Contempt for Human Life

That is the title of a post by Christopher Bertram of Crooked Timber commenting on the tragic find of 39 dead Asians boxed in a truck container in the UK. To which Boris Johnson's immediate comment was: ‘All such traders in human beings should be hunted down and brought to justice.’

Here are the most salient passages of

Contempt for Human Life

That things are going so badly for people that they have to leave friends and family should be a reason for human sympathy whatever the cause, but tracing those causes often leads straight back to those of us who live in the countries they are heading for, the decisions of our politicians and our ways of life. These explanations will not form part of the investigations by the Essex police. The countries mentioned by Steen are marked by our interventions, sometimes directly, sometimes through sanctions, sometimes through actions in the wider region such as the 2003 Iraq invasion. The environmental changes that are pushing many people to move are caused by greenhouse gases that they did not emit. The rich world’s appetite for narcotics, and the decisions of our leaders to fight a ‘war’ against them, lie behind the criminal violence that drives people from Central America and elsewhere.

Those hard borders mean than people now have to pay smugglers to take them by dangerous methods and routes. The countries they are heading for, which never cease to trumpet how welcoming they are to ‘genuine’ refugees, are absolutely determined to prevent people who might claim asylum from arriving. A variety of measures, documented by David Scott Fitzgerald in Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers, now make it impossible for people with the wrong passport or the wrong profile to get on a plane from Tehran, Addis Ababa or Shanghai. They won’t be allowed to buy a ticket; airlines and shipping companies will stop them boarding without a visa, and no wealthy country will grant one. Countries along the way, often brutal dictatorships, are bribed to prevent the undesirable from crossing. Keep them there, out of sight: anywhere but here.

What our politicians and pundits object to is not the making of money from human suffering, or dead bodies, so long as the bodies are somewhere else. When they turn up in Essex, dead people are an embarrassment and the perpetrators must be found.