Given the frequency with which we talk about migrations, we could ask ourselves if a World Day of Migrants. However, it is precisely the discourse on migration and not the phenomenon itself, natural and millenary, that makes such an event necessary. The municipal movement knows this and has been reminding anyone who wants to listen for years.
As the level of government closest to the people, it matters little that municipal governments lack the powers and resources to address migration policies, almost all of them state or supranational. Nothing exempts them from the responsibility of addressing the local reality and taking care of the people who inhabit it. Our cities are the fruit and the reflection of us, the people who inhabit them, regardless of our origin or legal status. The margins of our citizenship are not dictated by borders, but by our way of life, our local community, the places we recognize as our own. And although local governments do not have borders, many of them are crossed by them.
Last October I had the privilege of visiting Lampedusa. There, in the heart of the Mediterranean, each of these arguments emerged with more force if possible. Like so many other places, the municipality is inhabited by a small community installed on a large border. It is not just a geographical border, but a crossroads in which countless contradictions, injustices and inequalities forged for such a long time that they even seem part of normality are found on a daily basis. Lampedusa is above all a normal place, full of daily actions with neighbors who lament and celebrate the same things as in the rest of the streets of the planet.
The only difference is that, from the island, the horizon is infinite and full of boats. For a thousand different reasons, dozens of boats travel every day on invisible highways loaded with food, merchandise, fish of all sizes and people who work, who suffer, who wait. And in that sea that feeds and embraces all people, a continuous trickle of tragedies splashes daily life in the neighborhood. Among all of them, on the night of October 3, 2013, a tragedy occurred that remains etched with particular harshness in the collective memory. At three fifteen in the morning, a boat carrying more than 500 people crowded together in search of a better future sank a few miles from the coast. 368 died. That moment, that misfortune and all those that followed have to serve to awaken consciences and tell the story to the world.
Today, the Lampedusa Cemetery is a monument to dignity and memory. There they rest, along with the townspeople, many other victims of a permanent tragedy. Their personal data, often impossible to trace, have been replaced by drawings of fish and mermaids, because the hope is that the sea where they were lost will welcome them.
On this island that does not reach 6,000 inhabitants, global geopolitics often rules. Its mayor, Totò Martello, has been asking for support for years. Martello, who in addition to being a mayor is a fisherman and knows the laws of the sea, is a regular at international forums on migration and development. As mayor, he experiences the gap between what the law says and what reality brings him on a daily basis. He often faces complaints from his neighbors about the damage that abandoned boats cause on fishing boats and explains to each other that getting rid of them is a national competence. Media between port authorities, humanitarian, ministries and brotherhoods to find solutions to problems that are not written in the books. It takes in live animals that have made the journey without being able to take people in. And it repeats, incessantly, that it is inadmissible to manage the same situation from the emergency for more than 30 years. The emergency becomes everyday.
Towards the Lampedusa Charter: building a bridge of peace
Off the coast of Lampedusa, Tunisia, on the other side of the horizon, is the city of Sfax. In addition to being the second city and economic engine of the country, Sfax is one of the Tunisian ports from which most young people go to sea. Sfax Deputy Mayor Med Wajdi Aydi has spent years engaging in exchanges with other members of UCLG to learn to connect all the actors in the territory and row with them in the same direction. Its objective is to save lives, restore hope to youth, provide information and shelter to those who lack them. Now, Lampedusa and Sfax dream of building a bridge: a bridge of peace that brings back the dignity of those who were lost in the few hundred miles that separate their two continents.
Under the leadership of Lampedusa, the UCLG membership has embarked on a journey to draw up a Bill of Rights on human mobility that puts dignity at the center, recognition at the base and peace on the horizon.
It would be inhumane to remain indifferent and it is no longer possible to participate as mere observers. In the municipal movement we know and defend that borders are not natural, that human mobility is. We know that joint and beneficial solutions will not be found without changing the conversation. And we know, we defend, that the conversation is about people and territories, about human rights and about the opportunity to grow up in welcoming communities.
Now, Lampedusa and Sfax dream of building a bridge: a bridge of peace that brings back the dignity of those who were lost in the scarce hundred miles that separate their two continents.
Under Lampedusa’s leadership, the United Cities and Local Governments membership has embarked on a journey to develop a Bill of Rights on human mobility that puts dignity at the center, recognition at the base, and peace on the horizon. With the Lampedusa Charter, the local governments of all continents assume the responsibility of addressing migration from the desire to guarantee universal access to the Right to the City.
This Charter is a new signal to all the actors that govern migration at the international level that local levels of government are art and part of this phenomenon and that, with or without powers, they are forced to confront it. The objective is to act with shared values in the new social contract that the global agendas propose. The new multilateralism that we seek and need must also review the notions of border and citizenship to bring them closer to the realities we inhabit. We cannot look the other way.
The world is full of Lampedusas that we cannot afford. They are repeated on the borders of Poland or on the roads of Mexico
From the visit to Lampedusa with the Deputy Mayor of Sfax to participate in the annual remembrance events, we have not brought a history of borders but a story of neighbors, neighbors, survivors, authorities and civil society. A community suffering with global responsibilities. The world is full of Lampedusas that we cannot afford. They are repeated on the borders of Poland or on the roads of Mexico. The municipal movement listens and asks the world to restore dignity, equity, recognition and solidarity in the governance of migration. We propose to build a new framework based on participatory, community and resilient solutions. Because this is not a question of borders but of humanity.
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