Antonio Navalón
From the Book of Books to the other installments that history has given us as if they were a kind of bundles of the Apocalypse, it is written that there are times when crises are triggered and behave in such a way that they cease to be crises and become hecatombs. I don’t know what the first migration was, probably the Exodus. If so, the first “coyote” must have been Moses. However, Moses had a mandate. A mandate was assigned to him by a harsh and jealous God who also forced him to take off his shoes when he entered Horeb, the holy land. When God appeared to him in the form of a bush, Moses asked in surprise who he was, to which God replied, “I am who I am”. Subsequently, Moses was commanded to save and lead the people of Israel out of the bondage of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land.
God did not have to explain why He had chosen those people or why He sent them to the Promised Land, He was who He was, and His word was exempt from explanations. However, with that Exodus, the great migrations began. From that moment on, the history of humanity became a permanent redefinition of who is the owner of the land, who has the right to live, and how we combine the opportunities given to us by the place where we are born or under the circumstances in which we come to this world, with what we need from others who simply have nothing.
China, India, and the region’s countries now account for more than fifty percent of the world’s population. Suppose one consolidates the social balance of these countries. In that case, one could find consolidated perceptions similar to the underdevelopment, hunger, poverty, and life under the most precarious conditions of the already decadent white world, the supposed triumphant world. We, the whites, are more than one thousand three hundred million inhabitants who until ten years ago obtained about eighty percent of the benefits produced by the planet, hence the need for large numbers of slaves.
I don’t even want to think about how I would feel if I had been born in one of the regions near the Democratic Republic of Congo or how I would feel if I were simply one of the many peoples and tribes dedicated to carving out the bowels of the Earth to take everything from diamonds to tungsten; from lithium to any other material.
Migration is a cursed word and is the collective poison of our times. For example, in the United States, no one wants to see that in that false cowardly dilemma of being weak in the face of migration is also one of the most significant American challenges. This challenge is posed because the country of the Stars and Stripes has become an old, defeated nation with little desire and willingness to work. However, it seems that our neighbors to the North are constantly grappling with the reality that they have no future without migrants. The plan presented by President Biden, the so-called “New Deal”, can only be achieved if those from Zacatecas, Punjab, and many other areas of the world go to crush stones. And that is because the Americans, those who consumed and lost the most perfect empire ever made, are no longer fit and willing to continue working.
That being said, why all the showmanship on the part of the Border Patrol, why the need to hunt down Haitians and Central Americans as if they were cattle? But the worst of all this is that the National Guard collaborates with the US forces in the migratory Wall on the banks of the Suchiate River as if it were what in its time was the support of Hungarian special forces to the SS against the Jews. All to prevent our Central American brothers and sisters – who every day are less brothers and sisters and more objects of elimination – from even having the illusion of living as we once wished.
The world seems to want to forget that we are currently going through an absolutely unprecedented situation where the great reserves of coexistence and collective functioning have been shattered. There is no longer any prey for hatred or malice, and there are no longer limits to collective social behavior. All this that is happening and evolving is a consequence of the so-called communications revolution. Just as the “Black Lives Matter” movement became a phenomenon that overtook the State and the majority of people, the explosion of bitterness and poison generated by migration and its treatment will also eventually and inevitably explode, creating problems worldwide.
Migration has become a universal pandemic. It generates hatred wherever it goes. It recomposes societies based on small ropes and that are only snakes’ nests against each other. The migrant is no longer grateful for having received a second chance. The same communications explosion has made him think that he also has the right to the development cake and that it is not that we allow him to live under the condition that he goes hungry, cold and serves us as a slave to build a new life, but that the reality is that during all these years we have stolen his piece of the pie.
All of the above explains the Arabs’ feeling in the suburbs of Paris or why the city in which the most Spanish is spoken, Los Angeles, is a set of gunpowder about to explode. And everything is due to a straightforward reason, which is that, unlike other times, migration today is not made for those who arrive with the spirit of finding their place and collaborating with the societies that welcome them. Today migration is based on resentment on those who come and fear of those who receive them voluntarily or involuntarily. It is not about continuing to give exceptional budgets so that our National Guard can continue mistreating our Central American brothers and sisters. It is about, among other things, not forgetting that the President who governs under the sustenance of having been elected with the highest number of votes ever obtained is a President built on solidarity and empathy towards others. “First the poor,” that’s what he said. I doubt that the word “poor” is intended for or refers only to Mexicans in his mind. Being poor is a way of life, and it is a condition that does not expire after crossing a border. I understand that ours go first, but Haitians, Hondurans, and other Central Americans are also part of that group he promised to defend, albeit indirectly.
Those who arrive in our country and the different migratory reception points do not arrive under a welcome or social integration program. Still, on the contrary, they come under a condition of hatred. Those who cannot arrive fill us with shame, and both in the Washington hills and the National Palace, it is necessary to remember that the world without migrants is simply not possible. If migrants are required, why not, instead of mistreating them and creating universities of hate, do we not dedicate ourselves to creating rational systems of reception? It is urgent to establish a mechanism under which death, hunger, and poverty in the internment camps of Tijuana or Tapachula are not places where – as the Chileans showed us regarding the Venezuelan case – they end up burning the few belongings that human beings have.
In 2005 I had the opportunity to participate in a debate organized by the New York University School of Law on migration within the Program “Tijuana: The Third Nation” where Jorge Castañeda, professor of the institution and former Secretary of Foreign Affairs, also participated. Exteriors. What impressed me most about the presentation was when former Foreign Minister Castañeda said that Mexico had no moral right to complain about the treatment received by its immigrants in the United States since Mexicans treated those who arrived at the Southern Border worse. At the time, it seemed an exaggeration, and I did not share what was said. Sixteen years later, I have to confess that the former Chancellor was right. And that at that time, we had not yet reached the dishonorable role of becoming Donald Trump’s Wall wearing the uniforms of the National Guard.
It is necessary to be very careful. These are not the grapes of wrath. These are the moors of hatred between us, and we are doing it because we have simply settled under a mechanism of intellectual dumbing and an economic insult. It is time to understand that there can be no development without migrants and realize that it is time to create efficient formulas for social integration. Otherwise, sooner rather than later, our entire environment and those of our neighbors will harbor so many enemies that it will be impossible to defend ourselves. Without leaving aside the fact that, amid this climate, this madness, and this pandemic of hatred, I want to say that, if not solved, the blow of terrorism could have a place.
Amid this pandemic of hatred, it is necessary to determine a policy and a fixed course that determines what we will do with all those who cross borders with the human desire for a better quality of life. It would be not very honest to forget that a Mexican also decided to seek a better life and set out for the United States one day. Today, instead of persecuting and mistreating, we have to add up and find a way that borders are not synonymous with persecution and hatred.
