A few days back, I asked a journalist why the grim tick tock of migrant death on the Mediterranean wasn’t a daily story. Surely there was enough drama in it? His reply: “it’s the same thing over and over”.
Yet the revelation that 400 migrants had drowned this week as they fled to Europe from Libya seems to have struck a new chord.
The story went global, and even my alma mater, the Financial Times, not particularly known for its social justice campaigns, felt impelled to run an editorial.
The shame of Europe over migrant boat people
The steadily increasing flow of migrants and asylum seekers attempting to reach Europe via the Mediterranean represents one of the biggest challenges confronting the EU.
Public anguish in many EU states over immigration makes the problem in the Mediterranean difficult to resolve. Still Europe’s response should be condemned for what it is: inadequate and inhumane.
About time too. Maybe, maybe, this particular episode will spark the debate so sorely needed to wake Europe from its torpor.
IOs and NGOs lined up to sound the alarm, including IOM, UNHCR and Save the Children.
Amnesty International said “European governments’ ongoing negligence towards the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean has contributed to a more than 50-fold increase in migrant and refugee deaths since the beginning of 2015.”
Dimitris Avramopoulos, the EU’s commissioner for migration, described “the unprecedented influx of migrants at our borders, and in particular refugees” as “the new norm“, and said “we will need to adjust our responses accordingly.”
More than 1,100 writers, including the recently deceased Günter Grass, sent a letter to the European Parliament calling for greater protections for refugees.
The EU could start by reversing its decision to cut its search and rescue operations, and the UK should rethink its disgraceful position that people should be left to die at sea pour encourager les autres.
The trouble is, we have been here before. Interest spikes whenever there is a particularly terrible incident, and disappears shortly thereafter. As the writers suggested, the drowning of more than 300 people near Lampedusa “had no impact on refugee policies”.
Temporary outrage only goes so far. To change this picture and the EU’s response, more focus is needed on the other side of the coin: empathy.
The challenge is to show people that the boat people aren’t some mysterious outside force, a horde of numbers, but potential neighbours, invested in finding peace, and making their new homes more prosperous.
This is no small challenge.
Pew Global last year polled seven European countries, and found the majority wanted less immigration – with the highest opposition in Italy and Greece.
“Roughly seven-in-ten Greeks and Italians say immigrants are a burden on the country because they take jobs and consume social benefits.”
Those countries also happen to be front line states in the Mediterranean boat crisis.
In the UK this year, the general election debate has been dominated by immigration, with even the Labour Party forced to harden its stance, amid a surge in populist opposition.
Until this perception shifts, efforts to galvanise public opinion against deaths at sea will struggle.
To that end, those campaigning for more sympathy might take a leaf out of a smart new campaign currently creating some buzz in Britain.
Monday saw the official launch of the #iamanimmigrant campaign, which started as a crowdfunded idea to put posters on the London Underground, and which has since expanded throughout the UK and is beginning to harbour international ambitions. 
The brainchild of the Movement against Xenophobia, set up in 2013 to end the increasing toxic political rhetoric against immigrants, it resonated with people tired of the vilification of newcomers as the source of society’s ills.
The media responded enthusiastically, enjoying a fresh counter-narrative during an election campaign dominated by negativity.
What #iamanimmigrant so cleverly does, with the help of photographer Philip Volkers, is to put a compassionate human face to the people being vilified, revealing them to be as much invested in their adopted homeland as its other inhabitants.
This is something the Mediterranean boat people campaign could do more of. To complement the shock horror incidents and rising numbers (too big to do anything about!) with human stories, appealing to empathy as well as outrage.
With so much personal drama, the potential is huge. Imagine a refugee girl in Syria, fleeing for her life across the border to Lebanon, encountering rising hostility, struggling to make her way to Libya, throwing her life into the hands of criminals and boarding the boat of death.
These are epic journeys in every sense, as gripping as any TV fiction.
If we want to change Europe’s mindset about the Mediterranean boat crisis, we need to appeal to people’s natural attraction to a strong story, their connection to tales of overcoming adversity.
To end this crisis, we need to make it a lot more human.
aidinsider 