No doubt, as did the major milestones of our thousand-year-old history, the large masses of people currently migrating across our planet are bothering us: they are disrupting our habits and our living conditions, the well-adjusted rhythm of our individual lives as well as of our administrations and our organizations; in particular, the images which we see on television and all that we hear and read in the media profoundly upset our minds and our ways of thinking, and divide our societies in two – those for or those against the migrants who are arriving from everywhere. They close or open our hearts…

Our memory, too immediate and nearsighted, forgets that the history of humanity comes from migration and that all the countries of the world have been built on these ceaseless movements of populations. The wisdom of all the world teaches us that vita est in motu, life is in movement; conversely, death marks the end of moving, such as we know it. It follows that as long as we are alive on this planet, we are all migrants, whether we are sedentary or in forced exile.

Will we know how to welcome with all the hospitality that they deserve those who come to us from more or less far away and for various reasons? It is a question of life and death for our civilization and our global living-together: if Europe and each of its member countries remain inward-looking, it would certainly be suicidal for the great European project but also, by contagion and imitation, it could spread to other countries of the world, and by reciprocity, may cause them to close their borders and create more walls.

We at Josefa, along with many others, are convinced that, far from threatening our economy and our social organization, the arrival and reception of migrants, especially those who were forced to leave everything for the reasons which we know, nourish the life of our ageing societies in every way. These newcomers bring us their skills and their experience, and in particular the unique experience of a forced migration, all the wealth of their culture and of their way of thinking and living. They stimulate the necessary transformation of our Western civilization ailing from its wealth, subjugated by financial powers, and lacking inspiration. They boost our own personal and collective migration towards a new living-together.

Jean-Louis