I consider myself a humanitarian, but the answer to the migration crisis is not simply offering everyone “freedom of movement”. Especially not when authoritarian states use “people on the move” as a weapon in their hybrid warfare.
This post is about state repression of rescue efforts that try to prevent people from drowning in the Mediterranean.
And it’s a shitty thing that they do that, but having ships out there that pick people up and bring them to Italy is not the answer either, as those people are facing mortal danger in the first place because they hope to get picked up.
Why are the rescue ships not dropping people off back in North Africa? Why is the crew claiming to fight for “the freedom of movement” and thus supporting illegal migration?
This is a false narrative pushed by right-wing media. By far the most boats make it across with zero help and people certainly do not hope to be picked up as that means they end up in often very shitty camps in countries they don’t want to stay in.
These rescue efforts are real, although of course the often unscrupulous people smugglers are known to care little about the risks involved.
Dropping them back off in Libya is not an option, as that is a highly unsafe country currently having a civil war and local criminal gangs are well known to torture and enslave migrants there.
Edit: and it is also false to say these are illegal immigrants. Even assuming some of them would not be accepted as asylum seekers according to existing laws, you can’t just assume so and many of them are genuine legal asylum seekers.
And nobody says so. The problems that lead to people dying while trying to reach Europe is multifactorial, and so the solutions need to be multifactorial.
To reduce the number of refugees we need to fight climate change, revoked neocolonialistic trade deals that pull the livelihood from where the refugees come from, stop delivering arms into a lot of active war zones and to oppressive governments, etc.
To ensure the safety of refugees already on the move and who will yet get to move, we need to establish safe routes, stop pushbacks, improve conditions in refugee camps in Europe, accelerate the asylum admission processes, agree on fair ways of distributions, improve on integration measures, etc.
Nobody said it’s easy though.
And what do we do with the Russians starting civil wars in Africa? Or Chinese neocolonialism?
Yes, we should unfuck the asylum process and speed it up. Also the one for legal migration. The problem though is that if Europe plays the humanitarian and tries to fix Africa, Europe’s detractors will keep fucking it up even more.
Another problem is this, “agree on fair ways of distributions”. What’s fair? Is it fair when the German chancellor stands up and encourages migration, while the standing agreements put all the burden on other countries? Is it fair for Hungary to say “we did not fuck Africa up, we can’t afford to have a part in fixing it either”?
All I’m saying is that I agree that this is a multifaceted problem, but people like this ship’s crew make it worse for everyone.
but people like this ship’s crew make it worse for everyone.
How? Please tell me you don’t want to say not letting people die is making the situation worse.
people like this ship’s crew make it worse for everyone.
Letting people die at sea just means being cruel. Nothing else. It doesn’t magically send some kind of signal not to cross the sea to would-be migrants. Despite “conservatives” constructing their own alternate realities, this is, in fact, a well-researched fact.
