The sad thing is the people out there on the boats are in all likelihood just trying to scrape a living and the people who deserve to be in harm's way are higher up the economic ladder. There are a lot of world problems that amount to "no one holds China accountable" (and to a lesser extent, first world nations don't do enough to hold themselves accountable), and I would really like for countries to tax and/or sanction China for their negative externalities (e.g., pollution, overfishing) it would make the world a much better place--either China starts to compete fairly or else they lose the wealthiest markets to the advantage of the whole world and especially countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and South America who would fill the manufacturing void.
Mandatory disclaimer for the pro-China accounts: I'm very much not interested in deflecting to the West's problems--they exist, but they don't excuse China (nor does China's bad behavior excuse that of the West's). This kind of deflection is just a race to the bottom.
"Desperate" doesn't imply "legally innocent". In particular, China has an abundance of desperate people (I won't remark on its political system), so punishing the desperate in this case probably won't move the needle.
Further, and I say this as someone who prefers to err on the tough-on-crime side, it's unjust to punish the desperate when the wealthy are pulling the strings, raking in the profit, and bearing none of the risk.
Europe lost a lot, if not all, soft power during the Arabic Spring and the subsequent refugee crisis. There, we showed to the world that we outsourced border protection to people like Gadhafi. And that we really didn't give a fuck about human rights. The vile of human rights having been the moral source of Europes soft power, flanked by its economic power. The former was thrown out of the window, the latter then easily used against us by rich totalitarian countries (pick your favourite). The US witnessed something similar under Trump. Important to note, that it took almost 80-odd years since WW2 to build that power, but only a couple years to throw it out of the window.
Europe is very capable of border protection - but because of the human right thing, it is not seen as good, if the border police just shoots illegal trespassers.
So people do care about human rights.
But of course with hypocrisy - so we are quite nice - but we paid Gaddafi and now ergogan and morocco to do the dirty work to keep them away, so we can have more or less clean hands.
FWIW, this was nothing but a media circus. Trump largely continued immigration practices that existed under Obama and indeed Trump deported fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama did in his first term, but under Obama everything was great and then under Trump they were “concentration camps” and kids were in cages and being separated from their family and America is a white supremacist hellscape and etc.
This doesn’t mean that the Us didn’t deserve its immigration-policy reckoning; only that Trump didn’t do anything to cause it except offend the media.
(for the rabid partisans out there, this one particular defense of Trump doesn’t imply that I’m a Trump supporter or that he doesn’t deserve criticism for other things, etc)
>Therefore, the concept of people's war was applied to the sea with fishermen and other nautical laborers being drafted into a maritime militia.
>Most vessels are issued with navigation and communication equipment while some are also issuedsmallarms. The communications systems can be used both for communication and espionage. Often fishermen supply their own vessels, however, there are also core contingents of the maritime militia who operate vessels fitted out for militia work instead of fishing; thesevesselsfeaturereinforcedbowsforramming and high powered water cannons. The increasing sophistication of militia vessels' communication equipment is a double-edged sword for Chinese authorities. New equipment, as well as training in its use, has substantially improved command, control, and coordination of militia units. However, the vessels' resulting professionalism and sophisticated maneuvers make them more identifiable as government-sponsored actors, dampening their ability to function as a gray-zone force.
