More than 60 people have died after a wooden boat believed to be carrying refugees crashed off the coast of Italy’s Calabria region. Twelve of the refugees who died were children.

“Wooden debris from the shattered boat was still being buffeted by rough seas, pushed up along the coast and strewn across the beach in southern Italy on Monday morning — grim evidence of the tragic end of a journey that scores of people hoped would deliver them to a better life,” CBS News reported.

The vessel had set sail from Turkey several days ago with refugees from Afghanistan, Iran and several other countries, and crashed on Sunday in stormy weather near Steccato di Cutro, a seaside resort on the eastern coast of Calabria, Al Jazeera reported.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni “has concentrated on complicating efforts by humanitarian boats to make multiple rescues in the central Mediterranean by assigning them ports of disembarkation along Italy’s northern coasts. That means the vessels need more time to return to the sea after bringing migrants aboard and taking them safely to shore.” (NPR).

In a recent article for the BBC, Bernd Debusmann Jr. takes a closer look at Uniting For Ukraine, a U.S. government program that allows Americans to sponsor Ukrainians to come to the US for up to two years. The program, “which has been considered a resounding success, has led to the Biden administration announcing similar initiatives for refugees from other countries,” writes Debusmann.

Under Uniting for Ukraine, sponsors are supposed to help provide financial support for basic needs such as housing and health care, “but participants and activists say the initiative has led to bonds being formed between refugees and their sponsors that often go far beyond their initial commitments,” the article notes.

The Biden administration recently announced that sponsors could help bring in 30,000 people a month from Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela for a period of up to two years, the article said.

And in January, the Biden administration unveiled Welcome Corps, “which seeks to mobilize 10,000 Americans to help 5,000 refugees from around the globe come to the US.”

In a recent New Yorker article, Geraldo Cadava provides important context about the new Welcome Corps program unveiled by the State Department in January.

“Under the plan, groups of five or more American citizens or permanent residents can apply to privately sponsor the resettlement of refugees,” writes Cadava.

The Welcome Corps will not replace existing refugee support groups, he notes. Instead, “it will provide an additional avenue for Americans to participate in resettlement, helping to place refugees in areas of the country where resettlement agencies don’t work, and shift some of the expense to private citizens.”

Click here for the article.

At least 18 migrants have been found dead in Bulgaria in an abandoned truck near the capital Sofia, Al Jazeera reported on Feb. 17.

“The truck was transporting timber and carrying refugees and migrants hidden in a compartment, the country’s interior ministry said in a statement on Friday,” Al Jazeera reported.

“The Interior Ministry said that, according to initial information, the truck was carrying about 40 migrants. The survivors were taken to nearby hospitals for emergency treatment,” the New York Times reported.

In August 2022, Jérôme Tubiana and Khaled Mattawa boarded the Geo Barents, a rescue vessel run by Doctors Without Borders, and participated in the rescue of migrants on the Mediterranean Sea.

They detailed their experiences through diary entries recently published in the New York Review of Books.

Along with describing the perilous journeys of the migrants that are rescued, Tubiana and Mattawa detail how the European Union is working with the Libyan Coast Guard to prevent the arrival of migrants to Europe.

“The EU perceives its policy in the Central Mediterranean as a success. Arrivals from Libya decreased from 165,000 in 2016 to seven thousand in 2019, and arrivals between 2017 and 2021 combined barely exceeded those of 2016 alone,” writes Tubiana in one of his diary entries. “On the other hand, the rate of migrants returned to Libya increased during the same period from 7 percent to nearly 50 percent. In the past decade, over 20,000 died in the Central Mediterranean.”

A number of the rescued migrants describe in detail being kidnapped, trafficked and held for ransom in Libya.

Click here for the New York Review of Books piece (requires subscription).

Mattawa teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Tubiana has advised Médecins Sans Frontières’s programs for migrants and refugees since 2018.

In a recent episode of a Migration Policy Institute podcast, Ama Francis, a Climate Displacement Project Strategist at the International Refugee Assistance Project, proposes that the U.S. consider creating a climate humanitarian visa.

“The way that I imagine this looking is that we would have a new visa category that was for people from climate vulnerable areas,” Francis said during the podcast episode.

Such a visa would involve two-step eligibility. The first step would be establishing that a person is from a climate vulnerable region. “You could have a U.S. agency. for example, responsible for determining — based on scientific data — which areas of countries are particularly prone to climate impacts. And if you are a person coming from one of those regions, sub-regions in a country, or from a country, you would be just prima facie eligible for this visa,” she said.

“But then you’d have to meet this other layer of eligibility which could be based on vulnerability,” she said. With the climate visa, “you could design it so that people who might have difficulty accessing other forms of immigration relief….could actually migrate.”

Click here for the full episode of the Migration Policy Institute podcast featuring Francis.