Many of the migrants you see on the news, arriving on the Mediterranean coast or dying at sea, depart from Libya. There, smugglers cram them onto rubber or wooden rafts and shove them out to sea. Sometimes they pack as many as four hundred people onto a single raft. I knew people who tried to cross there, where smugglers charge a thousand dollars for passage to Europe. Often these people came back, saying they had been cheated out of their money.
