Universal citizenship, humanist response to violence against migrants

Universal citizenship, humanist response to violence against migrants

They die drowned in the Mediterranean, they are deported in the Balkans, they are persecuted in the United States, they are exploited in the Far and in the Middle East, they are detained in Europe, they discriminate in South America, violent in Central America and Africa. They are stripped of their savings to finance crossings, cross borders or obtain visas. They survive in camps and sheds; overcrowded in urban peripheries, hidden in low-income neighborhoods, or locked in concentration camps awaiting their next deportation.
The allusion to a “regular, orderly and safe” migration is not fortuitous, since these are the nuclear terms of the Global Pact on Migration signed in Marrakech (December 2018).

Everywhere the system expels, limits, mistreats, imprisons and attacks them. In many places migrants find aversion, suspicion, hatred. Although there are also sentient beings who contribute their share of humanity by putting themselves in the place of those who are far from their usual environment and their loved ones.

Although an important group of migrants flee from violence and war, many more are those who self-exile because of the lack of possibilities or moved by the illusion of work with better incomes for themselves or to give economic relief to those left behind.

Not only those who cross borders migrate. Also those who are forced to leave the countryside, those who are expelled from their territories due to the extension of the agricultural estates, for the construction of megaprojects, mining destruction, for the extinction of livelihoods in rural areas or encouraged by an alleged Improvement of the conditions of existence in the city.

Almost all of them, inside or outside their countries of birth, are awaited by danger, exploitation, segregation, partial or total deprivation of rights and yet continue their random journey, in search of what they imagine will be a life best.

What motivates migration is not only in places of origin

There are 250 million international migrants, with women and girls making up half of this quota.

More than 65 million have been forced to migrate forcibly by wars or persecution, six times more than a decade ago. A third of these people are considered refugees and half of the refugees are children.

It is usually indicated as causes of migration to what happens in the places of origin. However, it should be added that capitalist exploitation in places of destination is also one of the forces that encourage the phenomenon. Due to their precarious situation, migrants are forced to do jobs that the local population does not want to assume, with lower wages and working conditions below the current norm or without any rights. In countries of concentrated wealth, a cold calculation sometimes allows them to assume a formal job, so that their contribution balances the financing of states with aging populations.

And if all this were not enough, as poor payment for the services provided, xenophobia extends as a form of manipulation of established power, blaming migrants - as happened in other historical moments of systemic crisis - of social strangulation that those same powers they produce through their irrational search for revenue.

This means that social indignation is not aimed at transforming unjust structures, but that it is discharged overseas as a cathartic valve. The discourse of rejection of the migrant also serves as a springboard to the political opportunism of right-wing proclamations, which, if advanced, are inevitably a prelude to greater adjustment and repression of the same local population.

“They come to take what is ours”

The previous argument is usually a sentence put forward by those who are celebrated, without too much merit of their own, as "natives" or natives of the place (beyond that in their history they usually exhibit the traces of a migration equivalent to the one they now repulse). The theft they fear so much certainly exists. However, thieves are others.

How to calculate the economic damage that colonialism caused for 500 years to the regions of the global South? How much silver, gold, wood, species, banana, sugar, cocoa, coffee, rubber, diamonds, oil the empires took? How many human lives did they reap without offering any reparation? How much slave labor was used without remuneration or social promotion? How much manufacturing development prevented them from selling their own merchandise? With the interests of the case, - such as the mathematics that jealously configure when they are the creditors - would not reach all the money from the North to compensate for the damage caused.

They came and forcibly took away what was "ours."

It did not reach such a felony, and again, through forced loans and doubtful loans, the banking houses of the North continued to plunder the nations of Latin America, Africa and Asia during the post-colonial period and until the end of the 20th century. Debts grew and became unpayable, while valuable resources were leaked that would have enabled a non-dependent local development.

According to World Bank calculations “Between 1980 and 2000 the Third World reimbursed its creditors a little more than $ 3,450,000,000,000 (if you want to calculate the reimbursements made by the periphery as a whole, you must add more than 640 billion of dollars returned by the countries of the former Eastern bloc. Total for the Periphery: about 4,100,000,000,000 dollars. World Bank, GDF, 2001). "

These did not even come, but they still took the "ours".

But nothing reached the voracity of the conglomerates of the global North. Thus, with neoliberal ideologies as a neo-colonial argument, companies were privatized, which became the property of global corporations. If there were problems, that is, if an attempt was made to recover the power over natural resources or national strategic companies, the disputes had to be resolved in places governed by the North, paying, once again, huge amounts.

They came, they left, and anyway, they took everything. Or almost everything, leaving yes, ecological, economic and human deterioration hardly repairable.

At the same time, “free trade” was propagated and implemented, which meant that the South could continue to export primary products in unfair trade for capital goods or manufactures, without customs protection for the development of national industries. Again, they came for "ours."

And finally the internet appeared, with which at the click of a button it trades, definances, exploits, and how not to see it? The “ours” is removed for the umpteenth time. Our who - hence the quotation marks - was never truly so ours. Because in the South, the property was almost always in the hands of oligarchs and governments that the North put and took out when they were no longer useful. They did not leave the dignity of sovereignty, they also took it away.
With this background, how is it that Northern governments complain that many people now arrive to claim at least crumbs of stolen welfare? The governments that put up walls and fences, which build border armies, are the same that continue to sell weapons that throw millions of human beings into desperate migration.

Those who claim to offer "humanitarian aid" are the same as continuing to dispossess resources as if it were something natural or moral.

What self-confidence, cynicism and hypocrisy of the governments of Europe and the United States, who proclaim the defense of "human rights" and accuse other nations of violating them! How false and indefensible his speech! Instead of pontificating what should be done, they should start by setting an example. A gigantic and fair historical reparation cannot be delayed in turn. Part of it is the establishment of a Universal Citizenship.

Universal Citizenship, for a world without walls

In June 2017, the visionary government of Evo Morales organized in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the World People's Conference for a World without Walls towards Universal Citizenship. In its final declaration, human mobility is dignified without bending as "a right rooted in the essential equality of the human being."

Regarding the systemic root of the issue, the text - whose complete reading we recommend - points out: “We have verified as main causes of this crisis the military conflicts and military interventions, climate change and the enormous economic asymmetries between the States and the interior from them. These destructive situations have their origin in the dominant world order, which in its voracious disproportion for profit and the appropriation of common goods generates violence, promotes inequalities, and destroys Mother Earth. The migration crisis is one of the manifestations of the integral crisis of neoliberal globalization. ”

Attendees at the popular summit summed up a ten-point program in ten points, among which the removal of “physical walls that separate peoples; legal invisible walls that persecute and criminalize; mental walls that use fear, discrimination and xenophobia to separate us between brothers. Similarly, we denounce the media walls that disqualify or stigmatize migrants, and we are committed to promoting the creation of alternative means of communication. ”

Rejecting the criminalization of migrants, deriving war resources for integration programs, combating “criminal networks that traffic with human beings, and declaring trafficking and trafficking of persons as a crime against humanity”, were other proposals.

 As a fundamental statement, this document calls for “overcoming the hegemonic perspective of migration policy that poses a management of migration in a“ regular, orderly and safe ”way, by a humanistic vision that allows to welcome, protect, promote and integrate migrants . ”

The allusion to a “regular, orderly and safe” migration is not fortuitous, since these are the nuclear terms of the Global Pact on Migration signed in Marrakech (December 2018), which 156 countries finally joined (out of 193 that make up the system of United Nations).

The pact is a non-binding agreement on twenty-three objectives that, even when it validates guarantees of elementary rights such as “measures against trafficking and trafficking of persons, avoiding the separation of families, using the detention of migrants only as a last option or recognizing the the right of irregular migrants to receive health and education in their countries of destination ”, does not advance beyond the status quo of a world of unequal life opportunities.

In the text, the States undertake to cooperate with search and rescue missions when it comes to saving the lives of migrants, a premise that exhibits their total falsehood in the daily acts of persecution, punishment and omission of aid to immigrants.

For the rest, the signatories of the pact promise "to guarantee a" safe and dignified "return to deported immigrants and not to expel those who face a" real and foreseeable risk "of death, torture or other inhuman treatment." Risk that is calculated by a bureaucracy that acts according to the parameters and requirements of a wealthy world.

No more could be expected from an international system, whose current axis aims to protect and not affect power interests. In short, under the wing of sovereign legislation and "rationality," that pact ensures recipient countries dispose of migration according to their own order, needs and convenience. Even so, countries like the United States, Israel, Chile, Austria, Hungary, the Dominican Republic, Poland, Estonia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Australia considered it too collateral and withdrew their approval.

A humanistic vision of migration

Moving towards a humanistic vision of migration means getting rid of a feudal look, anchored in the subjection of human beings to naturalized, physically located and immovable identities. The enormous facilities achieved in human mobility, the shortening of time and space invite to remove impediments to free movement.

The obstacles to Universal Citizenship, to the free and welcome settlement of human beings anywhere on Earth, are remnants of a previous time, but also contradictions arising from the interest of maintaining illegitimate benefits at the expense of the suffering of others.

Neoliberalism promotes the free mobility of capital and trade without borders while criminalizing and using the poor migrant. Thus, countries with greater economic power refuse to share knowledge and technological development with places where there is only a lack, then repelling those who knock at their door asking for help.

On the contrary, to adopt a humanistic dimension of migration is to adhere fervently to the idea of ​​the renewal encounter between cultures and people, it is to appreciate in a felt and effective way the valence and equivalence of each particular identity. It is preparing to share the fruits of the collective human effort coined in centuries, without any requirement.

It is to recognize the justice of undertaking the historical reparation of the colonial dispossession and to close the long historical chapter of economies founded on war. It is to vibrate with the possibility of cooperation, solidarity and empathy between peoples.

Inspired by a humanistic view means celebrating migration, recognizing the historical trajectory of human groups towards horizons of confluence and fusion. It is, in short, to assume the unity of diversity as a project towards a shared space, the Universal Human Nation.