Illegal migration needs a rational multilateral solution
No one can disagree with the mayor of San Antonio, Mr Ron Nirenberg, that the deaths of 50 migrants who were abandoned in a tractor-trailer without air-conditioning in the sweltering Texas heat “is nothing short of a horrific human tragedy”.
The gruesome discovery, we are told, was made late Monday when a San Antonio city worker heard a cry for help from the truck, which had been parked on a lonely back road in the town in the sprawling US state.
Up to midday Tuesday, news services reported that the home countries of all of the migrants and how long they were left abandoned were not yet known. What they have found out so far, though, is that 22 of the migrants were from Mexico, seven from Guatemala, and two from Honduras.
Hopefully by today the nationalities of the other unfortunate souls will be known and, eventually, arrangements will be made with their families for their recovery.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to those families as this kind of news is never pleasant. Indeed, US President Mr Joseph Biden has described the deaths as “horrifying and heartbreaking”. And, reacting to initial reports that smugglers or human traffickers were to blame, he correctly stated that: “Exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit is shameful.”
This despicable practice has been a bane of human existence for centuries, the most egregious being the Atlantic slave trade under which, from the 16th to the 19th century, up to 12 million Africans were captured in their homeland, transported across the Atlantic Ocean in subhuman conditions to the Americas, and sold into slavery.
Naturally, the forced migration of our African ancestors was far different from what obtains today, as the people who take dangerous risks to travel from poor countries to developed nations are trying to find a better life.
But that prospect of a better life has resulted in death to scores of people for many decades, many of whom, as with Monday’s victims in Texas, have perished in like manner.
We recall the 39 Vietnamese migrants who were found dead in a trailer in Essex, England, on October 23, 2019. Also, the 71 migrants — eight of them children — from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan who were found dead in an abandoned truck on a highway in Austria on August 27, 2015.
We remember as well that on May 14, 2003 a total of 19 migrants died inside a hot tractor-trailer travelling from south Texas to Houston. And, three years before that, in June 2000, authorities in the English port town of Dover found 58 of 60 Chinese immigrants dead inside a truck that had taken them across the English Channel from Belgium.
Illegal migration, as we pointed out in this space recently, has increased dramatically in recent decades, and Jamaicans have been among those individuals trying to get into the Unites States through Mexico.
The problem is not easy to deal with as illegal immigrants are deemed to drain states of resources that governments would rather allocate to the welfare of legitimate citizens.
While we cannot condone illegal immigration, we reiterate that this nagging issue needs a rational multilateral mechanism for placing people wishing to migrate in countries that want or are willing to have them.