n June 14, a migrant-packed boat reportedly carrying between 500 and 700 migrants capsized off the coast of Greece. Of the more than 100 people rescued, 12 are from Pakistan. So far, 81 bodies have been recovered. The hopes for the rest are fading. More than 300 hundred Pakistani migrants are believed to have been on board the capsized trawler.

Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif declared a day of national mourning, and Defence Minister Khawaja Asif thundered against the practice of human smuggling and its broader social and economic cost to families in the National Assembly. About 5,000 migrants have lost their lives on the European seas since 2014.

In recent years, arduous and risky journeys across the seas have grown. During my work with refuges in both Greece and Lebanon, I saw an increasing trend towards rickety, unsafe boats and dinghies as a vehicle to Europe.

From Lebanon, desperate Palestinian and Syrian refugees are increasingly taking risky boat journeys to Cyprus and Italy in recent years. Yet the source of most boat migrants remains the lawless and ungoverned Libya. The ill-fated fish trawler that sank off the Greek coast had also originated from Libya.

The spike in risky sea journeys has coincided with restrictive EU asylum and immigration policies. These restrictions have been gathering pace since 2015, when Germany opened its doors to the Syrian refugees, provoking a far-right and populist backlash.

Europe has escalated patrolling on the seas and established militarised outposts near the countries that are the source of migrant outflow. Besides securitising asylum policy through border patrolling and managing other outlying countries located on the migration route, Europe has also offered help to countries like Turkey to manage the flow of refugees coming through its doors via a hefty aid package first announced in 2016.

European leaders have also made a beeline to Tunisia in recent months with offers of financial aid and easing the passage of an IMF bailout package in an effort to stem the flow of migrants via the Tunisian route. These measures are aimed at external management of migration flows through the countries placed en route to Europe.

In European countries, the feeling against migrants is hardening. The rise of the far right in Europe and the elevation of far-right parties to power positions in Europe has led to the passage of draconian laws prohibiting charities from helping refugees or rescuing them from the seas if they fall into distress.

In 2018, under the previous Italian administration of Matteo Salvini, a leader of the far-right Lega party, one of the toughest legislations was introduced. It branded the NGOs working with refugees and migrants as people smugglers. Not only that, Salvini disallowed the disembarkation of any distressed ships carrying migrants in Italy. Many NGOs involved in search and rescue operations on the sea were discouraged from helping out the distressed ships. Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, from another far-right party, has continued with the policies. The NGOs working with refugees have been fined for joining search and rescue operations.

In Greece, anti-migrant sentiments have grown under the new centre-right administration of the New Democracy Party. In 2020, the famous Moria camp was closed to be replaced with model camps with limited provision for the refugee. This seems part of a larger plan to make the environment harsh and unhospitable for the refugees in Greece.

As late as May, a leaked video showed the Greek coastguard transferring migrants from inland Lesbos to a coast guard ship to be offloaded on a raft in the sea without regard to the safety of the migrants. Luckily, the raft was saved by Turkish coast guards.

In the current tragedy, Greek coast guards have been accused of looking the other way while the migrant trawler was sinking before their eyes. This accusation does not seem farfetched once the video clip is factored in. The Greek government and the coast guards have angrily denied these accusations maintaining that the migrant ship refused their help as it was determined to head onto Italy.

In Britain, the hostile migrant policy developed under Theresa May has been ramped up under the new home secretary, Suella Braverman. She has made stopping migrants’ boats through the English Channel a centrepiece of her immigration policy. Many migrants have perished in the English Channel in an effort to reach English shores.

Europe is easy to reach because of its geography. Yet, with the closure of legal routes of migration, more and more people are taking to the option of dingy and rickety boats in an effort to reach European shores. Even in the case of managed migration through Turkey charged with processing applications for onward transmission of the rightful asylum claimants to Europe, Europe has only accepted a limited number of filtered applicants. This is because of the reluctance of some countries, such as Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, to take in the processed migrants and refugees.

As a result, some European countries are overwhelmed with the extra burden of taking in more refugees and migrants than allowed in the proposed quota. In a new deal struck on June 8, EU governments agreed on a principle of “mandatory solidarity”, which requires all member states located beyond the frontline states to accept 30,000 migrants each year. In case of them not accepting refugees and asylum-seekers, they will pay 20,000 euros per migrant into an EU-wide fund. This may boost funds available to the frontline states such as Italy.

Despite the agreement, broader issues like economic disparity and poverty in the northern countries, the trade imbalance between the north and south, increasingly restrictive EU asylum and immigration policies and the rise of the far-right parties on the back of anti-migrant sentiments will continue to drive the flow of economically desperate youth to the prosperous European shores.

Opening up legal routes of migration, sharing the burden of migrants and refugees and introducing liberal immigration policies coupled with the creation of a hospitable environment for migrants and refugees will go a long way in solving the challenge of the migration crisis.

The writer is the author of Patient Pakistan: Reforming and Fixing Healthcare for All in the 21st Century. He has worked on refugee projects in Europe, the UK, Greece and Lebanon