Here’s a sim­ple test to val­i­date the head­line of this post.
From 2014 to March this year, 26,334 MIGRANTS/REFUGEES/EX-PATS died or went miss­ing try­ing to cross the Mediter­ranean Sea from Turkey and North Africa.
Now rank the cap­i­talised labels accord­ing to the chord they struck.

In sim­ple terms, migrant, refugee and ex-pat (short for ex-patri­ate) all mean the same thing; some­one who has left their native land for anoth­er country.
How they are applied as labels is quite anoth­er matter.
Ex-pats arrive with mon­ey or skills and usu­al­ly both, which makes them gen­er­al­ly welcome.
Refugee is a legal des­ig­na­tion for some­one flee­ing across an inter­na­tion­al bor­der because of per­se­cu­tion or con­flict. It con­fers an inter­na­tion­al­ly-des­ig­nat­ed sta­tus with clear rights and for the most part, sym­pa­thy and assistance.
Migrants are more com­mon­ly seen as oppor­tu­ni­ty seek­ers and hence open to being pigeon-holed as poten­tial leech­es, tak­ing advan­tage of wel­fare sys­tems, health ser­vices and the like.
Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s nos­tal­gia trip to Ire­land puts into sharp relief the fact that the pre­pon­der­ance is usu­al­ly the opposite.
When his ances­tors fled famine and polit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion in the mid-19^th cen­tu­ry, Irish immi­grants were accused of steal­ing Amer­i­can jobs.
In a way, that was even­tu­al­ly true. Biden is one of 22 Amer­i­can pres­i­dents who’ve claimed Irish ances­try, includ­ing John F Kennedy, Ronald Rea­gan, and Bill Clinton.
“We came from noth­ing” is a ubiq­ui­tous form of self-praise. The truth of the boast is rel­a­tive to the def­i­n­i­tion of “noth­ing”. More impor­tant is what had to be over­come just to reach the point of an oppor­tu­ni­ty to “get some­where in life”. It’s impos­si­ble for any of us born in a place migrants are des­per­ate to reach to com­pre­hend how bad life had to be for them to run the risks and suf­fer the hor­rors of a jour­ney they, as often as not, know about from those who pre­ced­ed them.
The only humane, or viable way to curb ille­gal migra­tion is to help make it more worth­while for peo­ple to stay in their own country.
That requires a long-term com­mit­ment to invest­ment, zero tol­er­ance of cor­rup­tion in the name of mak­ing a prof­it, and refus­ing to sup­port despot­ic, human rights abus­ing leaders.

                  WHAT THE ANSWER IS NOT

Instead, West­ern gov­ern­ments embrace the equiv­a­lent of hand­ing a drown­ing per­son a lead weight instead of a life belt.
Florida’s ver­sion is bussing migrants from Cen­tral Amer­i­ca to wher­ev­er seems like­ly to gen­er­ate polit­i­cal cap­i­tal for wan­na-be pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Ron DeSantis.
One has to won­der whether he is aware (or would care either way) that the drug gangs war­ring for con­trol of  the  polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic dis­as­ters the migrants are flee­ing are ben­e­fi­cia­ries of the gun laws he supports.
Accord­ing to Ioan Gril­lo, author of “Blood Gun Mon­ey: How Amer­i­ca Arms Gangs and Car­tels“: An iron riv­er of ille­gal guns flows from the US to Mex­i­co, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, and across the hemi­sphere, help­ing make the Amer­i­c­as the world’s most homi­ci­dal region, with 47 of the world’s 50 most mur­der­ous cities.”
The British government’s “plan” to  deal with undoc­u­ment­ed migrants brav­ing the Eng­lish Chan­nel in small boats by export­ing them to Rwan­da was slammed by Human Rights Watch as “an abro­ga­tion of the UK’s inter­na­tion­al responsibilities…”
Euro­pean gov­ern­ments are lit­tle better.
Greece erect­ed a fence to keep migrants out, Hun­gary put up a wall, (sound famil­iar?) and  Croa­t­ia and Ser­bia have vio­lent­ly pushed back migrants.
Italy and Mal­ta keep try­ing new ways to make cross­ing the Mediter­ranean from North Africa in leaky boats run by peo­ple traf­fick­ers, so dan­ger­ous that migrant num­bers will be reduced by drown­ing. Among them are delib­er­ate­ly slow respons­es to over­loaded boats in dis­tress, and impos­ing oper­a­tional restric­tions on NGOs ded­i­cat­ed to res­cue at sea.
At the time of writ­ing at least 450 migrants were known to have died on the cross­ings since Jan­u­ary, the dead­liest first quarter since 2017. More than 200,000  have per­ished at sea since 2014.
And yet they keep coming.
Accord­ing to the Unit­ed Nations almost 28,000 peo­ple have arrived in Italy by sea since the begin­ning of this year.
The most sym­pa­thet­ic view of migrants is that they are vic­tims of the bad luck of geog­ra­phy. But geog­ra­phy as we knew it — lines on maps, dif­fer­ent colours for coun­tries with dis­tinct bor­ders, cus­toms, lan­guages and so on — is steadi­ly ooz­ing into an amor­phous mass, cour­tesy of the effects of cli­mate change, strife, world-wide reces­sion, the pol­i­tics of greed, racism, will­ful igno­rance of his­to­ry (when it’s not being re-writ­ten), and just for good mea­sure, Covid and what­ev­er pan­dem­ic is next.
It is well past time to re-eval­u­ate our cat­e­gories for peo­ple seek­ing a bet­ter life.

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