A WAR WITHOUT BORDERS 

The pleasure of travelling, the will of adventure or of discover: certainly the reasons that push people into emigrating are not these. People emigrate because they suddenly cannot survive any longer in lands that could once feed everybody; because they cannot do otherwise following industrial reorganisation and mass dismissal; because they have to escape from ecological disasters, desertification, poisoning of the country; because they must flee from war or famine. When people do not emigrate in search of better living conditions, they do so because they have no other choice: this is the gap between the emigrant and the traveller or, most importantly, the tourist. The racist propaganda, which depicts Europe as a land being invaded by ignorant and angry crowds, is completely wrong. Only seventeen per cent of those who wander in the world are directed towards our continent. Most people keep on moving in Africa and Asia, where, close to a poor and desolate country, there is by now a poorer and more desolate one where to escape from. The total mobilisation imposed by the economy and by the States is a planetary phenomenon: millions of exploited go through the hell of the trade paradise shunted from a border to another, crowded in suburbs, compelled to be in refugee camps surrounded by police and army or in the ‘waiting zones’ of airports and football grounds, locked up in concentration camps and finally deported amid the general indifference. No invasion is on the way, there exists on the contrary a civil war that has not been declared and that has no borders.

If we consider carefully the history of migrations in the last two centuries, we will find out that it is the advance of progress that compels entire masses to abandon everything they have to look for another life elsewhere. Here are a few examples. It was the introduction of the cotton machines in the United States and of the looms in Great Britain that, at the end of the eighteenth century, brought black people into the American countryside. It was precisely around those looms that rebellious English craftsmen, once scattered in their villages, were compelled to gather. Machines and workers locked in the factories, imprisoned in the first metropolis of industrial civilisation. From that moment on, the industrial revolution went through the whole planet and re-organised it in the name of its machines. Following a double and cyclic movement, it destroyed the obsolete economic and social relations. Afterwards it uprooted and dispersed the exploited and eventually concentrated them in new places of production. Italian and Irish emigrants who went through the oceans causing the borders of capitalism to grow broader, left the remains of the clash between the expanding capitalism and the peasant world behind them. In other words, capitalism has always prepared the conditions for the emigrants to escape from their countries of origin and at the same time those for the immigrants to arrive in the countries that needed work at low cost: the expulsion and attraction reasons for migrations, to use the arid slang of demography. This reality of the past is also proved by the fact that for a long time some States have bought workforce directly from the States that could offer it. The Belgian government, for example, has bought from the Italian one two thousand miners a week for thirty years, through bilateral agreements which have been renewed till the end of the Seventies. The pendulum of progress has always swung between the mass uprooting of the exploited and their integration in new ways of life. This movement has become faster and wider thanks to the growing strength of technology and science. It seems that this pendulum has now gone mad, as if it was blocked on the first pole, the uprooting of the exploited. The destructive processes brought about by the new technologies are deeper and more and more uncontrollable even for the bosses themselves. Moreover, the normal procedure of industrial production causes not only the countryside to be destroyed and mass dismissal to be introduced, but it also brings more and more wars, coups, ecological disasters and famine. All these factors compose a mosaic made of oppression and misery in which the effects of exploitation become in their turns immediate and remote causes of suffering and uprooting in a never ending spiral which makes hypocritical any distinction between evacuees, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and survivors.

Some of the migrants, therefore, are still blackmailed and low cost workers in the industrialised countries: giving and refusing visas determine a social hierarchy among them, the spectre of deportation guarantees their obedience. All the others are most of all surplus labour that no one knows how to exploit, a scapegoat for explosive social tensions that emerge even in our countries, internal and external enemies whom propaganda ask us to assail. This is a picture which reminds the one of Europe in the Thirties, covered with millions of refugees from the First World War, stateless and surplus people, a continent that already sensed on the horizon the concentration camps and an even bloodier war.

Strangers everywhere