Profiteering on Human Lives

Europe is struggling to deal with a record swell of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, arriving by land and by sea, and the human tragedies continue to mount.

Last week alone, at least 150 migrants from an assortment of countries were reported drowned off western Libya after a fishing boat carrying them sank in the Mediterranean. And 71 refugees fleeing war-ravaged Syria were discovered to have suffocated inside a truck that had taken them from Hungary and was abandoned on an Austrian highway, with the refugees locked inside. The victims included eight women and three children.

Over recent years, hundreds of thousands of migrants from places like Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria and the horn of Africa have found their way to European countries, many of them having paid smugglers to arrange their passage. Such human traffickers are believed to have abandoned the truck in Austria, and Hungarian police, aided by Austrian authorities, arrested three Bulgarian citizens and an Afghan citizen in connection with that tragedy.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 3,000 migrants perished or went missing en route in 2014 alone.

We Jews cannot help but recoil at the thought of people desperately seeking refuge in new places because of threatening situations in their home countries. Many of us have countless relatives who were born in Eastern Europe and, for being unable to escape the scourge of the Nazis and their cohorts, perished during the Holocaust years. And all of us know well the tragic stories of the many Jews who were refused refuge in other lands.

As it happens, though, those seeking asylum in European countries today, although colloquially all referred to as “migrants,” are comprised of two distinct groups. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, there are refugees — “persons fleeing armed conflict or persecution” and seeking safety in other countries — and there are actual migrants, people who “choose to move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives by finding work, or in some cases for education, family reunification, or other reasons.”

Both groups are worthy of sympathy, but there is a qualitative difference between people whose lives in their home countries are in direct danger and people who are seeking to better their lot. In fact, the 1951 Refugee Convention specifically provides certain legal protections (most importantly, that they cannot be returned to life-threatening situations) to the first group but not to the second.

Countries, including our own, cannot be expected to open their borders to all who wish to enter. A former ambassador to a Middle Eastern state recently asserted from his experience that if one asked any of a group of anti-American protesters where he most would like to live, the answer would be America. Who wouldn’t want to share in the prosperity and freedoms the United States has to offer?

But wholesale immigration places burdens on the labor market, increases risks to security, and taxes the social security system. Creating a workable, responsible, immigration policy is a vital part of any country’s responsibility. And European nations, no less than our own, have to formulate immigration policies that are humanitarian but not foolhardy. United Nations officials have called on European officials to improve their efforts to resolve the growing humanitarian crisis.

When true refugees, however, fleeing oppression or worse, arrive on the doorstep of an enlightened country, they cannot be dismissed. To their credit, many European countries seem to have internalized that lesson. Germany — the irony cannot be ignored — receives by far the most asylum applications in the European Union, and is expecting 800,000 refugees to arrive this year. And there are approximately 1.5 million recognized refugees living in the 28 member states of the European Union plus Norway and Switzerland.

But no one can deny the underlying evil of the unscrupulous souls who seek to enrich themselves at the expense of desperate people — even to the point of risking, or taking, the lives of refugees.

In the words of Austrian prosecutor Johann Fuchs, commenting on the deaths of those who were abandoned in a sealed truck, “We are talking about human trafficking, homicide, even murder.”

The illegal trade in humans has broadened from arranging perilous journeys across the Mediterranean to profiteering from the tens of thousands now pouring in through the Balkans. It should be clear that the profiteers need to be identified, pursued and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

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