Europe can’t afford to sit back and do nothing when thousands of migrants are dying every week

Dozens of orphaned and malnourished children daily cry out for help; injured victims are thrown to sharks or forced overboard by religious fanatics; and hundreds die needlessly in this ruthless, expanding traffic in human suffering.

Migrants and refugees, the majority young men, are coming to Libya, the closest point to the Italian coast, and other staging points, from all over the Middle East and north and west Africa, driven by a range of factors. These include all-out war, Islamist insurgencies and climate change-related drought and famine. Rapid population growth, exacerbating a chronic lack of jobs and economic opportunity, is another powerful spur. The result has been called the biggest human upheaval since the Second World War. Mostly, these legions of the displaced are heading for Europe. So what is Europe doing about it? The answer, so far, is dismayingly little. Instead of rallying around Italy’s admirable Mare Nostrum search and rescue programme, which plucked 100,000 people from the sea in 2014, the EU replaced it with a more limited border security operation run by its Frontex agency. So far this year, Frontex, by comparison, has rescued only 5,000 people. Monthly funding for its Triton programme is less than a third of the Mare Nostrum budget. continue