Invasion of a Certain Kind

IN February, a rusty, decrepit freighter named the East Sea ran aground on the Cote d’Azur near Saint-Tropez. Its captain and crew fled, and when police and medical teams arrived on the vessel, they found 900 people—250 men, 180 women, and 480 children—cooped up in the hold. Mainly Iraqi Kurds, they had paid gangs approximately $4,500 per adult and $2,000 per child to be smuggled into Western Europe. In return for this money, they had squatted in a hot, filthy, pitch-black hold, with no ventilation and almost no food or water, for a voyage of eight days. About a dozen swam ashore and disappeared. The rest were abandoned to the attentions of French immigration authorities, most asserting that they were political refugees seeking asylum, many that they were heading for Britain, which has (by European standards) relatively liberal asylum laws.

If these details sound dramatic, the event itself was no more than an everyday occurrence on the borders of Western Europe from the Baltic to Sicily. The Mediterranean trade in refugees has already produced far worse tragedies than the East Sea: Smugglers in fast boats have thrown babies overboard in the Adriatic to divert their pursuers; and a Dutch truckdriver has just been sentenced to 14 years in prison for murdering 58 Chinese illegal immigrants, found dead—of suffocation—in a container in Dover last June.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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IN February, a rusty, decrepit freighter named the East Sea ran aground on the Cote d’Azur near Saint-Tropez. Its captain and crew fled, and when police and medical teams arrived on the vessel, they found 900 people—250 men, 180 women, and 480 children—cooped up in the hold. Mainly Iraqi Kurds, they had paid gangs approximately $4,500 per adult and $2,000 per child to be smuggled into Western Europe. In return for this money, they had squatted in a hot, filthy, pitch-black hold, with no ventilation and almost no food or water, for a voyage of eight days. About a dozen swam ashore and disappeared. The rest were abandoned to the attentions of French immigration authorities, most asserting that they were political refugees seeking asylum, many that they were heading for Britain, which has (by European standards) relatively liberal asylum laws.

If these details sound dramatic, the event itself was no more than an everyday occurrence on the borders of Western Europe from the Baltic to Sicily. The Mediterranean trade in refugees has already produced far worse tragedies than the East Sea: Smugglers in fast boats have thrown babies overboard in the Adriatic to divert their pursuers; and a Dutch truckdriver has just been sentenced to 14 years in prison for murdering 58 Chinese illegal immigrants, found dead—of suffocation—in a container in Dover last June.