Human belongs to the animal kingdom, members of which differ from plants in one main point: their motility, or their ability to move. Unlike plants, which can feed themselves stationarily through photosynthesis, animals need to transpose themselves in order to survive. Through the long process of evolution, animals have developed their moving abilities to extraordinary degrees. They learned to swim and spread all over the lengths and the depths of the oceans. They crawled out of the water, some made legs and dominated the land. They made wings and swarmed in the air. Some of them developed high speeds, others clambering skills, others agility and some of them – like many birds, sharks, antelopes and humans – developed endurance or shrewdness to venture long journeys. That’s about how the prehistoric human erected on his two legs, devised wheels and rafts, tamed oxen and horses, and set out to conquer the world.
Being of such a nature, humans throughout their entire history kept undertaking risky migrant enterprises every time their life, liberty, or well-being, came under threat. That’s how millions of Europeans, haunted by poverty, misery and persecution, hopped on their massive metallic vessels and crossed the oceans to inhabit the “new world” during the latter two centuries. That’s how their ancestors stormed into Europe onto their horses’ saddles many centuries ago, reducing to ruins the great Roman Empire and the ancient world. That’s how the founders of the great ancient civilizations made it to the Mediterranean basin and the middle east from some unknown places at some primeval ages and who knows by what means. That’s how all the ethnographic, linguistic and cultural features of our contemporary world have been formed the way we know them today: by migration – a constant flux of people moving around the globe, pretty much as winds and ocean currents do. Since the beginning of time people had been moving constantly and no force ever succeeded in obstructing them.
How about today? We live in the 21st century. The terrestrial surface of our planet is carved by an immense network of railways and highways, connecting every possible inhabited spot on the planet with any other, in a velocity unimaginable before. Thousands and thousands of airplanes rip the skies every day, making it possible to reach any verge of any continent before a complete revolution of the sun. We have internet, information can be given and received to and from any spot upon the earth in literally zero time.
And now the question comes: Would it be possible, by any means, any power, any authority, any measures taken, any alteration of Europe’s border policies, prevent the movement of desperate people? I do not think so. And whoever thinks so is terribly mistaken, I’m afraid. When someone and his kin is facing slavery, incarnation, starvation, having a mortar landed into his house through the roof, captivity and decapitation because of his beliefs, or anything of the kind, that person is forced to move. And if that force has been proven unstoppable throughout the entire history of mankind, I cannot see how somebody could count on it being proven differently in our times. Wouldn’t it be more constructive – if so our times may claim to be any wiser – if European leaders and European people in general were to focus in contributing drastically in the melioration of the life conditions of those people – so they wouldn’t have any reason to move in the first place – instead of letting themselves plunge into that futile and paranoiac abyss of xenophobia dominant today in Europe?
