taken in the most people at 2.5 million, most of them from neighbouring Syria. Pakistan took in 1.6 million people, mostly from Afghanistan. Tiny Lebanon, another Syrian neighbour took in 1.1 million people.
It beggars belief, and it is hard to actually visualise just how many people are fleeing from conflicts. In today's world of media coverage, it is hard to ignore the atrocities that are taking place in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, amongst others.
Yet there are those who continue to try and downplay what is going on in these countries - girls being sold as sex slaves, people killed for their religious beliefs, gay people flung off buildings... the list goes on and on. Yet many still ask the question: "Why can't they go back to their country?"
The answer is simple, they cannot go back to their country because there is not much left of it. Physically, Syria's once beautiful and proud cities are hulks of rubble. Morally, they do not want to run the risk of being shot, killed, raped or tortured.
Europe has an ageing population and a sluggish economy and some leaders, even on a regional level, have said the their countries or cities or towns actually need migrants to keep the sluggish European economy ticking over.
The migration phenomenon is not something which will go away. While some people leave their home continents to seek a better life in general, the route cause is always internal strife and persecution. Arrivals in Malta have largely dried up over the past couple of years, mostly due to the EU's Frontex mission extending its mandate to patrol much close to the Libyan Coast. This coupled with the ousting of Islamic State from Sirte, seems to have stemmed the tide of departures.
But, there is always the danger of Libya fracturing into a failed state, something it has come close to doing on many occasions. If that happens, then the implications are massive. The point has been debated at length. If the Libyan people become the people who flee seeking asylum, rather than Libya just being a point of departure, it is an absolute game changer.
This month alone, 850 people have died crossing the Mediterranean, but if the departures from Libya increase, that number would drastically spike. The world and Europe in particular claimed to have changed its point of view when the image of Aylan Kurdi made the headlines. That is almost two years ago. Since then many more children and babies have died, their only crime was that they were born in the wrong country.