Are the world’s richer nations normalising the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean? That’s the fear of the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), the body established in 1951 “out of the chaos and displacement of western Europe after the second world war”. Eleven million people were uprooted and the IOM’s job was to help European governments identify countries where people could be resettled.
In the 1950s, the IOM arranged transport for nearly a million migrants to their new home countries, with the success of the resettlement programme based on international cooperation, and the idea that the burden had to be shared. Fast forward more than 70 years from the IOM’s creation, and we see a very different attitude towards the world’s various migration crises, when the climate crisis, along with war and poverty, is helping fuel displacement in unprecedented numbers.
