In Europe, there is an absence of sympathy for illegal immigrants who sacrifice their life’s savings and risk their lives crossing the sea on rickety boats or who smuggle themselves into Britain in airless containers. Even those who arrive at their chosen destinations safely are either deported, locked up or made to feel like third-class citizens, considered by local populations to be potential criminals or carriers of disease out to deprive nationals of their jobs. Those without papers are driven to take the dirtiest menial jobs with salaries that barely enable them to survive.

The few who manage to remain in their “promised lands” often become virtual pariahs upon whom all societal ills are heaped. Why are they so eager to leave their families and friends to embark on a dangerous adventure that so often ends in tragedy and tears?

Last week, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry announced that a boat carrying 83 illegal Egyptian migrants lost communications and disappeared before reaching the shores of Greece. It’s an all too common occurrence.

In June, the Egyptian Navy rescued 55 Egyptian and Bangladeshi migrants from a sinking boat that was bound for Europe, while that same month a fishing vessel meant to carry just 40 passengers, but crammed with up to 150, sank off the coast of Libya. They never did reach Italy. Most were unable to swim and only two managed to survive.

I doubt the smugglers care. They grow fat on the death of poor people, many of whom, according to reports in Al-Ahram Weekly, pay up to $4,640 for the voyage. This is a sum equivalent to four years’ salary or more for most Egyptians, which suggests the members of entire families must often chip in, perhaps even selling gold jewelry or inherited property in hopes of legally joining their relative in the future.

Last year, Egypt signed a bilateral agreement with Italy, which resulted in 2,400 Egyptians being deported back to their homeland. But many have wizened up since and travel without documents in the hopes of passing themselves off as Palestinians or Iraqis so as to fall outside the agreement’s scope.

Spain has long been attempting to contend with the illegal immigration of Sub-Saharan Africans who arrive on its coast hanging onto rubber rafts or terrified that their less than seaworthy vessels will capsize. They’re the lucky ones. Untold thousands die every year trying to make it across the Strait of Gibraltar after paying unscrupulous traffickers more than 2,000 euros for a journey that costs visa-holders a mere fraction.

In July, the Moroccan Navy arrested 52, while hundreds more were caught by Spanish authorities attempting illegal entry. Last year, a 24-year-old illegal arrested off the Spanish coast happily flourished two kilos of cannabis in hopes they would be his passport to a Spanish jail instead of deportation. However, the judge was too savvy and his ruse failed.

Britain has witnessed its own tragedies, such as the dozens of illegal Chinese immigrants who died gasping for air inside an airtight container destined for Dover in 2001. A 20-year-old survivor of a similar journey explained to a court that he had been held prisoner in a London apartment until his family in China paid approximately $34,000 to the gang that organized his hellish six-month journey.

As a British passport-holder who has, thankfully, never been homeless or known real gnawing hunger, it isn’t easy for me to imagine walking in the shoes of such desperate individuals as the destitute Iraqi who approached me for help in Bangkok. Con men lured him there on the promise of a visa to Australia and instead fleeced him and a lady Iraqi doctor of every penny they had. He ended up wandering the streets begging for food and she despairingly threw herself down a flight of stairs, not knowing how to care for her two children traveling with her.

Fear, hopelessness and poverty are the drivers of illegal immigration. People everywhere want a life and who are we, sitting in our air-conditioned homes or offices with full stomachs planning our next vacations, to blame them?

A few days ago I came face to face with abject poverty. I came across a tiny white kitten on a street in Alexandria, and followed her in the belief she might need rescuing. It turned out that she belonged to a family of five (a couple and their three children) who didn’t even have mattresses or pillows to their name let alone a table, fridge or cooker. Their living area consisted of a room no bigger than a large cupboard and part of an open stairwell. The only food in evidence was some stale round loaves and an opened packet of white cheese. These are the kind of people who risk the waves clutching a dream.

None of their children had ever been to school because their father’s salary of LE120 a month wouldn’t cover even the miniscule fees. Yet, whatever they lacked in education was more than compensated by warm smiles and hearts that had opened to an orphaned kitten. For those Europeans who have hardened their own hearts toward people fleeing poverty or persecution, there may be a lesson here.