There have been frequent reports that people attempting to cross from North Africa to Europe have drowned when their overloaded and unseaworthy craft foundered. Australia also attracts people from the Middle East and elsewhere and numbers die in attempting to cross tropical waters north of Australia.
These would-be migrants need to be desperate or foolhardy to risk their lives in this way and to consign to often fraudulent and almost invariably unscrupulous agents their lives and such limited worldly goods as they have managed to bring with them.
Our sympathies have become hardened by accounts of the way in which human rights, especially but by no means exclusively in developing countries, have been so frequently violated. Our sympathies are also often blinded by fears that immigration may deprive us of jobs and cause social disruption.