Before the outbreak of cruelty in Gaza slid any topic towards irrelevance, at the beginning of October, some journalists showed the seams of another tragedy: the record number of immigrant arrivals in the Canary Islands. The furor caused by the more than 32,000 people who this year alone jumped into the sea from Africa to set foot in Europe was documented by this and other media for several weeks.
The harsh testimonies of the journeys, the data on arrivals and deaths increasing every day, the fragility of the system and the politicians talking about invasions, burdens and typhus made it impossible to think outside the “migration crisis” approach. In this, as in others emergencies From the past, everything that the sea brings is negative, problematic or uncomfortable.
It is difficult to find stories that address hope, perhaps because bad news prevails and takes up all the available words. What is read with urgency and feels imperative usually devours important and very human things, such as desires, potential or capabilities. No one thinks of saying that the future of Spain also comes in cayuco, and for this reason, migrated people are very rarely asked about it —as Massimo Livi suggests in his book Brief history of migrations— who they are and what their life plan is.
This collective approach is fueled by at least four dominant narratives. The first conceives migration as a threat. Potential fissures in the social stability, cultural integrity and economic heritage of Spain travel aboard these precarious vessels. Then there is migration as a condemnation, in which the most paternalistic places these African silhouettes in a place of rootlessness and defenselessness. Vulnerability is inherent and that is why they must be saved now—and they will always have to be saved.
Spain’s regulatory architecture still insists on perpetuating the limbos in which a migrant must demonstrate to the point of exhaustion that they have reasons to remain on this soil.
Then there is migration as an economic debate, in which calculations are made to fit foreigners into the labor market, in the demographic argument, in fiscal opportunity or in economic utility. Without any of these categories, human mobility is unjustifiable. And finally, there is the ambiguous narrative of the good migrant, which revolves around meritocracy and which pumps out that imaginary of exceptionality, of effort and hard work as bargaining chips for roots. It is an ethnocentric vision, in which to be equal, we must win us the right to be. Although he recognizes some potential in people, he omits that the starting box is not the same for everyone.
As a whole, these are constructions that lack substantial reflection: if a human being is capable of crossing a desert and an ocean to make a new life for themselves in this country, why have we not been able to formulate mechanisms to make that happen? happen? It is still difficult for us, for example, to involve governments and companies in the creation of a system that goes beyond reception and guardianship, and focuses on promoting the capacity and autonomy of each human being. It is difficult for us to understand, even in the most well-intentioned social sector, that “development—as Professor Mbuyi Kabunda explained—supposes a break with dependency.”
Spain’s regulatory architecture still insists on perpetuating the limbos in which a migrant must demonstrate to exhaustion that he has reasons to remain on this land, to which he arrived risking his life, and meanwhile politics entrenches itself in preventing a debacle of the system. and the story reinforces again and again the category of “irregular immigration.”
Despite having seen them many times, the photographs of those young people who arrive in cayuco—in which there are more and more women and children—are spread along with publications and headlines that consider them a problem, that ignore all that abundance of bravery. and resilience that led them to the shores of the Canary Islands. Because we only see the narrowness and poverty, because it is difficult for us to think that they have arrived with no other hope than not to return, or rather, that they have come to stay, to dream here, to create here and one day be. “the new Spaniards”. It is still difficult for us to believe for a moment any of that and to dedicate to them, at least as a welcome, a few words of optimism.
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