In the last decade, has hardly been spoken of immigration policy. It may seem a contradiction in a few years, in which immigration as a phenomenon has increasingly come to dominate political agendas and public debates. But little progress has been made, to say nothing, in the development of instruments that allow to talk in public management from the mobility. In democratic systems, that means to talk about rights (and yes, also duties), freedoms and guarantees.
The mobility rights appears to be out of the public policy debate. Some voices advocating for the disabled without explaining how to protect people from all kinds of exploitation; others —the more— they believe their rights are threatened by this global mobility.
This construct is not free: it has been forming gradually in the conjunction of two trends. The first is based on the not doing anything, not wanting to talk about how to manage immigration, in not address how to cope with fears (often misunderstood and intentionally fed) of a part of the population to whom the world seems to change too fast. That seems to have been, in good part, the attitude of social-democracy in the North to meet the immigration policies: better not to speak of the subject in order to avoid possible costs of elections. The other line has drunk of sources are more conservative, and has become a strong problematise and, at times, criminalize the different. Using speeches epidermal, the language nativist confronting a them threatening compared with a us threatened has been growing in the public debate, in which neither have been put on the table proposals for change are realistic and reasonable, be adjusted to the right (and rights) to manage the migration from the res publica.
not To recognize this absence of debate, based on assumptions outdated, has worn the public action migration essentially as a control of the borders. Reinforcing this view is based on the security that converts the immigration threat is trying to do immigration policy from the border. An attempt that cannot fail to be unsuccessful, because the border is a tool which, converted into an end in itself, becomes a distortion of the orderly management of migration flows, as advocated by the Global Compact of Migration. This dysfunction leads to constant violations of the rights and becomes a gloomy business for the benefit of a few pockets at the expense of many lives.
In the absence of migration policies, comprehensive understanding of the mobility as a global phenomenon, in the absence of a new perspective that exceeds archetypes already outdated, they move many projects for life. And move, increasingly, many lives shattered by actions short-sighted that leave you in the hands of all kinds of abuse. Lift the look of the border is essential in terms of good management to ensure that, in democracies healthy, the protection of the rights of 70 years were constituted as inalienable to any human being.
Gemma Pinyol-Jimenez is the director of migration policy and diversity at Instrategies. Associate researcher GRITIM-UPF.
