Posted on 02 December 2013
On 3 October 2013, 366 migrants drowned when their boat sank less than a mile off the shore of the Italian island of Lampedusa. The magnitude of the disaster and the awareness it raised about the unacceptable risk faced by migrants smuggled by sea t o Europe triggered unprecedented reactions. Italian and EU leaders as well as the media, civil society, the Catholic Church and public opinion all made their voices heard.
Just a few days later, 31 October, 2013, 92 persons were found dead in central Sahara on the route from Niger to Algeria. The immediate reaction was to denounce the² dangers of irregular migration across the Sahara to the EU, even though no one knows where these migrants had been headed. Was it Europe or, more probably, Algeria? Migrants smuggled across the Mediterranean are mainly young men. Instead the Sahara dead were mostly women and children, a fact which suggests that they might have been hoping to reunite with their husbands and fathers in Algeria, a country that is host to some 100,000 migrant workers from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Beyond the death of so many innocent people, the pressure that those who survived the journey and those that undertook similar cross-Mediterranean voyages would put on a tiny Italian island became a worry at the Italian and also at the EU level. It sparked a drive to reform the EU immigration and asylum policies. The European Council of 25 October 2013 invited “the newly established Task Force for the Mediterranean, led by the European Commission and involving Member States, EU agencies and the EEAS, to identify -based on the principles of prevention, protection and solidarity - priority actions for a more efficient short term use of European policies and tools.
A number of questions must be addressed in finding the best policy response. Was the Lampedusa tragedy the sign of a new trend in irregular migration to the EU; or was it a sign of increased risks associated with smuggling? Do smuggled migrants resemble regular asylum seekers and migrants or do they represent a specific group? In other words do the Lampedusa events call for a drastic revision of EU asylum and migration policy or an ad hoc response?
Read the research report Migrants smuggled by sea to the EU: facts, laws and policy options [PDF] by Philippe De Bruycker, Anna Di Bartolomeo and Philippe Fargues.
An article has been written in the Italian newspaper "la Repubblica" on this research.