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They were laughing as the ship sank.

Not the migrants, of course. By all accounts — though there are only a few of those, because there are only a few survivors — the migrants were doing exactly what you’d expect them to do as the sea devoured their boat. Screaming. Crying. Gasping for air. Grasping at lifebuoys.

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But the people smugglers: they laughed. Incensed that the 500 Palestinians, Sudanese and Syrians refused to transfer from a dangerous vessel to a more dangerous vessel, the smugglers used their own boat as a battering ram against the one that carried the refugees away from war but not toward anything better. To hell with the two-year-old who drifted along surging Mediterranean waves while adults slipped below them, to hell with the 17-year-old, now dead, who needed to buy his father heart medicine — to hell with everyone. The smugglers charged. And they laughed.

The rest of the world isn’t laughing. We — civilized people, nice people, people who have never had to be a boat person and have never taken the opportunity to drown one — condemn anyone savage enough to push the head of a refugee underwater, let alone 500 heads. But as refugees become submerged in the depths of violence and the dangerous flight from violence, we are letting them sink. Where we might bring refugees to safer shores, many Western nations are raising the levees.