Lost at sea... our human values?
In this post, I am going to discuss four events, three very recent and one in the past. By the time I am done, I am hoping—indeed expecting—you will agree they are all related:
The loss of the submersible Titan with five aboard, as it sought to explore the wreck of the Titanic.
The loss of the fishing boat Adriana, carrying up to 750 migrants off the coast of Greece, with as many as 600 dead.
The Evian Conference of 1938, in which delegates of 32 nations met to discuss the plight of German Jewish refugees from Hitler.
The fierce attempts by officials in several Hudson Valley, New York counties to stop a fairly small number of asylum seekers to take up temporary residence there.
A tale of two ships.
During the night of June 13/14 of this year, the Adriana capsized off of Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula, with a Greek coast guard cutter nearby. The ship had left Libya five days earlier, and was headed for Italy. Only about a hundred of its estimated 750 passengers survived, including all of the crew; all of the survivors were men, because the women and children had been stowed below decks. The migrants were mostly from Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine.
At the time, the disaster received some brief coverage in the United States, although it seems to have taken a couple of days for that to happen; and much more coverage in Europe, as might be expected. But a few days later, the media’s attention turned to something it obviously considered much more newsworthy: The voyage of the Titan to the bottom of the North Atlantic, where the wreckage of the Titanic had come to rest after hitting an iceberg in April 1912. The passengers had paid a reported $250,000 each to make the journey, which began the morning of June 18. But less than three hours later it had lost contact with its mother ship.
It may be a cliche to say “the world watched transfixed” as the chances for the vessel’s recovery grew ever more dim, but it was true. A search and rescue mission was launched, but by June 22 it was clear the Titan and all five passengers were lost due to a violent implosion of the vessel.
While most U.S media, especially cable TV stations, kept its focus on the plight of these five unfortunate humans—including a billionaire and his reportedly terrified son, and also a renowned French scientist—over in Europe journalists were asking a lot of questions about the fate of the migrants. As early as June 18, the BBC had investigated enough to question the Greek coast guard’s story, which was that the migrants refused help and wanted to continue on to Italy. But it turned out that the overloaded fishing boat had been drifting for hours before the Greek ship apparently tried to tow it out of Greek waters, thus—according to some survivors—causing the boat to capsize. The following day, June 19, The Guardian, which a few days earlier had reported on suspicions about what really happened, confirmed this story.
To their credit, both the New York Times and PBS News Hour also got on the story on June 19, even though the fate of the Titan was not yet known. At that time, few other U.S. news outlets followed suit. Meanwhile, on social media, especially Twitter, some began commenting on the greater attention being paid to the Titan with its five passengers than to the Adriana with 750.
A similar point was made by Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi in an eloquent June 22 piece entitled “The Greek shipwreck was a horrific tragedy. Yet it didn’t get the attention of the Titanic story.” Mahdawi, after agreeing that the loss of the Titan was a human tragedy deserving of the fascination and attention it generated, nevertheless commented:
“While it’s only natural to be glued to the Titan story, it’s far from the only recent maritime tragedy in recent weeks. And yet it’s absorbing a disproportionate amount of the world’s attention, empathy and resources. Last Wednesday, one of the worst tragedies that has ever occurred on the Mediterranean Sea took place: a fishing boat carrying about 750 people, mainly Pakistani and Afghan migrants, capsized on its way to Italy. There were 100 children below deck in that ship. One hundred children. The exact number of fatalities is unclear: so far we know that 78 people have been confirmed dead and as many as 500 are missing. Those are heartbreaking numbers and yet hundreds of dead and missing migrants have failed to garner anywhere near the amount of attention from the US media as five rich adventurers.
I’m not saying there hasn’t been any coverage of the Greek shipwreck. Of course there has. But it pales in comparison to the attention that’s been given to the Titan’s disappearance. The rescue efforts also couldn’t be more different: a frantic rush to save five wealthy people versus a shoulder shrug at the idea of 100 children dead at the bottom of the sea.”
Some articles emphasized the recent waves of attempted immigration from Pakistan, whose citizens apparently made up the largest group of passengers on the boat. In recent years, political repression and often desperate economic conditions have led to new waves of migrants trying to leave the country (for an earlier and detailed account, see “The Perils of Pakistani Migrants Heading to Europe,” published in 2016 by the Pulitzer Center.)
After the Titan was clearly lost, some media did begin to take a closer look at who the migrants were, and why they were making this desperate journey. There were good stories in the New York Times, Al Jazeera, and the Washington Post, the latter with the apt headline, “They knew the boat could sink. Boarding it didn’t feel like a choice.” And on June 23, the Times explored the discrepancies in the attention paid to the two disasters in an article entitled, “5 Deaths At Sea Gripped the World. Hundreds of Others Got a Shrug.”
This particular piece, by reporter Richard Pérez-Peña, provided some explanations for the attention gap, focusing especially on xenophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant attitudes.
“‘We saw how some lives are valued and some are not,’” Judith Sunderland, acting deputy director for Europe at the group Human Rights Watch, said in an interview. And in looking at the treatment of migrants, she added, ‘We cannot avoid talking about racism and xenophobia.’
At a forum in Athens on Thursday, former President Barack Obama weighed in, saying of the submersible, ‘the fact that that’s gotten so much more attention than 700 people who sank, that’s an untenable situation.’”
The attention of the U.S. media on the tragedy was relatively short-lived, however. After a July 1 report in the New York Times about new information suggesting that hundreds of deaths could probably have been prevented—and that the Greek coast guard and Greek officials were apparently fervently hoping that the boat would continue on to Italy, where it would no longer be their problem—the story pretty much died out in the mainstream American media. (Evidence also emerged in Europe that Greek authorities had tampered with the testimonies of some of the survivors.)
Should we be surprised at the failure to help the migrants, and the short attention span of the U.S. media? To answer that, let’s go back into the past, and then come back to the present.
The Evian Conference: No one wanted the Jews.
As most readers know or should know, by 1935 it was clear that whatever Hitler and the Nazis had in store for the Jews of Germany, it was not going to be good. That same year the German Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws, the first step in an ever tightening noose of restrictions on the rights of Jewish citizens. By 1938, half of Germany’s 900,000 Jews had been expelled or fled Germany, and many more wanted to leave. But there was a problem: The anti-immigration policies of many countries, including the United States, greatly restricted the number of refugees that nations could or would take in.
This was particularly embarrassing for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, because it contradicted his professed commitment to human rights (later codified in his so-called Four Freedoms: the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear.)
Some historians have suggested that as a deflection from his own government’s failure to help Jewish refugees, Roosevelt decided to organize a conference of nations and try to get them to commit to taking in German refugees, spreading the responsibility around as widely as possible. (Wikipedia has a very good entry on these events, as does the Holocaust Encyclopedia.)
The conference took place in the French town of Évian-les-Bains, famous then and now for its spring water. Between July 6-15, 1938, delegates from 32 countries attended. Remarkably, the U.S., unlike most other countries, did not send any government officials to the meeting; instead, Roosevelt sent a businessman friend. A lot of revealing things happened at that conference, which are worth reading about. But in the end, only one of the attending nations agreed to take in any refugees at all: the Dominican Republic. The U.S. agreed to nothing.
Later, as we know, the U.S. turned away thousands of Jewish refugees who tried to make it to its shores, the stuff of books and movies. While the ugly tradition of turning away refugees did not start with the rise of Nazi Germany, one might say that just as the Nazis perfected the art of mass murder, the U.S. and other nations have perfected the art of coming up with excuses for turning away people facing want and danger. That’s because no one leaves home without a good reason, and every refugee has their story—even if, in some cases, their main reason for emigrating is due to economic deprivation.
Now let’s come back to the present day.
A wave of callousness: Turning away asylum seekers in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Earlier this year, the Irish journalist Sally Hayden published a searing book on the plight of refugees, “My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route.” Here is a brief description, from the publisher:
“With unprecedented access to people currently inside Libyan detention centers, Hayden’s book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya once the EU started funding interceptions in 2017.”
I’ve read it, and I urge you to do so too. You will find out why so many thousands of migrants make the journey to Libya and then board boats like the Adriana to try to make it to Europe, and why they keep on trying even though they know thousands before them have died. (According to the U.N.'s Missing Migrants Project, at least 1,450 migrant deaths were recorded on that route in 2022 alone.)
If you don’t have time to read the book right now, you might try reading a piece Hayden wrote earlier this month for Lithub.com, “The Horrific Human Consequences of Anti-Migration Policies.” The article begins:
“Imagine this. Your very existence is effectively about to become illegal. Your family and friends may be obligated to betray you. You could be sent to prison for decades. Journalists who report on your plight could be locked up too. You have a short period of time—maybe weeks, maybe days, maybe hours—to leave your country and get to a safe place.
That was the situation over the last few months for those who are LGBT+ in Uganda, where a brutal new anti-homosexuality bill has now been adopted into law.”
Hayden gives another example:
“Now imagine this. You are Somali, in a war-torn country where a devastating drought has likely killed tens of thousands of people. Most of those deaths go unrecorded; they are referenced only as part of an estimate. The global public will never know the hopes, dreams, passions and kindnesses of the dead, though they might have a vague awareness that Somalia—like most African countries—produces a tiny fraction of the world’s emissions, yet is on the forefront of climate change. Somalis know that if they can get to a wealthy, secure state, they could send back money to keep their families alive.”
The point, as I hope will be obvious, is that refugees usually have very good reasons for leaving their countries, and if—that’s a big if—they reach a safe haven, they deserve the kind of caring and support that we all would want to find if we were fleeing persecution, climate driven floods and famine, and yes, even crushing poverty. And yet in many states in the U.S., anti-immigration sentiment has prevented that from happening. So the governors of some states have thought it amusing to send refugees who land on their shores to blue states where they might be more welcome, a way, I suppose, of “owning the libs”—if you like refugees so much, you take care of them.
According to estimates, more than 50,000 migrants have arrived in New York City alone during the current “immigration crisis.” (Why it’s a “crisis” when so much of our economy relies on immigrant labor is beyond the scope of this discussion, but it’s a conversation worth having.) The administration of Mayor Eric Adams has done a lot, despite Adams’s often unhelpful statements on the matter, to accommodate them. But it’s reasonable for other communities in New York state to help out, and so Adams has been sending—or trying to—immigrants, many of who are asylum seekers, to communities north of the city.
I live in the Hudson Valley, Westchester County to be precise. Although Westchester is one of the richest counties in the U.S., not everyone here is wealthy, including yours truly. There are many working class communities here. Nevertheless, most of the county leans heavily Democratic, and I’m proud to say that we have accommodated a fair number of migrants in our communities. Indeed, some local media have taken pains to talk to migrants about what brought them here in the first place. For example:
“Jorge didn't want to leave Venezuela or his family, but forced himself when he feared he might be killed at his job at a petroleum plant.
He spent months making his way to the U.S., passing corpses in a notorious jungle stretch and stopping in towns to earn money to continue his journey.
Today, he's safe in New York [state] with the trauma of his trip behind him. But he's stuck in limbo as authorities decide his fate.”
Yet we are not talking about thousands of people, but only hundreds at most.
So far, Westchester seems to be doing the right thing. But the local governments of a number of other counties—including Orange, Rockland, Dutchess, and Putnam—have tried to issue orders blocking any hotels or other facilities from accepting the migrants. I say “tried,” because court battles are currently raging over the legitimacy of these orders, and the outcome has yet to be determined. To cut to the chase: Is this not a level of cruelty below the minimum standards of morality and compassion any decent person should set for themselves?
Yet even our local Congressman, Republican Mike Lawler—who “serves” the Hudson River-straddling counties of Westchester and Rockland—has adopted Trumpian rhetoric on the matter. (That’s why many Democrats here are excited that Mondaire Jones has decided to run to get his old 17th District Congressional seat back.)
I don’t know to what extent a better understanding the plight of refugees and asylum seekers might change the minds of those who would turn them away. I will have to leave such questions to sociologists and psychologists and others who study such questions. But to use another cliche, it seems it can’t hurt to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
I hope more people will try taking that journey.
Uplifting! :)