The migrants who embark upon this journey are typically represented as terrorized and impoverished—as people driven (to quote Amnesty International) “to risk their lives in treacherous sea crossings in a desperate attempt to reach safety in Europe.” The demographic and economic facts complicate that story. When populations flee war or famine, they generally flee together: the elderly and the infants, women as well as men. The current migrants, however, are overwhelmingly working-age males. All of them have paid a substantial price to make the trip: it can cost upwards of $2,000 to board a smuggler’s boat, to say nothing of hundreds or even thousands of dollars to travel from home to the embarkation point in the first place. Very few of the migrants from Libya are actually Libyan nationals.

Doug Saunders, a British Canadian journalist who has spent considerable time reporting from North Africa and the Middle East and who in 2012 published a book that was sympathetic to trans-Mediterranean migrants, rejects as “insidious” the notion that such migrants are fleeing famine and death. To the contrary, he wrote recently:

Every boat person I’ve met has been ambitious, urban, educated, and, if not middle-class (though a surprising number are …), then far from subsistence peasantry. They are very poor by European standards, but often comfortable by African and Middle Eastern ones.

What these migrants are doing is what migrants have always done: they’re pursuing a better life. But although migration is attractive to the migrants, it is unwanted by European electorates—and the tension between continued migration and public opinion is changing the Continent in dangerous ways.

Across the European Union, 57 percent of residents express negative attitudes about immigration from outside the EU. Naturally, elected politicians take the popular view and promise sharp reductions in immigration. And yet, the reductions never come, because the EU has encoded refugee rights into laws and treaties that cannot easily be changed. As a result, migrants have enormous incentives to present themselves as refugees. In turn, those European elites who favor higher levels of migration pretend to believe them. Altogether, the realities of trans-Mediterranean immigration are thus tightly swaddled in lies.

Leaders throughout the eurozone are already presiding over a precarious situation, thanks to continuing budget austerity and very high unemployment. Voters’ inability to affect policy further damages the credibility of democratic politics, and strengthens “anti-party parties” such as France’s extremist National Front.

The trip across the Mediterranean is short in kilometers, but quite long in psychic distance. A migrant crossing to Italy today leaves behind a world of informal rules and enters a world governed by written laws, formal credentials, and bureaucracy—a world where his own credentials (if he has any) count for nothing. He will enter a labor market in which both the employment rate and the relative wage of low-skilled workers have been declining for years. He may accept these conditions as an improvement. His children won’t.