The deaths in Essex remind us of the bruising reality of immigration

Editorial: The thing that all people making desperately dangerous journeys have in common is the search for safety and brighter prospects for themselves and their families. Their motives are honourable

The discovery of the bodies of 39 people inside a lorry container in Grays, Essex, is rightly being treated as murder. Mass murder, in fact, and, according to the home secretary, Priti Patel, police forces from across Europe are coordinating their work. At first, the origin of the lorry was unclear, but the latest from police is that it is thought to have carried its passengers to the UK from Zeebrugge, in Belgium. In any case, they evidently did not survive their ordeal.

There is much that is unknown about the case, despite speculation. It is not determined, for example, whether the dead could be characterised as asylum seekers, or refugees from war, or more purely economic migrants. In a way, such categorisations are becoming increasingly blurred.

The difference between a family escaping a life in ruins and abject poverty as a result of war or massive economic dislocation is usually a false one. The thing that all such people making desperately dangerous journeys to find a better life in the west, including Britain, have in common is just that – they are all seeking safety and brighter prospects for themselves and their families. Their motives are honourable.

Young and fit – they have to be to endure the hardships and privations of a trek across the Sahara or through eastern Europe – they simply want to work rather than scrounge. Many of them would not be here, in Europe, was it not for the west’s ill-starred interventions. Syrian emigration, for example, was negligible before the war; now some 3 million are housed in Turkey, and the best part of a million more in Germany and Sweden, the two most welcoming of the EU nations.

Because the route through Turkey has been narrowed, with an EU-Turkey migrant cooperation treaty, and because crossing the Mediterranean has become so much more hazardous due to the hostile line taken by Italy’s neo-fascistic government, so the people traffickers are probing new routes into western Europe. Lines of least resistance are always being sought.

For a time, the obscure and distant crossing between Norway and Russia was exploited. Now it would seem that the additional security measures at Calais and the periodic clearance of the shanty settlements is simply pushing the flow elsewhere. Nor have the French ports been entirely abandoned in any case; migrant babies and children are reportedly suffering the “worst conditions ever seen” in northern France after yet another police crackdown. Thermal cameras, towering fences, draconian fines of lorry drivers… and still the migrants try to scramble on to or into the lorries.

Although the flows of migrants are rather lower than at the height of the crisis in 2015-16, the horrific deaths of 39 blameless human beings in a steel box remind the world that the crisis is not over. Indeed, if the fresh incursions by Turkish troops into Syria destabilise the region further, the influx of migrants may pick up again.

Besides, a combination of grinding economic hardship, misrule, climate change and armed conflict effectively guarantees a constant pressure of people emerging from west Africa through Libya and the Middle East all the way to the Pakistan border with India. As Russia, the west, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the heirs and successors of al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic State play out their complex and sometimes overlapping proxy wars and terror campaigns across a wide swathe of Africa and the Middle East, the migration will continue.

There will, in other words, be more cases like the one in Grays, no matter how vigilant the border police. No matter how many people traffickers are successfully prosecuted and locked up for abduction and murder, as they should be, this mass movement of people, the biggest since the end of the Second World War, will continue – and Britain has a moral and legal duty to treat them more humanely than the 39 whose deaths we report today.