Migrant Crisis in the Mediterranean: What You Need to Know
The boat has become a symbol of the crisis in the Mediterranean: a creaky fishing boat, maybe, or a sagging rubber raft, crowded with refugees seeking a better life on a new shore.
It's a powerful symbol, a marker for the thousands of men, women, and children who have died in recent years taking that risk. But it's only one part of a crisis that now stretches across the Sahara Desert, through the lawless towns of North Africa, deep into organized crime rings in Europe.
Border patrols can't stop it. Rescue missions can't solve it. The problems facing the region, an
ongoing RAND initiative shows, reach far deeper than Western governments have been willing to acknowledge. And that means fixing them will require reaching deeper still.
“It came from the frustration of seeing how oversimplified the problem was being presented,” said
Giacomo Persi Paoli, a researcher with
RAND Europe who led the project. “The problems are so deeply interconnected that we can't solve them with this firefighting approach, putting out one fire at a time.”
He speaks from experience.