Italian customs officers board illegal immigrants in Lampedusa, Italy.

Getty Images

Imagine traveling for three days with 28 people in a boat that is only 5 by 1.5 meters. Now imagine that you have no life jacket and very little food and drink.

One of the effects of Covid-19, be it the travel restrictions and bans put in place around the world as governments seek to control its spread, or how deteriorating economic conditions caused more people to try to reach Europe, smuggling routes have been compromised.

Frontex is the European Border and Coast Guard Agency responsible for monitoring the borders of the Member States of the EU / Schengen Area. A current report on the first half of 2021 shows a sharp increase in the number of illegal entry attempts into European countries. Early calculations show that 61,000 people tried to enter Europe illegally between January and June 2021, 59% more than in 2020. In fact, Frontex recorded 11,150 illegal border crossings at the EU’s external borders in June 2021 alone, which is 69%. more than in the same month last year.

And the reason is relatively easy to understand. In the first six months of 2020, governments had many Covid-19 travel restrictions that could be resumed after the restrictions were relaxed. The largest increase was on the Central Mediterranean Route, where smuggling networks resumed their activities in Libya and Tunisia, taking mostly Tunisian and Bangladeshi nationals with them (4,700 in June 2021 alone).

Many of these people are picked up in boats that are too small for the number of people, with no life jackets, with little food and drink (certainly not enough for the trip or the number of people involved) and in poor physical condition. Many do not survive the journey –according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM)7,418 migrants and refugees had arrived by sea in the Canary Islands in Spain at the end of July 2021, but 250 died in the attempt (an increase from 2019 and 2020 numbers).

However a latest report by the Spanish migration NGO Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) suggests that the number of deaths from so-called invisible shipwrecks, boats that disappear without a trace, could actually be eight times higher than IOM estimates.

Spain’s Canary Islands are indeed facing a crisis, not least driven by the worsening economic situation in Morocco due to Covid-19. As more men, women and children arrive from Africa (there were 23,023 arrivals in 2020, many in the last three months of the year), the islands’ resources and infrastructure have been increasingly strained. Amnesty International has asked Spain to bring these people to the mainland to avoid catastrophic living conditions in migrant camps.

Likewise, numbers of illegal crossings across the English Channel have risen when migrants attempted to get into the UK from France. The Guardian reported that as of Tuesday July 20, 8,452 people were caught trying to get to England, which was higher than the figure for all of 2020 when 8,417 people made the journey (the numbers obviously refer to the recorded numbers ).

On Sunday 25 July alone, there were 12 incidents in which a total of 378 migrants were arrested by UK border authorities and another five incidents arrested another 178 people who reached Kent in the UK on French ships.

Algerian nationals make up the majority of nationals seeking asylum in Spain (60%) on the western Mediterranean route, followed by Moroccans. Syrian and Turkish nationals are the most commonly discovered nationals on the Eastern Mediterranean route to Greece.

Hassan Hadda, a 25-year-old Moroccan sandwich maker from Dakhla, Western Sahara, is one of the lucky ones to survive the trip. He has been in a camp in the Canary Islands since 2017 and is awaiting regularization. Hadda told The Guardian that “I had always dreamed of coming to Europe as a child. No matter where it was – France, Spain or anywhere else – I felt like I had no future if I stayed where there was no work and no one Human rights, that’s why I risked my life. “

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR