On 19 September the United Nations General Assembly will host its first ever High-Level Summit to Address Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants with the aim of bringing countries together behind a more humane and coordinated approach to addressing the worst refugee crisis since the end of WWII. The summit provides an historic opportunity to develop a blueprint for a better international response. On the occasion of this meeting, UNAI has asked researches at UNAI member institutions to submit articles highlighting their research and its implications in helping to solve the issue. Through this series, UNAI hopes to provide an understanding of refugee/migrant flows to its readers, highlight the importance of addressing refugee and migration flows in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and showcase the work of professors and researchers at UNAI institutions. Please note that the articles are for discussion, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.
Laura Zanfrini, Universidad Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano
The existing refugee crisis is emblematic of the ambivalence of Europe and the fact that they do not deal with forced migration at this time. Despite being the cradle of human rights and the very concept of political asylum, Europe, at the same time it is governed through the security logic that prevails in existence. Globally. He led with the greatest movement of migrants and refugees since World War II, Europe has demonstrated the arbitrariness of its borders, whether internal and external.
The incorporated border control strategy aimed at containing migration went hand in hand with the procedure of enlargement of the European Union around 28 Member States, thus reinforcing motion toward the abolition of internal borders. But today, it is precisely the call to its external borders which may just query the very concept of a European not unusual space, as shown in an expanding tendency to suspend loose motion in Europe, reintroducing the controls and internal limits.
The control of humanitarian migration is one of the spaces in which significant progress has been made in the network process, that is, in the progression of an EU at the scale of the EU to a challenge that was once the prerogative of individual states; But unfortunately, this led to a construction in national interests and national selfishness. It is vital to notice how insistent calls for Europe tend to concentrate on the distribution of refugees and not in the propensity to panting the duty to handle this monumental challenge. The emergency scenario touches the cornerstone of the foreign coverage formula since a government formula concentrated in the State with inherent limitations will have to interact with a phenomenon such as forced migration, whose nature transcends the limits of individual countries. Ironically, the depression that allows the walls of the barbed cord, as well as the walls created through legislation and regulations, has resulted in a point of cooperation, although modest, which until now, European countries have not been able to reach. Finally, Europe faces the need to reconsider the concept of border that is difficult to reconcile with the concept of universal human equality, one of the basic principles on which European civilization is based.
The refugee factor The inevitable gap between the inclusive logic of universal human rights and the prerogative of the nation state to exclude undesirables. In fact, after a unilateral procedure of definition through countries of destination, the figure of the refugee is emblematic of the contradiction of a state-centered Formula in reaction to demands for justice and belonging to today’s global society, and demonstrates the limits of our formulas in protecting the deficient and vulnerable. on the basis of the fiction of national societies delimited through national fences.
Upon entering the discussion more deeply, and beyond the countries of the contrast division, the occasions of recent months have revealed the main weaknesses of Europeans in this case:
First of all, having reduced border management to a technocratic task, measured in terms of economic costs and efficiency, as is clearly demonstrated by the crude bookkeeping approach regarding expulsions whose increase is hailed as a success, Europe has discovered that it lacks convincing, persuasive and ethically based criteria for distinguishing between authentic and fictitious refugees.
At the same time, Europe has sought to involve migrant arrivals thanks to the doubtful practice of externalization of limits. The desire to limit migratory flows and reduce the number of refugee/asylum applications, added through agreements with countries explained as Insurance (which signed with Turkey is only the last of a long series), has definitely prevailed over the real control of migratory flows. In consequence, Europe has realized that it did not have those instruments, such as humanitarian channels, which, which They would have imaginable managing urgency in a way more in line with the precept 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.
Within the current framework of human mobility the distinction between economic and humanitarian migration is increasingly shaky and uncertain, and sometimes openly questioned by those who believe in the existence of a universal right to migrate (founded on the principles of freedom of movement, the equality of all human beings, or the right to go abroad in search of dignified life conditions whenever they are not guaranteed in one’s home country).
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 possibly would come with a wide diversity of human rights violations, adding the concern of being an issue to sterilization or splitting, to the violations of homosexuals and survival committed to through environmental screws to call only a few. In addition, flight migrants do not necessarily succeed in a foreign territory, however, they are located in one of the many overpopulated refugee fields for other internal displaced persons, in which many of them will also end up living for years in a type of captivity that is the very antithesis of the preference for freedom that had once marked the adventure of other people who migrate for humanitarian reasons. Migration is uncommon not only forced, but even mandatory, carried out through various traffic bureaucracy and slavery. Finally, the coverage systems have been built according to a male archetype, although now we know that the paths of forced migrants are deeply Gfinisher, a condition that makes them inappropriate to fulfill the express wishes and dangers that represent female migrants .
It is exactly the inclusion of new categories of other people in the coverage formula that has initiated the increase in applications, which makes the difference between voluntary and forced migrations that are increasingly porous and questionable. However, abandoning this unsatisfactory difference would not be useful in managing mass arrivals such as those recorded in recent months. Undoubtedly, in the hole opened through the lack of shared criteria, it is relatively simple to submit unjustified and instrumental requests for humanitarian coverage. Very often, this is done with the complicity of actors and organizations that can be motivated through charitable intentions, but underestimate that they have an effect on what their movements have on the resources and on the structure of the mandatory consensus to deal with the most wonderful conditions vulnerability. Consequently, it is mandatory to take into account the essential difference between Americans fleeing various types of persecution or war, those fleeing economic and environmental conditions that threaten their lives, and those who migrate because they need to improve their status.
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 competition 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, she 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 such arbitrary criteria is intended to provide immigrants with such advantageous advantages for the receiving network and to assuage concerns that the newcomers will irreparably replace the characteristics on which the procedure of the national structure is based. On this day, we can also perceive why the young European democracies in the east, new, in a history of forced relocations and ethnic cleansing and difficult replacement in the post-communist era, are reluctant to open their borders to ethnic and devout minorities whose minorities have no direct experience, but only a wisdom influenced through alarmist statements and the concern of terrorism.
Since a shared collective identity is a basic detail of each political network, the challenge lies, in fact, in the reluctance to come with new members when a network feels that it is in danger of wasting its identity. However, we will not have the most internal identity in Europe, which generated the precept of individual dignity and the concept of institutionalized solidarity, which would be in danger of disappearing if we made the decision to abdicate the basic precepts of the Basic precepts of the basic precepts of the basic precepts of the basic precepts of the basic precepts of the basic precepts of the basic precepts of the basic precepts of the basic precepts of the basic precepts of our religion. The civilization or if the call to protect us opposes migrants and refugees prevail over our preference to welcome them.
Finally, the asylum that grants policies and other bureaucracy of humanitarian coverage constitutes a conscious way to announce the principles, values and visions of the world. Humanitarian migration policies, which are issues for security and budgetary pressures, deserve to be an opportunity for societies to reflect on the values in which they are based and deserve to be transmitted as an inheritance for long -term generations. It is with this awareness that European societies have to face the maximum serious crisis of refugees and migration since World War II.
Laura Zanfrini, PhD in Sociology, is recently a professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Milan, where she teaches the sociology of migration and interethnic relations and organizations, the environment, and social innovation. She is the scientific director, she is the scientific director. the Well Research Center (work, wellness, business and lifelong learning) and human mobility and global judge of the summer school. She is the head of the Department of Economics and Labour and director of CEDOC (Documentation Centre) of the ISMU Foundation, the leading Italian clinical establishment for foreign migration and intercultural relations.
Professor Zanfrini has worked as representative Italian and foreign organizations, is an advisor to the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Other Itinerant People, and is a member of the clinical committee for several journals. She is the writer of over three hundred pounds, essays and articles.