At least six Afghan migrants drowned in the English Channel last week when the boat they were on capsized and sank. Two others are missing. These six are among the hundreds of people who have died trying to cross the Channel since 2000. These deaths are criminal, they are murders, and they are completely unnecessary. Yet the gruesome toll will continue to rise as long as capitalism-imperialism dominates the planet.

The English Channel is the last leg of a journey for countless people fleeing poverty, persecution, war, and environmental devastation in their homelands, mainly in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Many of these migrants have to traverse the Mediterranean Sea. The United Nations describes the Mediterranean as the most dangerous migration route in the world, where “one in six people … die” on their journeys.

One out of six. Dead. For the “crime” of being desperate, and seeking a better life… in a world ruled by capitalism-imperialism.

And if the desperate migrants make it to Europe, they have to cross numerous fortified borders of European countries. These borders have “[e]lectric fences, watchtowers, dog patrol units, helicopters and surveillance drones [which have] mushroomed across European frontiers … the EU (European Union) border agency Frontex … [is] the best-funded among all EU agencies.” People by the thousands have died at every step of these journeys. Even those who reach England are imperiled. In 2019, 39 Vietnamese people suffocated in the back of a smuggler’s truck in Essex, England.

Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (UK), called the recent deaths in the English Channel a “horrific tragedy.” He blamed “criminal gangs” who traffic in desperate human beings. These gangs are a grotesque product of a global system of exploitation and oppression. But they are small-scale gangsters in comparison to big-time gangsters like Sunak and his capo, Joe Biden. The system of capitalism-imperialism Sunak represents is responsible for the horrors inflicted on billions of people worldwide that force many of them to leave their homelands; it is responsible for the horrors inflicted on them as they try to make it to somewhere they can survive with some dignity; it is responsible for the tens of thousands of deaths of immigrants across the entire planet.

Just a few days after this horrific incident, an even more horrific tragedy took place. A boat sank in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Cape Verde in West Africa with over 60 people presumed dead. Thirty-eight were rescued, including children aged 12 to 16. More than 100 people were on the boat, mostly from Senegal and Sierra Leone. Desperate people fleeing their homelands for the basic ability to survive—fleeing droughts, wars, and farmlands turned to deserts. Instead of being welcomed, with their contributions integrated into society—they are met with barbed wires, walls and watery deaths.

As Bob Avakian said in an interview last year:

The imperialists have no answer to this, other than more horror: brutal apprehensions, detention camps of unspeakable misery and cruelty, family separations, border enforcement that spawns migrant smuggling rings that morph into trafficking for forced labor and sexual exploitation.

…[T]here are no international laws and protections that address this, that is, in any seriously humanitarian way. The laws in force are the laws of the imperialist dominators of the world: regulating and militarizing borders to safeguard imperial interests, and super-exploiting immigrants that do cross into the imperialist heartlands and are forced to “live in the shadows” without rights. It is a statement of our times that the U.S.-Mexico border and the Mediterranean have become burial grounds for migrants and refugees, that refugee camps become recruiting grounds for the global “sex trade.”