It is a lot more complex than you make it seem.

Your position can be rephrased as "It is better to let refugees drown in the Mediterranean than think Europe might welcome more of them." I agree - it is likely over the long term that the more dangerous and hopeless the journey, the fewer might attempt it.

So now, we pit the "moral responsibility" to Europe to minimize population growth via immigration vs. the moral responsibility to save the lives of those in your backyard who have risked it to get there.

OR the EU could make/force an agreement that Libya/Algeria/Morocco take back migrants recovered in the Mediterranean.

I think the point is to stop these people taking dangerous journeys not to send them to the bottom of the sea. It both moral and more efficient.

They obviously aren't going to stop the moment EU declares a cease to rescue operations. It will need to taper off, which will mean death in the short term.

I think this really isn't the case. It's just that "rescue" has a different meaning. Instead to wait for migrants get into european waters and bring them on EU shores they use drones to alert neighbouring countries (i.e Libya) and stop them taking these dangerous journeys before getting in EU waters. Otherwise what use would the drones have? Watch and bet whether the migrants make it or not on EU shores?

They're using the drones to conduct other patrolling duties, not to save migrants.

Obviously they look for any illegal cargo but I believe now the migrants make the bulk of incidents. Isn't this supposed to detect migrants ships faster(i.e before they get into EU waters) ?

> OR the EU could make/force an agreement that Libya/Algeria/Morocco take back migrants recovered in the Mediterranean.

There is also a third option, which is to send them somewhere else. There are a number of countries in Africa that are poor, but still aren't in the midst of any active war or genocide. If you're from a country that is, why not go there?

The answer is that the real reason so many want to come to the EU isn't the humanitarian crisis at home, it's for the better money. But when that's their primary motivation, and they have the same alternative as anyone from any of the other countries they could live in, then their claim is no better than anyone else's.

It's fair to not want to be in Libya right now, but when you have the option to move east, west or south, there is a lot less moral force in the argument that you have a right to move north.

I don't know why you get so down-voted. It's a known fact that a big part of migrants from the mediterranean area are economic migrants. I remember when they refused to seek asylum in less wealthy countries from Europe and traveled on foot. Some chose to take dangerous and illegal journeys even from France (via Calais) to UK. Now tell me these people deserve asylum.

These. People. Deserve. Asylum. Let's say you have to flee the U.S., will you go to Russia ("they have cell coverage!") or will you go to France? My money is that you'll pick France and you'll fight for it.

> These. People. Deserve. Asylum.

Why? Those people are _economic migrants_, we don't have a duty to welcome them (unlike, say refugees from Syria)

Have you seen photos from these countries? Everything is destroyed in some cities and they have lost everything they had Including family members.

Some countries in the Middle East are already hosting as much as total EU is hosting and even more.

They just don’t complain as much as some of our politicians do to get voted.

> Have you seen photos from these countries? Everything is destroyed in some cities and they have lost everything they had Including family members.

Which is why they want to leave, but has nothing to do with the point that there are many other places for them to go.

> They just don’t complain as much as some of our politicians do to get voted.

Because they don't have redistributive social assistance systems based on assumptions about what proportion of the population are net recipients that accepting large amounts of indigent immigration would violate.

A poor and rural country can accept almost arbitrarily large numbers of refugees because they're also a labor force, so you give them jobs building housing and growing food and they support themselves.

That doesn't work in urbanized countries because there isn't any cheap land available and in a lot of places there is already an oversupply of unskilled labor, so in that environment they can't support their own weight and it limits the number you can accept.

>> Everything is destroyed in some cities and they have lost everything they had Including family members.

I think most of us agree that migrants traveling long and dangerous distances to Europe don't have much to loose back home. Now the question is if their lives are not in danger anymore why should Europe host them and pay them a better life ? Is this supposed to be a solution to world's poverty? As we've seen if support is provided or better said lack of counter-measures you may experience a continuous stream of migrants(i.e millions). Even if we want, we can't welcome everybody, I fear we can't coup even with the people who really need help, let alone the economic migrants.

On the other side there is also the cultural issue. Millions of people change the landscape for sure and the natives don't want to compete with migrants(why would they?). UK is leaving EU because of european "migrants" so it's not something to ignore.

Indeed that’s really a problem and there is even more to it. But perhaps building a wall or letting them to die is not a good solution for it.

>> But perhaps building a wall or letting them to die is not a good solution for it.

Well I don't think "anyone" in Europe wants to send these migrants to the bottom of the sea. A solution currently worked on is to pay other countries closer culturally, socially and even geographically (i.e Turkey) to host these people.

The lack of border security gives a sense of unease especially if you expect people from a war torn country or a country where crime is high so I fully support securing the borders.

However the deshumanisation of migrants and treating them as criminals (or worse) is totally wrong and has no place in a civilised country. You can have both border security and immigration. Just be honest who is allowed in and who is not, put in place agreed quotas and that's it. At least everyone knows(including the migrants) what your stance is.

> Well I don't think "anyone" in Europe wants to send these migrants to the bottom of the sea.

https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/08/14/let-them-drown-italys-trum...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/05/09...

https://inews.co.uk/culture/radio/caller-says-let-them-sink-...

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/11/09/evidence-shows-...

> There is also a third option, which is to send them somewhere else. There are a number of countries in Africa that are poor, but still aren't in the midst of any active war or genocide. If you're from a country that is, why not go there?

Because if you're going to uproot your life, you're not going to simply go to another miserable country like Bulgaria, you'll go to a country where it's worth moving to. When you buy a new phone, do you buy last year's phone ("it's good enough!") or do you buy the damn best phone you can afford ("it'll last me a long time!")? France will "last" someone a longer time than Bulgaria.

If everybody would rather live in France than Africa but not everyone will fit, we have a supply shortage -- a problem that markets like phones would solve with pricing. So are you suggesting that governments start auctioning off immigration slots?

It certainly didn’t help that the US, France, Italy and the UK deliberately destabilized some of these countries (Libya in particular)

Italy had no interest to destabilize Libya, in fact it had a good relationship with Gaddafi. It intervened only after US and France started, as a sort of damage control, since France was set to replace the Italian-friendly government with a France-friendly one. (I will add that US, France and Egypt are _still_ making a mess in Libya by providing weapons to the opposition to the UN-recognized government).

In any case, I don't think it would change too much, since most of the migrants are not Libyans running away from the civil war.

Regarding France, I though our gov publicly supported the UN-recognized government, with the French equivalent of 'thoughts and prayers' and not much more. But from reading the news, it seems it's a little more complicated.

This is the new version of Western Exceptionalism: Everything - bad - that happens in the world, is always fault of Europe or the US.

The people that live in those countries, the warlords they support, the wars they fight, the human atrocities they commit, their ethnically motivated conflicts, are never their fault, we are supposed to treat them as infants when it comes to all the shortcomings of their actions.

I'm sympathetic to your annoyance at reflexive anti-Americanism. We sure have had a bad string of making the same mistakes though over the past twenty years.

The pattern is: There is a dictator that is oppressing his people, we feel bad about it and want them to be able to have democracy. We overthrow the dictator, and then things get complicated and we walk away, leaving the place in civil war and ruin.

Often the problem is that the only reason it's a country at all is that some guy in London drew a line on a map a couple of hundred years ago, and the borders do not reflect ethnic or religious loyalties. In this post colonial situation, often the only thing holding the country together was the violence of the dictator. We then swoop in with fighter jets and maybe even ground troops, maybe stick around a while to run a few elections, but generally without the understanding of what's left of the power structure in the country.

This is precisely what happened in Libya, and after Iraq and Afghanistan it's shameful that we just continue to do the same thing. Bomb Gaddafi and let the chips fall where they may, which turns out to be years long civil war.

If you want to look for a relatively successful model of U.S. intervention, it's what we did in Yugoslavia. Just recognize that the country doesn't have enough holding it together to be a functioning democracy, break it up along ethnic lines, institute democracy in the statelets, and then let them all join the EU when they're ready.

> the borders do not reflect ethnic or religious loyalties.

Wouldn't the diversity give them strength?

Plenty of borders in Europe, Asia, and even Africa have mixed nationality and religions too and there isn’t constant violence and repression by the biggest tribe. There’s far more positive examples than not around the globe.

I’m actually in favour in smaller nation states and redrawing lines as a solution to the failures of centralized mega states and old world borders, such as lack of representation and cultural differences which cause policy conflicts (the smaller stuff, not just violence which is atypical in most places). Plus smaller states = way more experimentation, which the US states were supposed to be with Federalism but has had that slowly taken away.

But that’s another story which doesn’t help explain the contradictions of this common explanation used selectively in Africa.

There are a number of stable prosperous multiethnic states. In the specific examples of Iraq, Syria, and Libya though, part of the specific rationale for the U.S. moving in to overthrow the dictator was that the dictator and his ethnic group were oppressing the rest of the country.

If democracy is instituted, and the ruling group was a minority, there will be resentment on the side of the majority for past treatment, and resentment on the side of the formerly ruling minority for their diminished status. This has a tendency to boil over into civil war.

This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia, and we solved it by breaking up the country, and it has been fairly peaceful for twenty years. The main place where there are still problems is in Bosnia, and specifically because we left Bosnia together and the Bosnian Serbs want out.

To keep it short, if you don't want migrants think twice before starting a war(i.e is it worth it? What after we win?) or just stop pretending you care about human rights(i.e people dying of hunger, abuse etc) even if you are indirectly responsible.

I agree with you that many countries had flawed leadership to begin with it's not really the case with many others(i.e much of the middle east). Removing the government of another country by military force and destroying the social and physical infrastructure is the direct reason for the current situation. Arming various extremist groups does not help either. As we know Al-Qaeda was armed and trained by the U.S in the first place.

Why did US invade Iraq? We know it's for the oil now but at least it should have had the decency to provide security/safety transition to a democracy in exchange for their resources. Not to mention that US vets their leaders/administration. They are not infants but have little choice in the face of the world's most powerful country/countries.

Regarding Lybia, the Western intervention just finished Khadafi's regime, the social and physical infrastructure were already well damaged from the existing conflict; without intervention, the conflict would have dragged on like in Syria. But now since there's a new war, the Western intervention seemed to have changed nothing, just with a new set of leaders.

>> Western intervention seemed to have changed nothing, just with a new set of leaders.

That's why I believe the world starts loosing its faith in the West. The latest interventions brought nothing good.

> Why did US invade Iraq?

Why did Iraq invade Kuwait? Start a fight with a US ally and then complain when the US intervenes.

Wrong war. Iraq didn't invade Kuwait the second time around; we blamed him for arming terrorists and maintaining weapons in violation of the terms of the ceasefire ending the first Gulf War.

The Iraq-Kuwait war was settled 20 years before the Iraq invasion. So to answer your question Iraq invaded Kuwait for the same reasons U.S invaded Iraq: oil. Thus the reason we have a U.S invasion of Iraq, not a U.S-Iraq war.

The pretext of invasions were different though. Busch said it was because Saddam was evil and had weapons of mass destruction. Saddam was more decent in its allegations and said Kuwait was stealing Iraqi petroleum through slant drilling.

Btw Saddam Hussein regime was "created" by the US and the UK...

It’s not Western Exceptionalism. It’s about being empathetic as a human being.

Unfortunately some politicians are harming the way we feel about each other for the sake of their own game.

Please explain how blaming Europe/US for all the problems non western countries face, is "empathy". Because it really looks like "ideology", not like "empathy".

EU replacing patrol ships with Drones is not different than building a wall in the boarder.

EU is already rejecting many refugees. It’s not like someone that makes it to the shore is going to stay without a good reason.

That’s not just a good solution to this problem.

My comment you were responding to, had absolutely nothing to do with drones.

The comment was about perpetually blaming the EU/US for whatever bad happens in 3rd world countries.

I wonder who the “experts” condemning this are, and what they are experts in. I’m an expert, and I support the decision.

Who are you and what are you an expert in?

The article cites: Gabriele Iacovino as the expert. His bio via google translate https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

Experts are people who, by agreeing with the writers premise, have demonstrated their knowledge and expertise. You are definitely not an expert; at least not inasmuch as the term is used in this article by this writer.

Another way to stop drownings is to go and pick people up with rescue boats. There is no disadvantage to allowing them to enter the EU.

There is a disadvantage if it turns out that these people make on average a negative contribution to the economy (i.e. if the aid they need and damage they cause via crimes is higher than the surplus created by them aiding others, and producing useful labor, good and services), which would mean that they make the people already there worse off and worser off the more of them are allowed to enter.

I'm not sure whether they are a positive or negative contribution, and this also depends on how good the accepting state is at integration and education.

Or they could bring them back to their port of departure on the South of the Mediterranean, so they can try to enter legally. (or better not at all.)

People without work permits are either dependent on government support or contribute to worsening working conditions for everyone by working illegally. More resources have to be spent to make them productive.

In the best case, taking in random people off the boats is still worse than a capability based immigration policy that encourages people with qualification to immigrate safely.