The deaths of at least 62 migrants in a wooden boat on the Calabrian coast on Sunday – with fears that the toll will rise much higher – have provoked predictable refrains from Europe’s political class. Expressions of horror have been accompanied by an insistence that Europe must redouble its attempts to bring people smugglers to justice.
On Friday, 15 EU states had, in the same vein, issued a statement calling for financial support for “all types of border protection infrastructure including physical barriers” and demanded more options for accelerated deportation.
Yet an emphasis on measures directed exclusively at strangling the smuggling networks ignores the context of mass migration and will do little to turn back a tide of human desperation rooted in a flight from wars and oppression. It is an attempt to evade treaty and moral obligations to provide succour and protection for those in peril.
This is a passing of the buck to those immediate neighbours who may be even less able or willing to cope with such influxes. The lost boat came from Izmir in Turkey, a country accommodating nearly four million displaced people. More than 44,000 Afghans were deported from Turkey back to Afghanistan in the first eight months after the Taliban took power.
This year already over 240 refugees have died crossing the central Mediterranean and International Organisation for Migration (IOM) figures put the total who have died on this route, once described by the UN as the deadliest migration route in the world, at 20,430 since 2014.
Europe must respond to this trade in human life, as it did over Ukraine, by opening its doors and creating more safe legal pathways to settling in all the member states. The UN High Commission for Refugees estimates that more than two million refugees will be in need of resettlement this year, a third more than 2022. It has appealed for predictable, multi-year resettlement commitments from states, with enough flexibility to ensure places can be allocated based on urgent and emergency needs across the world.