by Fabio Alberti, founder of Un Ponte Per

"I have in my eyes the dreadful scene of the waves of an enemy sea that, after swallowing dozens of people, tosses what remains of a lifeboat of hope, stranded and then destroyed, near Crotone. Only the last known shipwreck. How many unknown ones we do not know by definition.

But we do know that there will be many more because a forced conduit is in operation, forcing growing masses to emigrate, a sort of watering hole that no one seems to want to turn off.

So take this as an outlet. And forgive some inaccuracies.

But I wonder why, out of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of committees, associations, organisations for assistance, relief, and defence of the rights of migrants, not a single one can be found that asks the Italian government and the European Union for something concrete to protect the right of those who live in the Global South to remain in their own land in dignity and safety? Why do we have to hear the fateful and hairy 'let's help them in their homes' from the Lega and instead there is no concrete indication of what this means?

Why do we keep accepting and repeating the phrase 'they flee from war and hunger', as if war and hunger were midsummer fortunes and not products of human policies, without ever mentioning those who provoke war and hunger, organise it, and practice it.

Don't we have more to ask for than welcome? And if we do, why don't we do it in the same tone of voice? Why don't the demonstrations we make on the issue of emigration carry the sign 'No more colonial exploitation' high in the front row ?

However, this concentration on the issue ofreception (don't get me wrong, necessary and rightful) has ended up shifting the issue of emigration from a political and rights issue to a mere humanitarian one, so that it almost seems as if reception is a pleasure to be done out of a good heart, 'humanitarian' indeed. And not, if not a right, as it should be the right of every human being to be able to take up residence wherever he or she wishes, at least a duty, ofEurope, being itself, with all the evidence, through ecological debt, through arms trafficking, through its colonial past, the cause of the evil that it attempts to confine across borders.

For this is the truth that we all know, but too little is said.

The wars from which those who migrate flee are fuelled, when not provoked, wanted, organised as part of the struggle to grab land and raw materials for industry in the North. Of course there are local causes, but these are intertwined with legacies of colonialism and above all with the activity that the former occupying powers continue undaunted to produce in determining governments and policies. And not a few African leaders have been in trouble for denouncing the interference of the former colonial powers, Thomas Sankara for one.

The adverse climatic conditions that force migration are a direct consequence of Western industrial production, since it has been calculated that African populations produced less than one tenth of the carbon dioxide caused by European overdevelopment. There is therefore a European debt to Africa that should impose the reception of a surveyed share of the 216 million potential environmentally displaced persons predicted by the World Bank. So much for humanitarianism. Here, reception is a duty.

The hunger that forces people to look elsewhere for sources of life does not come from nowhere or even 'from nature', but from, among other things, the transformation of subsistence agriculture into monocultures for export resulting from integration into the world market, with whose proceeds the richest fractions of the population buy goods produced in the North, often imported at the expense of local production that has been denied protection as a result of liberalist trade treaties.

Corrupt regimes, swallowing up resources, holding populations hostage by stealing futures and resources are often 'friendly' regimes, supported, fortified, sometimes installed by western countries. And economic policies that have not allowed development are often advised, when not imposed by a monetary fund dominated by the US and European nations.

All this is known to all. Or at least to us. It is not everything, of course, but it is a significant part of the phenomenon.

Why then do we clamour for the revision, or cancellation depending on the radicality or point of view of each, of the legislation that prevents migrants from entering Europe and do not demand, demonstrate, petition in the same way and with the same force for example to demand a revision of trade policies, from the BITs to the free trade agreements, through which the European Union and Italy with it, continues to maintain unequal terms of trade with African countries?

Why do we accept that only those who, whether militias or smugglers, are only the last link in a chain of causes that lead to the deaths of thousands of people that has at its origin multinational crime syndicates that plunder resources by exploiting those who work for starvation wages?

I know very well that there are those who, much better than I, have already said these things and who have studied and written about Italian and European foreign and trade policies towards Africa. That I am not saying anything new, but don't hold it against me if I say that the public confrontation seems to be only between those who ask for hospitality and those who do not want to give it. Instead, the responsibility of foreign, economic, commercial, military, in essence neo-colonial, Italian and European policies as the cause of emigration does not seem to be on the agenda, and therefore neither is that of actions to overturn them.

Perhaps there is a need to build a platform for a new foreign policy that seriously focuses on the right to stay as well as the right to emigrate. Perhaps the fight for reception would also have more force, because it would be part of a process that at least calls for, if it cannot yet envisage, a reduction and then an end to this epochal deportation of the people of Africa (and not only) that not the sea, but politics, transforms into bodies carried by the waves."

** By 'reception policy' I mean here the claiming, advocacy, and campaigning policies that focus only on the humanitarian aspect of reception and end up being at the expense, in fact, of a discourse on rights, an analysis of the causes, and therefore the claiming of actions to change Italian and European foreign and trade policies necessary to put an end to the obligation to emigrate.

Article originally published on 2 March 2023.