Hundreds of people are believed to have died at sea this weekend, having attempted to make their way into the European Union (EU) in an overcrowded, unseaworthy fishing boat. The bloc’s open borders and welfare policies have created “pull factors” continuously exploited by human traffickers, to the detriment of those who risk everything in pursuit of economic migration.
The United Nations has so far confirmed 78 drownings, with around 500 more migrants unaccounted for, days after their ship sank near the coast of Pylos, in Southern Greece. Of the 104 known survivors, all are male, though it is believed there were a large number of women and children in the hold of the vessel.
Such sea crossings are now commonplace, abetted by non-government organizations (NGOs) operating so-called rescue ships off Africa, which collect migrants from smugglers’ vessels and ferry them to Europe rather than much closer African ports.
In 2017, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency admitted that NGO and state vessels meeting migrants at sea and bringing them the rest of the way to Europe encouraged crossings and “help[ed] criminals achieve their objectives at minimum cost, strengthen[ing] their business model”.
Arriving migrants are not detained while they are vetted and their asylum claims processed.
Border control advocates have long argued that the more crossings are incentivised, the more drownings there will be. The drowning death of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler, helped to spark the European migrant crisis of 2015.
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