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Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life,

and I'm Tim Harford.

In this program we'll be looking at two of the numbers that have been making the news

over the last year.

The European migrant crisis has never been far from the headlines.

There's a father there in the middle just holding on to his child.

Who would put all those people onto that boat, pack them in?

The wind was strong on Lesbos today and the rough seas brought with them bodies.

Thousands and thousands of people have been here

and thousands more behind them.

They're queuing patiently to get permissions across the border into Croatia.

Boatloads of people are still fleeing conflict, violence or poverty to try to start new lives in Europe. So our first guest is

Leonard Doyle from the International Organization for Migration which is based in

Switzerland. I think the most significant number this year is the 1,056,000 asylum applications

that have been logged in European Union countries between January and October of 2015.

So this is well up on the 662,000 applications

over the entire of 2014.

And of course we all know this because every time we've turned on the radio

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