Everyone Knew the Migrant Ship Was Doomed. No One Helped
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I feel like this debate only ever gets two sorts of representation, the people who think every migrant is a desperate refugee in need of rescue, and the "fortress Europe, it's an invasion" people. I don't think those extremes are very useful in addressing this issue. There's a serious shift to the right wing in Europe right now, especially Italy and Greece, who are on the front lines of this thing.
Because the existing framework favors migrants once they reach an EU country, the countries where the migrants first land are incentivized to intercept and return them at sea... or just ignore them and let them take their chances.
If we can just convince the "fortress Europe" camp.. or either camp, actually, that sending aid/investment to where the immigrants are coming from can substitute for allowing immigration, then both could be happy. The migrants receive the same aid they would in Europe, and Europe gets to play fortress - win-win.
We're used to goods from faraway China stocking our shelves, sending cargo across the Mediterranean is trivial in comparison.
https://apnews.com/article/ethiopia-humanitarian-food-aid-38...
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jun/29/e...
This isn't as simple as "Just throw more money at 'em" or even "just send more food." Decades of this casual attitude has led to governments who simply shrug and leg the international community handle the business of feeding their people, freeing them up to do other things with their money, such as murdering whole regions full of people. Food and monetary aid is also used as a weapon, shared with allies and regime supporters, and denied to "undesirable elements."
And frankly none of that would matter to the Pakistani men on the boat in question in OOP's article, none of whom were desperate for aid. They wanted a better life for them and their kids, they wanted economic opportunities, and they weren't getting that in Pakistan. An uptick in aid wouldn't change that either!
I did not say aid/investment by accident. It could well be charitable investment, i.e. into farming or other equipment, with no expectation of payback.
As for corruption - if the aid is in the form of food or equipment, that's harder to turn into weapons than cash. If corruption is an issue, the aid can go to their less-corrupt neighbors that accept the migrants, or it can be handled by the same NGOs and such that help immigrants in Europe, if the local authorities are too corrupt to be trusted with anything.
And if none of that works, then why it would work in Europe, if the people involved are the same?
> Decades of this casual attitude
Calling massive humanitarian aid "casual" reeks of trying to blame foreign corruption on those trying to charitably help.
If you give a poor farmer a tractor, then that raises more taxes for the corrupt government, which will spend the money on perpetuating corruption, and then they collapse, and then there's a power vacuum, and then a civil war, and it just keeps going
There have always been groups that want to solve poverty. People who have experienced poverty and people who live in poverty want to solve poverty. Yet poverty continues, because it's not a problem anyone knows how to solve