For our regular readers there is not much new here except that we get some details about one particular smuggling route out of Egypt and it makes me wonder why the hell all of the European powers and American pressure on Egypt too, couldn’t get the Egyptian government to stop this lucrative smuggling route.
Instead of really clamping down on Egypt, one policy consideration for the Europeans is to increase LEGAL immigration as a way of stopping the smuggling business. Sheesh!
The ‘stars’ of this New York Times article are Palestinian brothers who survived a boat wreck and are now in Malta hankering to move on to a first world country. Emphasis is mine:
Today, the business of smuggling refugees and migrants across the Mediterranean into Europe has become a hugely profitable, if deadly, enterprise, with more than 3,000 people believed to have died so far this year. One United Nations official estimated that in 2014 smugglers on those routes would gross more than $1 billion, with sophisticated operations that sometimes overlap with criminal gangs who traffic in arms and drugs.
For Europe, the enormous influx of migrants and refugees has stirred both sympathy and resentment, while presenting a policy conundrum — the humanitarian imperative of rescuing the desperate at sea versus the economic and political burden of absorbing them.
With illegal migration very likely to keep growing, one question is whether to expand legal migration.
[….]
By some estimates, as many as one million migrants are hiding on the North African coast, from Libya to Egypt, during the peak summer months, waiting for boats. In Egypt, smuggling in Alexandria and nearby ports has risen sharply since the Syrian exodus began in 2013, when five to seven boats left every week. Now five to seven boats leave every day.
The Palestinian survivors, looking for sympathy, want your help to get into some sweet country:
Today, the three survivors are living in a migrant center and trapped in bureaucratic limbo in Malta. They want to reach a country that will provide them asylum, perhaps Sweden or Canada or Australia. But on Wednesday, they must submit fingerprints and be processed in Malta.
“We need support,” said Mamoun Doghmosh. “We need help.”
Read it all. Note that there are many places along this smuggling pipeline where the migrant flow could be stopped.
Please don’t anyone tell them that the US State Department is packing up illegal aliens in Malta and bringing them to America. We will be taking another 500 this fiscal year!
See our ‘invasion of Europe’ archive here.