It happens every time. A boat sinks, bodies in the water, the coast guard too late. Statements of regret, the same phrases recycled: tragedy, people smugglers, tough decisions. Then the usual numbers. Six dead, forty missing. Nearly 30,000 drowned since 2014. A 40% increase in crossings this year. Nothing changes.
The government in Rome will say it’s cracking down. That its deals with Tunisia and Libya are working. That this wouldn’t happen if Europe were just a little tougher. Giorgia Meloni tried. Closed the ports, cut NGO rescue operations, handed millions to North African regimes. The boats kept coming. She couldn’t explain why deterrence wasn’t working. No one ever can.
The migrants this time were from Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali. War, hunger, drought, military coups—take your pick. The ongoing legacy of empire. Resources extracted, economies destabilised, political systems gutted to serve foreign capital. And when people flee the consequences, they are called illegal. A word that makes them sound less like workers, more like criminals. But the waves don’t check passports.
The harder the route, the more dangerous the crossing. The more governments try to “stop the boats,” the more people die in them. Everyone knows this, but the policy debate rolls on as if it were still an open question. The centrists tinker with border deals; the far right makes speeches about invasion. Italy is still ruled by Meloni, still funnelling money to Tunisia to stop the crossings, still forcing NGOs to abandon rescues, still blaming migrants for the consequences of capitalism. Germany’s coalition fights over border controls. France moves further right. And Britain, under Labour, wants to have it both ways, tough rhetoric for Reform voters, quiet expansion of legal migration for business. The economy needs workers. The NHS is collapsing. The care sector would crumble without foreign labour. So the government huffs and puffs, threatens new laws, shakes its fist at small boats, but it lets people in. It has to.
Because Meloni and her party won’t admit it, but they need migrant workers. Who else picks the tomatoes, harvests the grapes, bends double in the heat for wages Italians will not accept? Italy’s agricultural sector depends on them, as it has for decades. Nearly a third of the workforce in farming is foreign-born. In some regions, it’s almost half. The work is seasonal, precarious, dangerous. Every year there are reports of workers collapsing in the fields, dying from heat exhaustion. The bosses don’t care. The government pretends to. But it raises the quotas for seasonal workers anyway. The economy demands labour, and capital will always find a way to extract it
Meanwhile, the far right has noticed another problem: not enough babies. Viktor Orbán offers tax breaks for large Hungarian families, bans abortion, and talks of “Hungarian children” preserving the nation. The AfD wants women back in the kitchen. Meloni, too, has her vision of “traditional families,” white and fertile. Have babies! they cry, but they know it won’t work. The cost of living is too high, wages too low, housing out of reach. No one starts a family when they can barely afford to live.
What they refuse to acknowledge is that the answer is already in front of them. The migrants in their boats are not an invasion but a workforce. Capital knows this. Germany needs a million more workers. Italy’s villages are emptying. Britain’s crops are left rotting, its care homes understaffed. And Labour knows it too. They need migration to keep the economy running, just as the Tories did. Just as every government has. But admitting that would be fatal. So they keep pretending. Keep promising to “fix” the problem while relying on it. Keep treating migrants as a threat while depending on their labour.
Because this is not new. The European economy was built on migration, on colonial subjects forced to move, on labour markets shaped by imperial need, on refugees absorbed when it suited, rejected when it didn’t. Borders have always been porous when capital demands it. And always violent when it doesn’t.
And so the boats keep coming. The bodies keep washing up. The numbers keep climbing. And next time it happens, someone will say never again, as if we haven’t already agreed that this will happen forever.
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