38 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
night.... He was still breathing but he
was not able to talk.... I don’t know
what happened to him.... I don’t
know what he had done.”
In the weeks that followed, Candé
tried to stay out of trouble and clung to
a hopeful rumor: the guards planned to
release the migrants in his cell in honor
of Ramadan, two months away. “The
lord is miraculous,” Luther wrote in a
journal he kept. “May his grace con-
tinue to protect all migrants around the
world and especially those in Libya.”
W
hat came to be called the mi-
grant crisis began around 2010,
when people fleeing violence, poverty,
and the effects of climate change in the
Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa
started f looding into Europe. The
World Bank predicts that, in the next
fifty years, droughts, crop failures, ris-
ing seas, and desertification will dis-
place a hundred and fifty million more
people, mostly from the Global South,
accelerating migration to Europe and
elsewhere. In 2015 alone, a million peo-
ple came to Europe from the Middle
East and Africa. A popular route went
through Libya, then across the Medi-
terranean Sea to Italy—a distance of
less than two hundred miles.
Europe had long pressed Libya to
help curb such migration. Muammar
Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, had once em-
braced Pan-Africanism and encouraged
sub-Saharan Africans to serve in the
country’s oil fields. But in 2008 he signed
a “friendship treaty” with Silvio Ber-
lusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, that
committed him to implementing strict
controls. Qaddafi sometimes used this
as a bargaining chip: he threatened, in
2010, that if the E.U. did not send him
more than six billion dollars a year in
aid money he would “turn Europe
Black.” In 2011, Qaddafi was toppled
and killed in an insurrection sparked
by the Arab Spring and supported by
a U.S.-led invasion. Afterward, Libya
descended into chaos. Today, two gov-
ernments compete for legitimacy: the
U.N.-recognized Government of Na-
tional Unity, and an administration
based in Tobruk and backed by Russia
and the self-proclaimed Libyan Na-
tional Army. Both rely on shifting, cyn-
ical alliances with armed militias that
have tribal allegiances and control large
portions of the country. Libya’s remotebeaches, increasingly unpoliced, have
been swamped with migrants headed
for Europe.
One of the first major tragedies of
the migrant crisis occurred in 2013, when
a dinghy carrying more than five hun-
dred migrants, most of them Eritrean,
caught fire and sank in the Mediterra-
nean, killing three hundred and sixty
people. They were less than half a mile
from Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost
island. At first, European leaders re-
sponded with compassion. “We can do
this!” Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chan-
cellor, said, promising a permissive ap-
proach to immigration. In early 2014,
Matteo Renzi, at thirty-nine, was elected
Prime Minister of Italy, the youngest
in its history. A telegenic centrist lib-
eral in the model of Bill Clinton, Renzi
was predicted to dominate the coun-
try’s politics for the next decade. Like
Merkel, he welcomed migrants, saying
that, if Europe was willing to turn its
back on “dead bodies in the sea,” it could
not call itself “civilized.” He supported
an ambitious search-and-rescue pro-
gram called Operation Mare Nostrum,
or Our Sea, which insured the safe pas-
sage of some hundred and fifty thou-
sand migrants, and Italy provided legal
assistance for asylum claims.
As the number of migrants rose, Eu-
ropean ambivalence turned to recalci-
trance. Migrants needed medical care,
jobs, and schooling, which strained re-
sources. James F. Hollifield, a migra-
tion expert at the French Institutes for
Advanced Studies, told me, “We in the
liberal West are in a conundrum. We
have to find a way to secure borders
and manage migration without under-
mining the social contract and the lib-
eral state itself.” Nationalist parties such
as the Alternative for Germany and
France’s National Rally exploited the
situation, fostering xenophobia. In 2015,
men from North Africa sexually as-
saulted women in Cologne, Germany,
fuelling alarm; the next year, an asylum
seeker from Tunisia drove a truck into
a Christmas market in Berlin, killing
twelve. Merkel, under pressure, even-
tually insisted that migrants assimilate
and supported a ban on burqas.
Renzi’s Mare Nostrum program had
cost a hundred and fifteen million euros,
and Italy, which was struggling to stave
off its third recession in six years, could“He finally agreed to take me dancing, and then we both realized we
have no idea where you’d go to do that or what it even means.”