This weekend, Hungarian police made a fifth arrest connected to the death of the 71 migrant workers whose corpses were found in a truck abandoned in Austria.
The horrific death of those migrants—the latest in a series of tragic mass deaths this summer—has elevated Europe's migration challenge to a crisis point, says Charles Sennott, head of The GroundTruth Project.
"People are risking everything—their lives, everything they have—to try and make it in this world in an economy with tremendous income inequality," he said.
Prompted by recent tragedies, interior and justice ministers of the EU will meet in Brussels in mid-September to discuss new policies to alleviate the crisis. Those policies will have to include ways of apportioning asylum-seekers among EU member states, Sennott said. Currently, Germany and Sweden lead the EU in terms of accommodating the highest numbers of migrants. It is estimated that 332,000 migrants entered the EU illegally this year.
But one thing for sure is that, no matter how the EU responds, migrants will continue to come.
"One of the things we forget about the immigration crisis...the back story to it is about desperation, lack of opportunity, and anyone will do anything they can, including risking their own lives, to try and find a way forward in this life," Sennott said.
Later in the segment, Sennott was joined by Beth Murphy, documentary filmmaker and founder of Principle Pictures, who just returned from the opening of a girls' school in Afghanistan.
To hear more from Charles Sennott and Beth Murphy, tune in to Boston Public Radio above.
