This past Sunday, hundreds of refugees from the war torn nation are believed to have drowned when their boat, operated by smugglers, capsized. Survivors have stated that many of the ship’s occupants moved to one side of the ship when a patrol boat was sighted (the ship was actually a commercial vessel), causing the ship to capsize.
Sadly, this tragedy is not uncommon. A recent AP article on migration trends and deaths reported that more than 3,000 refugees died crossing the Mediterranean in 2014, compared to fewer than 250 along the U.S.-Mexico border. Indeed, while last week’s sinking is the most severe instance of Libyan migrants perishing in the Mediterranean, similar tragedies have been occurring on a smaller scale for months, if not years. This unprecedented level of maritime catastrophe constitutes a humanitarian crisis.
Political leaders across Europe have been quick to recognize the crisis and will discuss the matter in upcoming discussions in Luxemburg. But while recognizing the problem is easy, finding a solution is difficult.
The Prime Minster of Australia, Tony Abbott, recently advocated that European leaders implement harsher deterrence policies to dissuade Libyan migrants from illegally immigrating. Australia has instituted stricter deterrence policies under Abbott’s leadership, including sending back migrants from Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations. But instituting stricter deterrence polices in the Mediterranean will only worsen an already dire situation.
To understand the plight of Libyan refugees, it is important to first understand what has caused the mass exodus from the North African nation. Until 2011, Libya was a totalitarian state under the control of Muammar Gaddafi, a brutal leader. But as the Arab Spring spread from Tunisia across North Africa and the Arab world, civil insurrection against Gaddafi arose in Libya. Fearing that an impending civil war could lead to a humanitarian crisis and potentially endanger the lives of Americans, President Barack Obama began to conduct airstrikes against the Gaddafi regime.
There is no doubt that Gaddafi was a brutal dictator, and his government was possibly complicit in the Lockerbie terrorist attack. But in the months and years that have followed the American-led NATO airstrikes in Libya, the Obama Administration has utterly failed to engage in responsible state building in Libya. As Alan J. Kuperman masterfully notes in Foreign Affairs, Libya has gone from having a poor government to none whatsoever. While the humanitarian crisis in Syria and rise of the Islamic State have attracted the concern of international powers, Libya has been left to rot ungoverned.
Since 2011, Libya has been consumed with conflict between rival paramilitary factions (in one notable instance, the capitol’s airport was shut down as two warring groups engaged in a gun battle on the tarmac). ISIS is believed to have a presence in the nation, having recently killed more than a dozen Egyptian Christians on Libyan shores. The attacks against American diplomats in Benghazi, which left four U.S. citizens dead, demonstrate the severity of lawlessness that has left Libya in shatters.
Understandably, many Libyans wish to leave this chaos. Hundreds of thousands of Libyans have fled to neighboring state Egypt and Tunisia, but still more seek a better life in Europe, bringing us to the current dilemma. How should European nations respond to this crisis?
If European policymakers wish to responsibly address Libyan migration, they should look to the history of another group of political refugees: Cubans. For decades, Cubans fleeing political persecution or seeking a better life have fled from Communist Cuba to Southern Florida.
Even before the implementation of the “Wet Feet, Dry Feet” policy in 1995, which stated that Cubans who made it to U.S. soil could receive political asylum, but those who are found at sea are repatriated, Cubans made the perilous sea journey to Florida in droves. Tragically, many hundreds, if not thousands, of Cubans died making this voyage. But the promise of a better life in a free, democratic nation was motivation enough for many Cubans to risk the voyage time and time again. In fact, some Cubans continue to risk their lives making the journey today in spite of the easing of Cuban-U.S. relations.
If there is a lesson to be learned from this case study, it is that individuals seeking a better life for themselves and their families will keep coming and coming and coming. The actions of Cuban refugees are not unique; almost ironically, many Haitians have died attempting to cross the Caribbean for a better life in Cuba, and some argue that this is the motivation of Mexican migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Libyan migrants today face more dire circumstances at home than any of these populations. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that they’ll keep coming.
In his remarks regarding deterrence, Tony Abbott stated that smugglers lead to dangerous migrant crossings. Abbott is correct that smugglers do facilitate dangerous migration. But he fails to recognize that these men also provide for a demand; refugees from across the war torn nation of Libya are seeking a better life, and at present, they’re the only ones offering passage (notably, Tunisia has stopped accepting Libyan refugees, further compounding the problem).
European leaders have no choice but to drastically increase their humanitarian aid to Libyan migrants. The Italian program Mare Nostrum did a phenomenal job rescuing migrants as compared to the current joint European program, but perhaps Mare Nostrum was not even enough.
The time has already come and gone for NATO nations to engage in the responsible statecraft in Libya that they should have in 2011; perhaps even if NATO nations had remained, Libya may have still descended into civil unrest.
But lacking effective immigration channels from North Africa to Europe, Libyans will keep coming and keep dying in the Mediterranean. While I am not advocating open borders (far from it, such policies are not worth the risk), European leaders do need to recognize this migration reality. If the leaders of Europe’s largest nations truly do believe these disasters are unacceptable, it is time to radically increase their funding for rescue efforts and increase the number of refugees the EU accepts on an annual basis. The EU may not have directly created this migration catastrophe, but it is each member nation’s humanitarian responsibility to try to solve it.
Reach the columnist at clmurph5@asu.edu or follow @ConnorLMurphy on Twitter.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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