I do wonder why they are risking there lives
coming here when our country is falling apart.
It’s a good question you are asking and it gets explained in the Hayden book I mentioned above.
For example, Eritrea is run like ancient Sparta. When you enter your teenage years, you get automatically enlisted in the military in perpetuity.
And if you speak out, you get disappeared (or tortured at the very least).
Meanwhile, in Sierra Leone, a country which should be as rich as Saudi Arabia according to one commentator (because of the presence of diamonds), life expectancy is around 30 years lower than ours and there is almost nothing for anyone with aspirations. During the civil war there, one person who Hayden profiles saw their grandfather get his arms hacked off and then he bled to death.
In the case of Gambia, until fairly recently it was ruled by an erratic and deranged dictator who headed death squads and ordered literal witch hunts, where elderly people in rural villages were rounded up and forced to drink hallucinogenic liquids as a means of control.
So these are the circumstances that cause people to risk everything.
Of course, they don’t know that this country is falling apart too. What they see when they get a glimpse of life in Europe through a tv or smartphone looks like a utopia to them.
Perhaps the moral question that surrounds this whole issue is this one: ‘What (if anything) does a country owe desperate people whom it does not consider to be its citizens?’
It’s a variant of ‘Does charity begin at home?’ I suppose.
Will have to save an exploration of it for another time. But provisionally, I would say that to simply favour our own citizenry in this regard is morally questionable. And for the record, the great ethicists like Kant, and utilitarian philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, Henry Sidgwick and, latterly, Peter Singer, would all have argued that we do owe these people something.
Have really spent too much time posting on here today and can barely think straight, so can only provide a quick example of this line of thinking, but it can be found in a brief video (about alleviating poverty in developing countries rather than migrancy):