None if by sea: Rethinking immigration at Radcliffe
Just north of Libya’s territorial waters, a rescue boat operated by Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières/MSF) awaits the call. A small wooden fishing boat, sometimes a rubber dinghy, overloaded with refugees to five or six times its capacity, is in distress — in danger of capsizing in the rough Mediterranean waters. Equipped with a search-and-rescue crew and medical team, MSF responds, locating the distressed boat, evacuating the men, women, and children and treating them for ailments from dehydration to torture wounds they’ve sustained in arbitrary detention in Libya. MSF then transports the refugees to a safe port in southern Italy. In the years of the NGO’s presence in the Mediterranean — from 2015‒2018 — MSF executed 425 of these rescue operations and assisted 77,000 people. As its director of advocacy and communications, Hernan del Valle RI ’19 witnessed the crisis up close, helping oversee MSF’s search-and-rescue operations for people fleeing...