Inclusion or exclusion? The boundary is born as an inclusive idea and ends as an exclusive idea. Where the border is considered as frontier then it is exclusion and disregard of otherness and the other. Is it conceivable, today, a project of commercial globalization and at the same time a policy of insurmountable barriers that separate peoples and states?
The border in history has been an element of separation, often taking on a dimension of contrast between a civil and reassuring world and a barbaric world. In a way, it is a wall. A legal wall that cannot be crossed over. But the border has also been a place of meeting and communication, which allows the exchange of goods, also becoming a phenomenon of osmosis, of mutual acculturation and an opportunity for interaction.
On the problem of immigration the Magisterium, particularly of Pope Ratzinger and Pope Bergoglio, has underlined two lines that are completed in the search for a not simple but necessary solution. These are two fundamental rights of every person, which demand to be faced with equal and convergent commitment: the right to remain in one’s own country and not be forced to leave it by the slavery of misery and war; and the right to leave one’s own country, in the absence of minimum conditions for a dignified life. “Migrants are our brothers and sisters who seek a better life away from poverty, hunger and exploitation” (Pope Francis, Message World Day of Migrants and Refugees, 2016).
Some, even among Catholics, raise perplexity about an openness that seems indiscriminate. However, there remains a point on which everyone agrees: the real evil is not immigration but the injustice widespread in the world, which causes it.
Add to this a wicked narration by some media that operate a real psychological terrorism, overestimating the number of asylum seekers, presenting them as dangerous and exploitative of local resources stolen from citizens, focusing on landings that are not at all the channel of greatest influx of arrivals. Above all, by operating an evaluative inequality between rich and poor immigrants, the latter identified, with a devaluing and threatening meaning.