How Else Can We Think About Migration?

In her book, Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration, Italian professor Donatella Di Cesare questions the idea of the exclusionary state. She asks, is migration not a fundamental human right? Are we not all temporary guests—tenants, in fact—on this only earth of ours? What purpose, then—whose purpose—do borders serve? Excerpt:

Upon her arrival, the migrant faces a state that stands up in all its supremacy. These two are the main actors, the two protagonists on this stage. The migrant’s rights, starting with her right to move, crash up against the sovereignty which the state exercises over the nation and over its territorial dominion.

In the picture book world, The Voyage by Veronica Salinas, speaks the same kind of truth, from the dedication onward:

“For everyone who has had to leave.”

This is the experience of an emigrant, an immigrant, a migrant, anyone who has known, in their skin, all those shades of meaning that we embed into the act of moving.

“You are blown so far that you forget/who you are and where you come from.”

We move the self and thereby must become a new, necessarily reinvented self. We do not typically anticipate all this at the outset of the journey. Salinas’s slender text captures this uncertainty with simple precision:

“And you wait and wait and wait for something to happen.”

The turning point comes in the recognition of the newcomer by another. That’s when bewilderment gives way to understanding. Di Cesare refers to Derrida and his discussions of hospitality. She suggests that traditional political philosophy has evaded the question of welcome. She is emphatic that we must find a new way of being in the world, a way that is unconnected to the ownership of land. She calls for citizenship unbound from the possession of territory.

With fire and flood on the doorstep of every continent, many of us humans will be in this position one day.

“Maybe one day you have to leave.”

This is already true across much of the global South, where people flee from catastrophes caused by the extractive excesses of the global North, but the results are already visible in California and Kentucky, Italy and England.

What will we do if and when we have to leave a place that we have learned to call ours? What will we do when that other arrives on a doorstep that we have come to see as our own? Di Cesare offers a view of migration as something other than crisis, other than suspicion and distrust of the stranger.