The 21st century will be known in global history as an era of migration. The flow of populations moving from one place to another on the planet is more visible than ever. The reasons are different; people are looking for better jobs and education for themselves and their children, departing from natural disasters, fleeing conflict and political oppression in search of safety, etc. Economic or political, voluntary or forced, migration has become a global phenomenon that reshapes not only the demographics of the world but the entire social reality. Children, with their migrant families, children also abandoned by families, children exploited in the context of migration (especially through trafficking), children fleeing from situations of very serious violence and abuse, make up a large part of this moving population.
Only through an exercise of re-imagining migration at the collective mental level we will be able to find both at the micro-level of interpersonal relations and at the macro-level of national and international policies, the path of a coexistence based on mutual respect.
The first step we can do is to make it simple. We are all immigrants. Whoever sent a DNA fragment to an examiner knows that there is no pure race or ethnicity. The genealogical tree of each of us reveals a wide range of influences of all kinds from many corners of the world. Genetic puritanism does not exist. We are, in various forms and degrees, related to each other.
Then it would be good to work on destabilizing our own stereotypes and prejudices about others in general and about migrants in particular. Each of us can do this individually, trying to understand the simple mechanism by which we get to label by increasing the differences between ourselves and the 'others', and greatly diminishing the differences between us. This is how we become the beautiful and good ones and 'they', strangers, those who come with all the problems. This is how we get to say (and then even believe) that all foreigners are uneducated, all migrants steal our jobs, because of them we can no longer be safe in our schools and cities. This is how we get our children away from the migrant or refugee children that we consider dangerous. The effort is even harder to make when other important social institutions (the media or schools), don't provide many anti-stereotype messages. The media turns the news about migration into sensationalist, fatalistic, alarmist news. The schools rarely offer integration programs for children and young people in search of a new beginning. Above all, the wave of nationalism and conservatism that seems to haunt the world does not support the efforts of re-imagination but, on the contrary, urges us to cognitive laziness. We avoid any positive information about the benefits brought by waves of migration. We keep the comfort bubble in which we have built a life without 'others' and thus, instead of building bridges between us, we build walls.
Author: Laura Grünberg, Professor Ph.D. University of Bucharest, Faculty of Sociology, founding member of AnaLize Feminist Society AnA, expert on gender issues and literature writer for children.
This article has been prepared and published as part of the thematic package by Terre des hommes Romania, within the regional project 'Building Relationships through Innovative Development of Gender-Based Violence Awareness in Europe - BRIDGE'.
The BRIDGE project is implemented under the lead of the Terre des hommes Regional Office for Europe together with partners from Belgium (Defense for Children International DCI-Belgium and FEDASIL), Greece (ARSIS), Malta (Kopin) and Romania (Tdh Romania), and has the general objective to strengthen the statutory response to GBV affecting children and young people on the move in EU countries.
The BRIDGE project is supported by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014–2020).
The content of this article represents the views of the author only and is his/her sole responsibility. The European Commission does not accept any responsibility for use that may be made of the information it contains.