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Weapons of mass migration, how states exploit the failure of migration policies by Rubin Anderson and David Keene.

Six people have died and several people are still missing after a boat carrying migrants sank in the English Channel.

In the last seven days alone more than 2,000 people have tried to cross the channel in small boats.

If you enter Britain illegally, you will be detained and swiftly removed.

Look at the business of tackling the migration crisis in Europe

and you will find evidence not of some one-off failure to plan ahead

or a policy initiative gone wrong through unexpected circumstances.

Rather, you face something akin to a complex crime scene

where the damage, the ostensible mistakes, and the cover-ups have all been systematic.

The perverse outcomes of the war on smuggling,

including thousands of border deaths,

escalating political brinkmanship,

and the professionalization of the human smuggling business itself

are more than a blip or an anomaly.

When policies persistently fail, we need to look not only at what went wrong but also at

what went right and that who is benefiting from the wreckage.

The habit of waging war on everything has spread from the early days of the war on

communism and the war on drugs to fights against crime, terrorism, irregular migration and many more complex political problems.

These wars never seem to be won and often have disastrous results, yet politicians continue to declare them.

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