The death of 50 people, believed to be illegal immigrants, in San Antonio in the USA is the latest in a string of migration tragedies that have left humanity badly shaken. At least 46 bodies were found in an abandoned tractor-trailer in a remote back road in San Antonio, Texas, some 240 km from the border with Mexico. They faced a horrible death, confined into a non-cooled tractor-trailer without water for an unspecified period of time, in temperatures nearing 38°C. Though the nationalities of the victims and the survivors were not officially confirmed, reactions from Mexico suggest that they were Mexicans. Indeed, over the past few months, there has been a spurt in migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border. As the mayor of San Antonio said, the people who died “were likely trying to find a better life” — migrants are driven towards the USA or Europe due to conflict or lack of opportunities in their home countries. Hope and desperation make them disregard the very real risks they undertake, the least of which is being arrested by the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) force. The arrests have been surging, with 2,39,416 individuals nabbed along the Mexico border in May. Among those arrested were 2,438 persons from India, a rise of 55 per cent since April. The CBP also arrested 2,310 individuals from Turkey and 3,394 from Russia — it’s obvious that the relatively porous US-Mexico border attracts a high number of illegal immigrants, who are at the mercy of ruthless human smugglers. Often, migrants must hike miles of difficult desert terrain, in extreme summer heat, endangering their lives.

Human beings have migrated from place to place for thousands of years, trying to ‘find a better life’. In the modern context, overpopulation and greater pressure on the natural resources have led to stricter border controls — yet, desperation will make people gamble their very lives. There are no easy solutions to the vexed issue of illegal immigration — except justice, stability and more equitable distribution of global wealth. These ideas could be termed utopian — yet these are the very ideas that are worth working and hoping for.

(Tribune, India)