Anti-"migrants" perspective

If the media, political or academic words were to be taken seriously, European societies would be divided between two opposing tendencies towards the so-called migrants: the "for" and the "against"

Dialectics of hospitality and rejection, of open borders and walls, of the security of some versus the non-security of others... In short, views put arbitrarily in two "open" (for and against) camps around a "closed" camp that would be that of the so-called migrants.

This descriptive analysis is certainly a little reductive, even arbitrary; however, it is not so far off from this challenge that Europe, in particular, is facing and that many have chosen to call the "migrant crisis"!

In our critical approach, let us take one more step: who can reasonably say who is "a migrant" and who is not? The IOM, UNESCO, Wikipedia…, some European anthropologists or sociologists…?

Seen from this angle, the subject is serious; it involves the lives of millions of men or women. And who would dare to admit the relevance of this gap between "migrants" and "non-migrants" which ultimately leads to the current approaches?

The human drama is growing: how, in this century, can we continue to think in this way, to choose to look at some people in a certain way because they are allegedly "migrants" and to look at other people in another way because they are allegedly "non-migrants"?

Our societies seem to have become blind; the only outlook that has survived seems to be an "economic-political" outlook: this category, "migrants", would constitute a political, media, social playground for a society in need of projects, in search of actions.

Where are we going without each other?

The Josefa Foundation departs from this approach, rejecting it by simply claiming that "we are all migrants" by virtue of our migrant humanity, according to our uniqueness and according to the various facets of our human condition: the physical, spatiotemporal ones; the psycho-intellectual and the spiritual ones.

In addition to the experience in Brussels, since 2015 at the Josefa House, the Josefa Foundation has been trying to raise the banner of our humanity: no more discrimination against some who are "migrants" and others not. Josefa resolutely adopts an anti-"migrants" perspective, because you and I, each in our own way, are "migrants".

Those who have the power or the will to understand, let them understand!

Pierre