The Plight of Young Africans Seeking Work

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/opinion/the-plight-of-young-africans-seeking-work.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Fleeing Desperation in Africa on the Most Dangerous Journey” (news article, June 17):

I’ve been reading accounts like this for decades right here in The New York Times. Diplomats and leaders with far more authority than I have debated these issues even longer.

Do the African leaders even reflect on these events and cries for reform to benefit their people? Will they ever forfeit their excessive lifestyles and greed?

I tire of seeing African leaders inflicting death and destruction on their people, yet at the same time luxuriating in palaces, with hefty bank accounts abroad.

It breaks my heart to continue to read how these people and others, too, around the world still suffer needlessly.

GEORGE J. McALLISTER

Cambridge, Mass.

To the Editor:

The French work to live, while Americans live to work: So goes a familiar adage contrasting the joie de vivre that differentiates our frenemies in France from our own Protestant work ethic.

Your arresting article should add to such pithy contrasts a more somber one: Africans die to work. The mortal risks that countless young Africans are taking to help their families and communities by seeking work in distant (and increasingly hostile) Europe and America should give us pause not only for reflection and compassion but also for admiration and “grit envy.”

Those of us born and raised in developed countries have merely won the lottery of life. We deserve no merit for the luck that dealt us the gold of American citizenship simply by virtue of being born here.

These brave African youths deserve our greatest respect. It is they — not the wayward deviants of Boko Haram and Al Shabab — who represent the true face of Africa.

WILLIAM F. S. MILES

Boston

The writer, a professor of political science at Northeastern University, is the author of “My African Horse Problem,” a memoir.