I have up close and personal experience with boat people. My own case involved Vietnamese fleeing their country in the late ’70s. The destination was The Philippines where the government had turned what was once a tourist island in Subic Bay into a huge refugee camp. What these boat people will face is many times worse.

From The Independent:

Here’s a formula for making a killing in times of crisis. Go to the south-eastern tip of Bangladesh, on the border with Burma, and buy an old fishing boat. It’ll cost 100,000 taka, or about £900. Then budget 450 pounds, for rice and drinking water, and maybe another £450 for bribes. Then head off and trawl for clients among the most destitute communities in Bangladesh – a country so densely populated country and so poor that for Britain to be on similar economic terms it would have to have a population of 200 million with an average income around four per cent of what a Briton’s is today,

But the target market we are looking at here is several times more impoverished than that. We are talking about quite possibly the most neglected people in Asia, or anywhere else.

John Carlin’s report is long and detailed and offers a view of it means to truly be at the bottom, no, to be underneath, deep, deep underneath the bottom of our planet’s pile of humanity.