‘The de facto apartheid that I witnessed in this rundown district was only one episode in a relentless war against illegal immigration that is beginning to recall some of the darker periods of European history.’ The place Matthew Carr is referring to in this article for the New York Times is Attiki Square in Athens, where families of migrants and refugees, particularly Afghans, gather, who are regularly attacked by Greek neo-Nazi groups and then made to move on by the police.

When I read the article I was struck by the title ‘The war against immigrants’ and the way Carr linked the stories of manhunts in various parts of Europe and the Mediterranean. ‘I have seen French police in Calais confiscate blankets from homeless migrants in what one official described to me as a “cleaning operation”. I have seen starving Somali migrants in Greece rummaging through rubbish bins; Afghan asylum seekers in France hunted down by police in abandoned railway sidings; penniless Malians living in ruined buildings in southern Spain; and African migrants hiding from police raids in the forests of Morocco.’

These are stories of migration, which recur and resemble each other, just like the actions by police on the border all inevitably recall military operations, planned and coordinated as though in a real conflict, faced with a ‘real enemy’. It should be clear by now that economic migration is a physiological mobility phenomenon, linked in particular to the demand for labour in advanced economies and the globalisation process and the revolution in communication and transport. And managing this phenomenon requires multilateral agreements and coordination by international institutions, with clear and shared rules. Instead, migration has been left to single governments’ policies that are influenced by domestic propaganda reasons, portraying this phenomenon as a temporary event to be contained, or in the worst cases, as a threat to local identity and the security of their own citizens. For this reason governments all tend to militarise their borders, greatly restricting entry and limiting as much as possible the duration of permits to stay.

This approach and these policies have created a new, obvious contradiction between the need for foreign workers in advanced economies and the possibility of entering, living and working legally with dignity.