Lhe now daily debate around the theme of immigration is surprising in its blindness to the real changes in our world. It seems to come straight from the last century, even from a bygone millennium, from this era when a dominant Europe had the means to make the absolute sovereignty of its States alone an effective and respected principle of international regulation. Have we even understood that this world no longer exists?
If we want to deal humanly and rationally with today’s migration issues, we must first change the software, draw the obvious consequences of a globalization which belongs to the present cycle of our history, and which profoundly modifies the situation due to migration.
Such a rupture has not only altered the technical parameters of our time, facilitating transport, reducing distances, increasing the visibility of more favorable and more distant places: so many factors which already give unprecedented strength to human mobility… But it has especially affected social behavior, creating over time a globalized imagination that affects each individual – is this not our case? that of our children? −, whatever their condition, increasingly connected to a world that arouses attractions, desires, and the desire to achieve, thus lastingly affecting everyone’s way of being in a greatly expanded environment.
The globalization of human beings
This means that migration, once exceptional, even transgressive, is gradually becoming the future of the world. Where sedentary lifestyle, fixedness, confinement slowly but surely take the forms of the past, to in turn embody the exception of tomorrow.
Does this mean that we just have to let ourselves be carried away by this new wind? No: on the contrary, this mutation obliges us, but in a direction totally opposite to what a blissful conservatism leads us to conclude. If we leave a static world to adapt to that of mobility, everything remains to be done to define the new rules. To understand this time of globalization of human beings, we who were able to understand that of goods without too much difficulty. To achieve this global governance of migration that optimizes the well-being of its three protagonists: sending societies, receiving societies and migrants themselves.
But, for this, we must accept that migration is the principle and not the transgression; and also understand that there is no national interest that can flourish outside of a reconstructed universal. Basically, migration is the same as climate, both implying this necessary inversion in the order of factors. However, we can bet that the first is easier to manage as the short-term advantages of rationalized migration are great, for our demography, our productive effort, the rapprochement of cultures: well-managed flows at the global level are capable of generating benefits immediate actions that belie easy slogans!
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