2025-05-31
49 分钟The Economist.
During the migrant crisis that gripped Europe back in 2015, the numbers strained the imagination.
More than a million migrants made their way in, many fleeing serious civil war.
As governments tried to manage the flood, one picture really galvanized people that year.
A two-year-old Syrian boy drowned, washed up on a beach.
For a pained moment, those incomprehensible numbers representing people became just people,
part of broken families, people with names like Alan Kurdi.
A decade later, migrant deaths still happen, are happening, quite probably right now somewhere in the Mediterranean.
20 dead or 40 or 100.
They're numbers because that's more spiritually manageable,
but also because we will just never know who many of them are.
That same year that Alan Kurdi drowned,
a heaving fishing boat sank off the coast of Libya with perhaps a thousand on board.
No one is sure exactly.
But they, they had names too, and there's an international project to find them all out.
I'm Jason Palmer, and this is The Weekend Intelligence.
This week, my colleague Barclay Bram learns in visceral detail
just how hard it is to identify the casualties of migration
and just how determined a handful of people are to do it anyway,
to put names to numbers and dignify the dead.