Don’t be duped by this ‘rescue mission’

THE great Chinese sage Confucius correctly said that we would never get anything right until we learned to call things by their proper names.

The blizzard of lies which surrounds the subject of mass immigration is one of the main reasons why we cannot deal with this crisis. Take, for instance, the incessant claims in all media that European ships are ‘rescuing’ the migrants who set sail night and day from Libya in leaky, unseaworthy little boats.

No, that is not what they are doing. They are assisting greedy people-smugglers, who deliberately expose migrants to danger because they know they will then be picked up and taken to Italy, or wherever it is.

I suppose it is just possible that the migrants themselves, mostly fit young men from sub-Saharan Africa, don’t know that this is the plan, in which case you have to wonder why they pay large sums of money to be allowed to get into vessels which are obviously dangerous and will plainly never get them across the Mediterranean.

But the smugglers know it and so, I suspect, do quite a lot of the supposedly saintly charitable organisations which arrange for them to take the next stage in their journey. Again you have to ask yourself what precisely these people hope to achieve. This extraordinary process, never previously known in the history of civilised nations, is doing terrible damage to Europe.

Every major country which has experienced this sudden arrival of lawless queue-jumpers has been convulsed with discontent and anger – for it is always the poor and weak who live with the direct consequences of open borders.

It will not stop, or even slow down, if we continue to mislead ourselves. If we were really ‘rescuing’ these migrants, then what would stop us taking them back to the beaches they came from, which we never do?