More on that mass drowning in the Mediterranean last night, from the CBC.
Italian prosecutors said a Bangladeshi survivor flown to Sicily for treatment told them 950 people were aboard, including hundreds who had been locked in the hold by smugglers. Earlier, authorities said a survivor told them 700 migrants were on board.
It wasn’t immediately clear if they were referring to the same survivor, and Italian Premier Matteo Renzi said authorities were “not in a position to confirm or verify” the death toll.
Locked in the hold. [shudder]
By nightfall Sunday, rescuers on 18 ships had found 28 survivors and “alas, 24 dead,” he said.
The premier of Malta, whose island nation participated in the search and rescue mission, put the number of survivors at 50 total.
Renzi said a total of 18 ships, including nearby commercial vessels pressed into service, were helping in the search mission. An Italian Navy helicopter carried one injured survivor to a hospital in Sicily.
…
The 20-meter vessel may have overturned because migrants rushed to one side of the craft late Saturday night when they saw an approaching Portuguese-flagged container ship, the King Jacob, which the Italian Coast Guard had dispatched to help them.
The ship was sent to the area in Libyan waters by Italy’s Coast Guard, and once the crew spotted the overloaded boat, it “immediately deployed rescue boats, gangway, nets and life rings,” a spokesman for the ship’s owner said in a statement.
Renzi praised the King Jacob, saying the ship “immediately went into action” on what would become its fifth recent rescue operation.
The ship was sent there to help, and its arrival may have caused the capsizing.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement Sunday that 219,000 people crossed the Mediterranean by sea and 3,500 died last year. This year, 35,000 asylum seekers and migrants have reached Europe so far and more than 900 are known to have died in failed crossings. Last week, 400 people were presumed drowned when another boat capsized.
The smugglers are capitalizing on the migrants’ desperation and taking advantage of chaos and violence in Libya, where rival militias, tribal factions and other political forces have destabilized the country since bloody end of the long dictatorship of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.
Not much of a spring.
I wonder what sort of media coverage this is getting in the countries the refugees came from, if their families are wondering or will ever know.
And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, these gangsters only have the ability to capitalise because of the prohibition on movement inflicted on them by western governments. That is what has to change.
Don’t be ridiculous, Bluntnose. Open borders don’t come with free transportation.
I heard a public radio report this morning that the Italian PM had suggested attacking the people smugglers, but changed his mind later, officially. It was also reported that the smugglers are making billions of dollars from the trade, they’re not poor fisherman desperate for a few dollars.
@2 Bluntnose
You’re welcome to open your borders anytime you choose.
If the border was open those migrants could buy a ticket on a ship with proper safety standards, even subsidised by charities or travel by land if it were easier or safer, not be smuggled on an inflateable. It is the prohibition that is killing them. There is nothing silly about that and I am surprised you think there is. Do you imagine those rafts are a choice? That they had other options?
But I am not. One day, perhaps.
Open borders would not provide transportation. Open borders would not provide the money for fares. It is not solely restrictions on immigration that is killing them. Of course I don’t “imagine those rafts are a choice”; do you imagine that poverty has nothing to do with them?
Ophelia, open borders would allow immigrants to buy fares on the usual way and not force them into the hands of gangsters. They are paying to travel on those death traps, through the nose. If we open the borders the drownings will stop. instead there is a din of dishonest hand wringing and virtue signalling and plans only to send them back to their misery to try again in ever more desperate conditions.
@8 Bluntnose,
To what extent should any country’s borders be open? “Open” in the sense of free entry for all potential immigrants? Are you assuming that the capacity of societies to absorb immigrants is independent of social, economic and political factors?
What would be the effect on Western nations of unrestricted immigration, since it’s obvious they would be the destination of choice for many immigrants?
All borders should be entirely open. The rights of movement and assembly are fundamental human rights that should not be arbitrarily interfered with by policemen of any stripe.
The affect of western nations of unrestricted immigration can be see in, for example, New York. Look at the before and after pictures, before the gate closed. But the affects on the rich should be of less consequence to us, morally, than the affects on the poor and weak and the abuse of their human rights to move where they want and associate with who they want. Of course there are huge political difficulties to overcome, but we are never going to start overcoming them so long as we don’t clearly see where we ought to be getting to.
Many of our ancestors thought it the most obvious common sense that the rights of women to go where they want and associate with whom they want should be restricted in the ways that the rights of men should not. Defending closed borders is no different.
@10 Bluntnose “The rights of movement and assembly are fundamental human rights that should not be arbitrarily interfered with by policemen of any stripe.”
You’ve included the qualifier ‘arbitrarily’, so I presume that the harm principle applies. Applying that principle, we have to compare the benefits to immigrants with the cost to the population of the recipient nation of an indefinitely large immigration rate i.e. the harm done to them.
“The affect of western nations of unrestricted immigration can be see in, for example, New York.”
Not necessarily, no one really knows what the social, political and economic conditions in New York would be if unrestricted immigration had continued to 2015, perhaps more like Beijing or Sao Paulo.
“But the affects on the rich should be of less consequence to us, morally, than the affects on the poor and weak and the abuse of their human rights to move where they want and associate with who they want”
The same criteria should be applied to the poor and weak who are citizens of the country where unrestricted immigration is allowed. The rich will be living in gated communities or suburbs far from the areas where the immigrants initially settle. Where will the majority of the low-income population be concentrated? In the inner suburbs of the major Western cities.
RJW