Immigrant Tragedy

One benefit of living overseas is that you are given a wider perception of the immigrant issue. When I hear the word immigrant, the image of desperate South Americans hopping across the Mexican border into the United States is not the only image that comes to my mind. I vividly remember a friend of mine named Coen (pronounced Koon), who was Dutch, complaining to me about the influx of Arab immigrants into Holland. He described the problems the immigrants posed the same way that some Americans complain about illegal immigrant Latinos. The Arabs were, according to him, ruining his country's culture, bringing crime, and taking all of the lower-paying jobs. I then realized that the immigrant issue is not unique to one country but a universal fact. I have since then been more sympathetic to the immigrant cause, albeit with certain reservations. So it strikes me as deeply sad when I read about the situation in the Meditteranean sea, where many African workers have lost their lives being shipped to Europe. Apparently, the trade works this way: many impoverished Africans travel to Libya because of its relative success as an economy and because it's a good starting point for migrating to Europe. Resulting from the recent worldwide economic hardship, many of the migrants will illegally travel to Europe via an intricate smuggling system that involves a halfway point on an island in the Mediterranean. This comes at great risk, the sailing is rough and sometimes a boat will capsize. One did very recently, roughly 200 African migrants dying in the sea. I find all of this horrifying: that people would put themselves through such terrifying and treacherous circumstances out of such desperation, that their desperation is growing from the economic downturn that the world (no thanks to our economy) has found itself in, and simply the image of hundreds of bodies floating in the ocean. It's awfully sad to contemplate, and I think it ought to be a reminder to us that while we Americans are surely going through hard times, it is people in the third world countries who are getting the worst of it. And that is simply not right and not fair.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/03/31/libya.migrants.plight/index.html?iref=mpstoryview