XIIth General Assembly of
MIAMSI
CONTRIBUTION ABOUT
SUB-SAHARIAN MIGRATIONS / EUROPE
We will undoubtedly speak of
migrations during the coming days, but as migrations concern the displacement
of all sorts of living creatures, my contribution will modestly concentrate on
the migrations of human beings.
We equally know that most of the analyses about
migration often refer solely to the macro dimension leaving aside the
micro-social one, that is to say the relationship between human beings. This
dimension is capital to understand every day’s life of the sub-Saharan
immigrants in the direction of
If immigration offers chances on the
economical, social and cultural levels, we cannot ignore that it also generates
without doubt sufferings, anguishes and sometimes interrogations.
I will
thus give some paths of reflexions of what can be preoccupying in the lives of
the immigrants, most particularly those who are qualified either as “illegal”
or “paperless”.
1- The immigrant:
double pain on the economic level
In the country of
origin:
He is expected to
provide everything (food, health…) but no one cares for his personal future.
The following remark is often heard “ at home, they
think that we have everything here, but life is very hard”. Of course, no one
hears this complaining. It appears that these persons are, like lambs, sent to
the slaughterhouse by their family or by their group; it is those remained at
home that receive and spend the money and benefit of a
better life. What is worse, sometimes the plans for investment made by the
immigrant are diverted and squandered by his own family. What can he do?
What is the alternative?
In
He often must work under the identity of
another person, who himself sleeps late, doing nothing and expects a cheque at
the end of the month. What can he do? What is the alternative? The
solution remains to go on working while hoping to meet someone more honest who
will accept to share.
We consider that in
such situations, the immigrant is the victim of the supposed solidarity of his
own community. It is violation of the elementary rights of the weaker.
In order to escape
such intra-community injustice, immigrates without papers build up strategies
that lead them into more complex situations, often more disastrous.
2. The
immigrant: the fabrication of a faked identity
Since the illegal immigrant does not exist as
a person, because he is without papers, he has to find a name, a family, a
country, a new life. He has to create a faked identity.
How painful when nameless parents,
that are paperless ones, use all sorts of strategies to get papers
including the programming of the birth of human beings for the sake of
legislations.
What is more worrying in this situation is the fact
of bearing someone else’s name instead of that of
one’s own parents. There is breach of symbolic and social links there. In a near future there will be a serious difficulty to draw
genealogic trees. As exemple, children are adopted by specialists in adoption
and will have difficulty to realise that they have own parents. This fact is
only strategy, but the psychical consequences in time is unpredictable.
3. The immigrate: the
unconscious building up of collective suicide.
Whitout acting as the devil’s
advocate, I estimate that, when these human beings will realize that they are
the products of faked identities, they will call to account not only their
community itself but, what is more serious, the family.
4. The immigrate: the loss
of imaginary.
Among the
paperless immigrants there are christians. These
persons, in their country, identified themselves, in some manner, with
I will end up
in proposing some exhortations.
If we want to build bridges, we must imperatively place the dignity of the human person in the center of our preoccupations.
If we think it is
possible to build bridges, we must be daring enough to question our own
practices among our people, our cultures and our Churches
Jean de Dieu
DEMBELE
Anthropologist
MCRC of Mali