The sea of the dead

While the Interior ministers of the European Union are meeting telematically to discuss the tightening of border controls, this news appears, which you can read in Ara Balears: seventeen people have died trying to reach Mallorca in a makeshift boat, after two weeks adrift. Maritime Rescue found two people inside the boat, malnourished and dehydrated, who before being admitted to Son Espases hospital were able to report that there were nineteen people on board. All the others had died. These seventeen deaths are added to the more than five hundred so far this year on the migratory route trying to reach the Balearic Islands from Algeria. It is one of the main entry routes for immigrants into the western Mediterranean, and also one of the most dangerous.When we talk about migration, we are talking about this, about poor people dying at sea, drowned, or of thirst and hunger. Whether mafias are the ones who brought them there, or governments that encourage their own citizens to go to their death, as we have seen these days, does not exempt First World countries from the political and moral duty to help these people, to welcome them, and to have foreseen all the mechanisms that civilization, democracy, and wealth allow in the service of an objective superior to any other: to recognize, restore, and protect their dignity as human beings. Before the mafias and depraved governments, the force that drives these people is desperation, pure and simple. They assume the risks, the scams, and the humiliations because they know that here, in Europe, a relatively few kilometers from their villages devastated by corruption, living conditions are better. And they are: objectively, we are better off here. Let's prove it: let's develop migratory policies based on the civilizing and inalienable principle of human dignity. It is from this principle that the institutions of the post-World War II world order were built, starting with the United Nations and the European Union. It is these institutions and this world order that the great authoritarian powers—the USA and Russia—now want to dismantle, with the participation of smaller but equally criminal governments like Israel or Morocco. That the European Union approved barely two months ago a pact on migration that includes the imprisonment of immigrants in prisons (they call them "centers") in non-EU countries is something worse than a shame: it is a defeat. It is the European Union proclaiming to the world that it is incapable of being itself. That it is preparing for dismantling. Returning to the Balearic route, the local government of PP and Vox says it is "overwhelmed" by the eleven thousand people who have arrived in dinghies from January 2025 to July 2026. They are not, however, dealing with the twenty million tourists who are destroying the islands during this tourist season. No, saying this is not do-goodism, nor wokism nor demagoguery: demagoguery is using migration crises to try to grab votes by inciting hate speech and racism.