If there's anything to prove that open borders are actually a pretty inhuman arrangement, the statistics on migrant drowning deaths from Italy would tell that story.

According to the IOM, 515 migrants have either died or gone missing in the first five months of 2019, compared to 664 during the same period of 2018; 1,738 in 2017; 2,557 in 2016; and 1,806 in 2015. Of those who died in 2019, only 260 died in the “Central Mediterranean Route,” which would be headed toward Italy.

Migrant arrivals to Europe have correspondingly dropped, with 24,687 arriving in Europe in the first five months of 2019, compared to 43,765 in 2018; 76,501 in 2017; and 212,981 in 2016, during the same period.

Last January, Italian daily La Verità reported that “the Salvini method works,” referring to plummeting migrant deaths following the border controls put in place by Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who has insisted that open ports fuel human trafficking and encourage migrants to undertake perilous sea crossings.

So migrant deaths are reduced, not increased, by Italy shutting its ports to all comers.

What it shows is migrants are human. And as human beings, they respond to incentives, something the left is entirely opaque to.

Allow illegal crossers in, even on humanitarian grounds, and watch a thousand more ships set sail filled with migrants looking for the same excellent deal.

More ships, more drowning deaths, and not in the least because the ships are moving illegally. Illegal immigration means secretive moves and with watching for them, checking on their welfare, looking for their arrival, the migrants are on their own if the ship capsizes, any effort to save them then is reactive and anyone who's rescued is just lucky. The open ports, though, are the attractive nuisance, much like an unfenced swimming pool, something we have laws about for a reason.

How very similar this is to the land crossings over the unfenced U.S. border.

The left would have you think that open borders are a wonderful thing, and migrant crossings are a non-issue. The only real problem migrants face in crossing that attractive nuisance is U.S. authorities trying to stop them.

It's rubbish. There is no such thing as an open border. Migrants who want to cross can either deal with U.S. immigration officials - or criminal cartel gangs who exact 'payments' as well as a harsh and unforgiving desert. How much more humane it is to have an easier legal immigration process if the economy calls for it, which is Congress's job to enact since it sets migration quotas. Walls, and legal immigration, are what's genuinely humane. This is as true in the U.S. as it is measurably so in Italy.