Over the weekend, hundreds of migrants — 800, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, including many children — died when their ship capsized off the coast of Libya. EU leaders have already responded with a 10-point plan to deal with the Mediterranean migration crisis, focusing on increasing sea patrols and dismantling smuggling operations. Italy's former Mare Nostrum operation, a search-and-rescue mission that saved more than 100,000 migrants before being canceled last year, is being held up as a model of how to proceed. "The short-term solution is fairly obvious," Joshua Keating writes at Slate. "The EU as a whole needs a more ambitious plan to rescue migrants."
That's definitely true. But even the best search-and-rescue operation will only manage the problem. It won't go away until life in the EU is no longer dramatically better than life in the migrants' home countries. And while many migrants are fleeing violence and political instability in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere, many others are merely fleeing poverty. One survivor of this weekend's ship sinking was reportedly from Bangladesh.
The migrants are making a rational choice. If they make it over to Europe, and are allowed to stay, they will earn not just a little more but much, much more than they would have at home. It's pretty firmly established that workers in developed countries make much more than workers in developing countries doing identical labor. The Center for Global Development's Michael Clemens, Claudio Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett estimate that if the average Yemeni or Nigerian moved to the US and did the same work, he'd make about 15 times as much.