Mass immigration appears in the politic agenda since almost a decade, and for at least another ten years will continue to occupy newspapers front pages.
Media attention is directed mainly to daily chronicles or to proposals on how to find ways to fight it, but they rarely analyze the deep roots and the main facets of the phenomenon. However these same chronicles, reporting fresher events linked to the war in some regions – often distinguished from the more general immigration wave (of economic nature)-, require an in-depth anamnesis of the phenomenon in order to generate a diagnosis untainted by emotion and identify a consistent therapeutic line.
The emotion of public opinion is driven overall by the tragedies of those who flee from war areas; therefore, we have to step back and analyze with intellectual honesty the underlying causes of immigration, which are directly linked to the unfair distribution of wealth between the North and the South of the world.
Since the political and economic split East-West has vaporized (due to the failure of the self-defined socialist countries), a North-South dichotomy, i.e. the conflict between the world’s haves and have nots, has emerged as one of the main problems of the present historical moment. This confrontation, however, has remained the subject of scholarly treatises and learned essays on geopolitics, but has never become the theme of a single international political meeting.
This careless negligence probably is the root cause of many of the problems that in recent decades are harassing the human society, starting precisely from the exoduses south-north and – as we will see- the associated phenomenon of terrorism.
The abdication of the international political instances in favor of the individual states and/or, worse, to the uncontrolled forces of spontaneous society, has triggered a series of actions and reactions that we can categorize according to two different strands:
a) government initiatives of some of the faster growing economies (the so-called BRICS), or who control the resources highly demanded by the rich nations, OPEC countries in the lead;
b) spontaneous answers of the populations of the most economically underdeveloped and politically absent countries.
The common denominator is that both groups aim to contend their part of wealth and resource to affluent economies.
Institutional activism
By transforming the money exchange control from a classical instrument of exploitation in the hands of the most rich countries, into a weapon of economic fight, some governments led by China have relied on the same laws of the market to invade the West with products, often unsophisticated, but at very competitive prices. The result has been a sharp weakening of the manufacturing sector of developed countries that has dealt a blow to the economies least prepared to face international competition in terms of innovation and quality.
This phenomenon has caused the displacement of considerable masses of money to some emerging countries. However, only the Chinese government (the only one that retains a complete control of nearly three-quarters of its economy) has used this influx of means of payment in a strategic manner. Such a maneuver is not available to the other BRICS because of private-fragmentation of the production system and the consequential and contemporary illicit outflow of the freshly arrived capitals towards tax havens.
Other countries, favored by the geo-physical distribution of resources (the kingdom and the Arab emirates) have set their strategy of competition with the rich nations of the North in a less obvious, but more sophisticated and effective way: Western money, in fact, has continued and continues to pour into their coffers at the same pace at which the wells flowed crude oil towards the North; these governments had only the sole task of administering the flux
a) to meet the needs of unbridled domestic consumptions,
b) to invest in view of the exhaustion of wells and/or the growth of energy sources alternative to fossil fuels,
c) but, above all, to make a singular return migration of petrodollars towards the developed countries from which they had arrived, in exchange for a reverse migration of the power of control over many large multinational companies or over the real estates of the greatest Northern capitals historical centers.
Spontaneous answers: the integration
lacking adequate government policies (at states and, especially, international level) populations of many underdeveloped countries have produced two forms of spontaneous reaction to the unequal distribution of wealth: a submissive integration desire or a rabid expropriation drive.
An increasing part of the most disadvantaged mankind has begun to invite itself to the table of the richest countries, choosing the path of integration through the ancient instrument of emigration. The entire history of the species, for that matter, is marked by migration and as for some birds, maybe one day you will find that there is a gene in the human DNA that leads us to constantly look for new promised lands.
When humanity, just fallen from the Ethiopian plateau (or South African plains) trees, began the colonization of the planet, the entire history has been marked by more or less epochal emigration shifts towards lands (considered) most fertile or less crowded. Needless to go into the details.
And even today, after all, the recent phenomenon of mass tourism can be considered as a non-episodic emergence of an ancestral push towards the exploration of unknown lands or different settlement alternatives: the more we are rooted in a city and state, and the stronger we feel the need of temporary emigration towards wonderful lands of which we preserve the memory (at least until the following vacation), as some of the most rewarding and gratifying days..
Among many people lying below the poverty line, the individual integration within opulent nations is the first and greatest aspiration.
This tendency, incidentally, will surely increase further with the widening of the wealth distribution gap, even in the face of possible further impoverishment of the countries of origin, due the deteriorated (or perishable) political and climatic conditions, unless a strong action is undertaken in those same countries with specific UN policies.
The struggle
In this scenery it is particularly important that we focus on the spontaneous reaction of some Middle-East groups we are getting used to call “extremists”.
Their reasoning deserves a special attention.
Normally they start from the evident and indisputable finding of unequal distribution of consumed resources, pointing out that the highest levels of well-being and wealth are concentrated in the northern hemisphere of the world.
The next step is the ascertainment that this distribution coincides with the religious geography of the planet.
These simple observations lead to establish the following almost self-evident transitivity equation:
Rich countries = Christians Countries
Poor (and exploited) countries = Islamic Countries
(It doesn’t matter if people in many poor countries is not Muslim. Not-Muslim poor countries are assimilated to the rich ones, or are not considered at all: they are infidels and the coherence is not important).
Hence the economic North-South conflict get characterized as a religious war between Islamic countries against infidel countries, wherever and how rich they are (hence, for example, the support to rebellion attempts by some Islamist Uighur groups, against the infidel central government in China).
Two interesting aspects of this radicalization, apart the call to arms of all Muslims against the rich infidels, are:
- the fiercer apposition to their most close West, namely the State of Israel;
- and the even more strong (and often bloodier) rivalry between believers who support the need for this holy war and the co-religionists who do not agree with this view.
These co-religionists are treated as traitors of the faith, therefore more foes than the real enemies.
Clearly, the degree of exploitation of religion for not religious goals is at its best; however, in many of the so-called crisis areas, these calls to arms are working, feed the mobilization against the rich and infidel exploiter countries and provide an ideological and ennobling basis for the most barbaric terrorism. Which is not so a new phenomenon, since the first kamikaze and terrorist in history has been the biblical Samson who killed himself and all the elders of the Philistines, by bringing down the columns of the building where he was under captivity.
To return to our main theme, terrorism has to be considered as a kind of flip side of emigration and one of the many facets of the polyhedron of the unjust distribution of wealth.
It’s the stem problem of wealth and resources distribution, therefore, which we should face if we want to solve any of the complex facets of our historic momentum, including immigration and terrorism.
Groped shortcuts or different solutions are unhistorical and can only worsen the situation.
War and of hunger refugees
The migration crisis has brought to the surface the worst and the best of the old Europe. The dramatic images published by the media have sparked a wave of emotion, which is matched by the cynicism of some governments and populist politicians.
In vain the farsighted Union citizens have tried to awaken the most basic feelings of humanity, relying on the tragic images of war refugees. In fact, the distinction between these people and the economic migrants is weak and does not have a real sense, if not for the greater urgency degree and the faded memories that some Europeans retain of the world war.
A bloody death due to bombs is not much different from a slower death due to hunger: only the urgency for an help may change, but not so much.
Specifically, then, the exiled Syrians and Afghans are also the result of political intervention (and non-intervention) adopted in the recent past by the Northern governments (Western and Eastern), with regard to these countries. Even the climate, with the a decade of exceptional drought in Syria and Iraq, may have played an important role, first by encouraging strong waves of urbanization and then the escape from the bombed cities.
We cannot forget the case of South Sudan and Eritrea, which can’t be evoked without arousing the ire or the concerns of some big countries (like as Russia and China) who consider any foreign intervention as a break their non-interference taboo.
Some leaders, unaccustomed to the study of history, think that they can solve the migration problem by erecting walls, cutting bridges and churning decrees. The Romans (a millennium and a half ago, in Britain and against the so-called barbarians) and several times numerous Chinese potentates (against the nomadic border tribes) have tried this way . But always with poor, if not zero and uncertain results.
In a world that is getting smaller and smaller, it is difficult that they succeed today.
In an era when the goods are virtually free to move around the planet, except for the payment of some customs, it will be difficult to persist to counter the free movement of persons. Like it or not, a world without borders and passports is not only desirable, but constitutes an historically inevitable stage.
The talks underway for a transatlantic common market and for a similar community in the Asian South-East (apart the problems tied to the negotiation methods), are moving in this direction.
Let’s help them at home
As for the economic migrants, those who honestly believe that the aid should begin in their own countries are surely right. It is not sure, however, that the proponents of this point of view are fully aware of what it involves. In fact, it is not enough to send them some peanuts and used clothes, to bring peace to our conscience.
To help them in their countries, as first thing we should give an answer to the main cause of migration, namely the imbalance in the distribution of resources. Above all, we must set aside the widespread illusion that the crisis of employment and GDP in some Western countries could be resolved with policies aimed to permanently support domestic consumptions: it is like trying to treat a drug addict by administering him additional drug doses; he will have a temporary relief to his abstinence, but in the long lung run his addiction will worsen.
As citizens of the affluent countries we must resign ourselves to consume less and to give more (or more shares of our working time) to the third world: a process which the market has already triggered, although with its lengthy and many casualties. To avoid the latter, it is necessary that the governments undertake to lead this trend, although no politician, eager for votes (and deaf to history), is willing to do own this recipe. In any case, this is a theme considerably broader which we cannot afford here.
Michele di Pisa 