Wrecked boats in Lampedusa. Image: Marco Molino
It’s easy to forget, when a dehumanised mass of “immigrants” is invoked in political debate, that these are people no different from you and me, our families and our friends. The Guardian cites “one survivor of a [migrant boat] sinking off Malta [who] recounted spending several days clinging to a buoyancy aid along with a teenage Egyptian whose hope was to pay for heart medicine for his father. The youth drowned before they could be saved”.
In the space of last week alone, an estimated 1,200 such people died in two separate disasters in the Mediterranean. And we need to be crystal clear about this: there is a direct line between those deaths and the increasing virulence of Britain’s anti-immigrant politics. These were not passive tragedies but the result of conscious policy choices made in an atmosphere of noxious xenophobia.
