Our politicians inform us that low-skill migrants will make any country richer and the existing residents of any country better off. Apparently, not everyone got this memo. “Taking Hard Line, Greece Turns Back Migrants by Abandoning Them at Sea” (NYT, August 14):
The Greek government has secretly expelled more than 1,000 refugees from Europe’s borders in recent months, sailing many of them to the edge of Greek territorial waters and then abandoning them in inflatable and sometimes overburdened life rafts.
Since 2015, European countries like Greece and Italy have mainly relied on proxies, like the Turkish and Libyan governments, to head off maritime migration. What is different now is that the Greek government is increasingly taking matters into its own hands, watchdog groups and researchers say.
For example, migrants have been forced onto sometimes leaky life rafts and left to drift at the border between Turkish and Greek waters, while others have been left to drift in their own boats after Greek officials disabled their engines.
The most confusing part of this: Since migrants make a country rich, why aren’t other countries rushing in with surplus cruise ships to pick up these valuable migrants and invite them to settle permanently? There is no country on Earth that wants to be richer?
Some 2004 images from Santorini, the all-American Greek island:
Separately, does the NYT running stories about the travails of migrants mean that we’re nearing the end of coronapanic? Will it soon be time to return to climate panic, for example?
Why isn’t NYT praising Greece for strongly locking down the country to save lives from coronavirus?
> Separately, does the NYT running stories about the travails of migrants mean that we’re nearing the end of coronapanic? Will it soon be time to return to climate panic, for example?
It has already begun: https://twitter.com/TommySiegel/status/1296467075968507910