N° 19 décembre Since the beginning of August, 3,000 migrants have tried to enter Polish territory. A barbed wire fence 2.50 meters high and 180 km long was erected by Poland accusing Belarus,
on the other side of the border, of sending migrants Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis; exhausted by days and nights spent in the cold without food, a dozen people have already died. 3000 soldiers are deployed on the border between Poland and Belarus. The Polish Prime Minister came and paraded in military uniform; according to him: "it was necessary to protect the" sacred "territory of Poland". His ruling party in Poland, ultra conservative, is struggling in the polls and sees this migration crisis as an opportunity to regain popularity. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are today rejected by these same countries that attack them militarily. There is no need to go to Poland to find that European leaders don't care about migrants. You only need to go to Calais or Grande-Synthe where thousands of them are trying to rally England and are being hunted down and endlessly harassed by the Macron government like the occupants of the Sécheries shanty town in Grande-Synthe who have been expelled at dawn on Tuesday. Migrants have become a political weapon. Poland, Cyprus, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and Hungary ask Brussels to finance the construction of barriers at their borders to prevent the arrival of migrants.
* As soon as 2015 Hungary built a wall of barbed wire four meters high over 175 kilometers of borders. Bulgaria has erected nearly 176 kilometers of barbed wire fences along its border with Turkey, and lately Greece has also added 40 kilometers of walls…
* Some states also fund land and sea patrols, for example in Croatia, where the police violently attacked migrants who crossed the border.
Damien Simonneau, a specialist in migratory flows, observes that "The States of the European Union have been strengthening their borders for 20 years now, with many millions of euros. And yet it does not follow that the number of unauthorized migrants and asylum seekers is decreasing "..."a wall aims above all to stage a political show for the leaders, especially for Poland, for Hungary, for Greece…. It is a way to show that they are doing something about migration."
Capital, its media, the governments at their service seek to divert attention from those who are really responsible for the crisis, unemployment and misery…. Capitalism is destroying the planet with the big multinationals’ thirst for profits. It plunders the nations and their resources, each imperialist power seeks to have the largest share of the wealth. In France, most politicians have supported France's interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Syria and the Sahel (1)...everyone sheds tears over the conditions of migrants, but this is to better avoid the debate on the causes and each has strived to propose solutions to repel them and use them to justify an aggressive policy. They all agree on international politics just as they agree with national politics since none condemn capitalism. Potential immigrants only ask to arrive through secure and legal channels to seek asylum, instead of this they find themselves dependent on unscrupulous smugglers and hunted down like criminals. Social start-ups are doing business on the backs of refugees and one of them, Each One, has raised millions of euros in public subsidies for the resumption of studies and access to employment for refugees; it has private donors such as the Total foundation, Société Générale, BNP Paribas, L'Oréal… In 2020, its turnover was almost one million euros, its target for 2021: to quadruple it. The company employs around 40 people, the development of the company relies on 5,000 volunteer students; these social start-ups are valued at more than a billion dollars…
The capitalists profit from immigration; the European Union is entirely devoted to the interests of capital, and immigration makes it possible to put pressure on wages and divide the working class.
The German capitalists and Merkel organized the influx of a million immigrants into Germany with the aim of exploiting these workers at low "cost" under the pretext of a labor shortage. The same in the picking agriculture in Italy, Spain, France... with more or less illegal immigration, bosses can hire for low wages for a maximum of working hours and many immigrants are ready to work for poverty wages. When the right and the far right attack immigration, their lies can deceive the people and capture popular discontent; none calls for an end to imperialist aggression and to their international competition between major capitalist powers for the conquest of new markets causing tensions which continue to exacerbate. The struggle for the domination of world trade between China, the USA, Europe... the conquest of territories for the circulation of raw materials, each defending its own capitalist interests. Imperialisms clash, alliances are formed but can compete with each other according to the interests of the multinationals on which they depend. The US wants to regain control of world capitalism, in the near and middle east by making Israel its armed wing in the region, by threatening resisting countries, intervening directly in Latin America. From Brazil to the Mexican borders, populations are fleeing poverty, sometimes drought, violence, victims of gangs and traffickers, tossed from border to border; and now there are Haitians who have fled their island to join Brazil, Chile, Mexico… This is the reality of capitalism and its consequences for seeking ever more profit at any cost: the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) made public in June the number of internally and externally displaced people in the world: 82.4 million (+ 4%). Migrants or refugees flee their countries, many die on the way and add to the hundreds of thousands of deaths under the bombs of the great capitalist powers. Poverty is wreaking havoc: according to the United Nations report 2.3 billion people (or 30% of the world population) did not have access to adequate food all year round and 811 million people were under -fed in 2020. Among children under 5, 52 million are wasted (extreme thinness), 17 million are severely wasted, and 155 million are stunted. This is why we must put an end to this capitalist system harmful to human development.
(1) Libya: 250,000 killed in the war; Syria: 384,000 victims, including 22,000 children, 5.6 million Syrians are refugees in 125 countries. Mali more than 600 dead and several thousand injured; Iraq: 500,000 people lost their lives or violence uprooted more than 3 million people. Afghanistan: nineteen years of war, 150,000 dead, the countries of the region are already hosting large numbers of Afghans. There are 780,000 recognized refugees in Iran, 1.4 million in Pakistan and several million remain unaccounted for. Palestine: there are 5,500,000 Palestinian refugees in the world and no one condemns the racist Israeli power.