Challenge we cannot avoid - Migration crisis

EVERY generation is sent challenges it might prefer to avoid. 

Global warming and an increasingly violent Islamic minority are two of today’s challenges but are on such a scale that all sorts of excuses can be found not to grasp those particular nettles just yet.

The terrible plight of those refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean is another of those unavoidable, discomforting challenges. Already this week 300 people have died running the gauntlet, deaths the UN insists were unnecessary. The UNHCR says about 3,500 migrants died trying to cross the Mediterranean last year. Since then rescue services have been downgraded because, claim some EU states including Britain, they encouraged refugees to try to escape whatever tyranny they find themselves trapped in. Such hubris, such callous indifference to the life-or-death reality faced by hundreds of thousands of North Africa’s dispossessed is almost imperial in its disdain. It is an affront to any idea of humanity and its no-room-at-the-inn rejection does little credit to our Christian — or post-Christian — culture.

Of course our resources are stretched but they always are. It is an appalling indictment of us and Europe that we cannot find a resolution to this terribly difficult problem. We will have to because it is not going to go away. Forced migration is a reality in an ever more divided and populated world. We must learn to deal with it — and quickly.