The Mediterranean has become Europe’s sea of death. More than 3,000 refugees and migrants have already been killed this year trying to escape war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East and break into the continental fortress to the north. That is more than four times 2013’s grim tally and makes up three quarters of a new annual global death toll of migrants. By any reckoning, this is a humanitarian disaster on Europe’s borders: the direct result of a system that favours the free movement of cheap European labour over providing refuge for victims of conflagration and destitution on our periphery.
These are the Syrians, Palestinians, Eritreans and Libyans, many of them children, driven into the hands of people traffickers to be drowned in overcrowded fishing boats, or sold to corrupt officials as European coastguards patrol off the sun-soaked beaches. Since the beginning of the century, more than 22,000 are estimated to have lost their lives trying to reach Europe. The annual cull reached a climax last month when a boat carrying refugees and migrants from Egypt to Malta was rammed and sunk by traffickers after those on board refused to transfer to a smaller vessel. Five hundred people died.
One of them was an Egyptian 14-year-old who wanted to earn money to pay for his sick father’s treatment. Others had survived Israel’s summer onslaught on Gaza and used money given to rebuild their homes to escape the siege for good. Imagine the resources that would have been poured into the investigation if 500 white Europeans had been deliberately killed in the Mediterranean — far more, clearly, than the 298 who died in the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine two months earlier.
But when it comes to the Arab and African victims of Europe’s watery killing fields, the rich world establishment shrugs and moves on. At least the Argentinian Pope Francis visited Italy’s frontline island of Lampedusa off the north African coast soon after his election to call for a “reawakening of conscience” over the scandal.
This is, after all, only the most visible sharp end of the global north-south divide of wealth and poverty, the brutality of which puts migrants battling to stow away on ferries at Calais into perspective. In reality, the 3,072 migrants recorded by the International Organisation for Migration as killed trying to reach Europe is certainly an underestimate, as elsewhere in the world. Who records migrants’ deaths in the desert?
Across the world, perhaps 120,000 migrants have been killed since 2000. In Europe, the number of irregular migrants detected by the Italian authorities this year has been 112,000 — up threefold on 2013 — as the wars Europe has fought or fuelled on its doorstep, from Libya to the Levant, come home to roost.
But it’s not so different on the US-Mexican border or in sea-lanes between Indonesia and Australia, those two other frontlines between what used to be called the first and third worlds. In the past 15 years, at least 6,000 migrants have died trying to cross into the US, and 1,500 have perished on their journey to Australia.
The Australian government boasts that it has cut the death toll by interning or dumping migrants on impoverished states and turning back boats by force. That is the grim face of 21st-century global privilege up against the consequences of its actions in the rest of the world.
Given the escalating scale of global inequality, the only surprise is that migration pressures are not greater still. In the late 19th century average income in the richest countries was around five times that of the poorest. By the early years of this century, it was more than 18 times higher – in the US it is now around 25 times that of the poorest.
The champions of capitalist globalisation insisted that the power of global markets would change all that. But, if you strip out China – which has delivered the fastest growth and poverty reduction in history, albeit at high environmental and social cost, by ignoring the neoliberal Washington consensus – poverty and inequality has continued to grow between as well as within countries.
As the catechism of “free market” deregulation has been imposed across the world under “free trade” and “partnership” agreements and the destructive discipline of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, capital and resources have been sucked out of the developing world and tens of millions of people have been driven into urban poverty by corporate land grabs.
That is why the number living on less than $2 a day in sub-Saharan Africa has doubled since 1981 under the sway of rich world globalisation. Africa’s boom has been in resource exploitation, not in most people’s living standards. So it is hardly surprising that migration from the global south to high and middle-income countries has more or less tripled over the past half century.
Add the impact of multiple wars over the past two decades, sponsored or fuelled by rich world countries – from Iraq and Afghanistan to Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali and Libya – and the pressures on Europe’s borders and off its coasts are not hard to understand.
Those wars have generated tens of millions of refugees, the large majority of whom end up in the developing world itself. Libya, which turned into a failed state courtesy of Nato intervention, is now the country of departure for many of the doomed migrant boats to Europe.
And the refugees from Gaza are escaping decades of Israeli war, occupation and siege, which has been armed and funded by the US and EU. Factor in the growing impact of climate change across the African Sahel region and already precarious populations on Europe’s borders, and today’s level of migration north could end up looking like a trickle.
The reality is that the economic model forced down our throats for a generation is not delivering for most of the world’s population, north or south.
If we are to avoid the crises it has already fostered from turning into something worse, there will need to be a break with it, a respite from western war-making and radical action to slash global carbon emissions. Any one of those changes would, of course, represent a seismic shift. But without them, the bloodletting on our borders can only grow.