The Search to Belong
Afro-Colombians on the Atrato river in Colombia.
VOLUME 28, NUMBER 2, JUNE 2006
"It used to be that the buses would leave once a month," Margarita tells us as we sit in the sweltering heat of Ocosingo in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. "Now they leave once a week."
We are discussing the increasing number of people who are leaving their homes, heading north in search of safer and better lives, and the reasons for this migration.
For over a decade, a low-intensity armed conflict was waged in Chiapas between the Mexican army and the insurgent Zapatistas, with no peaceful resolution. There is a continued heavy military presence, and the local groups Inter Pares works with report ongoing human rights violations. Chiapas is also a region rich in natural resources, and there is a growing presence of transnational corporations hungry for its water, gas and minerals. Many people are being forced to leave their homes to make way for hydroelectric dams and mining. And for many others, there is no longer a local economy to support livelihoods. In Chiapas, as in many other places in the global south, the political and economic reasons for migration are integrally intertwined, and there is not much choice in the matter. "Soon all migration will be forced migration," a colleague tells us shortly before we leave.
For migrants, the journey northward is fraught with perils. Many people jump to their deaths from moving trains to avoid police and army checkpoints. Women are subject to harassment and sexual abuse. And for the thousands of people who do survive the journey, their stories do not get much better. In Canada and the United States, they work long hours in construction, manufacturing and service industries, they pick fruit and vegetables, they take care of other people's children, and they clean homes they will never be able to own, with few of the protections and none of the benefits afforded to citizens. As a Mexican friend puts it, "Migrants are the eternal throw-away workers."
While so much of the world's population on the move remains within the poorest countries of the south, many people in the countries of the north live in fear of the "masses" supposedly clamouring to get in. And this climate of fear has increased in the current global context of heightened security. People who move are sometimes seen as a threat, "migrant" equated with "terrorist."
Migration policies set the boundaries between "us" and "them," and tell us much about who we are as nations. We are defined by our treatment of non-citizens, and by the extent to which the protection of the rights of some comes at the expense of the rights of others. There can be no security for some if there is no security for all. We need to insist on a common standard of dignity and rights for everyone who is on the move, regardless of their place of origin and the reason for their dislocation, as well as for all those who live within our borders, regardless of status or category.
The people we meet in Chiapas, in Colombia, and along the borders of Burma who have been forced to leave their places of belonging cannot be merely reduced to categories - migrant, refugee, displaced person. They are people. They have dreams and aspirations, and contributions to make to their new homes, as well as the ones they left behind. Building and sustaining community is integral to the process of migration. When people move, they do not do so in isolation; they follow the paths taken by others before them, and maintain their connections to those they leave behind. Migration is about relationships across borders, it is about the search to belong and create anew what has been lost.
This Bulletin highlights actions in support of people's struggles to rebuild their lives and communities across borders.
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