Joe Biden Is Adopting the Same Policies That Led to Last Week’s Greek Tragedy – By Angelo Guisado, Jamie Kessler, and Robert Nestler (Slate) / June 23, 2023
Earlier this month, a boat carrying an estimated 700 migrants sunk off the coast of Pylos, Greece. At least 82 people died, only 102 have been rescued, hundreds are still missing, and many are feared dead. The shipwreck was one of the deadliest incidents off the country’s coast in modern history and has prompted shock and outrage across the world.
Pylos, though, must be placed in a global context where anti-migrant policies from Europe to the U.S. result in inevitable tragedies repeating themselves over and over again. Almost exactly one year ago, 53 people were found dead in an abandoned truck in San Antonio, in what the New York Times reported was one of the “worst episodes of migrant deaths on the southern border in recent years.” The victims, migrants from Mexico and Central America, died after being trapped inside a tractor-trailer in the sweltering Texas heat. And just three months ago, 39 migrants burned to death inside a Ciudad Juarez detention center near the U.S. border. As Pedro Gerson wrote in Slate at the time, policies on both sides of the U.S. border guaranteed the fire would “not only be a tragedy but also a premonition of what is to come” for future migrants seeking refuge in the United States. The Pylos disaster renders this prophecy just as true in the Mediterranean as it is in the Sonoran Desert.
All of these incidents are tragedies of unimaginable proportions, but they are not coincidences. As three human rights lawyers working in the European Union and the United States, we know that they are the direct result of parallel policies implemented at our respective external borders.
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