While brochures and websites on the integration of immigrants continue to regularly present us with an integration model based on the society of the so-called glorious French 30s, the years of maximum development of the welfare state, today our world is immersed in a radical transformation. In recent years we have entered the so-called crisis, a new correlation of forces and power structures in which the reality of migration, how could it be otherwise, has also been radically modified.
How to guarantee the full rights of people who emigrate in a society that is undergoing a profound transformation? And I deliberately write the word “suffering” because we are seeing that we are heading towards a world in which 1% of the population controls a large part of the resources and mechanisms of power while the other 99% has to divide the rest. Migration, as a social phenomenon, is not left out of this reality in a context of radical globalization.
Thus, in today’s world, there are as many immigrants in Spain as there are Spanish emigrants. Every year, tens of thousands of Spaniards, most of them young, pack their bags looking for opportunities all over the world, facing these realities of precariousness and insecurity. Very few countries are now just pure senders or recipients of emigrants. Most receive and send migrants in a kind of big revolving door, as I pointed out in the article in Public Chain migrations, emigrants in chains in which he showed how while Bolivians emigrate to Peru, Peruvians emigrate to Argentina, Argentines emigrate to Spain and Spaniards emigrate to Germany… giving rise to a kind of revolving door. In other words, emigrants from lower-income countries occupy the places of natives with higher incomes, who in turn emigrate occupying the labor niches that others have left, and so on, incessantly. But they all emigrate, worsening their working conditions, their precariousness, losing their rights… With each turn of the door, exploitation and exclusion increase.
We are immersed in great changes in the areas of power —such as the disappearance of the middle classes— also within the framework of societies, as Sennett points out, in which machines carry out an increasingly relevant part of the work. New realities, which it is urgent to debate and analyze in order to guarantee the rights of people who emigrate, among whom, by the way, within this 99%, we can be ourselves or our closest relatives.
I believe that faced with these new realities, the immigrant must now integrate, side by side with the native in the fight for the right to work, to housing… a fight against precariousness and common exploitation. And in a global struggle, proposing global answers to global problems.