The number of people trying to migrate via the Central Mediterranean route does not increase when governments or NGOs carry out search and rescue operations. The number of migrants trying to reach the European continent varies depending on the intensity of war conflicts, natural disasters or the economic situation of their countries of origin, but does not depend on the probability that they will be rescued.
The stretch of sea that separates North Africa and Turkey from Italy and Malta is the setting for the central Mediterranean route, one of the busiest and most dangerous migration routes globally. The Missing Migrants Project, part of the UN, has recorded more than 20,000 deaths since 2014. In the first quarter of this year, 441 people lost their lives on the journey.
Various initiatives, both public and private, have tried to limit deaths on the route in recent years, carrying out search and rescue operations, in which rescue boats try to help people who are at risk in the sea. However, various countries of the European Union have recently denounced that these actions promote irregular migration, criminalizing the NGOs that carry them out and even accusing them of contributing to the death of thousands of people.
This assumption, however, is not supported by the data. It is the conclusion of a collaborative study between three German universities and one American, published this Thursday in Scientific Reports. “Search and rescue operations above all save lives and do not attract migration,” Ramona Rischke, a researcher at the German Center for Research on Integration and Migration, and one of the authors of the work, summarized at a press conference.
The research compares, using computer models, the number of people who would have tried to migrate had the rescue operations not been carried out with the real number. The work has not found any difference between the two situations, something that Rischke does not consider surprising since previous, less detailed investigations had suggested that this relationship was not probable.
To estimate the expected flow of migrants if rescue operations had not been carried out, the team has relied on the figures for the years prior to these actions and on the social, economic and climatic factors that existed in the respective countries of origin. Among them are changes in the intensity of conflicts, natural disasters or the price of basic goods, for example, all of them phenomena for which there is evidence that they influence the migratory flow.
“The search and rescue operations did not alter the flow, they were simply a response to it,” the leader of the work, Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez, PhD in Sociology and researcher at the University of Potsdam, in Germany, also pointed out at a press conference. “The migration flow would have been the same without them,” she concludes.
The team has also used the model to analyze whether the migration flow had changed since 2017, at which time the EU-supported Libyan Coast Guard stepped up its efforts to intercept and return the boats to the country’s shores. In this case, the authors point out, the effect is clear: the intervention has reduced the number of migratory attempts.
However, this reduction has coincided with reports “of human rights violations against migrants in Libya, and of potential increases in the mortality rate on the Central Mediterranean route, as a potential consequence of the intervention of the Coast Guard,” Rodríguez warns. -Sanchez. The leader of the study has asked for more research in this regard to clarify whether these policies are actually contributing to the local deterioration of human rights.
