A mirror of conflicts tearing up regions of the world
by digby
It's only going to get worse folks. When one part of the world is in chaos (which, by the way, the west helped cause) people vote with their feet. They have no choice.
Migrants rushed the tunnel linking France and England repeatedly for a second night on Wednesday and one man was crushed to death by a truck in the chaos, deepening tensions surrounding the thousands of people camped in this northern French port city.
To get to the tunnel, migrants must cross a busy highway, scale or cut through barricades and fences, and pry open cargo doors or crouch in the freight cars that cradle the tractor-trailers. It's not clear how many have successfully made the 35-minute journey to Britain, but Eurotunnel said it had blocked more than 37,000 attempts since January. Nine people have died trying since June.
There were wildly conflicting totals of people involved Wednesday, ranging from 150 to as many as 1,200. But French authorities and the company agreed there had been about 2,000 attempts on each of two successive nights. British Home Secretary Theresa May said "a number" of migrants made it through overnight.
Attempts have been increasing exponentially as has the sense of crisis in recent weeks, spurred by new barriers around the Eurotunnel site, lack of access to the Calais port, labor strife that turned the rails into protest sites for striking workers, and an influx of desperate migrants.
Many British officials are alarmed at what they see as a potential influx of foreigners, while French officials are concerned about the makeshift Calais tent camps derisively called "the Jungle."
"This exceptional migrant situation has dramatic human consequences," said French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. "Calais is a mirror of conflicts tearing up regions of the world."
America's "border problems" are nothing like this, by the way. People have been migrating back and forth over the invisible line we call "the border" for centuries. It's always been part of America. It's just that a certain group of white Americans are being focused on them at the moment for the political benefit of some very rich people who need their votes.
But that does not mean that immigration isn't a very real problem in other parts of the world due to chaos caused by war and that it won't be an even bigger problem going forward due to chaos caused by climate change. This is going to be the new normal and I don't think western leaders have even begun to think through a rational policy to deal with it.
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