Deaths at the Border. Control and Repression Replacing Reception

“Four survivors from a ship packed with 193 people”. “The numbers of missing are imprecise, but in the hundreds.” “Eight bodies but a massacre feared”. By now we do not speak about the dead, but those who did “not survive”, making calculations by exclusion. It is increasingly difficult to know how many people continue to lose their lives at sea. Understanding how many victims our borders have claimed is simply too shameful. Since the beginning of 2017, 240 people have already died crossing the Canal of Sicily, and we are only half way through January.

Why The Death Continues

Little more than a hundred euros and a few weeks' wait. That's the price any Italian citizen has to pay and the procedure to follow if they want a passport. Who knows how many people who request and make use of their own document are aware that what to them is a banal and routine operation, is beyond the reach of thousands of others, indeed is impossible. Who knows if European citizens think even for a moment that to have the same freedom of movement there are people who, even today, are forced to pay with their very lives, to waste away in prison for months and to sell their bodies.