The Arab Spring has not radically changed patterns of migration in the Mediterranean, and the "migration crisis" label does not capture a composite and stratified reality. Ever since the emergence of popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, European media and politicians have worried about the prospect of a "tidal wave" of North Africans on Europe. These sensationalist predictions have no scientific basis though ! Migration, in its various forms, has nevertheless played a determining role in the uprisings that have spread across these regions. The lines of vehicles fleeing the besieged cities and villages in Libya, the emigrant workers awaiting repatriation to the detention centers in Egypt and Tunisia, the boats that are stranded on the island of Lampedusa and in which are piled Tunisians and sub-Saharan Africans seeking to cross the Mediterranean Sea, and the return to Cairo of many emigrants and university students who want to join the demonstrations on Tahrir Square, are just a few examples to show how this intersection between human mobility took place and events in North Africa. Some recent migration phenomena cannot be reduced to a simple side effect of revolutions. The potential links between, on the one hand, the reduction of migration possibilities from North Africa to Europe (due to the economic crisis and the intensification of border controls), which is accompanied by disadvantaged young people and deprived of rights of a feeling of exclusion and discontent, and on the other hand, street protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Morocco deserve closer examination. The largest flow of modern African migration funnels through a single country — Libya. Coming from the south, migrants flee the vestiges of wars that have left entire nations in ruin. From the east, they escape a life of indefinite military servitude and violent conflict. From the west, they evade destitution and governments that arbitrarily jail whomever they please. Some arrive by choice, others by force. But Libya is the purgatory where most migrants prepare to face the deadliest stretch of the Mediterranean Sea.To understand the reality of Libya's escalating migration crisis, one must weave together the threads of instability left behind by a toppled dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, and the power vacuum filled by rivaling factions vying to take his place. The chaos allowed smuggling networks to thrive, suddenly opening up a lucrative market designed to profit off trading humans like other goods and commodities. The country's 1,100-mile coastline has effectively become an open border without government forces to monitor who comes and who goes. Smugglers have filled the void, willing to tightly pack hundreds of migrants at a time into flimsy vessels and shuttle them to Italy. Migrant crossings through the central Mediterranean jumped by more than four-fold after 2013. Unlike the millions of people forcibly displaced by Syria's brutal five-year civil war, migrants that pass through Libya do so amid a complex web of forces that have uprooted entire generations. For years, broad regions of sub-Saharan Africa have been swallowed by squalor and extreme poverty, crushed under the rule of oppressive governments or caught in the crosshairs of deadly groups that thrive on terror.~ but it is never a safe passage !
The EU recently approved a plan to launch a military operation in the Mediterranean aimed at crippling the movement of the human-trafficking networks. “This attempt has the goal of limiting the torrents of the illegal immigrants that influx to the EU countries via the Mediterranean on rickety boats and ships, which in most cases have sent them to the bottom of the sea.” An EU source stated. The source added that this military operation will later involve steps that allow it to intercept the smugglers’ boats and ships; however, the EU is still awaiting to be granted the do-so from Libyan authorities.