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Stopping the Mediterranean migration tragedies has no quick fix

Jonathan Lindsell, 21 April 2015

European foreign and interior ministers met in Luxembourg on Monday for crisis talks after 700 migrants died off Sicily this weekend. UNHCR estimates that 218,000 crossed the sea in 2014, and another 3,500 died.

It is important that EU leaders do not take a knee-jerk superficial approach. Population displacement is an extremely complex issue, one academics have fought over for years, complicated by the West’s role in Libya’s current instability. Italian authorities believe 90% of the boats are boarded on the Libyan coast.

In Finland, the anti-migration party ‘The Finns’ came second in Sunday’s election, meaning they are likely to govern with the Centre Party. Formerly the ‘True Finns’, their leader Timo Soini is aiming for the Foreign Minister post. He is unlikely to commit more of Finland’s recession-hit resources to address problems in the distant Mediterranean. The outgoing Finnish government already drafted plans for expelling Greece from the Euro. This could alienate Greece, even drive it from the EU, making south European cooperation on migration impossible.

Britain, with an election in two weeks, cannot commit to the kind of joint operation required. The Conservative party has a prominent, tough line on immigration which would be ridiculed as hypocritical if it endorsed any action that saw more newcomers from North Africa.

Italy’s proposal would be for the EU to help fund its elapsed Mare Nostrum (‘our sea’) programme, or one like it, which had three times the number of patrols than the EU’s current replacement, Operation Triton. The UK coalition previously opposed this, arguing that Mare Nostrum is a ‘pull factor’ encouraging more migrants and traffickers to attempt the trip in the knowledge that the Italian navy might save them.

Germany, which has seen a spike in asylum claims and is struggling to contain the Pegida movement, wants to get EU members to agree to a system of sharing asylum seekers and refugees more equally. Free movement and Dublin Convention rules currently mean refugees must apply to their country of entry, or try to illegally gravitate towards the wealthier states.

Philip Hammond told the BBC he favoured ‘a comprehensive, European level response’ which clashes with his party’s aim to resist devolving more power to Brussels. His priorities were ‘targeting the criminals… managing this traffic’ and the importance of ‘work upstream in the countries from which these people are coming’. This is difficult, not just because of Libya’s lack off stable government, but because migrants come from distressed regions across Africa and the Middle East.

David Cameron said that the other side of the equation was using the aid budget to help improve the migrants’ countries’ governance. He will meet other EU leaders on Thursday to conclude a deal centred on better Triton resources for civil-military operations to destroy traffickers’ ships.

At least discussion seems to have moved from an Australian-style offshore processing model. But tackling today’s traffickers, without addressing the demand side that drives thousands to attempt the desperate crossing, is likely only to delay attempts, not solve the issue.

1 comment on “Stopping the Mediterranean migration tragedies has no quick fix”

  1. Mass immigration is invasion resulting in the effective colonisation of parts of the invaded country because immigrants from a similar background have a pronounced tendency to congregate in the same area. Any other description of mass immigration wilfully is dishonest.

    Anti-immigration parties are on the rise because all over the developed world elites have ignored the wishes of their people and forced mass immigration on them. In Britain this has been accompanied by the increasingly punitive application of the criminal law to those who protest about mass immigration and its effects.

    Nor is it only the developed world. Everywhere mass immigration is abhorred, for example, in South Africa where the government has had to send in the army to stop attacks on migrants – see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/11548755/South-African-government-vows-swift-action-against-xenophobic-attackers.html

    The promotion of mass immigration is a particularly deep treason, because unlike an invasion by military force the legions of the immigrant army are disparate and cannot be readily expelled. Where mass immigration is promoted by a government, as happened under Blair, see the Blair advisor Andrew Neather’s 2009 article http://www.standard.co.uk/news/dont-listen-to-the-whingers–london-needs-immigrants-6786170.html – to deliberately change the nature of British society by, in Neather’s words, “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date” it is the most profound and contemptible of treasons.

    The French writer Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints describes a situation not unlike that of the present exodus from North Africa and the Middle East. In Raspail’s book the invasion is by large ships crammed with Third World migrants coming to Europe where the ships are beached and the migrants flood into Europe, a Europe which has lost the will to resist because of decades of politically correct internationalist propaganda. Europe and eventually the entire developed world falls to the invasion of the Third World hordes who are armed only with their misery and the Pavlovian response of First World populations who have lost the will to resits because they have been brainwashed by the multicultural propaganda. This is the scenario which is now being acted out in the Mediterranean, but with, in the main, small boats, rather than large ones.

    The answer to the problem is very simple, spend money on surveillance methods such as drones and satellites and a substantial fleet of fast manoeuvrable ships which can patrol the Med and intercept immigrant laden boats and ships and tow them back from whence they came.

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