39 migrants found dead in Essex, England

This was a very thoughtful big-picture commentary on the ongoing tragedies associated with rampant nationalism. Thank you.

There is a recent series on Netflix, a procedural that focuses on the interrogation of the accused in the police station. Although the episodes all use the same set, some are set in Spain, France, Germany and the UK. One of the UK stories was about the police trying to persuade a driver to tell them where he abandoned a truck full of immigrants, lest they freeze to death.

Thanks for the article. I forwarded URLs for both to a friend who is now beginning to do activism along the border in the US Southwest to counter, resist, or mitigate the evils being visited upon immigrants and refugees there. It is dangerous work and he needs all the information he can get. One can learn further by doing searches on the Net for the people and organizations mentioned.

I sometimes tell people that national borders are a species of violence; some get it, some don’t.

The behaviour of countries like this towards migrants reveals that they are governed not with an eye to the welfare of people, but property.

I don’t know whether or not there is a technical term for this sort of governance, but it is repellent.

I’m in agreement with the spirit and sentiment of the piece, but….

I think you’re pretty far out on a limb to suggest that your so called ‘entrepreneurs’ who assist migrants political or otherwise deserve much praise for the task they undertake.[There is nothing in my piece that “suggests” this and you need to look to your reading skills Trader Joe. CB] While no doubt there are some exceptions, the vast majority are exploitative criminals who deserve to be subjected to the exact same treatment that they subject their ‘cargo’ to. They spend zero seconds thinking they are helping a refugee and all of their moments figuring out how to exploit someone vulnerable and not get caught. They are effectively drug dealers just catering to a different need.

39 people don’t die in a lorry because some nice guy made an innocent mistake – they die because someone with no regard whatsoever for human life decided to save their own neck at the cost of others.

Also – I’m no fan of Boris, but his reaction didn’t deserve your pot-shot (at least yet). He expressed the appropriate outrage and indicated the appropriate intentions about capturing the bad guys. Reserve the outrage for the policies that caused the need for such trafficking – not his support for entrepreneurs.

@9 Trader Joe – CB’s editorial

From the piece:
“Johnson’s revulsion at ‘traders in human beings’ suggests an uncharacteristic aversion to entrepreneurship. But the rhetorical attempt to appeal to our sense that lives should not be bought and sold masks the fact that states also criminalise people who assist migrants and refugees out of solidarity and concern: the Sea Watch captains Carola Rackete and Pia Klemp were arrested by Italy for rescuing people in the Mediterranean; Scott Warren was prosecuted for providing aid in the Arizona desert; Cédric Herrou, a French farmer, was brought to trial for giving shelter to Africans freezing in the Alps.”

I’ll accept I didn’t spend hours pondering this passage – but I’m not sure how to take it other than as an equalization between whomever might have left the 39 humans in the truck and the legitimately good work of all the people you mention who were/are in fact good Samaritans. That may not have been your intent – but its surely how it reads.

My point was entirely to say while there are some good people involved in assisting refugees with borders, and that the rules quite often are bad, these people are not those people – if my reading skills failed me in this interpretation, I’d allow that others might be reading it the same way.

So… Tim Worstall is actually a professional public intellectual? he lives on the money peopleepay him for the products of his thinking? jesus fucking wept. Here I was thinking he was a no-name person-in-the-street like me and I was going to carefully explain exactly why “first safe country” is an obviously foolish and impractical standard, but, like… people actually pay him and he needs help to do basic shit like this?

First safe country is stupid because people can only be deported to their country of citizenship. If a person presents at the second safe country… there’s no mechanism to get the first safe country to accept them, is there. The choices open to an official are “admit the person” or “send them back to their country of citizenship”, and whether the second is a good idea doesn’t depend on their itinerary.

That took me, with no domain knowledge and a standard uni education, five minutes of not-particularly-hard thinking. Tim… clearly wasn’t up to that, and he purports that his thinking is of high professional standard. I cannot regard that claim as being true.

(note the fundamental assymetry. Countries have to accept non-citizens presenting…. unless the country is tim’s country, which can pick and chose. It really doesn’t make sense in a world where the self and others have equivalent authority, only if you special-case yourself)

Hi Chris. First, thanks for posting this and for your long commitment to removing borders, a cause I don’t support. I just read a selection of fairly good articles on the routes, fees, practices and arrival points in Britain.

Several of the regulars (Henry, John-Belle, Corey) have sound reasons for not posting here, and are perhaps sharing all their best writing and web-data with Mark Z. and his investors. They’re missed.

Or, perhaps these CT posters share the frustration expressed in a comment condemning commenters as a ‘tedious’ lot. Speaking as an infrequent reader, I’ve noticed that only you, JQ, and Harry are producing regularly readable work. The comments are just that – comments.

I’m reading a critic now from a different time, who prefaced his plunge into a difficult topic by noting, that ‘poor framing of a question in imprecise and vague terms results only in frustration and additional useless discussions.’

That’s how I read a great deal of the antipathy on the nets and in some of your own posts. Conflating immigrants with refugees, and avoiding the terms like foreign nationals, or citizens of other nations, or passport holders from China and Viet Nam, as these poor folks are, obscures central key facts from our discussions.

I don’t see CT as a site promoting ‘group hugs’ and I’m certain that’s not your intent.

But it isn’t clear to me how vague and sometimes incorrect language is moving the needle, improving discussions, or reducing the palpable frustration which permeates so much of the internet today.

If the CT community is a collection of happy, productive bunnies all brimming with optimism and the confidence which follows hard work well done, then I apologize. There’s so much to enjoy and admire in the writing of the CT posters. I feel, however, that too few are willing to jettison practices, beliefs, and ideas that may no longer be working, or useful.

A little more rigor and open-mindedness would be very welcome, and probably provide a welcome breath of light and fresh air.

Britain is a wonderful place to live. 39 people from other nations just lost their lives trying to get to a place that is too often described at CT as a kind of hell. The world is full of light and has in many, many respects never been better.

You’d never guess that as a regular readers of posts and comments here.

“First safe country is stupid because people can only be deported to their country of citizenship. If a person presents at the second safe country… there’s no mechanism to get the first safe country to accept them, is there. The choices open to an official are “admit the person” or “send them back to their country of citizenship”, and whether the second is a good idea doesn’t depend on their itinerary.”

Amazingly, that’s actually what the Dublin regulations – which are supposed at least to be the law here inside the EU – say. From the link that Chris B provides:

“One aspect of the system is referred to as the Dublin system or the Dublin Regulation. This piece of EU law provides broadly that where an asylum seeker has been fingerprinted in an EU Member State but then moves on to another EU Member State, the asylum seeker can be sent back to the first country to have the asylum claim processed there.”

As a USAian, I get why asylum-seekers transit Mexico and other countries, to get to the US. But I’m curious why someone would transit the EU (and esp. the western continental EU countries) to get to the UK ….. I wouldn’t have thought that the Benelux countries, or Germany, or France, were much worse-off than the UK? Is it the presence of large immigrant communities already ? Or something else?

Just curious.

Is it the presence of large immigrant communities already ? Or something else?

My guess (I don’t live in the EU) is the former. Perhaps less because that makes the final destination more attractive to the smugglees as it makes it more attractive to the smugglers, who have reception networks set up there.

Chris, thanks for the pointer to the book: I’ll get it and read it. I’m not quite clear on how it’ll help, but I guess we’ll see …. the reason I’m not sure it’ll help clarify, is that we’re not talking about smugglers bringing people from outside the EU, to inside the EU. Or even from poorer parts of the EU, to richer parts. We’re talking about smugglers bringing people from one rich part of the EU, to another rich part.

And if it were about immigrant communities (esp. in the case of Vietnam) I’d think that they’d be heading for France, not the UK.

But maybe the book will clarify …..