DAKAR: Massaer Niang had been praying he would be caught when Spanish border guards dragged him, struggling for breath, out of the rough waters off North Africa.

Like thousands of migrants who try to break into “fortress Europe” each year, the 24-year-old Senegalese student had hidden between the carriages of goods trains, been beaten by police and shot at during repeated attempts to get out of Africa.

In the cold night-time waters off the heavily guarded border between Morocco and Ceuta, a Spanish enclave and one of the last staging posts on the smuggling route to mainland Europe, Niang’s dream of finding work to support his family began to fade.

“This time I wanted to be caught because I thought I was going to die,” he said, back in Senegal’s capital Dakar after repeatedly being detained in Morocco and eventually deported.

“There were waves which pushed me under each time I came up. There was a strong wind and I was being swept out,” said Niang, who does not know how to swim.

Thousands of illegal immigrants land on Europe’s southern shores each year in rickety and overcrowded boats. Thousands more die in the attempt, non-governmental organisations say.

Often they are educated young men who risk their lives not for the glamour of a western lifestyle — many expect to face humiliating poverty and racist abuse in Europe — but simply in the hope of repatriating money for needy relatives.

Niang wanted to be a doctor or pharmacist but his father died just after he left high school. With no jobs in Senegal, his family said he should take the clandestine route to Europe.

He tried for eight months to get into Ceuta, slicing his hands on the razor-wire border fence and almost drowning twice when he tried to swim round it, wearing a wetsuit and car tyre inner tube for buoyancy, sold to him by a Moroccan fixer.

Each time, border guards caught him and dumped him on the barren Morocco-Algeria border, hoping he would not try again. Each time he smuggled his way back on trucks and goods trains.

With the 3,000 euros ($3,600) his father left the family wasted on swindlers who promised safe passage, he eventually stormed the fence with hundreds of other Africans last October, when Madrid and Rabat sent troops to the frontier.

“When we tried the forced attack, the guards shot. It became a war,” Niang said, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his room empty except for a mattress and dusty television set.

“I’d prefer to starve to death than go that route again.”

The European Union has warned immigration is a “time bomb” and some officials want a joint Mediterranean security force of marine guards and police officers to combat human trafficking.

Italy saw a 50 per cent rise in the number of African migrants crossing to its shores by boat last year, while Spanish lifeboats rescued close to 6,000 at sea.

“The slogan for young people in Africa has become immigrate or die,” said Alioune Tine, secretary-general of Senegal-based African human rights group RADDHO.—Reuters