An incongruous scene has become increasingly common on Europe’s beaches: tourists sunbathing, fishing and playing as bedraggled migrants make their way ashore.
“This is an era of unprecedented movement across borders,” Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the International Organization of Migration in Italy, told the Washington Post in April. In 2014, the European Union received about 626,000 applications for asylum, the most since 1992.
So far this year, more than 100,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean, bound for European shores. Nearly 2,000 have died at sea. The photos below suggest how chillingly unremarkable this flow of lives has become, at least to some seaside habitués.
