Foreign Rights

At the borders of Europe, walls and fences are springing up like mushrooms. An epidemic of barbed wire, the symptom of a xenophobic worldview in which migrants are seen as a threat to the Western world, a nuisance to be contained at all costs, even at the cost of their lives. Yet the only crime of these stigmatized travelers - men, women and children from Afghanistan, Senegal, Syria, Morocco, Bangladesh or Sudan - is to be on the move towards a new destiny. To put up a fortress against them, a ruinous paranoid delusion in the service of identitarian withdrawal, is also to ignore the mechanisms of migration, from which Europe has so much benefited. It's time to reverse the perspective, argues the author. In this in-depth investigation, carried out on both sides of the Mediterranean, Émilien Bernard shows the reality of the European borders set up against the "undesirables" who try to cross them. From Laâyoune to Melilla, via Lampedusa, Belgrade or Calais, the succession of obstacles, as diverse as they are useless, serve to push back and make invisible those who simply want to build a life elsewhere.