Accepting an inevitability - Immigrants deserve more

Just this weekend Tunisian coastguards intercepted 90 migrants fleeing Libya in a makeshift boat bound for the Italian island of Lampedusa. Those unfortunate people are just a tiny proportion of the hundreds of thousands trying to reach countries where there is some prospect of living beyond crushing poverty or oppression. That they are willing to take such terrible risks and run a gauntlet of exploitation, kidnapping, and preying criminality is an indication of their desperation.

Their plight must have some resonance in a country that lost so many people to economic emigration. That memory has not, however, led to welcoming or even function procedures for migrants arriving in this country. More than 4,000 — 4.360 — asylum seekers, including 1,600 children, live in direct-provision centres dotted across the country. Some have lived — if that is the right word — in these centres for years because there seems no political or social will to face this issue, one that is going to become ever more pressing.

Migration, economic or political, will be one of the defining issues of the coming years and unless we establish better procedures to cope with this inevitibility then we can anticipate another raft of chastening, shaming reports like those on industrial schools, orphanages or launderies. This time it’s different though, we can’t pretend we are not aware of the problem.