Asylum seekers should be welcomed, but the UK cannot take all migrants

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/13/europe-migrant-crisis-britain-economic-migrants

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A great sore, a gaping wound, is now festering along Europe’s southern shores. It is the human evidence of generations of failure that now makes the global north quite literally a destination of last resort. In the first five months of this year, 32,087 people have survived the crossing and arrived in Italy. Probably almost as many have landed in Greece and Malta.

Related: Theresa May: UK will not participate in EU migrant resettlement proposals

But no one knows how many people do not make it, whose perilous voyage ends in drowning; at best just another statistic, at worst another unidentifiable body washed up on a beach. Of all the shaming responses to the Mediterranean boat people, easily the worst was the decision by the EU last year not to fund a continuation of Italy’s Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue programme on the grounds that saving people from death by drowning just encouraged them to come.

Running it a close second is the suggestion of a military operation against the smugglers, with the idea of putting their boats beyond use. There are a lot of boats in the Mediterranean and, as Patrick Kingsley wrote this week, today’s smuggling vessel was yesterday’s fishing trawler. The boats are rented out on an operation by operation basis by loose networks of smart people making a trade in human life, often using “trained” migrants themselves as crew. It is the market at work. The opportunity for destroying them without also imperilling hundreds of vulnerable people seems vanishingly remote.

The position of an illegal migrant is almost more vulnerable than the western imagination, rarely troubled by such existential catastrophe, can grasp. Slowly and reluctantly, we are becoming familiar with the brutal experience of fear and uncertainty, sometimes of torture or rape. It would take a diamond-hard heart not to be moved by the faces of those who finally make it to the southern shores of Europe.

The elements in this grotesque tragedy are easy to describe. The failed states of sub-Saharan Africa from which many of the migrants have fled insecurity and lack of opportunity, the lawlessness of the north African coast that makes the smugglers’ operations both possible and, in an economy that barely functions legally, a least-bad option. And the gross disparity of wealth between the global north and south that makes devoting 0.7% of GDP to international development appear parsimonious.

Our sleight of hand over helping Syrians – paying for camps rather than providing safe homes and a future – is shaming.

The refugees do not embark on their voyages in ignorance but in despair. Give us a legal way to come, they beg. And who would not want them, these people of courage and enterprise and ambition who fight their way through such hazards to try to make a chance for themselves and their families?

Well, not me. Or rather, not as home secretary Theresa May writes this morning. She suggests that the EU says no survivor of the Mediterranean crossing should be sent back. If that was what was being suggested, she would be right. If a successful crossing were the equivalent of an entry visa to Europe, it would indeed merely fuel the smugglers’ trade.

But that is not the EU proposal. The commission wants to share the burden of looking after survivors not by sending them back, but by asking all EU countries to take some – and only for as long as it takes for their claims to be assessed. Those whose case is insufficient will be, where possible, repatriated. That may be miserable, but it is right.

That does not mean, however, that we can dodge our proper responsibility for people who are seeking asylum. Last year, the UK granted asylum to just 14,000 people, less than a third of the number granted in Germany. France and Italy each took 20,000. We are not pulling our weight on behalf of the world’s most desperate people. Our sleight of hand over helping Syrians – paying for camps rather than providing resettlement, safe homes and a future – is shaming.

Many of the people risking everything in the frail fishing boats of the Libyan smugglers do so because the process of resettlement from the camps is inadequate to the task, and countries like the UK are not taking their share. Theresa May is misrepresenting the proposal just so that she can reject it.

• This article was amended on 13 May 2015 to correct the description of the EU’s policy on Mediterranean migration, and the writer’s response to it. The text and headlines of this article were amended to reflect this