On September 19, the United Nations General Assembly will host its first summit to take on the giant movements of refugees and migrants to bring countries a more humane and coordinated technique to combat the worst crisis refugees since the end of World War II. The summit provides a historic opportunity to expand a plan for greater foreign response. In the case of this meeting, UNAI asked the UNAI member establishment studies to submit articles that go beyond their studies and their implications for assistance to solve the problem. Thanks to this series, UNAi hopes to provide an understanding of refugee/migrant flows to its readers, to emphasize the importance of attacking refugee and migration flows in the 2030 Agfinisha for sustainable progression and to provide paintings to teachers and studios of UNAI establishments. Please note that the articles are for discussion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.
Laura Zanfrini, Cattolica University of Sacro Cuore, Milano
The existing refugee crisis is emblematic of Europe’s ambivalence and failure to manage forced migration today. Despite being the cradle of human rights and the very concept of political asylum, Europe is governed at the same time through the logic of security that prevails throughout the world. Faced with the largest movement of migrants and refugees since the Second World War, Europe showed the arbitrariness of its borders, both internal and external.
The border control strategy incorporated to involve migration has gone hand in hand with the European Union extension procedure to 28 Member States, thus strengthening the motion towards the abolition of internal borders. But today, it is precisely the call to its external borders that would threaten the consultation of the concept of a non -unusual European space, as shown through a developing trend to suspend the loose movement in Europe, reintroducing the internal controls and limits .
The management of humanitarian migrations constitutes one of the areas where significant progress has been made in the process of communitarization, that is in developing an EU-wide approach to an issue that was once the prerogative of individual states; but unfortunately, this has led to an increase in national interests and national egoisms. It is important to note how the many insistent appeals to Europe tend to focus on distributing the burden of refugees, and not on the propensity to share the responsibility of managing this monumental challenge. The situation that emerges touches upon the very cornerstone of the international system of protection given that a State-centric government system with inherent limitations must interact with a phenomenon such as forced migration, whose very nature transcends the boundaries of individual countries. Ironically, the desperation which makes it possible to scale walls of barbed wire as well as walls created by laws and regulations, has resulted in a level of cooperation, albeit modest, that until now European countries had not been able to achieve. Finally, Europe is faced with the need to rethink the concept of border which is difficult to reconcile with the idea of universal human equality, one of the fundamental principles on which European civilization is based.
The refugee factor the inevitable hole between the inclusive logic of universal human rights and the prerogative of the national State to exclude undesirable. In fact, after a unilateral definition procedure through destination countries, the refugee figure is emblematic of the contradiction of a formula focused on the state in reaction to the demands of justice and belonging to the current global society, and demonstrates The limits of our formulas in protection of the poor and vulnerable, based on the fiction of national societies delimited through national fences.
Entering more deeply in the discussion, and beyond the contrasts dividing countries, the events of these last months have revealed the main weaknesses of the European approach in this matter:
First, having reduced border control to a technocratic task, measured in terms of economic prices and efficiency, as obviously shows through the crude oil accounting technique to deportations whose construction is acclaimed as a success, Europe has discovered that it lacks of convincing and convincing moral criteria to distinguish between authentic and fictional refugees.
At the same time, Europe has sought to contain migrant arrivals through the questionable practice of outsourcing boundaries. The need to restrain migration flows and reduce the number of refugee/asylum applications, including through agreements with countries defined as secure (that signed with Turkey is only the last in a long series), has definitely prevailed over the actual management of migratory fluxes. As a consequence, Europe has discovered that it lacks those instruments, such as humanitarian channels, which would have made it possible to manage the emergency in a way that would have been more in line with the principle of inalienable human dignity.
It took the shocking image of the dead body of a small child washed up on the beach to remind Europe that over time it had forgotten the principles of justice, equity and freedom upon which the very delicate issue of border management should be based. Not incidentally, this kind of approach is in contradiction with the effort to promote the European brand among potential talented immigrant workers, in order to become a competitive destination with respect to the traditional settlement countries.
In the existing framework of human mobility, the difference between economic and humanitarian migration is increasing Of freedom of movement, the equality of equality of equality of equality of all human beings, or the right to go abroad in search of decent life situations provided that they are not guaranteed in the country of origin of one).
Obviously, this difference cannot be based on shallow criteria, such as country of origin, or on the prototype of the refugee as explained in the 1951 Geneva Convention, for example as a political dissident persecuted through the government of his own country. Today, forced migration has a collective rather than an individual configuration and reflects a not unusual desire to flee from crisis conditions whose consequences and evolution are unpredictable. The risk we can flee to is not necessarily the state, but perhaps non-state actors or even the circle of family members.
The fear of persecution is not limited to imprisonment, but can come with a wide diversity of human rights violations, which adds concern to be subject to female sterilization or circumcision, violations of homosexual rights and survival committed through Environmental screwed to call some. , migrants flee The very antithesis of the preference for freedom that had once marked the adventure of other people who migrate for humanitarian reasons. Migration is not only forced not only, but even mandatory, carried out through various bureaucracy of trafficking and slavery. Finally, coverage systems have been built online. With a male archetype, although we now know that the paths of forced migrants are deeply Gfinishing, a condition that makes them inappropriate to fulfill the express desires and hazards that represent female migrants.
It is exactly the inclusion of new categories of other people in the coverage formula, which has begun to increase applications, which makes the difference between voluntary and forced migrations increasingly porous and questionable. However, the abandonment of this unsatisfactory difference would not be useful to manage mass arrivals such as those registered in recent months. Without a doubt, in the open hole through the lack of shared criteria, it is relatively simple to submit unjustified and instrumental humanitarian coverage applications. Very often, this is done with the complicity of the actors and organizations that can be motivated through the intentions of charity, but underestimate that they have an effect on which their movements have on the resources and in the structure of the mandatory consensus to treat the more wonderful conditions vulnerability. Consequently, it is mandatory to take into account the essential difference between Americans fleeing from various types of persecution or war, those who flee from the economic and environmental conditions that threaten their lives and those who migrate because they need to improve their state.
At a time when the greatest fear of European society is to control, oppose and protect itself, opposite to the arrivals that are rarely requested through destination countries, forced and voluntary migration tends to be considered as humanitarian coverage It represents a way to avoid more restrictive regulations on work migration. In addition, the discretion exercised during the processing of humanitarian coverage applications, as shown through the wonderful variance of approval rates, demonstrates the arbitrary nature of this difference in a global where migration is due to poverty, to Human rights violations, violent civil conflicts. or environmental disasters. In this context, the general tendency to acceptance that prevailed in the hereafter has been replaced, even in countries historically more willing to obtain migrants, by dissatisfaction and hostility towards humanitarian migrants, which are considered a risk of point of view; This also exposes refugees and asylum seekers to the danger of racist and xenophobic violence. These processes inspire the use of asylum as a tool for the border police and the adoption of policies that weaken the condition of humanitarian migrants, a vicious circle that only undermines customers of other people forced to migrate.
Immigration is a phenomenon that, through definition, questions the barriers of a community; Not only physical and political barriers, but also those that describe their identity, thus wondering the principles and values in which a society is founded, whether they are formed through a non -unusual story and taxes through nationalist myths . Therefore, it is almost inevitable that when this phenomenon seems on such a scale and with such an unpredictable evolution, it generates alarmist reactions. These reactions have led to various attempts to choose immigrants according to arbitrary criteria. For example, there is a strong tension in several EU countries to the cultural and devout history of applicants and asylum migrants and announce Christians to Muslim immigrants, despite the fact that the proposal to mention the Christian roots from Europe in the EU letter has been rejected. The application of faith as a criterion of choice is also probably undermining the principles on which the EU has been founded, namely the universalism and dignity of all human beings. The inclusion of schooling and skill titles as an access criteria have reintroduced a founded detail on the elegance of membership, and while opting for more knowledgeable and qualified refugees, it is helping its integration to market work, it is discriminatory. Taking into account the country of origin under the euphemism of merit is ambiguous and can undermine the coverage of migrants from safe countries.
The application of these arbitrary criteria attempt to present immigrants as advantageous to the receiving community and mitigate fears that the new arrivals will irreparably change the features on which the process of nation building was based. In this light, we can also understand why the young East-European democracies, fresh from a history of forced relocations and ethnic cleansings and the difficult shift to the post-communist era, are reluctant to open their frontiers to ethnic and religious minorities of whom they have no direct experience, but only a knowledge influenced by alarmist declarations and the fear of terrorism.
Given that a shared collective identity is a basic element of each political community, the problem lies, in fact, in the reluctance to include new members when a community feels it is in danger of losing its identity. However, we should not forget that it is precisely the most profound identity of Europe, the one which generated the principle of individual dignity and the idea of an institutionalized solidarity, which would be in danger of disappearing should we decide to abdicate the fundamental principles of our civilization or if the call to defend ourselves against migrants and refugees prevails over our desire to welcome them.
Finally, policies for the granting of asylum and other forms of humanitarian protection represent a conscious way of affirming principles, values and worldviews. Policies addressing humanitarian migrations, which today are often subject to security and budgetary pressures, should be an opportunity for societies to reflect on the values on which they are based and deserve to be handed down as a legacy to future generations. It is with this awareness that European societies must deal with the most severe refugee and migration crisis since World War II.
Laura Zanfrini, PhD in Sociology, is currently Full Professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Milan where she teaches Sociology of Migrations and Interethnic Relations and Organizations, Environment and Social Innovation. She is the scientific director of the research centre WWELL (Work, Welfare, Enterprise and Lifelong Learning) and of the Summer School Human Mobility and Global Justice. She is head of the Economic and Labour Department and chief officer of Cedoc (Documentation Center) at the Ismu Foundation, the main Italian scientific institution studying international migrations and intercultural relations.
Prof. Zanfrini has worked as a consultant to numerous Italian and international organization, serves as a Councilor of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People and is Member of the Scientific Committee of several reviews. She has authored more than 300 books, essays and articles.