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migrants
'Unacceptable Tragedy': 10,000+ Migrants Died Trying to Reach Spain This Year
"These figures are evidence of a profound failure of rescue and protection systems," said one campaigner.
Dec 26, 2024
More than 10,000 migrants died while trying to reach Spain this year—a more than 50% increase from 2023—according to a Spanish advocacy group's annual report published this week.
The NGO Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) said in its Monitoring the Right to Life—2024 report that 10,457 migrants died en route to Spain via the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea this year. Victims included 1,538 children and adolescents and 421 women. Victims hailed from 28 mostly African nations, with some coming from as far afield as Iraq and Pakistan.
"These figures are evidence of a profound failure of rescue and protection systems," the group's founder, Helena Maleno, said in a statement. "More than 10,400 people dead or missing in a single year is an unacceptable tragedy."
Walking Borders said its report "documents the deadliest period on record, with devastating figures averaging 30 deaths a day," up from an average of 18 deaths per day in 2023.
Estás cifras son el horror 👇🏾
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— Helena Maleno Garzón (@helenamaleno.bsky.social) December 26, 2024 at 12:06 AM
According to the report:
The Atlantic route, with 9,757 deaths, remains the deadliest in the world. Tragedies have increased, especially on the Mauritanian route, consolidating this country as the main departure point to the Canary Islands. The Algerian route, in the Mediterranean, is the second deadliest according to our records, with 517 victims. The Strait of Gibraltar has taken up to 110 lives, and another 73 have been lost on the Alboran route. In addition, 131 vessels were lost, with all persons on board.
Spain's Interior Ministry said earlier this month that, as of December 15, 57,738 migrants successfully reached the country this year by sea, an all-time high.
Walking Borders denounced what it called "the main causes of this increase in shipwrecks and victims," including "the omission of the duty to rescue, the prioritization of migration control over the right to life, the externalization of borders in countries without adequate resources, the inaction and arbitrariness in rescues, [and] the criminalization of social organizations and families."
The group also noted "the situations of extreme vulnerability" that push migrants "to throw themselves into the sea in very precarious conditions."
These include "violence, discrimination, racism, deportations, and sexual violence," as well as "being forced to survive in extreme conditions" prior to departure.
"The number of victims continues to grow and the act of documenting deaths or preserving the victims' memory carries the threat of persecution and stigmatization," the publication states, adding that the dead migrants' voices "can be heard in this report, crying out at their disappearance and death and questioning their fate. They call for justice and an end to impunity."
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World Braces for Outcome of Trump-Harris Election
From Palestine to Ukraine to the southern U.S. border, people expressed fears of how a Donald Trump victory could adversely affect them.
Nov 05, 2024
People, governments, and rights groups around the world watched with bated breath as Americans headed to the polls Tuesday to elect a new president in a tight contest whose results are fraught with implications on a wide range of issues, from the climate emergency and migration to support for Ukraine and international trade.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris is facing off against former Republican President Donald Trump in a knife-edge race whose outcome may not be known until after Election Day.
In the Middle East, there are fears that a second Trump administration could be even worse for Palestinians, more than 160,000 of whom have been killed, wounded, or left missing by Israel's U.S.-backed assaults on Gaza and the West Bank.
While Harris has promised that she won't change President Joe Biden's "unwavering" support for Israel—which includes approving tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid and diplomatic cover like multiple vetoes of United Nations cease-fire resolutions—Trump has encouraged Israel, which is on trial for alleged genocide at the International Court of Justice, to "finish what they started" and "get it over with fast."
Ammar Joudeh, a resident of the heavily bombed Jabalia refugee camp in obliterated northern Gaza,
toldAl Jazeera Monday: "If Trump wins, disaster has befallen us. Trump's presidency was disastrous for the Palestinian cause. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and normalization with Arab countries increased."
"If Trump wins, we'll be displaced to the Sinai Peninsula [in Egypt]," he added. "Israel has already enacted much of Trump's plan to displace us from northern Gaza. If Trump takes office again, he'll finish the plan."
Wafaa Abdel Rahman, who lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said that "as a Palestinian, the two options are worse than each other. It seems to us as Palestinians like choosing between the devil and Satan."
"If Trump wins, I believe that the war will be resolved in Israel's favor quickly and more violently," she added. "Trump policy is clear and known to us as Palestinians. However, Harris will complete what her successor started and adopt the same position as her party, and thus we will remain in a long-term war without a resolution. In both cases, the result is death for Gaza, but in the second case, it will be a slow and more painful death."
Meanwhile in Israel, recent polling shows Trump—who is so popular with Israel's right that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu named a planned community in the illegally occupied Syrian Golan Heights after him—with over three times the support of Harris.
The big question in Iran is whether the winner of the U.S. election will pursue a path toward diplomacy or potential war. Tehran-based political analyst Diako Hosseini toldAl Jazeera on Tuesday that "pursuing diplomacy with Trump is much harder for Iran due to the assassination" of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, which was ordered by the former Republican president in January 2020.
"However, if a potential Harris administration is willing, Iran would not have any major obstacles for direct bilateral talks," he added. "Nevertheless, Iran is well and realistically aware that regardless of who takes over the White House as president, diplomacy with Washington is now considerably much more difficult than any other time."
Migrants and asylum-seekers have expressed alarm over Trump's plan for even tougher bans, border closures, and mass deportations than occurred during his first term. Trump has vowed to carry out "the largest deportation operation in American history" and reinstate first-term policies targeting asylum-seekers and people from Muslim-majority nations.
Flor Ramirez, a community navigator at the advocacy group Arise Chicago, toldSouth Side Weekly Monday that migrants are once again experiencing the "collective fear" they felt during Trump's first term.
"It was a fear that cut through our family. I had to talk to my bishop, to tell him that if I got deported, if I could please leave him a notarized letter that he would take care of my children, because my biggest fear at that time was that my children... would be separated," she said.
In Asia and Europe, the prospect of crippling tariffs imposed by Trump is stoking fear of negative economic implications, including a weakened euro.
"Tariffs will seriously dampen the [European Union's] economic growth," Zach Meyers, assistant director of the Center for European Reform, toldFortune on Sunday.
Ukrainians and their backers are also bracing for the possibility that a President Trump would end or dramatically cut aid to Ukraine, which is fighting to defend itself against a nearly three-year Russian invasion and the occupation. Harris supports continued aid to Ukraine. Trump says he will prioritize ending the war quickly—an objective he
claims he could achieve "in 24 hours."
Far-right Hungarian President Viktor Orbán and Trump, who are mutual admirers, said Sunday that Europe will have to rethink its support for Ukraine if the Republican wins, as the continent "will not be able to bear the burdens of the war alone." Orbán opposes military aid to Ukraine.
Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance—who is also a U.S. senator from Ohio—has proposed letting Russia keep the Ukrainian territory it has occupied and establishing a "heavily fortified" demilitarized buffer zone along the war's front line. Ukraine would be forced to accept neutrality under the plan.
Referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin—who favored Trump in the 2016 contest against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton—Harris' campaign said the proposed "Trump-Vance-Putin plan for Ukraine is a surrender plan."
"Trump won't say he wants Ukraine to win because he's rooting for Vladimir Putin," a Harris campaign spokesperson said in September."
While some Ukrainians say they want Trump to win because they believe he could help end a war of attrition that's claimed at least tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives, others fear the implications of a possible end or precipitous reduction of U.S. aid.
In the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, one produce vendor with relatives living under Russian occupation, recently toldCBS News that "for us, it's a matter of survival."
"We are really strong. We will hold on," she said. "We hope America will keep helping us, and not abandon us."
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Trump and Vance Spread Hateful Lies About Migrants to Distract From Their Economic Destruction
The influx of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio is a success story, not a scandal.
Sep 12, 2024
When my dad moved to southwest Ohio in the early 1970s, the Dayton-Springfield area’s second city was home to over 80,000 people. When I was growing up nearby in the 1990s, it was 70,000. Today, it’s less than 60,000.
Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt cities and towns. And behind those numbers is a lot of human suffering.
Corporations engineered trade deals that made it cheaper to move jobs abroad, where they could pay workers less and pollute more with impunity. As the region’s secure blue collar jobs dried up, so did the local tax base—and as union membership dwindled, so did social cohesion.
Young people sought greener pastures elsewhere while those who remained nursed resentments, battled a flood of opioids, and gritted their teeth through empty promises from politicians.
It’s a sad chapter for countless American cities, but it hardly needs to be the last one. After all, the region’s affordable housing—and infrastructure built to support larger populations—can make it attractive for new arrivals looking to build a better life. And they in turn revitalize their new communities.
It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.
So it was in Springfield, where between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian migrants have settled in the last few years. “On Sunday afternoons, you could suddenly hear Creole mass wafting through downtown streets,” NPR reported. “Haitian restaurants started popping up.”
One migrant told the network he’d heard that “Ohio is the [best] place to come get a job easily.” He now works at a steel plant and as a Creole translator. Local employers have heaped praise on their Haitian American workers, while small businesses have reaped the benefits of new customers and wages have surged.
Reversing decades of population decline in a few short years is bound to cause some growing pains. But on balance, Springfield is a textbook case of how immigration can change a region’s luck for the better.
“Immigrants are good for this country,” my colleagues Lindsay Koshgarian and Alliyah Lusuegro have written. “They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses, and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?)… They make the United States the strong, diverse nation that it is.”
In fact, it was earlier waves of migration—including African Americans from the South, poor whites from Appalachia, and immigrants from abroad—that fueled much of the industrial heartland’s earlier prosperity.
But some powerful people don’t want to share prosperity equally. So they lie.
“From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant campaigns to white supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights,” Lindsay and Alliyah explain, “these people stoke fear about immigrants to divide us for their own gain.”
So it is with an absurd and dangerous lie — peddled recently by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Republican politicians, and a bunch of internet trolls—that Haitian Americans are fueling a crime wave in Springfield, abducting and eating people’s pets, and other racist nonsense.
“According to interviews with a dozen local, county, and officials as well as city police data,” Reuters reports, there’s been no “general rise in violent or property crime” or “reports or specific claims of pets being harmed” in Springfield. Instead, many of these lies appear to have originated with a local neo-Nazi group called “Blood Pride”—who are about as lovely as they sound.
“In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want,” Lindsay and Alliyah point out.
Politicians who want you to believe otherwise are covering for someone else—like the corporations who shipped jobs out of communities like Spingfield in the first place—all to win votes from pathetic white nationalists in need of a new hobby. It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.
Springfield’s immigrant influx is a success story, not a scandal. And don’t let any desperate politicians tell you otherwise.
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