The rescue racket

What is happening in the 300-mile stretch of sea between Sicily and Libya, day in and day out — in other words, what ‘we’ are doing there — is beyond reasonable doubt insane.

A sane person would assume that the 181,436 migrants (a new record) who made it by sea to Italy last year had done so under their own steam in flimsy fishing boats and dinghies at least some of the way across the Mediterranean. This, after all, is the message aid agencies and governments put out.

In fact, every one of those 181,436 was picked up by EU and non-government aid-agency vessels off the Libyan coast just outside the 12-mile territorial limit, then ferried across to Europe. The people-smuggler boats — more often than not these days dangerously unseaworthy rubber dinghies — chug out towards the 12-mile limit, send out a distress signal, and Bob’s your uncle.

Nearly all the migrants arriving in Italy are young men from West Africa, not refugees. They have the cash for a ticket on a smuggler boat (€1,500, give or take) so are not destitute. That’s getting on for £300 million in ticket sales last year. West African migrants are big business.

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The justification for the presence of the EU and aid-agency fleets in the southern Mediterranean is to save lives, and in the case of the EU’s Operation Sophia to arrest people smugglers and destroy their boats. If the fleets did not patrol, there would be far fewer deaths, because far fewer migrants would dare to put to sea. There would be far fewer people smugglers. Yet thanks to this enormous rescue fleet, the Italian interior ministry expects 250,000 more migrant boat people.

The madness does not end here. There’s reason to suspect that the people smugglers are actually in direct contact with aid agencies, which is why they are so often first on the scene to rescue migrant boats — and this is a criminal offence.