In the past two weeks, more than a thousand people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe on often-overloaded boats. In 2014, more than three thousand perished on this crossing.
Each individual migrant’s motives are unique and unknowable, but this collective surge in deaths clearly stems, in part, from the disorder engulfing parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Civil war and state collapse have expanded the incentives and opportunities to flee, and the increased flow of migrants along dangerous routes has, predictably, led to a surge in accidental deaths.
Of course, those deaths also owe something to the policies of the countries toward which the overloaded boats sail...
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An article by Sarah Stillman in this week’s New Yorker describes how, over the past 15 years, the U.S. has adopted tougher measures to keep migrants from crossing illegally into the U.S. from Mexico in spite of the U.S. economy’s continued dependence on more immigrant labor than our government will legally allow to enter. These measures, which include the construction of hundreds of miles of fence, apparently have slowed the rate of illegal crossings. At the same time, they have encouraged the expansion of the human-smuggling business, catalyzed the growth of criminal rackets that extort the families of kidnapped migrants for ransom, and, as in the Mediterranean, contributed to a significant increase in the number of deaths occurring en route.
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How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should make economists’ jaws hit their desks. When it comes to policies that restrict emigration, there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.
