Stork theory fails in Europe

Just a year ago, pundits were holding out that Europe would find economic salvation in the “warm bodies” crossing the Mediterranean. It was an argument that never made sense, given the millions of unemployed but educated youth already in the European Union. Instead of a new round of guest workers, Germany has added hundreds of thousands of new dependents on the state, most with few job skills and no language preparation. The latter problem now taxes police departments, which have to find Pashto translators to investigate crimes such as the murder of Muslims for apostasy.

Migrants make poor entitlement slaves.

Euro governments participate in the slave trade.

But it may finally be dawning on Europe’s elites that their attempts to rescue people at sea are endangering migrants as often as saving them. Migrants hoping for a European rescue are put on inflatable rafts (or worse) and launched off the coast of Tripoli. They make about one-sixth of the journey toward Sicily, and sometimes even less. Once they cross out of Libyan waters they enter what is commonly known as the “Search and Rescue” Zone or just “SAR Zone.” They then signal their distress and get European rides the rest of the way — or they collapse and capsize and the migrants drown. Over the weekend, the Irish navy, and its ship LÉ Eithne, took more than 700 migrants. The composition tells you the nature of the migration: a score of children, some pregnant women . . . and over 500 adult males. The problem is that by running this ferry service, Europeans have created an ugly industry in Libya. The slave trade and human-smuggling enterprises are now among the most important private-sector businesses in the chaotic post-Gaddafi Libya, which is ruled by two rival governments and several other militias and gangs. This is a brutal business, and the stories from it are terrifying. According to the Daily Telegraph, a young Gambian migrant told the International Organization for Migration that he witnessed a sick friend of his buried alive in one of the sordid migrant encampments in Libya, because he “wouldn’t have survived anyway.” If a migrant in Libya is thought to have relatives with money, he is often sold in a human market to gangs that will torture him to extract the cash from his family.

A failed effort to get north Africans to cover a bunch of Euro retirees with have no children.