Free movement to save lives of migrants

Since Britain and the US both played a significant role in destroying territories such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan through military action, and since they are the Western regions with most wealth, influence and power, it should be considered a pressing responsibility for both these powers to help find solutions to a crisis they played a vital role in creating.

Instead the dominant media narrative very rarely makes any connection between Anglo-American action in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and the now appalling reality of thousands upon thousands of people forced to flee war in sheer impoverishment danger and fear.

We have all heard the tragic stories of migrants drowning while packed desperately into vessels crossing the Mediterranean and we have all lamented such loss of life while at the same time the majority of European countries, with the exception of Germany, are certainly not doing anywhere near what they could to stop this.

Barack Obama has been remarkably quiet on the migrant issue though the US has led the way in military intervention across Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Britain and America have been happy to drop bombs on Middle Eastern countries, and yet the response to the migrants its waging of war has produced its minimal.

The lack of swift actionon the migrant problem meansmigrants packed into camps like Calais where they are forced to live like dogs while their applications for asylum are processed. They are cramped together, starving, often without electricty or sanitation and are policed like criminals to stop them escaping the abject conditions. Many of them are children and adolescents who have lost their families in war-torn Syria. That this dehumanising treatment is allowed under international law is an indictment to the principles of democracy and freedom we claim to hold so dear. It seems we are happy for immorality to reign so long as the immorality does not happen on our own doorstep.

According to the UN over one million migrants reached Britain in 2015 and millions more are expected; the tide of refugees is growing and cannotbe stopped. Eventually the sheer number will force us to address this problem more comprehensively than we have to date.

European territories have made the maintenance of their own wealth, tight border controls and stupid bureaucracies matter more than attempting to save the lives of these desperate men, women and children.

We hear much about regulating the numbers of migrants that countries take in for fear the population swell will spin things out of control, with borders policed as though we owned the land - which in fact, and most crucially, we do not. In a sense we are all refugees upon the earth.

Call me crazy but border controls should not be the priority across Europe or the rest of the globe. These are man-made borders and if we claim to venerate freedom shouldn’t people be allowed to go where they wish?? Are we actually to let people die if they don’t have the correct papers or passports? Can we really be content with a world so essentially indifferent to so much preventable suffering? And what of mercy?