For five days, “Breaking News” alerts hit my phone repeatedly with updates on the search for a missing submersible. The search for the five-passenger vessel began only days after an overloaded migrant vessel capsized carrying some 750 desperate people bound for Greece.
The migrants aboard came from Pakistan, Egypt, Syria and Palestine, all funneled through Libya in a desperate attempt to reach Europe. Only 104 survivors have been found, making it one of the deadliest sinkings ever in the Mediterranean Sea. But this tragedy was one of many.
Perhaps it is because these events are so common that my phone didn’t light up with a play-by-play of efforts to save them. Thousands of migrants die in the Mediterranean Sea each year. While migrants die all around the world, including 1,400 last year in the Americas, the Mediterranean route is by far the deadliest.
