Mediterranean Death Rate Is Highest Since 2015 Migration Crisis

LONDON — The sea journey between North Africa and Italy is now deadlier than at any point since the peak of the European migration crisis in 2015, even as unauthorized migration along the route has fallen to its lowest level in the same period, according to data released Monday by the United Nations.

For every 18 migrants who reached Italy by boat during the first seven months of 2018, one person drowned attempting that voyage. The toll is nearly triple the death rate during the equivalent period of 2015, and roughly double the rate in 2016, when a record number of migrants landed without authorization in Italy, which for most of the 21st century has been the main port of entry for people hoping to reach Europe by boat.

The U.N.'s announcement was made against a backdrop of heightened political and social tension across Europe, where migration has helped strengthen local economies by increasing consumer demand while also creating additional pressure on state institutions and stoking the popularity of far-right parties and causes. Far-right politicians now share power in Italy and Austria, and have polled unusually well in Sweden and Germany, where thousands of far-right sympathizers rallied in the eastern town of Chemnitz this week in protest over immigration.

The rising Mediterranean death rate is largely because of a spike in shipwrecks that occurred after Matteo Salvini, Italy’s far-right interior minister, barred most rescue vessels from bringing migrants to Italian ports in June, according to a separate analysis by Matteo Villa, a migration specialist at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, a research group in Rome. About 1,600 migrants died in the Mediterranean in the first seven months of this year.

The arrival rate, which had plummeted before Salvini entered office in May because of measures taken by his predecessor, has fallen only slightly under the new minister. An average 2,200 people have arrived in Italy in each of the three months since Salvini’s appointment, compared with an average 2,700 during the three months that preceded it.

That higher rate was about 80 percent less than the levels during the peak of the crisis.

Unauthorized migration between Libya and Italy fell markedly in summer 2017, thanks to controversial negotiations between Marco Minniti, Salvini’s predecessor, and Libyan militias that control the southern Mediterranean smuggling trade. But the death rate did not rise, largely because of the continued presence off the Libyan coast of private rescue boats run by nongovernmental organizations.

Minniti’s government introduced protocols that deterred those boats from working close to the Libyan coast, and empowered the Libyan coast guard to intercept and return more migrants to Libya. But the private boats could still deliver rescued migrants to Italian ports.

That changed in June, days after Salvini’s appointment, when a boat run by Doctors Without Borders and SOS Mediterranean was forced to sail to Spain after being denied entry to ports in Sicily. Merchant vessels and Italian navy ships also have been refused permission to disembark rescued migrants in Italy, which has in turn deterred captains from sailing close to the Libyan coast.

This has left rescue responsibilities almost solely to the Libyan coast guard, an informal alliance of badly resourced and poorly trained sailors drawn from competing Libyan militias.

“A major factor contributing to the increased death rate is the decreased search and rescue capacity off the Libyan coast this year compared to the same period last year,” the U.N. refugee agency said in its report.

Villa described the situation as “a cautionary tale” for European officials who seek to justify countermigration measures with an argument that they are trying to save lives by stopping the smuggling trade.

“If your objective is to reduce the death rate, then you should be very wary of delegating rescue to the Libyan coast guard, because they are clearly unable to deal with levels of more than 3,000 departures per month,” Villa said.

Migration specialists and rights activists have also criticized the policy of returning migrants to Libya, where civil war and the breakdown of law and order have created dangerous conditions for migrants, who are sometimes held for ransom or put to work in slaverylike conditions by the militias who have nominally rescued them. Fighting in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, has placed thousands of detained migrants at risk, according to Doctors Without Borders, which operates a mission on the Libyan mainland as well as off the Libyan coast.

“Many of the detention centers in Tripoli are on the front line of the fighting, and the latest escalation of violence has left people trapped for days in appalling conditions without food,” Ibrahim Younis, the organization’s head of mission in Libya, wrote in an email.

“Those that have recently managed to escape the detention centers to nearby neighborhoods are at risk of being caught in the crossfire,” Younis said, adding that local hospitals where the organization refers migrants for secondary care “have stopped discharging patients due to the fact that conditions outside are too dangerous, leaving less and less beds available for new patients.”