LONDON — The 58 Chinese immigrants found suffocated in the back of a refrigerated truck in Dover last month have exposed a horrifyingly simple truth: Men, women and children are dying to get into Europe.
Although the Dover tragedy was extreme, it was hardly isolated. More than 2,000 people are known to have died crossing the seas and borders of Western Europe in the last seven years, and the mortal tide continues with numbing regularity.
They drown in the Adriatic on the way to Italy or in the Strait of Gibraltar while headed for Spain. They step on mines along the Iranian-Turkish border and freeze to death on an icy mountain pass between Bulgaria and Greece. They die in the landing gear of a commercial airplane.
This grim toll is the underbelly of Europe's economic success and, to some degree, of its efforts to clamp down on illegal immigration. Pulled by a demand for unskilled laborers and pushed by desperation in their own countries, more and more Asians, Africans, Indians and Eastern Europeans are making their way to Western Europe's dynamic cities.
Visa requirements, sanctions against airlines transporting illegal immigrants and new enforcement measures, however, have forced these desperate migrants to seek ever more clandestine and dangerous routes into Western Europe. Whether they are refugees fleeing persecution or laborers looking for a job, for the majority of migrants the only way into Europe is illegally and often perilously.
Professional traffickers are happy to ply their trade to the 250,000 refugees who ask for asylum in European Union countries each year and to the hundreds of thousands of economic migrants looking for a better life. Law enforcement officials and refugee workers say the business of human trafficking has become as lucrative as drug smuggling in Europe.
"There has always been illegal immigration, but there is a massive growth in organized, illegal immigration. Instead of coming in ones and twos, they are coming in fifties and hundreds," said Fleur Strong, a spokeswoman for Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service.
"In most European countries, the penalties for human trafficking are lower than for drugs, and the money is just as good," Strong said.
While the short trip from Albania to Italy may cost as little as $500 to $1,000, the price of an illegal journey from China's Fujian province to London ranges from $18,000 to $30,000.
