For a Diverse and Plural Millenium
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The North Poisoned by the Dart of Xenophobia¹

Irene León

The unprecedented massive migration of populations from the South towards the North puts into perspective global issues pertaining to the North and South. There is a close connection between the "globalization" of the economy, the polarization of inequalities and the progress of social exclusion phenomena, the main generators of the massive migratory process, in many cases headed by women.

Thus, while the power circles of transnational corporations absorb 25% of the world's gross domestic product, they provide jobs to barely 1% of the economically active population in countries of the South. However, governments of the South blinded by the belief that only the market can lead humanity towards a world of bounty, eliminate from day to day labor and social laws to give way to conditions imposed by transnational corporations and local elite.

However, the benefits of neoliberal "globalization" take time in reaching or will never reach the South. An indication of this is the previously existing inequality between the economic roles assigned by the market to each region, country and social group; and more importantly, the historical inequality of access to opportunities that forms part of the mercantile logic.

With the industrial dislocalization, for example, in many cases barely restricted to maquilas and tax-free zones, women of the South become involved in labor mechanisms in which high rates of exploitation are expressed, similar to those existing during slavery, without respect for working time limits nor labor stability, without social benefits nor healthy working spaces, without adequate salaries, among others.

The globalization of inequalities, and its polarization, is the main perverse effect of market domination at a planetary level. Furthermore, although contradictions are visible in all fields, it is expressed in a poignant way in the restriction to free transit of manual labor, while there is free transit of commodities and capital. This demonstrates that according to the logic of the market, humanity is at the service of the production of goods and of profit, and not the other way around.

According to the same logic, in Latin America and the Caribbean, in sharp contrast to the supposed liberal consumer modernism, most people are affected by the daily decrease of their purchasing power, the increase of unemployment, impoverishment, social atomization, urban and rural crises, and running out of survival strategies in their own settings. Thus, they are forced to undertake the well-known massive migrations, called savage, of workers towards the North, but also between and within countries of the South.

For women, the main preys of poverty, emigration seems to be the only possibility to improve their lot, that of their families and their communities, or to free themselves from oppressive settings. However, paradoxically, gender discrimination is becoming a gradually greater additional disadvantage to confront in immigration.

Immigration as a new form of apartheid

World powers concentrated in countries of the North and their respective national powers, see immigration as a sort of fatality which must be stopped, resorting to excluding measures.

In every country without exception, the issue of immigration has generated the most heated debates and polarization, which range from the xenophobic and racist vulgarity of the extreme right, the condescending complicity -and sometimes more than that- of center and left-wing sectors linked to power, to the positions of those who unconditionally defend equal rights and human dignity.

Immigration, especially clandestine immigration, has become the scapegoat of all the evils that countries suffer and the unfailing hook to catch votes. Thus, under the pretext of "controlling migratory flows", an avalanche of xenophobic technical measures and bills are being adopted. From the "struggle" against clandestine immigration, governments are moving towards an attempt to eradicate immigration in general. The idea that every immigrant is clandestine and guilty until otherwise proven, is generating citizen behaviors of persecution, espionage, and accusation, which endanger not only the security of immigrants, but also the existence of democracy in those countries.

"If the clandestine immigrant is the enemy and if he/she endangers our societies, why not resort to an army to defend the country",² the second in command of the Italian socialist party and vice president of the Claudio Martelli Council suggested in 1980. Since then, although undoubtedly that was not his purpose, the fascist Leagues, with a racist and xenophobic orientation, have spread out in Italy, mainly in the north. Then, during the government of Berlusconi, free powers were granted to immigration services to prevent the entrance of "lazy people from the south", as the leader of the Lombard leagues, Umberto Bassi, manifested.

In a similar way, the Belgian popular congressman Philipe Dewinter (VB) emphasized that the only solution to the problem of his country was to consolidate a national identity and, according to him, to achieve this "we must take forceful measures to solve the situation of aliens ... Suspend the flow, hermetically closing the borders, and see to the return of all immigrants, without exception, to their countries of origin". Meanwhile his political party additionally proposes: the immediate expulsion of every immigrant who commits a crime, the withdrawal of social measures and, even, the installation of ghettos to have greater control.³

In France, the socialist party filed away in 1991 a bill that intended to grant the right to vote to foreign residents and, in 1992, in marked contradiction to the French Constitution, authorized the kidnapping of foreigners in the international zone for twenty days with no judicial control.

In 1993 the socialist President Francois Miterrand, after affirming that "the level of tolerance had been saturated since the 70's" adopted a set of measures that imply the assumption that all foreigners are guilty. At the same time, he announced "greater firmness" in confronting clandestine immigration, because as his also socialist Prime Minister added, "France cannot receive all the misery of the world". Under these criteria, amendments to the nationality code restrict the principle of family unification and subordinate the permit of stay to regularity in entrance. Thus, maternity, paternity or marriage were no longer acceptable criteria for applying for residence.

To avoid "bribery", in 1992, the French government established sanctions to transportation companies that carry travelers without passports or without visas, a group generally constituted by asylum seekers or refugees. And, in December 1994, it put in force a law that threatened with a 5-year jail sentence any person who helped directly or indirectly in facilitating or trying to facilitate irregular entrance, transit or stay of foreigners in that country.

At the level of the European Community, Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Holland, and Portugal signed the Schengen Convention, in force since March 1995. This Convention establishes common entry laws for non-community members, as well as conditions for their transit inside the "great European space". It bases their common actions in the elaboration of a police data bank of the "undesirable". Under this convention, those who have subject to rejection by one of the member countries is automatically rejected by the others, a principle that threatens the right to free transit, part of the fundamental rights of a human being.

The European Union, out of a total global population of 343 million inhabitants, houses 6.4 million foreigners, barely 2.74% of the population. However, the creation of camps, mainly in central Europe, for illegal immigrants is being justified with the argument of over population of foreigners, including refuge seekers. As an example of the poor conditions in camps, we can mention Vintimille and Lyon in France, cases, which have been brought under public light.

However, racist and xenophobic expressions in Europe are not a novelty. They were at the root of the triumph of German National Socialism (1938-42). Likewise, the belief in the supremacy of the white race served to justify the greatest genocide known by humanity: that of European "colonial exploits" in America (initiated in 1492) and, more recently the South African apartheid. The logic of exclusion, mainly against immigration from the South, has again lighted the torch of the extreme right in Europe. How far will their consequences go?

Unilateral attack

Contrary to the expansionist will that motivated colonizing "migrations" from Europe to the South, Southern migrations to the North take place on an individual basis and in situations of power disadvantage. However, the word "invasion" is in vogue in Europe, and with it, the image of the immigrant = invader = aggressor, which serves as an argument to defend policies of exclusion, mass expulsions and even killings.

Hundreds of immigrants from Maghreb have been victims of racist crimes in France, Turks in Germany, Latin Americans in Spain, among others. However, the impunity that characterizes these crimes not only allow some local powers to assume mandates corresponding to migration authorities, but also allows certain political sectors or the population in general to assume such power of persecuting and sanctioning immigrants, whether illegal or not.

Xenophobic activism has returned and with it, the perspective that turns any immigrant into worthy of suspicion. Nevertheless, as the analyst Samir Naïr points out, in the case of immigration, "the victim does not represent a real threat and the aggressor knows this. The victim is defeated beforehand because he/she does not have the possibility of returning to his/her country of origin nor the possibility to defend him/herself based on his/her rights"⁴, and gradually fewer possibilities considering the attack by technical measures and legal modifications in force in every country.

Thus, the logic on which the attack on immigration is based, is part of the renewal of old forms of segregation, existing since the colonial period. It defines a world that looks like a pyramid, with the minute transnational elite, the technological, industrial and, above all, financial power at the top and in the lower basis a mass comprised by the majority of the world's population, mainly from the South. As the economist Susan Georges⁵ perceives this, it configures the structures for a planetary apartheid.

According to this structure, while mercantile elite calculate everything at a global scale, the principles of a planetary citizenship are far from being applied. Instead, a world in which actors and factors of exclusion are multiplied, open up to poorer populations already discriminated in their countries.

Immigration with "class"

The segregationist bias of the fight against immigration is also expressed in selection policies. When investments are involved, borders not only remain open, but according to their needs countries of the North promote the arrival of immigrants from the South with capital or professional education in the areas required by them. In the United States, for example, in 1991, at the same time that entry by land through its border with Mexico was denied, the Senate proposed the annual emission of 150,000 supplementary immigration visas for foreigners who, although they had no relatives in that country, had solid degrees or bank accounts.

Another project submitted to the House of Representatives, increased to 630,000 the number of annual visas to educated foreigners, investors from the South and their families. On their part, governments from the South, although the flight of talent and capital directly affect their own domestic interests, remain too vulnerable to political pressure from the North and from transnationals to act as democracies and claim for better conditions for themselves, much less for their emigrants. Therefore, they have maintained such a distance from the defense of their emigrants that the quality of immigrant, above all if one is illegal, almost sounds as acquiring the quality of a person without country.

Meanwhile, the defense assumed by organizations of the interested parties themselves, the immigrants, are new and in many cases, still fragile. They are generally humanitarian or social in character, of aid to fellow citizens, sports or civic oriented. In general, public or political actions have been defensive and the spaces for definition of a direct participation in the formulation of policies are still isolated or in an embryonic stage.

You have so much, you are worth so much ...

Following the dominant mercantile logic, companies, commercial networks and corporations, often times legal, of importation of clandestine immigrants have been created. The business is promising, since only in the United States, 50% of illegal immigrants (1,5 million people) have migrated thanks to "paid assistance", whose individual costs vary from 100 to 40,000 dollars, depending on economic solvency, distance and place of origin of the person requesting assistance.

It is presumed that women are the main users of these services. In addition to those directly searching for assistance to emigrate, there are those who are requested by promoters of these services and, in some cases, are trapped in mechanisms of trafficking in women.

In these "immigration" networks, following guidelines of ethnic and social economic segregation, women are traded like any other product; women and girls are selected, exported, rented, sold according to criteria defined in the offer and demand game. This market has two main aspects:

• The export and sales of women and girls for private domestic work and related work - which generally also includes sexual services.

• Sex work itself, which includes export, trafficking, sales, rental of women and girls to perform sex work of diverse nature.

Additionally, in many cases, domestic and sexual functions are inseparable. Such is the case of mail-order brides, in which Caribbean and Latin American women are sold to be married with European men - specially farmers - and assume the reproductive and sexual responsibilities considered to be inherent to such a function .... The approximate cost for the sale of brides is $5,000 dollars, of which women rarely receive a minimum percentage to pay for their travelling expenses. They frequently end up kidnapped and abused in foreign lands; many times not understanding the language and feeling guilty for their luck⁶.

However, in addition to the ignominious character of trafficking, it presents us with the fact that the work situation of women from the South is gradually more circumscribed to their physical attributes. In Japan, for example, 80% of immigrant women work in bars and private clubs, independently of their professional qualifications or aptitude to exercise such professions.

Likewise, Japanese indexes show a significant modification of the work relation of clandestine men and women. Until 1987, women predominated in marginal labor sectors; today immigrant men are the ones who work in the areas deserted by nationals. In addition, although there is no official record of gender work mobility in the informal market, especially in the sex and entertainment market, it is estimated that those indexes are also applicable to Europe.

Undoubtedly, there are women for whom emigration has meant a possibility of progress, especially material, for their families and/or of acquiring the goods they dreamt about in their countries of origin. There are also some who have exceptionally achieved some professional promotion, but most have not. Nearly all immigrant women in the North live to work and not the other way around, and they spend the days pining for a return that rarely occurs.

Uncertainties of refuge and asylum

The restrictions imposed on immigration have led directly to the decrease in admissions due to asylum or refuge. Border services, according to the new technical measures adopted by countries, have the mandate to extend suspicion of illegality to this category of individuals and to reduce the immigration demand by reducing asylum admissions.

According to the Geneva Convention (1961), asylum is restricted to personal persecution or risk to life provoked by State violence - situations of war do not justify in themselves an asylum petition - if and only if they can be sustained with "valid" proofs, which in most cases are impossible to obtain, since how can one obtain a certificate of arbitrary detention or of torture?

In addition, even with proofs of persecution, in cases of repression proven by the international community, paper work to obtain the status of refugee last an average of a year.

However, independently of the time required for paper work, applicants must also deliver the required proofs, express themselves quickly, clearly, orally and in writing. In the case of women, who are many times illiterate, this is an obstacle in the examination of cases. Most of them are fleeing traumatic situations of armed violence or repression, where rape is invariably one of the components, whose consequences are not considered as valid arguments to extend the time required for the presentation of proofs and much less for granting refuge.

In France, for example, barely 25% of asylum applicants manage to obtain an appointment to explain their case to an officer and around 90% of the cases receive a negative response. In 1994, out of 2,385 Algerians who requested political asylum, only 18 obtained it. In general terms, 8 out of 10 cases are rejected.

In most countries refugees receive an insignificant subsidy and are forbidden from working. Although in some cases, they have temporary work permits while they do the paper work, the suspension of such permit and even deportation can arrive at any moment.

The right to asylum was conceived in the 50's, on the cold war to take care of dissidents from Eastern Europe. In 1961, its application was extended according to the Geneva Convention, but it did not contemplate, and still does not, the various circumstances provoked by the multiplication of armed conflicts or by the consequences of low intensity war, which have led to the displacement of millions of people and have increased the demands for refuge and asylum.

Neither did it contemplate the possibility that victims of North/South imbalances, fleeing from poverty, could demand refuge. But, "the poor have authorized themselves the right to resort to the right to asylum, because they suffer misery and cannot, with some exceptions, expect the recognition of this form of persecution"⁷. But the times are unfavorable for them and resorting to refuge is a limited possibility even for victims of political persecution or repression.

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