Around 600 illegal immigrants die every year in a bid to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya to southern European coasts, said Malta’s Home Affairs and Justice Minister Tonio Borg while addressing European Union (EU) Interior Ministers conference on Tuesday.
The Minister pointed out that since the beginning of 2007, Malta has saved 315 shipwrecked immigrants attempting to enter Europe by sea, 250 of whom were taken on board Maltese ships in a fortnight.
While criticizing the present state of affairs, Dr Borg added that "It is unbelievable that on the doorstep of Europe we are having this tragic situation and not enough is being done."
Malta has urged the other 26 EU member states for the setting up of a burden-sharing system under which illegal migrants rescued or intercepted by EU ships outside of European waters would be taken in by the bloc's countries.
You have to wonder about these crazy Africans, packed like sardines into tiny fishing dinghies to make perilous journeys to Europe. Don't they know they're only going from the relative happiness of their absolute poverty, to the misery of the west's Relative Poverty? Really, we should be going the other way....
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Which is why almost all these median income/relative poverty/food insecurity/fifth quintile, etc., statistics are meaningless unless immigrants are broken out separately.
Relative poverty also ignores the reasons why some people are in the bottom 40%. Or should I say it makes the discussion of a whole area of reasons taboo, namely the personal choices and habits of the poor themselves. It ignores the possibility that the poor people, as individuals, have some responsibility for their own condition. You can't externalize all the causes of poverty.
Malta has urged the other 26 EU member states for the setting up of a burden-sharing system...
Doesn't that say it all? I've noticed that in the fiery debates om immigration David has been having on his site and AOG's site, the anti-immigration brigade is being very coy about what to do with the ten million illegals already in the country. "Secure the borders first and then we'll look at it" seems to be the popular thinking. I suppose there may be a (bad) argument for rounding everyone up at 3:00am for instant deportation, but to leave millions of newcomers defined as "burdens" in legal limbo for years is a recipe for disaster. It really is depressing to see so many folks assume hordes of immigrants are just objects who will sit patiently and behave the same way politically and socially no matter what their status and level of acceptance. You would think Europe taught us a lesson, but apparently not for many.
But back to your question, what the determined immigrant does more than anything is undermine the status and privileges of victimhood.
I am going to get back to that, I promise, but the short answer is, "if you're in a hole, first stop digging". Most of the anti-open borders crew is willing to absorb the current set as citizens, if we can be confident there won't be another massive wave over the next decade or two, as has happened every previous time.
The common threads here are two. First, behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated, extended, imitated and amplified. Second, the worst offenders are never the object class themselves, but always their pimps in the ruling class. We've spent the last forty years trying to buy off the poverty pimps, and so it should surprise nobody that there are now relative-poverty pimps. In like fashion, buying up racial/ethnic/gender blocs has been profitable for Democrats, and so it should surprise nobody that Republicans are trying to compete, however clumsily, even if it means importing new blocs wholesale. The only way out of this cycle, if there is a way out of this cycle (maybe there isn't), is to punish what has previously been rewarded. What happened in the Senate two weeks ago represents a tiny first step in that direction. My read is that people are angrier at their own politicians than they are at immigrants, and that that's exactly right.
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