Dying to get to Europe
- By Heiko Khoo
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 21, 2015
Poverty, famine, economic dislocation and war drive millions to seek a better life by means of migration, but human freedom is mainly decided by birth. The wealthier you are the more freedom you have.
Capitalism requires that popular consciousness accepts that injustice is justice. Those in poverty must blame themselves, and those who are secure, and who observe the miserable condition of others, must castigate the poor for their lack of responsibility. This requires a generalized immunity to the natural revulsion against barbarity - and that is what we are witnessing in the Mediterranean Sea.
As nationalist movements take to the streets of Europe and their political popularity grows, their answer to mass drowning is a cacophony of hysteria against the very migrants who drown!
The political elite appear to put things in more measured tones. So, the British Prime Minister David Cameron says: "We've got to deal with the instability in the countries concerned, we've got to go after the human traffickers and the criminals that are running this trade." Evidently profit is supposed to motivate everyone in the world except those in Africa who own boats, busses and lorries.
Last year European leaders agreed that if Europe rescues too many migrants from drowning this would encourage others. From November 2014, Italy stopped its search-and-rescue mission, called Mare Nostrum. This was replaced by a threadbare EU operation called Triton, which patrolled less than 30 nautical miles from the Italian coast. Put another way: they decided that death by drowning acts as a positive means to discourage migration. However, there are no measures that EU leaders can propose that will discourage people who have already travelled thousands of miles from boarding a vessel to cross the Mediterranean Sea.
Lest we forget, at times Europeans were all in favour of migration. Some 40 million migrated to the Americas in the 19th century. The British were particularly keen on migration: soldiers, administrators, adventurers, and their hangers on, paid for by the state, plundered the colonies. And it is no accident that the people migrating to Europe today come from countries plundered and robbed by European colonization and sliced-up into arbitrary and dependent nations when Europe's empires disintegrated after 1945.
The dream of an expanding union of nations and peoples with free movement and equal rights is entirely possible. Rather than erecting fences and ever-tighter border controls to prevent migration we need to build bridges between Africa and Europe both literally and economically and remove restrictions on movement based on poverty and nationality. But that means designing bold plans for global development and cooperation designed to serve the needs of the people and planet for centuries into the future.
China's engagement with Africa and South American over recent years shows that development can be dramatic as long as it is based on mutual benefit rather than on one-sided profits. China has shown that the tide can be turned on the poverty and rising inequality and that millions of new migrants can be incorporated into its urban centers every year. China has the advantage that its largest banks and corporations are public enterprises and so they can be used to serve the needs of the people.
The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://china.org.cn/opinion/heikokhoo.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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