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.
I’m glad this article exists; this has been bothering me. Specifically, I’m bothered that, while aljazeera featured the stories about the boat of refugees as and after it was happening, I haven’t seen it crop up in U.S. news at all. One of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean, and… crickets.
Then a submersible with a handful of white rich lads gets lost and it’s all over the papers and all anyone can talk about.
To be fair, part of this is the fact that the submersible story has a lot of wild and novel details to it, plus the novel “oh god imagine being trapped in a submarine” fear factor, that make it great for getting attention and clicks, but nevertheless.
The other part of it is that people see “poor, brown refugees drowned at sea in the Mediterranean, once again” and feel completely disconnected from that and glaze over. The refugees don’t get the same automatic “what would that feel like if it were me” empathizing, and the situation doesn’t get the same scrutiny of rescue details and chances and what exactly went wrong that resulted in hundreds and hundreds of innocent people drowning at sea.
And they were in a BOAT. They knew where the boat was. The boat was reachable. They just let them die.
It’s true that we’re talking about different countries and different organizations, but this is a recurring pattern. Refugees are being systematically and repeatedly allowed to drown when they are very near to people who could help them. Other people get prioritized and rescued like they’re kings.
Systematically being the key word. There is no way to claim that what keeps happening to boats carrying migrants is accidental. It’s a policy decision. So awful.
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. And the rest of the EU accepts this quietly because it solves their own issues with immigration.
It’s infuriating. I think that tacitly allowing people to be hurt or die for personal/political gain is one of the worst things a human being can do. And yet so many people - from fascists to liberals- seem to be on board. It’s so normalized. It’s the same at every border. Completely preventable. Completely unnecessary. Insane that “I don’t want those people moving here so let them die instead” is seen as a normal and politically centrist take.
I think a lot of people are less “we don’t want those people too move here” but “we want those people to go though proper channels to love here rather than just turning up en masse in boats”.
Disagree. There are no adequate proper channels, and at least in my country those have been narrowed and obstructed and restricted out of existence. The process is deliberately expensive, difficult, overly beaurocratic, and inaccessible for most people - and a lot of countries don’t take disabled folks or very poor people or [insert other indefensible reason]. Governments do that on purpose to prevent people from being able to come ‘legally’ at all. But presenting yourself at a border to request asylum is always legal under international law- that is a proper channel. So countries try to create ways to make that impossible, or very dangerous, or allow bad things to happen to those people, hoping it will dissuade people from coming to exercise their human rights. It doesn’t work, and people die, and we all say “how sad but they had it coming”. They didn’t! As human beings we have a responsibility to help other human beings, even if they broke a rule we made up on purpose to criminalize them and make them seem less deserving of our help. Being personally annoyed at a group of people isn’t a good enough reason to treat them the way most governments have. If they actually wanted people to immigrate “legally” instead, they’d open the borders and staff them adequately and fund programs for people to start their lives.
Edited for typos.
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.
while I certainly think the affluency of the victims is a factor it would be disingenuous to claim this is ALL it is.
For any regular occurrence, at some point apathy sets in. Car accidents are just not interesting to report after the hundreth time. If there were a dozen lost subs near the Titanic every year, I’m sure the story would lose it’s luster too.
There’s also the aspect that refugees are an ongoing and much more complex issue. You can’t just save one ship of refugees. There will be another one in short order. And if you do save them all the question is what do you do with them? At the very least that’ll cost you money. At worst it’ll cost you political power. Are you going to realize what these people have gone through to get them to a point where they are willingly face these risks? Realizing that maybe something should be done about that is even costlier. And depending on the political landscape in your country most will just consider this “a self solving problem” anyway.
This is not to excuse what we’re seeing. But we can’t pretend that the stories should be covered the same. They aren’t the same. One is much easier to cover than the other.
I see your point but just for the sake of discussion, try and change “refugees” with “people”.
You should notice how all the other considerations simply are not worth the electricity used to transmit them on your screen.
I mean, in an ideal world that emotive argument would work. But this isn’t an ideal world and that ignores all the additional baggage that comes with a country taking in these refugees/migrants loel housing, basic needs funding, healthcare, etc. This is on top of lots of European nations already suffering economically at the moment from the Covid fallout and the Ukraine situation. Just saying “we should save them as it’s the right thing to do” is far to simple for the world we live in.
I agree with that. As I already said, what I wrote was not supposed to be an excuse but an explanation.
For better or for worse, news outlets care about engagement. “50th boat full of migrants lost this year” won’t get many clicks. “Billionaires in trouble under the sea” will. If you think these type of stories are under-reported, feel free to start your own blog or discussion forum.