Calais: Thousands Are Sailing Again Across The Ocean.
Not a single trafficker was among the 141 adults and 135 children arrested as the camp was evacuated.
Not for one moment would I claim to know an easy way out of this.
This year alone several hundred people have drowned off Somalia and another 200 off the coast of Libya in a single incident in March; 73 died last month stranded right off the Italian coast and another 60 in Morocco just a few days ago.
The "No One Is Illegal" position strikes me as a fashionable abdication from the duty of actually proposing solutions and a weird concurrence with the far-right proposition that market forces alone should determine immigration policy. The barbaric "Just Keep Them Out" posture similarly surrenders to unreason. But it is the muddling European non-policy that created the jungles of Calais in the first place.
Bodies sometimes wash ashore at daybreak. Human traffickers ply the waters off the coast. Patrol boats set off in pursuit of dinghies crammed with desperate migrants.
It's complicated. All I know for certain is that the Afghans, Eritreans, Iraqis, Iranians, and all the other navvies of Calais are my people, and have always been my people, and always will be, and anyone who would counsel a policy that does not afford each of them the deepest respect and care, or would otherwise not assure them of all the dignity that is their due, is my enemy, and has always been my enemy, and always will be, and can go to hell.
So here's a tune. Listen to it, but scroll back up and look at that boy's face as you do.
Not for one moment would I claim to know an easy way out of this.
This year alone several hundred people have drowned off Somalia and another 200 off the coast of Libya in a single incident in March; 73 died last month stranded right off the Italian coast and another 60 in Morocco just a few days ago.
The "No One Is Illegal" position strikes me as a fashionable abdication from the duty of actually proposing solutions and a weird concurrence with the far-right proposition that market forces alone should determine immigration policy. The barbaric "Just Keep Them Out" posture similarly surrenders to unreason. But it is the muddling European non-policy that created the jungles of Calais in the first place.
Bodies sometimes wash ashore at daybreak. Human traffickers ply the waters off the coast. Patrol boats set off in pursuit of dinghies crammed with desperate migrants.
It's complicated. All I know for certain is that the Afghans, Eritreans, Iraqis, Iranians, and all the other navvies of Calais are my people, and have always been my people, and always will be, and anyone who would counsel a policy that does not afford each of them the deepest respect and care, or would otherwise not assure them of all the dignity that is their due, is my enemy, and has always been my enemy, and always will be, and can go to hell.
So here's a tune. Listen to it, but scroll back up and look at that boy's face as you do.
posted by Terry Glavin at 8:59 PM
1 Comments:
Any one of us would do the same if we were in these "economic refugee" shoes. In fact, many of us (or our forefathers) have done exactly the same thing. So, yeah, I feel for them.
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