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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Humanity 1. The NGO is "SOS Humanity", a German organisation.

The new Italian government is arguing that the host countries of these organisations should agree to take in some of the migrants who are being picked up at sea.

SOS Humanity argues that any migrant whose ship capsizes etc. and gets rescued by them has a right, under the law of the sea, to be taken to the nearest safe port. The incentive effects that this creates are obviously monstrous: you can go anywhere, provided you can do so unsafely. NGOs will make every effort to help you get into the country you want, provided that your boat sinks and the lives of e.g. your children are threatened...

It's like offering a child toys and candy every time they drink bleach.

The Italian government must be very careful, because the last interior minister who tried to reduce mass migration over the Mediterranean is now being prosecuted for "kidnapping" migrants and could face 15 years in jail for his actions as minister...

The solution is to take the refugees/migrants with open arms, pass a law that says you'll give them welfare, but that the funds can't raise the deficit, they have to come from funding for foreign aid and similar programs. Each time a boat of refugees come, you get to defund various NGOs.

The NGOs will then have a reason to not dump refugees in your country. And you can do this for every problem that NGOs try to saddle you with. Then NGOs are going to be a bit more cautious, and maybe even push back against other NGOs that try political stunts.

That sounds complicated and open to a hundred angles of attack that you can be sure the very active pro-immigrant elements will find long before the sluggish anti-immigrant side patches the holes. Trying to be clever seems risky when the other side has proven consistently more capable and subversive.

I doubt that SOS Humanity is funded by the Italian government. Maybe by the German government, but they're not taking the migrants to Germany.

The migrants will try to skeddadle for Germany. They all do.

Right now a waiting room at a border railway station I used to use a lot can't be used because it's permanently camped by a bunch of unwashed thirty-ish bearded brown men trying to get to Germany. I have very limited sense of smell due to some permanent upper airways infection but.. yuck.

Probably Syrians or some North Africans, as they have fairly nice clothes and phones. which would be odd for Pakistanis or Afghans.

I asked some locals, supposedly they change fairly quickly, they get tossed out from cross-border trains and end up there.

More importantly, who are the individuals behind SOS Humanity and who is bankrolling them? I couldn't find a single name in their website's About Us section.

How about prosecuting the individuals who are funding cross border people trafficking ? Because these NGOs were found to be cooperating with people smugglers.

If you can't win a case against the NGO, you're not going to win a case against people funding it.

There's a simple solution here that doesn't need to destroy Maritime law, you put everyone that immigrated into a country through this method into camps until they are fit to be shipped out or legally apply, and make the camps only slightly better than prison.

Anyone would take internment over drowning, but you wouldn't sail miles just to get interned and ultimately shipped back.

But then you run into the institutions that think incarceration of aliens which they are free to leave at any moment is a violation of their human rights for some reason.

I would think the ECHR much more relevant in this case. But yes this is quite exactly what prevents any reasonable scheme to prevent this situation.

Well, the simple solution is to repudiate those treaties.

I know it's part of the West's psychology to say "never again" about anything to do with WW2 (including the issue of people not wanting Jewish refugees) but this situation is unsustainable.

This is not a problem of having no solutions, it's a problem of will

And, frankly, dissimilar to the original situation. Massive difference between long-term - often assimilated- Jewish minorities in European nations being deported and no European doing anything and being on the hook for any unfortunate victim of racism, sexism, homophobia (as defined by the West - i.e. most of the world would be victimizing people on these grounds) or even climate change and other long-term baked in economic and material considerations.

Can Italy repudiate those treaties ?

If the constition isn't a suicide pact, neither are treaties which depend on it for validity. A treaty which abolishes the right of a state to prevent entry of armed, hostile foreigners, abolishes the state itself.

The first link is paywalled, but the second story quite clearly is about a state/states preventing entry, or at least doing their best to prevent so. There's no indication any treaty prevents this, and the Spanish (left-wing) prime minister says as much that they're going to prevent migrants from doing that. I'm not sure how it is relevant for this case, then?

The first link is paywalled

This, or this.

prevent migrants from doing that

I was wrong. It seems ECHR had given their blessing to treat a storming mob, differently than an orderly queue.

Alternatively, you can let them apply and then ship them back to Libya until their application has been processed(and most likely denied).

It's not like Libya is in any state to prevent that.

I think a sufficiently motivated prosecutor could probably make out a case that SOS Humanity are criminally conspiring with human traffickers to capsize ships and put migrants' lives in danger. Seems like an unavoidable conclusion in light of their MO that whatever maritime law compels a right of safe harbor under duress has been incorporated into SOS Humanity's standard operating procedures and they are complicit in creating those circumstances of duress.

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