HORGOS: Nila Eskanzadah, a 25-year-old midwife from Afghanistan, has been camping on the border between Hungary and Serbia for the past 16 days. She is on a list to cross to the other side of a razor wire fence into the EU free-travel zone on Thursday. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of migrants in transit through Serbia has doubled to 1,800 this week from 900 a month ago. While Balkan borders remain closed to migrants, aid workers warn that most of those 1,800 will put themselves in the hands of smugglers, while a few hundred, including Eskanzadah and her family, wait patiently to be allowed to enter Hungary legally. Hungary lets 30 refugees into the country daily, mostly families from conflict zones. “We don’t have more money to pay to smugglers,” Eskanzadah said as she opened a bag containing lunch provided by the UNHCR. According to the Serbian government, 500 people, half of them children, are living in makeshift camps at two border crossings between Serbia and Hungary, in what are described as transit zones. At the Horgos crossing where Eskanzadah and her family wait, there are 200 migrants, mainly from Afghanistan. They have access to one toilet and one drinking fountain. UNHCR and the Red Cross distribute three meals a day, while Serbian police patrol the camps. Tents, some made of sticks and blankets, have been put up along the wire fence Hungary put up last year to hold back the flow of migrants. Behind the tents is another metal fence to separate them from the highway to Budapest. Mohamed Hakim Ayoobi, a 41-year-old from Kabul, says he has not had a shower since he arrived three days ago. “I worked for Germans in Afghanistan and my life was threatened, that’s why I had to leave,” he told Reuters. More than 650,000 people from the Middle East, Asia and Africa passed through Serbia last year on their way to the European Union, but in March the borders closed, stemming but not completely stopping the migrants. So far this year Hungary says it has registered 19,140 asylum applications and more than 14,000 migrants have crossed its southern borders illegally. Hungary passed a law on Monday that allows police to send illegal migrants detained within 8 km (5 miles) of its southern frontier back to Serbia. “The approach is very selective and is not good. They (the migrants) are left there in dire conditions,” said Babar Baloch, UNHCR regional spokesman. “This will only increase their suffering. They are trying to escape wars and persecution. We should try to help them, not make their lives more difficult.” Meanwhile, at least 60,000 migrants have died making their way to new countries over the last 20 years, and their families rarely learned of their fate, the International Organization of Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday. In a report entitled “Fatal Journeys”, the agency called on authorities to ensure the missing are identified and their families traced. The estimated toll includes a record 5,400 migrants believed to have died in 2015 trying to cross borders, and a further 3,400 who have perished already this year, the IOM said. Of last year’s deaths, 3,770 occurred in the Mediterranean where boats capsized en route to Europe. Others died in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea and along the U.S.-Mexico border, it said. “Something in the region of 60,000 migrants across the world have died over the last 20 years,” Frank Laczko, director of IOM’s global migration data analysis centre, told a Geneva news briefing by telephone from Berlin. The death rate is particularly high in southeastern Asia, where migrants are trying to reach Thailand and Malaysia. “The volume of people making those crossings is perhaps lower but the death rate is similar to the Mediterranean death rate,” he said, noting it was one in 23 along the central Mediterranean route this year. However, a separate IOM report said the Central Mediterranean route is probably much more deadly than thought, because “reports of large numbers of bodies being washed up on the shores of North Africa indicate that shipwrecks occur without leaving any traces.” Families are left wondering if their relatives are alive or dead, the IOM said. Without legal proof of death, it may be difficult for spouses to remarry or for families to inherit property. Fewer than half of the 387 migrants who died when their boats capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa in October 2013 have been officially identified, it said. In the United States, a cemetery in Arizona contains the remains of at least 800 unidentified individuals believed to be migrants. “Missing migrants tend to be a low priority for many authorities around the world, because they are often an irregular situation, they may be undocumented and difficult to identify,” Laczko said. Little is known either about the deaths of migrants travelling north overland from sub-Saharan Africa. At present there is no established common practice for collecting information on migrant deaths between states, or even sometimes between different jurisdictions in the same country, the report said. “Above all, international and regional databases are needed, in which data that is collected nationally can be stored securely and accessed transnationally,” it said.