Rich Europe’s illegal immigration policy is foundering on hypocrisy

Europe can’t build a wall and hide behind it, stuffing itself with riches... and get away with it, writes Victoria White

ANSLAUGHTER, shipwreck and the promotion of illegal immigration… These are the charges against Tunisian Captain Mohammed Ali Malek and Syrian ship’s mate, Syrian Mahmud Bikhit, who were skippering the fishing vessel that sank on Sunday, drowning 800 to 900 people.

The few survivors’ stories are like a classic nightmare. The lower levels of the ship were locked and that’s where the children were. At least 100 of them drowned in their own hideous death chamber. Save the Children reckons, from survivors’ stories, that 60 of those children were unaccompanied minors.

They weren’t unaccompanied because no-one cared about them. It costs €2,500 to send a minor into one of these hell-holes; their families have scrimped, saved and borrowed the cash. All of those dead children have families who are in a frenzy of grief, but who may even fear to identify themselves in case they are accused of aiding illegal immigration.

READ MORE: Tunisian captain blamed for Mediterranean migrants’ deaths . 

If their loved-one is a teen, and from Bangladesh or Somalia, they will be hoping and praying he is one of the four as yet unnamed boys of 16 and 17 who have survived. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, information may be hard to get, and this will give some families false hopes that their child isn’t lying dead in a chamber of horrors on the sea bed.

Sickening pictures of the good-looking Mohammed Ali Malek have appeared in the last few days, which show him smiling. We’re all hoping that smile will be wiped right off him. We’re all looking for someone to blame.

But the truth we’re not facing is that Mohammed Ali Malek and Mahmud Bikhit can’t take all the blame for the loss of those lives. And they can’t take the blame for the other 800 or so lives that have been lost in more or less the same way since the beginning of this year, a death rate 30 times higher than last year’s. If that rate continues, there could be 30,000 deaths by the end of this year.

As European citizens, we must take a large part of the blame for those deaths. We have persisted in sitting back and looking on, while the Italian and Maltese governments wrestled alone with the problem.

Meanwhile insisting, all the while, by the way, that the Italians and Maltese adhere to the terms of the Euro, out of ‘solidarity’ with the rest of us.

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The Italian search-and-rescue operation put in place in 2013, after the Lampedusa tragedy, and which saved an estimated 100,000 lives, was called Mare Nostrum, which means ‘Our Sea’ in the international language of Latin. It is indeed ‘our sea’, and it is totally wrong to expect the Italians to bear the cost of the operation — which was €10m a month — and then have to deal with the flood of migrants at the gates of Europe.

Mare Nostrum was suspended last year, out of the mistaken idea that illegal immigrants would be encouraged to travel if they knew they would be rescued. But immigration has increased, reflecting the impossible situation of many people in poor, war-torn countries in such as sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Libya and Egypt and Syria. They must know the risks, because they are not stupid and it is hard, nowadays, to block international news.

They know the risks and they are prepared to take them. Among the disturbing pictures of the tragedy off Libya are some of survivors smiling, as if they feel the horrible gamble has paid off. This despite the poor living standards of most migrants to Europe, particularly the minors. A third of last year’s migrant youngsters have disappeared without trace.

The Italians are horrified by the butchery going on off their shores, but they are unable to deal with it on their own. Nor should they have to try.

This is an all-Europe problem that requires an all-Europe series of solutions and Taoiseach Enda Kenny must push for this, as European leaders meet today for crisis talks.

We Irish, with our strong folk memory of ‘coffin ships’ and our relatively positive experience of immigration, must be the strong voice of community responsibility.

The short-term answer is a new search-and-rescue operation under international stewardship. Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, has made Europe’s responsibility explicit, saying, “Twenty years ago, we and Europe closed our eyes to Srebenica. Today, it’s not possible to close our eyes again and only commemorate these events later.”

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Looking back, most commentators point the finger at the UN for allowing Srebenica to happen, and perhaps the UN would be the best steward of a new and genuine Mare Nostrum. A UN maritime initiative has been successful in tackling piracy off Somalia.

But the long-term answers are harder to give and surely mean more legal immigration from Africa to Europe.

UN Special Representative for Migration, Peter Sutherland, in whose voice of reason on these matters we should take pride, has stated the Europe can’t continue to hold 29% of the world’s wealth and take 9% of the migrants. We need a large, structured and proportionate immigration programme. I’m sorry, Minister for Justic, Frances Fitzgerald, but I don’t call taking 50 migrants to Ireland “proportionate.”

But the bigger issue is that Africa is our neighbour, historically and geographically, and there is no sea deep enough to keep Africa back. The only thing that will keep Africans in Africa is making Africa a better place to be. That will be harder and harder as climate change bites deeper and deeper into the ability of Africa to feed itself.

Europe can’t build a wall and hide behind it, stuffing itself with the world’s riches, while it destroys the world’s climate, and expect to get away with it. We will have to get poorer if we hope for some stabilisation of the world’s wealth and its people.

After all, Europe built its wealth by plundering Africa.

The very Eritrea that is now flooding Italy with migrants was flooded with 100,000 Italian colonists by 1938. The troubled lands supplying Europe with refugees are all former European colonies, which we have left in a state of malign neglect.

Europe needs a completely new kind of dialogue with the African Union, founded on the reality that the Mediterreanean and the Turkish border can’t keep our people apart.

And it is the thousands of illegal African migrants, both those who lived and those who died, along with their unscrupulous smugglers, who force us to look each other in the face.

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