“A decade or so after the peak of Europe’s migrant crisis, one of the busiest and deadliest entry points to the continent has devolved from crisis to something more chronic,” writes Giuliano Beniamino Fleri, a historian of migration, in a recent New York Times Opinion piece about Lampedusa.

“Lampedusa is the critical but deadly entry point to a continent that fears immigration but cannot live without it. It should be where the paradox of European migrant policy is most visible, but it’s disappearing from view,” Fleri writes.

Lampedusa, which is located between mainland Italy and the North African coasts of Libya and Tunisia, “has been a node along irregular migration routes to the European Union since the 1990s,” he notes.

The first paragraph of the piece is truly heartbreaking, with Fleri detailing how residents of Lampedusa have told him that they’re “used to getting phone calls from people across the sea. Mothers, fathers, siblings and friends call searching for someone who left to try to reach Europe but has not been heard from since. Was a son among the rescued? Did a daughter’s name appear on a list? Does any trace remain? The answer is often no.”

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez details why his government is bucking the global backlash against immigrants and instead embracing “a fast and simple path to regularize their immigration status.”

In January, his government “issued a decree that makes up to half a million undocumented migrants living in Spain eligible for temporary residence permits, with certain conditions, which they will be able to renew after a year,” notes Sanchez.

Sanchez notes there are two reasons for this strategy. The first “and most important is a moral one,” he said. “It is our duty to become the welcoming and tolerant society that our own relatives would have hoped to find on the other side of our borders.”

The second reason is purely pragmatic, Sanchez said. “The West needs people. Currently, few of its countries have a rising population growth rate. Unless they embrace migration, they will experience a sharp demographic decline that will prevent them from keeping their economies and public services afloat. Their gross domestic products will stagnate. Their public health care and pension systems will suffer. Neither A.I. nor robots will be able to prevent this outcome, at least not in the short or medium term. The only option to avoid decline is to integrate migrants in the most orderly and effective way possible.”