Rich countries show disregard for migrant lives

I refer to “US probes ‘horrifying and heartbreaking’ deaths of 50 migrants found in sweltering lorry” (June 28).

In countless online comments, one sees how migrants (and even refugees) are callously criticised, with presumptions they’ll become permanent burdens on their host nation. But that no longer matters when those migrants die in their attempts at achieving sanctuary.

Often overlooked by their critics is that many migrants are leaving their homes due to global warming-related chronic crop failure in the southern hemisphere, widely believed to be caused by the northern hemisphere’s chronic fossil-fuel burning.

Regardless of the circumstances, though, the landand water-based border-guard confrontations increasingly appearing in the news are scary.

Tragically, it’s as though some people can be perceived and treated by a large swathe of an otherwise free, democratic and relatively civilised society as though they are somehow disposable and, by extension, their suffering is somehow less worthy of external concerns. Perhaps it’s similar to how human smugglers perceive their cargo.

Albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, there is also an inhumane devaluation in the attitudes of external nations (usually of the Western world) towards the daily civilian lives devastatingly lost in war and famine: the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers.

Often enough, those people receive meagre column inches in first world newspapers.

Frank Sterle Jnr,

British Columbia, Canada