“Ocean Viking” is the name of the Norwegian humanitarian ship that, with 234 immigrants and after the racist rejection of the new ultra-right government of Italy, was finally able to dock in the French port of Toulon. The impact of this situation reactivated the controversy on (anti-)immigration policies in the European Union.
Pablo Vasco
The Ocean Viking wandered for three weeks in the Mediterranean Sea without being able to disembark the people rescued from six boats, coming from Libya, Algeria, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria and other countries with serious economic-social crises. It was three whole weeks of willful blindness and deafness on the part of all the capitalist governments, whether right-wing or social-democratic, of this Western Europe that many people still assume to be “civilized” and “democratic”.
At the head of the expulsion campaign of “fortress Europe”, the brand new Italian Prime Minister, the neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni, said that her ban is “only the beginning of the work, as decades of installed immigrationist propaganda must be countered”. And Emmanuel Macron, the president of this “land of asylum and human rights” France, authorized the disembarkation but only “exceptionally”.
The rescued people, among whom there are 57 children, are still sheltered and held in a closed “international waiting zone” on the island of Giens, guarded by the army. According to the French government, 44 will be expelled to their countries of origin “for not fulfilling the conditions”, 60 may request asylum, 26 minors have fled, and the remaining 100 have been released on the basis of a court order. It seems that twelve European countries will share out those who were accepted.
As a “sanction” towards Italy, Macron found no better option than suspending the entry into France of 3,500 refugees currently on Italian territory, scheduled for 2023. On top of that, the French government is preparing a new anti-immigration law with greater restrictions. In other words, the costs are always paid by the refugees and also the captains of the solidarity boats, often taken to court by the bourgeois governments.
Some figures and reasons for migration
When we speak of mass migrations, it is not an issue of that individual’s will: the causes lie in wars, famine, dictatorships or ecological catastrophes, which push thousands and thousands of people to leave their countries however they can. In other words, they are all evils caused by the same capitalist-imperialist system that then rages against its victims -immigrants – stigmatizing them, super-exploiting them and even leaving them to die in the middle of the sea.
Since 2014, more than 25,000 migrants have ended their lives in the Mediterranean, including 1,900 this year, either as a result of being shipwrecked in the open sea or unable to dock. That’s a truly terrifying number, almost eight deaths per day, every day, one after another.
Coastal countries are the first to be alerted, since the Dublin agreements (1990) require asylum applications to be processed in the first country of arrival in the European Union. Since the Schengen agreements (1990), the EU tightened the requirements for immigration. And in order not to “invade” the old continent, these “international zones” were created as dykes before allowing the distribution of asylum seekers among the countries of the Union. But they have even outsourced the control of European borders to non-European countries (Libya, Turkey, Morocco, Niger and others). What’s more: some far-right governments – such as those of Poland, Hungary and Austria – want the European Commission to finance the construction of a wall on the external borders of the EU, Trump style.
An outrageous double standard
Or rather two double standards, which must be unmasked and denounced. On the one hand, because their countries are NATO members, in the current political situation, Western European governments welcome without too many obstacles the refugees-immigrants arriving from Ukraine, which is obviously correct.
But what is politically and humanly questionable is their growing closed-mindedness towards those who come from other regions of the globe, generally from the southern hemisphere, which have been their colonies or semi-colonies. With what right do they reject, today, those who arrive from countries which those same metropolises have enslaved, exploited and plundered for decades and centuries until today, imposing poverty, backwardness and dependence on them?
The second double standard is of a more historical nature, of Europe in general and of Italy today in particular. We are facing a hypocritical cynicism, a selective forgetfulness for convenience, because they “forget” that in the last century, from those same countries, millions and millions of migrants fled forced by wars and hunger to Latin America, the United States, Australia and other more prosperous destinations.
As an Argentinean descendant of immigrants, for example, my Swiss grandfather and his sister, during their long days of travel by boat to Argentina, would gather leftover bread from the tables in case they had nothing to eat when they arrived… and they would cry in despair when they had to throw it away because it had been eaten! The same thing happened with my Italian and Basque great-grandparents or grandparents: they all came with one hand behind and the other ahead in search of a better and dignified future for themselves and their families. Many families were scattered for years, until the emigrants who had already settled could “send for” the rest, and others never managed to regroup.
How can we not be indignant, then, at the double standards of these imperialist governments, so racist and anti-immigrant, when they are currently playing the inverse role of receiving them instead of sending them, if they do not even recognize that in their countries it is mostly blacks, Indians, Arabs and other immigrants who work in garbage collection, construction, supermarkets and other services, that is, in the hardest and worst paid jobs, because many native Europeans are reluctant to do them!
Toughening immigration laws brings the capitalists a double benefit: disciplining these workers to accept lower wages and greater precariousness, while at the same time putting downward pressure on the wages and working conditions of the entire working class. The non-regularization of their situation obliges some immigrant workers to renew their provisional residence permits every six months, as well as their labor contracts, with the consequent instability and precariousness under the permanent threat of being fired from their jobs and even expelled from the country.
Towards a world without borders
The capitalist-imperialist system is inhuman by nature. In the service of the profits of the ruling bourgeoisie it promotes the free movement of goods and capital across borders, but at the same time erects humiliating walls, increasingly restricts and criminalizes the free movement of people. At the same time, the disgusting anti-immigrant and racist propaganda campaigns of the right and ultra-right have the political aim of dividing the working class, which is one and without borders.
As part of the political struggle to defeat this capitalist system based on exploitation and oppression, and replace it with the construction of a socialist society, we fight for:
No to “fortress Europe” and other obstacles to free immigration in all countries.
For the unity of the working class against the bosses and their governments. For the immediate entry and regularization of all refugees, immigrants or people “without papers”, with equal rights as the native population.