Your organisation has been very active of late calling for rescues of illegal immigrants who are attempting to cross from North Africa. Your organisation has been indulging in an epic bout of shroud-waving about the deaths of migrants/refugees/invaders (delete according to political view) in the Mediterranian Sea. My Twitter timeline has been full of posts from Save the Children appealing for a rescue operation to be set up in order to stop children from drowning. Your own website is stuffed full of ‘oh the humanity’ type press releases about how terrible it is and it appears that your ultimate aim may well be for these illegal migrants to be resettled in Europe, an option that would encourage yet more boatloads of illegals to set off to Europe.

If you really want to save the lives of the children and young people whose passage on these boats has been bought by their parents and carers, then rather than campaigning for an open-ended rescue and resettlement you should be calling for the boats to be stopped and for reforms in the governance of the countries from which the illegals are coming from. Letting these illegals flood in is not an option. It is not an option for two reasons. The first is that once the illegals are arrested from drowning they can claim asylum, or make use of the EU Human Rights Act in order to stay in the EU thereby bypassing the existing legal methods of immigration to the EU. The second reason why rescue and resettlement is not an option is that many of those crossing are not those who will easily integrate in or contribute to the life, culture or economy of the EU and many will ultimately end up making the lives of those in some of the poorest areas of the EU even worse than they are already.

It may make the individual donors or the extremely well paid management of Save the Children feel good about being virtuous in calling for a comprehensive rescue plan. However, it’s not the CEO of Save the Children who gets £138,000 per year and can afford to live in a decent area who will have to live next door to these migrants and the problems they cause, but the ordinary, and much lower paid, citizen who will have to put up with the violence, theft, sex-crime, anti-social behaviour and in some cases sedition, that these migrants are bringing to cities across the EU.

Nobody who considers themselves humane would want children to die unnecessarily and although rescue and resettlement might save the lives of migrants such a policy could end up endangering the lives of children and young people in Europe. It’s Europe’s young people and children who will end up being raped, stabbed or otherwise abused by these migrants, and it is European children who will end up having to compete for jobs with migrants who are willing to work for the minimum wage or less. Allowing these boats to discharge their human cargo onto European shores is a lose/lose situation for the people of Europe. Save the Children you seem extremely concerned about the fate of the children of illegals but appear to care nothing for the children of European nations who may well be at risk from the many criminals who are coming over on these boats.

The only way to improve the lives of the children in the countries where these illegals are coming from is for these countries to have free trade, honest government and a functioning judicial system. These are the things that Save the Children should be concentrating on, not these migrant rescues which are nothing more than the compassion and justice of fools.

If Save the Children really cared about the children and young people on these boats then they should be campaigning to stop these vessels before they leave North Africa. As long as the Med crossings are a viable way for illegals to gain entry to Europe, then they will not stop, and the deaths will continue to pile up until a proper end is put on this method of entering Europe.

The whole world has an interest in the continent of Africa developing, socially, politically and economically, such development would be right for Africa and right for the rest of the world, but this development cannot be achieved merely by opening up Europe’s borders to those who wish to leave Africa. Development will on come when Africa can use, and becomes stable and organised enough to use its abundant natural resources such as coal for example, to provide electricity for those who have none. Improvement will also come by African countries investing in infrastructure rather than in grandiose Presidential palaces or wasting money and human resources on tribal and religious wars.

Stop the boats and the deaths by drowning will also stop, it’s really is as simple as that and is the only sensible and equitable way to proceed. Giving money to Save The Children or supporting its call for a mass rescue of illegals will do nothing apart from perpetuate the problem and cause massive problems in Europe.

Links

A selection of shroud-waving press releases from Save the Children

http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/news-and-comment

A breakdown of pay structures in Save the Children

http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/staff-costs-at-save-the-children