The Guardian: Italy coastguard: 3,000 migrants rescued in one day in Mediterranean
“No casualties reported as Italy reports navy ships, patrol boats and other vessels picked up migrants crammed aboard various craft off the Libyan coast.”
I thought armed forces were for keeping invaders out, not rescuing them at sea and bringing them in?
Steve Sailer writes: One of the more curious aspects of the coverage of “Europe’s migrant crisis” is the apparent assumption that Europe couldn’t possibly do anything to keep Asians and Africans from crossing the Mediterranean because that would require naval forces, and whoever heard of Europe having boats in the water?
But European navies not only exist, they are currently policing the Indian Ocean to keep down Somali pirates.
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* The problem is 100 per cent one of will, not of ability. Even if EU countries had no naval capacity, they could still track the movement of vessels by satellite and know exactly which part of the European coast they were heading for. They would then have three chances to stop them.
They could prevent them from disembarking. If they failed to do that, they could arrest the “migrants”, detain them until they know where they came from, and then send them back.
If the invaders made it past all of these controls, they could still be prevented from finding work or claiming welfare benefits. European countries have always had a high level of state surveillance, both of their own citizens and resident foreigners. Carrying a government-issued identity card at all times is mandatory in many of them, and it’s impossible to work legally or claim benefits in any of them without proving your identity.
* Do you think it is your influence or a total coincidence? Too hard to tell. I often wonder how widespread your influence is. I notice a lot of topics you are the only one to bring up are being spoken about in mainstream media. One obvious one is the Chinese women using our 14th amendment to make little American citizens.
I wonder if Coulter or other well known voices are whispering into Trump’s ear about you.
* I think you point out the obvious while msm is wilfully ignorant, but here the issue is a lot more complex. I live far closer to the action than you do. It’s not that affected NATO members, and in particular the defense ministries of first-arrival countries, haven’t considered naval intervention to defend their sovereignty. Of course it would be totally possible to turn away trafficked boats, ridiculously simple at some popular points of arrival, in fact. But it opens a whole other can of worms. The difficulty is in laws and treaties, and protection of human lives, not practical feasibility.
There are a lot of complicated laws and treaties concerning military/police intervention at sea, not least concerning treatment of refugees (or alleged refugees, i.e. economic immigrants in the midst of genuine war/political refugees; in this case it doesn’t make a practical difference). I’m most familiar with the case of Greece and Turkey, but a lot of this applies to other countries too. The Greek navy or even local police on boat cannot just approach a boat and turn them away, much less chaperone them back to where they came from. This is only compounded by their volatile relationship with Turkey. Also, seeking out and punishing traffickers requires murky negotiations for which laws and protocol are mostly not in place. Turkey (and to be fair, this would be true of other countries) doesn’t even actually want to host the migrants, so they have a further incentive to obstruct the legal process (or even protect the traffickers?).
Also, I’m not going to get too much into the non-military, human element, but there is pure evil emanating from this modern migrant crossing. Regardless of where you stand on the rights of migrants in Europe, the thousands of capsized boats and drownings are a tear-your-hair-out tragedy. As we know, many of these deaths are not accidents, but brought on by the traffickers and migrants themselves. There is also this film footage of policemen at sea yelling and hitting at migrants to turn them away. If there are other, similar instances of this happening, it could easily have cost lives. I fear more robust naval intervention and its potential for violence, on both sides, and murder of the most vulnerable.
* The lives of at least 2 billion people on the planet are a “tear-your-hair-out tragedy”. In a few decades that number will double. By the end of the century it will triple. What’s your point?
I do respect your moral sensitivity, though. I encourage you to move to Africa and save some of them.
* If humanitarian concerns gives a boat filled with refugees right-of-way and license to violate territorial waters and to disembark on the shore, can not these same humanitarian concerns give the very same boat filled with refugees but towed by a coast guard ship right-of-way into the territorial waters of their country of origin and license to disembark on their home shore?
* Can such patrol physically stop migrants, and does it save lives? Yes and yes. As I said, the major issue here is the volatile bilateral relations between the respective countries of arrival and departure, and conflicting pan-European protocol concerning refugees. Australia this ain’t. Would hardline patrol deter migrants from continually trying to reach Europe? No.
Migrants have destroyed their own boats, ones carrying infants, in order to gain speeded access to care and rights, and used their own children as props in revolts against European border control and other authorities. We cannot begin to grasp their desperation and the lengths they will go to. Have you seen the easy descent into chaos at border control areas and refuge camps within Europe? Now imagine that at sea.
* The results of the two missions are for the same reason.
The anti-pirate patrol is in support of globalism and the profits of the globalists. Can’t have pirates cutting into the profits of the globalist trading system. So they shoot up the small boats of the pirates.
The ships in the Mediterranean are there to assist the mass movement of people into Europe in support of the globalist goal of destroying national borders. So they pick up the “refugees” from small boats a few miles off the African coast and deliver them to Europe.
* If the Brits could fend off the mighty Nazis, Europeans can keep out the ragtag hordes.
It is all a matter of will.
But the will has wilted. Not because of any fear of what illegals think but what the globo-elites think.
Illegals don’t own the western media.
* To me it’s entirely absurd that we have to “prove” that Europe is capable of stopping the migrants. Of course they’re capable. And of course they have boats in the Mediterranean to address the issue. The problem is that they’re using those boats to facilitate the invasion rather than stop it.
Many of the boats coming from Libya send distress signals just miles from Libyan waters. Rather than taking them back to Libya, which would put the ships back in action far sooner, the Europeans pick them up off their boats or out of the water and carry them the entire rest of the way to Europe.
This invasion is being facilitated by the governments of Europe.
There is not remotely any argument to be made that Europe doesn’t have the resources to secure its borders. The cost per migrant of supervising their arrival and then providing them government welfare is far higher than the cost of simply returning each one to the country from which he left, usually Turkey or Libya. You can then multiply that cost by the far larger numbers of migrants they have to deal with because the migrants know they will be allowed to settle in Europe. The total cost of facilitating this invasion will ultimately come to hundreds of billions of Euros. If Europe turned them back they would stop coming almost immediately.
* Let’s not build a roof to keep out the rain. It will never work.
Let’s not build a wear a coat to protect ourselves from the cold.
It will never work.
Let’s not close and lock the door to keep out burglars. It will never work.
Seriously, what is the point of having a nation if you can’t protect it?
* Try walking into the White House or George Soros’s house uninvited and see if they don’t yell at you, subdue you, and even beat you to keep you out. Worse comes to worse, I’ll bet they might even shoot you. It might easily cost you your life. Would a video of that prove that Barack Obama and George Soros are cruel and inhumane?
The videos of police ‘inhumanity’ are propaganda tools of the smugglers and invaders.
These laws and treaties are merely an excuse for facilitating the invasion of Europe. They have no real power to bar European governments from securing their borders and turning back the migrants.
