Boats to Europe

This morning, I noticed the talk of so-called 'boat refugees' on the radio and just now I read an article in the newspaper (Politiken) about the issue. There are a few things in the article that caught my attention - especially considering the newspaper's usual left of centre angle on issues of this sort...
The article reports that a European network of sorts has been established to patrol the waters that divide - or connect depending on how you look at it - Europe and Africa. There is much praise for this operation because it helps 'everyone': the European countries are relieved of the burden of 'Afrcians' (yes, that is the term used in the article) on their soil and the 'Africans' are saved from a horrible death in the water. Or...? The 'boat refugees' - who are not in any juridical sense refugees - are often called illegal immigrants because they arrive in the receiving country without documents, without the proper paperwork in order for them to be allowed to live in a European country.
In Thessaloniki, Yan and also Fitti, Yasemin's boyfriend, taught me a few things about this. First, there is no such thing as an 'illegal immigrant'. An immigrant is someone who has a permanent residence permit or citizenship in the state concerned. Furthermore, calling people - persons, individuals, humans like me and my neighbour - illegal signals a lack of understanding for their situation. Respect for human dignity, the main principle of human rights work, should be the guiding light when talking about a very difficult situation like this one. 'Illegal' refers to the crime they are committing - but we don't call murderers illegal persons, do we? Thus, the proper term is (economic) migrants.

Second, Yan wrote an entire thesis on the issue, asking the question: why do economic migrants, i.e. people who try to escape an unbearable situation which is caused by economic relations in the country, why do they not have the option to seek for a better life somewhere else? I'm not sure how Yan answered the question, but I know how she asked it. She pointed to the power of the European countries and their money, she pointed to the fact the developmental aid and programmes actually create more migrants instead of decreasing the number. And she pointed to the Eurocentrism inherent in so-called 'strict border control', the protective rhetoric towards the nation-state. She argued (in 80 pages) that economic migrants have a right to respect for their human rights too, just like everybody else - and that the problem is not only in the influx of 'Africans' but also in the actions of European states towards less privileged countries. Okay, maybe what I just wrote is not that clear - it was just to say that the issue is not simple, and that the 'boat refugees' are also human and should be treated as such.

Next wonderment is the fact that the article does not teach me anything about what happens to these people when the 'water border patrol' stops them. Do they just send the little boats back? Do they block their way in the water and look upon these people with no sense of compassion, with hard eyes because the people in the boat are doing something illegal? What is the function of these patrols is what I want to know...
And lastly, did it ever occur to anyone that the people who got on the boats already considered the risk of dying a helpless death in the water? I mean, the article calls these deaths a tragedy - but I would say the real tragedy is the situation that makes people take this risk, the situation in their 'African' homelands which make them put so little value in their own lives that the risk of not making it to the other shore is a risk worth taking.