Eight bodies recovered in Libya and Greece

Eight more bodies have been recovered along the Mediterranean migration routes, a grim data point that also illustrates how the sea has become a publicly financed “pull factor” machine.

According to Al Jazeera, five bodies were found in Libya after a boat carrying migrants capsized off the country’s western coast. Three others were recovered in Greece after a separate incident. The report describes continuing crossings and a rising death toll, with survivors typically rescued and transferred into reception systems.

The political rhetoric around these deaths tends to oscillate between two comforting stories: either “more rescues” will solve the problem, or “tougher borders” will. Both narratives avoid the central incentive structure: when states and state-adjacent actors build reliable search-and-rescue and disembarkation chains, they create an implicit insurance policy for the smuggling market.

In insurance terms, the premium is not paid by the risk-taker. The migrants do not internalise the full expected cost of the voyage; neither do the facilitators who sell places on overloaded boats. The premium is socialised—borne by European taxpayers funding coast guards, surveillance, emergency medicine, detention, asylum processing, legal appeals, and long-term welfare. Meanwhile the upside is privatised: smugglers collect cash up front; parts of the NGO and contractor ecosystem collect stable budgets and grants; politicians harvest moral signalling and, in some cases, demographic inflows that expand the client base of the state.

Game theory helps explain why deaths do not fall even as “humanitarian capacity” expands. Smugglers adapt to enforcement and rescue patterns by shifting routes, lowering boat quality, and increasing load factors—because the probability of interception or rescue is itself a parameter in their profit optimisation. If rescue becomes more likely, the market can clear at higher volumes with lower per-crossing quality. The system can therefore produce the perverse outcome of more departures and more fatalities, even when individual rescues succeed.

The tragedy is not that people move—humans have always moved—but that Europe’s welfare-and-asylum architecture turns migration into a state-managed programme where costs are externalised and accountability is diffuse. Private carriers, insurers, and landlords would impose stricter screening and pricing because they bear losses directly. The public sector, by contrast, can expand “capacity” while quietly shifting the bill to future budgets and local communities.

The bodies found in Libya and Greece are not just a humanitarian headline. They are the visible edge of a policy regime that subsidises risk, rewards intermediaries, and then expresses surprise when the market responds rationally.