‘Refugee Boats’ and African Capitalism
Until a few days ago, you could order “refugee boats” from Alibaba, the enormous Chinese e-marketplace. The Chinese-made rubber boats, available for a couple of hundred dollars, had “good capacity of anti-sinking,” the item’s order page claimed, even if “the boat is filled fully with water.”
Summer is here, and it’s once again high season for North African human traffickers, who send tens of thousands of migrants a year across the Mediterranean to Europe — in boats very different from those found on Alibaba. Scores of them sink, killing thousands every year.
At least 2,300 migrants have drowned in the first half of 2017, and the number of crossings is increasing.… Seguir leyendo »