End of the Year Issue
By Elian Jorand
“Let us think about it: the Mediterranean has become Europe’s largest cemetery.”
With these bleak few words, Pope Francis in Marseille succinctly summarized the current state of migration in the Mediterranean Sea. According to the United Nations, since the beginning of 2023, there have been 186,951 sea arrivals on the continent and 2,517 deaths. On average, in 2023, 11 children die per week attempting to reach the northern shore of the Mediterranean. This summer alone, nearly 1000 people died. Amidst such tragedy, European opinion has been sharply divided. The instrumentalization of migration to achieve political aims has created a national ‘macro-debate’, an obsession for the public about migration and the big consequences such a process carries.
The far right and neo-fascist parties form a spurious front against an ‘invasion’, threatening the tradition and customs of old Europe. Opposing the far right,those who call for uncompromising humanity and solidarity with those in need, welcoming migrants and helping them on their trek across Europe. Both sides generate substantial public debate, with far-fetched theories such the “Grand Remplacement” popularized by Eric Zemmour, or the left parties pushing forward with humanitarian and anti-racist policies. Today, 75 percent of French people are in favor of a public referendum to decide on a national migration policy. However, with the current political atmosphere, we must be able to rise above the noise and tribulations and pay attention to what is important. At the end of the day, the issue of migration should not be one of big theories and political instrumentalization, but one about the migrants themselves, and how and why there is immigration in Europe. We must recentralize the discourse of migration on the personal stories of migrants.
During my travels in West Africa, stories of migration came to be of regular occurrences — the youth trying to escape the lack of opportunity in Africa for Europe, in the hope of a ‘better life.’ I remember a distinct conversation with a friend and her family in an old West African style “dibiterie” in Saint-Louis. While eating a yassa, Leila talked about her hopes of leaving Senegal to pursue her education in a business school in Nancy, France. She spoke fondly about how this opportunity would allow her to get her dream job and lead the life she had always aspired to have. Yet, this was now only a dream, since her visa application to enter France had been rejected. Leila is only one among thousands of people immigrating out of Africa with the hope of a better life in Europe, whether their expectations are true or false. When they are denied the opportunity, people are often forced to go about it in an unofficial and dangerous way. The case of Senegal clearly demonstrates this. Hailed as a bastion of democracy and stability in a continent riddled with political insecurity, Senegal is nonetheless one of the countries which generates the most migrants from West Africa, with 25,000 people emigrating outside of the country, compared to only 12,000 people from neighboring war-torn Mali.
Poverty, amongst other factors, is a primary driver for migration. Looking at the different factors and theories, whether important or completely absurd, helps us understand the process in relation to the different actors. However, such a political approach dehumanizes a very human process. Migration is a fundamental process for humanity. Our story, that of the human species, started precisely with a worldwide migration. We must bring back this humanity to the process of migration. Stories like Leila’s are true for many thousand other humans, each one with their own specifications, making their story of migration unique. If we are to find a solution to migration, one of balance between migrants and host-nations, we must change our current approach which has only led to hate and death for the many actors. We must move away from big characterization and systematic categorization, and instead take a more humane approach, however hard that may be. Only when we take the steps towards understanding the stories behind migration, the reasons, the causes and the motivations, will we be able to tackle the issue. Now that the talking has taken place, and in the hope of finding a solution, we must listen to these stories.