Mapping Europe’s war on immigration

Door: Philippe Rekacewicz

“It is a strange thing, this paranoid fear of invasion, this determination to protect themselves at all costs from these human beings who every year exile themselves from their homelands to head for an imagined promised land in the rich countries. But the rich have decided that these tides of humanity are unwanted.

They fortify their frontiers, erect barriers, build the walls higher and higher. A veritable military strategy put into effect to keep out the “invaders.”

In an act of mimicry, other important countries like Brazil, China and Russia are joining in, putting in place their own “fortifications” to limit economic migration from poorer areas to their own regions of rapid growth.

Such physical obstacles are efficient tools for criminalizing immigration, for making it possible to pronounce concepts that should be unthinkable: “Illegal immigrant.” They make people think they are breaking the law. With the help of these new obstacles, juridical and physical, we have created a new category of criminal: the migrant.”

“This map was drawn for the first time in 2003, thanks to the meticulous work of Olivier Clochard of the Migrinter Institute at the University of Poitiers. We update it regularly, and alas, every time we have to add more black dots and draw the red circles even bigger.”

https://mondediplo.com/outsidein/mapping-europe-s-war-on-immigration