Europe's policy towards migrants - Must read: playwright Anders Lustgarten's article in the Guardian

Comment by playwright Anders Lustgarten in the Guardian about migration and Europe's policy towards migrants:

Anders Lustgarten is a London-based playwright whose work includes "Lampedusa", and "If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep".

His play "Lampedusa" is currently on stage in London at the Soho Theatre:

http://www.sohotheatre.com/writers/writers/anders-lustgarten/

Anders Lustgarten was a finalist for the 2007 Verity Bargate Award with his play The Punishment Stories. On the back of this, he was selected for our year-long attachment programme through which he was commissioned to write A Day at the Racists. This play was produced at the Finborough Theatre.

Anders went on to win the inaugural Harold Pinter Playwright’s Award in 2011 for If You Don’t Let Us Dream We Won’t Let You Sleep . He is currently under commission to the Royal Court and the National Theatre among others.

Lampedusa, his new play, was a straight submission to Soho, who then approached long-time collaborators and co-producers High Tide. It opens here on 8 April.

Anders’s journey captures the progression made by Soho writers from Verity Bargate Award through to production.

Read his column in The Guardian:

Refugees don’t need our tears. They need us to stop making them refugees

Anders Lustgarten

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/17/refugees-eu-policy-migrants-how-many-deaths?CMP=fb_gu

 A dinghy packed with migrants off the Libyan coast. ‘Five hundred people have already died this year; the figure for the equivalent period in 2014 was 15.' Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters

Extract from the beginning:

These are the people we are allowing to die in the Mediterranean. The EU’s de facto policy is to let migrants drown to stop others coming. Last year nearly four thousand bodies were recovered from the Med. Those are just the ones we found. The total number of arrivals in Italy in 2014 went up over 300% from the year before, to more than 170,000. And the EU’s response, driven by the cruellest British government in living memory, was to cut the main rescue operation, Mare Nostrum.



Extract from the conclusion:

"Our past work in Somalia, Syria and Iraq means those nationalities are top of the migrant list.

Not all migration is caused by the west, of course. But let’s have a real conversation about the part that is. Let’s have a real conversation about our ageing demographic and the massive skills shortage here, what it means for overstretched public services if we let migrants in (we’d need to raise money to meet increased demand, and the clearest and fairest way is a rise in taxes on the rich), the ethics of taking the cream of the crop from poor countries. Migration is a complex subject. But let’s not be cowards and pretend the migrants will stop coming. Because they won’t. This will never stop".