Three weeks later, and the situation had become more appalling. It became increasingly clear that the “plan” was to do nothing—that, in fact, the absence of a plan might even be the plan—for, if enough people died crossing the Mediterranean, maybe it would discourage others. And I wondered—what will that do to us, those of us just watching this? Were we not condemning our own souls, along with theirs?
When I consider the last few weeks, I realize I’m not concerned about the child migrants who are dead at the bottom of the Mediterranean. There is no point in being concerned about them—for they are dead. They think and feel nothing anymore—not after that last, terrible panic. After the waves came through the hatch, which was locked, and their mothers and fathers died next to them, trying to punch through the side of the boat, to escape.
There have been thousands of them before, and there will be thousands—thousands upon thousands—more. They died, or will die. My thoughts are not with them.
Do you know who I’m concerned about? Us. Those children—floating underwater, off the coast of Rhodes—they do not play out well for us.
Put aside how it makes us look to the rest of the world—our columnists calling them “cockroaches”; our government withdrawing funding for the rescue ship, a cold, unspinnable decision that could only have ever had one result: people dying.
Put aside, also, our reputation as a nation, for we still have enough friends—friends who agree with our policy; well, Australia, at least—to brush that off.
No—I worry about us. Every individual in this country. I’m worried about us being part of a nation that goes along with this being the plan. I’m worried about our mental health. I do not underestimate anxiety, and guilt, anymore—how they can torque up inside us, as we get older. How things we thought we could ignore—things that would pass—can get lodged in your heart, burning you for twenty bad years, before the world turns sour, and you collapse.
How much energy are we using to not think about those children? Would funding those rescue boats cost us more, as a country, than it will cost our souls and minds to think of those children in the sea? The Mediterranean—previously for holidays, and Cannes—is now to be fashioned into a siege trench, in which thousands and thousands of people will die. Is this what we do now? We protect the economy of Europe by letting the beaches of Greece and Italy fill with the corpses of families? How do we feel about that?
I know how we’re supposed to feel: like it must happen. That we are a small country, in a world full of misery, and we must protect ourselves. We are supposed to feel grateful we are being protected from these waves of migrants coming at us from the north, east, and south. There is a place for everyone on this earth, and everyone must stay where they are. Or, at least, not come here. Politicians have made hard decisions to keep our country safe for us. The birds may migrate, but we must not.
Except we do. Humans are migrant. The world is only full of towers and minarets and gardens and pathways because we spread across the world, in flocks: murmurations of humanity that came in waves. Almost all our history is simply about movement: trade routes, new lands, exchanging silk for flints; founding empires, America, mountain conquering, traveling to Disneyland or the moon.
Perhaps it’s because I am the grandchild of migrants, married to the child of migrants, but I am hyperaware of the plasticity of a “homeland.” I am aware of how much people move, and why. I note how the ones who migrate—away from trouble, away from war, or repression—are the ones obsessed with peace, stability, educating their children, fitting in, and getting on: the kind of supercitizens who recharge cities. I obsessively catalogue all the reasons why migration is argued to “not work,” when clearly it is working, because it has, all through history. It is history. I note how migration to Britain in particular is deemed inappropriate, because we are small, and crowded—despite only 2.27 percent of Britain being built upon, and our economic system being dependent on constantly expanding consumer demand.
But none of that really matters—not now. The thing that matters is this: people will not stop migrating out of fucked-up countries. There are currently more humans in transit—fleeing wars and repression in Syria, Eritrea, Libya, and Iraq—than at any point since the Second World War. Fifty million, according to the International Organization for Migration.
And if even a quarter of the predictions about climate change are true, they will be joined, within a generation, by millions more fleeing drought, flood, or countries that have been inundated by the sea. Most of this migration will be from the south to the north. The boats will not stop coming, because there is nowhere else for these people, with their children, to go.
And so my question is this: Won’t we, as a country, go mad if our sole and only plan, for the next fifty—the next hundred—years is to sit here and keep watching children drown? Isn’t that—just a little—like turning the unstoppability of migration into murder?