Page - 68 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

68 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis mass migrant death at sea, and it has been surpassed by even greater tragedies thereafter. The response to it, however, marked a rupture: ‘its scale [was] too great for us to ignore’.35 The disaster led to an international outcry, led by Pope Francis in what was his first official engagement. He visited Lampedusa where both the survivors and the bodies of some of the dead had been brought. Pope Francis responded that ‘The word disgrace comes to mind. It is a disgrace’. He also urged ‘Let’s unite our efforts so that tragedies like this don’t happen again’.36 Whilst in 2014, through a variety of governmental and private initiatives, some 170,000 migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean,37 less than eighteen months after 3 October 2013, several similar sized boats capsized close to Lampedusa, with over 300 migrants feared to have drowned.38 These, however, were overshadowed by an even larger catastrophe in the spring of 2015. In May 2015, a boat carrying over 800 migrants sank leaving just 28 survivors.39 In 2015, over a million migrants have attempted to reach Europe across the Mediterranean. Of these, ‘only’ 150,000 arrived in Italy from Africa, but the danger of this route is emphasised by the numbers continuing to drown in the ‘Blue Desert’. The International Organization of 35 ‘Europe’s Immigration Disaster’, ‘Dispatches’, Channel 4 television, 24 June 2014. 36 Guardian, 4 October 2013. 37 Guardian, 8 April 2015. 38 Metro, 12 February 2015. 39 Guardian, 23 May 2015. Fig. 5: Migrants’ and other tombstones, Lampedusa Cemetery, Photo: Tony Kushner