Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions, is the archetype of the migrant who, by divine injunction or due to other reasons, leaves his country, his homeland, his family and sets out for a promised, desired, but unknown land…

However, the Josefa Foundation wants to bypass this movement in space that some of us, usually referred to as "migrants", choose or undergo. Convinced that even the sedentary who have not been or are not physically brought to migrate are also migrants, as migration is part of human nature, the Foundation applies the term to every human being: sedentary or mobile, we are all migrants.

What does that mean? At first instance, it is certainly rare that someone, especially these days, remains in his birthplace or lives in the same home all his life: the increase in job mobility goes hand in hand with people moving to new places. Besides, if we, by chance, have never had to move, it is often our parents who come from elsewhere, either from another region or from another country. Thus, overall, the population of a country is migrant and humanity, as a whole, has been nomadic since the beginning of time.

But, above all, there exist fundamental movements in our personal life, within ourselves, even if some are invisible. Already, biology tells us, our cells are in constant renewal, even if it slows down with age, a change that affects us psychologically as well as physically: photos are there to show us. As mentioned above, there are also the changes in our professional activity that take us to new jobs, which change our behaviour, our ways of doing things, even our relationships with others: thus, we change. But, above all, there is our personal journey, woven from relationships, new or broken, that change us, all that we take in by our senses, our intellectual activity, all that we learn or forget, which transforms us and makes us evolve: thus, remaining ourselves, we become different throughout our life depending on our experiences and our personal development.

If we take seriously the meaning of words, nothing is worse than hearing someone claim to have "their minds made up". There is no denying that our convictions and the values we believe in are important, nor should we expect to change our ideas on a whim by the latest information from the web, the media, or the last person we met. But to be closed-minded, that is to say that our ideas do not change or cannot evolve, is to refrain from changing and progressing in one’s knowledge, experience, and one’s openness to the unknown, from being surprised by the unexpected and the new: it is to anticipate one’s death while remaining alive.

Thus, no matter how each of us evolves, life itself makes us all permanent migrants and, according to this fundamental approach proposed by the Josefa Foundation, allows us to be astonished, touched, without fear or apprehension, by the more or less tumultuous journey of those whom the media, the politicians and many social, economic, even cultural or confessional stakeholders refer to as "migrants". By that, we are all brothers in migration.