The Guardian view on danger at sea: looking out for all those in peril | Editorial
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Editorial: The contrast between the frantic hunt for a missing submersible and the failure to save migrants drowning in the Mediterranean is illuminating

A massive operation is under way to find and save a stricken vessel and its passengers. As time passes, anxious families and friends wait with growing fear. The US coastguard, Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels are all hunting for the Titan submersible, which has gone missing with five aboard on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the north Atlantic. The UK’s Ministry of Defence is also monitoring the situation.

It is hard to think of a starker contrast with the response to a fishing boat which sank in the Mediterranean last week with an estimated 750 people, including children, packed onboard. Only about 100 survived, making this one of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean. Greece and the EU blame people smugglers, who overcrowd boats and abuse those aboard them. But both have profound questions to answer about their own role in such disasters. Activists say authorities were repeatedly warned of the danger this boat faced, hours before it went down, but failed to act.

    • Exilfranke@feddit.deEnglish
      22·
      1 year ago

      It is a policy decision. And sadly, it is a pretty popular one. Rescuing these people would mean that the rescuing country needs to grant them asylum. Doing so would incentivize more refugees to choose this dangerous path as it would be a passage to Europe.

      This is one of the reasons why the far right political parties in Italy are so successful. They promise Italians that they would stop this type of immigration.

        • Novman@feddit.itEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          You are right. The social situation with migrants ( mostly MENA ) is so bad that people is infuriating with far-right cause the number of migrants entering by sea is higher than previous government. The people read english and starting to blame european unions and mostly american government to force us to accept migrants cause their ideology. They see far-right government as a sort of a puppet of foreign interest. They say: why you send weapons to ukraine when we have an actual invasion and you help them? I understand that americans have different views, european point of view is starting to become really really different.

        • jmp242@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          This completely misses some important points. First, most people don’t value human life infinitely other than maybe their own and close family. We don’t want anyone to die, but we don’t want to completely change our country and culture either. We don’t want to starve to pay for the entire world to be saved, and most of our interventions are controversial to say the least.

          You haven’t elucidated all points so I might be wrong here. Unless you think people should not as a community be able to have any rules (like HOAs or no homeless camps etc) then democracy has come out that extremely few people want to take on what seems like an infinite population that would like to come to the US and Europe and be taken care of by those governments. So why would democratic governments spend lots of money helping people illegally get here?

          Remember - the US and EU have been gutting social programs for citizens already here for decades, at least partially due to costs and an inability to raise taxes enough to cover them. I can argue that’s a problem all it’s own, and I don’t like it, but there is currently no capacity for migrants. I know very few people who would want to increase their taxes the substantial amount that would be needed to cover a large program for likely millions of migrants.

          We can make moral arguments here but not everyone has the same morals. And if you set democracy aside, I somehow doubt that is a trade people want to make.I also doubt a non democracy is going to do better for migrants.

          Then people will say we should fix the problem at the other side. How? Did you see the recent attempts at nation building? Do you want a western power to dictate to people how to run their countries? If we don’t do that (and even assuming we could somehow get them to be a US 2.0 or whatever) how do we fix up their countries? Presumably what they’re currently doing isn’t working hence the migration. I am sure we’ve tried asking nicely to not send migrants, to fix their countries, to get a better economy and whatever.