Towards An Understanding of the Complexity of Illegal Immigration of Africans

Opinion

With the arrival of the right-wing party in power in Italy, it was announced that there will be an end to illegal immigration through the waters of the Mediterranean. But for several months now the phenomenon has not only increased but has been accompanied by shipwrecks almost every day. The dead are being counted one by one. Immigration is showing up and rising in the debates of European countries willy-nilly. Here and there, consultations are not fruitful and will unfortunately not produce any if we continue by not identifying the real reasons for immigration. Until then the experts either do not want to dissect the root of the problem by pretending perhaps they would benefit (the Qatar gate is there to remind us) or they are completely disconnected from the migratory reality. As Mancini teaches, we must restore. To restore in the context evokes above all the recognition of a certain legitimacy of illegal immigration. He then evokes the idea of a new introduction to a new reality. According to R. Mancini, if the verb restore contains in itself the “following meanings: to clean up, to heal, to right, to compensate, to redeem, to liberate, to regenerate, to inaugurate, it is the mode of action that gives concrete direction to the action undertaken. That is why there must be a transformation to restitution.” Transforming does not resolve to reform a system in order to maintain or violently destroy it within a day. Transforming implies starting from a precise historical and conceptual context in order to be able to introduce into this existing situation the seeds of profound and systemic change. For us, this conceptual framework is rooted in the definition of whom a migrant is?

Opinion

The Migrant, The Mature Fruit of Globalization

To the question of who is a migrant, an immigrant; Migrate, Immigrate, the dictionaries consulted in various ways say in substance this: The verb “immigrate” means to enter temporarily or definitively in a country of which one does not have a nationality. An immigrant (or migrant) is the one who is immigrating or who has just immigrated. An immigrant is a person who is established in a country by way of immigration we are talking about political, economic, social, etc., it is clear that migration is not a new phenomenon, far from it. According to the latest IOM report, the bulk of African migration is taking place within the continent. To understand the migratory phenomenon which causes a series of difficulties for the European States and for which they are in search of solutions, it will be necessary to know and to identify the identity of the new migrant. It is only on this basis that a solution to curb the migratory influx will be found a solution. So, what is a 21st-century migrant? Without any detour today, the migrant is above all the ripe fruit of globalization.

According to Moreau-Defarges, recognized globalization can be defined as “The westernization of the world, the universalization of Western values, non-Western societies being forced to appropriate these values, simply because they are the values of the winner, of the strongest. This appropriation does not mean that these societies are becoming Western; it only means that these societies must reinvent themselves under the shock of Westernization.” And the essential characteristic of the West is expressed under the banner of freedom equality and brotherhood. But freedom is characterized above all as a power to act and transform any kind of unjust. And if freedom is a power, it cannot be conceived as a positive power, in the sense of acting and influencing the world that obeys an emergency, a necessity. The migrant today is an individual who engages in action in the fall abuse of power, in front of impoliteness, contempt, disgrace, injustice, denial, and various forms of misery. Illegal migration today is the rejection of these injustices on all the part of those who are concerned one the promising sides that are the victims of the populations of the South. To be free is above all to engage in action and the only action that is present today is unfortunately to venture at the risk of their lives on the journey through the Mediterranean. From the angle of this definition, we can easily sketch the reason why illegal and dangerous immigration is growing [1, 2].

The Reasons for the Exorbitant Influx of Illegal Immigrants

In the “Aventure ambiguë”, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, the author, already in 1961, makes this observation: “I am not a country of Diallobé distinct in front of a West and appreciating with a cold head what I can take from it and what I must leave it in return. I have become both, there is not a lucid head between two terms of a choice. There is a strange nature, distressed not to be both. He ends his analysis with a sense of failure in the face of the Westernization madness of Africa in these words: “We must go and learn at home the art of winning without being right [3]”.

The migrant is the one who has not been able to escape the madness of westernization, he has not had time and perhaps did not want to shoot, sort, choose, assimilate or reject what does not suit him. He is then the one who under all possible angulations trembles and metamorphoses according to the terms of Franz Fanon, ‘Black Skins White Masks. According to Livenais, The main objective of education is to transmit knowledge to school-aged young people, a living culture that may differ from one society to another and develop social values in them to prepare them to integrate into their society [4]”.

However, the etymology of the word “culture”, of the Latin word culture (“to dwell”, “to cultivate”, or “to honor”), itself derived from colere (to cultivate and celebrate), suggests that culture refers, in general, to human activity. The Latin term defines the action of cultivating the land in the first sense, then that of cultivating the spirit, and the soul in the figurative sense. Ciceron was the first to apply the word culture to the human being: A fertile field cannot be productive without culture, and it is the same for the human without teaching.

According to D. Taylor quoted by Frabboni, Culture is defined as “that complex set that includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morality, law, custom, and any capacity and habit acquired by man as a member of a society [5]”. The specificity of this later definition does away with the idea of discrimination which makes all the cultures analogous to each other; In addition, it reveals the unconditional link between education and culture but above all the different stages of the acquisition of culture. From this point of view, education must be seen as a system in relation to the social system; all teaching thus responds to various functions and the misalignments between these different functions can only be understood if a total and historical approach is adapted [6]. Because the school is the only institution which socializes the individual and the community which brings together singularities and collectives, which welds values and knowledge, morals and technology, culture and productivity. However, care must be taken to eliminate all forms of authoritarianism and to encourage and multiply links and dialogue between students and teachers, students among themselves as well as teachers.” According to the documents of the colonists, we find this revealing “The spread of the French language in our new colony by any means possible is one of the most powerful elements of assimilation into our ideas and civilization that we have at our disposal and all our efforts must be directed towards that end [7]” It is in this logic that every educational system was conceived and there is no doubt that it was consistent with the assigned functions of the colonizer. At the time of colonization there was “great coherence between the four functions mentioned above. Most of the education systems of today in the countries of the South, inherited from colonization in their structures as well as in their aims, are therefore not in any way part of the specific history of the societies concerned nor do they refer to their specific cultural dimension. Thus, the internal purpose of education was to train a limited number of pupils by internalizing European values and integrating pupils into a system that, in its structures, programs, and methods, was close to the metropolitan system. This integration of assimilated elite was achieved by internalizing European culture and the logic of the market system [8]”.

In the course of the 20th century, there was a worldwide diffusion of the Western model of the educational institution, itself historically dated and whose development, according to economists, was largely driven by the expansion of industrial capitalism, and the transition to independence did not result in their being called into question or redefined, including the language of instruction that remained that of the former colonizer [9].

During independence, the education system lost its coherence. Internally, it has retained its structures, most of its programs and methods, while the number of students per year has increased. As a result, Africa no longer has a place in Africa and is ready to join its cultural homeland, Europe. In this particular figure, envisaged as a general formation, teaching has not been able to transmit to the pupil the meaning of the object of the technique or develop in him the experimental spirit; on the contrary, it uproots the child from its environment without really integrating it into a world that has to mean for it. The student learns book-based knowledge in school that is not related to reality; he continues to learn knowledge that responds to a foreign cultural universe. In this context, the migrant finds no other solution than to leave. This revives and justifies the migratory desire of Africans.

The Most Poisonous Hatreds are those that Hide Under Out-dated Loves

Illegal immigration is above all a form of expression of hatred towards the West through the behavior of the chancelleries installed on the continent. The behavior of officials is really an abuse of power. The plausible and certain origin of the migratory phenomenon is the clear consequence of the abuse of power. Barrigah in the crisis of authority and abuse of power notes that “abuse of power can in a sense impose calm, but it is only an apparent tranquillity that masks frustrations ready to explode at the first attempt at liberation in the face of arbitrariness. Only respect for true authority creates the conditions for harmonious living”. ‘How citizens with full legitimacy to receive a visa have been turned away and humiliated by unscrupulous and insolent consular officials with ridiculous reasons for refusal without human rationality, and even without any respect for the legislative texts governing the phenomenon of immigration. The anti- European sentiment in many countries of the South derives from this. Love for the West is dramatically transformed into an out-of-control existential hatred. It is enough to check in the files of visa applications the refusal responses. As proof, I want a model from the Italian embassy in Accra. File N. Prat.1600/22. The reasons are absurdly disgusting and insulting because they do not fit into any documentation and text that structure the visa field.

• You have not submitted your family situation (What is the relationship between a study visa and a family situation?)
• The documentation of your means of sustenance is unreliable (on what basis and on what investigation can you say that?).
• You did not specify the relationship with the person to welcome you (one can imagine such a mistake? To immigrate for a study motivation will it be necessary to have a link with the hotel structure the apartment or the person who welcomes you?
• There are reasonable doubts about the true objectives
• The countless reasons why the applicants did not obtain a visa are unfounded, unfair, and ridiculous, and do not reflect any principle of fairness, impartiality, and transparency, but rather an abuse of power that tarnishes the image of European nations.

In all sincerity, the European nations suffer today before the tragedy of illegal immigration for the stupidity of their chancelleries which by the constant abuse of power of inhuman treatment towards legitimate applicants, have developed, nourished, and nourished the irrepressible desire to challenge and break the walls that prevented them from expressing and living. Because behind a legitimate or illegal visa applicant lies a vast network of family, ethnic, tribal, local, and community relationships. An unjustified but repeated rejection does not concern only an individual but an entire community that feels hurt and gives itself to the violence of all kinds related to the manipulation of the social corpus. Today the French and in general anti- European sentiment is not related to the manipulation of Wagner’s Russia or others but these entities have found a fertile ground characterized by the impact and impassable wall established by pitiful officials of the representations that seem to give visa applicants a unique way to achieve: cross the Mediterranean alive or dead. So then and against what could be thought of as illegal immigration is first and foremost a form of liberty as a power to act and to transform every form of injustice. In Asher’s words, it is the rejection of any form of injustice.

Combating Illegal Immigration

The chancelleries display their determination to fight illegal immigration through a series of actions among which two essentials.

Towards a Solution to Illegal Immigration

The fight against illegal immigration beyond the massive financing projects that the European Union has promised Africa requires above all the necessary understanding of the concept of community. Because without the understanding of this concept understood in Africa as a fundamental element of human development, any proposal as bright as it may be risks producing minimal effects. For this reason, it will be necessary to keep in mind the notion of environment, through the works of Maturana and Varela [14], as the basis of any action aimed at solving the migration problem this is why the concept of the environment should be emphasized as the basis for any action aimed at solving the migration problem.

Maturana and Varela’s inescapable contribution to the environmental debate is the theory of autopoiesis. Here is how Varela defines it in her book:

“A self-poetic system is organized as a network of production processes of components that (a) continuously regenerate by their transformations and interactions the network that produced them, and which (b) constitute the system as a concrete unit in the space where it exists, specifying the topological domain where it is realized as a network. It follows that a self-poetic machine continually generates and specifies its own organization. It performs this incessant process of replacing its components, because it is continually subjected to external disturbances, and constantly forced to compensate for these disturbances. Thus, a self-poetic machine is a system with stable relations whose fundamental invariant is its own organization (the network of relations that defines it [15]”.

Auto-poesis systems are autonomous systems and their interaction processes continually regenerate their own organization. It follows that a self-poetic machine continually generates and specifies its own organization. It performs this incessant process of replacing its components, because it is continually subjected to external disturbances, and constantly forced to compensate for these disturbances.

Thus, a self-poetic machine is a homeostatic system (or, better yet, stable relations), whose fundamental invariant is its own organization.

For Maturana and Varela, the main characteristic of life is the self-maintenance due to the internal network of work of the chemical system which reproduces continuously within its own border, also self-produced border. For the two authors of the Santiago school, to the question “what is life”? One must necessarily be added. “What is cognition?” In their approach, cognition originally means the specific interaction of the living cell with the environment, and later the concept is extended to all other domains. The cell, and any living organism, does not need any information from the environment to be itself: all the information necessary for an ant to be an ant is contained in the ant and the same is true for the elephant. In epistemological language, we say that the cell, and by inference any living organism, is an operationally closed system. This illustrates another apparent contradiction of the living: it does not need other information from the outside to be what it is, but it depends closely on external materials to survive. In more precise language, we can say that the cell - the living one - is a thermodynamically open system. Living beings need nutrients and energy, and these acquisitions are part of their lives. According to Maturana and Varela, the organism interacts with the environment in a “cognitive” way through which the organism “creates” its own environment and the environment allows the realization of the organism. So, we discover a clear interaction between the living and the environment. This is why the living must necessarily be considered in relation to its environment:

By interacting with its environment, a living organism will be confronted with a sequence of structural changes, and over time, it will form its own individual structural coupling network. At all points in this network, the structure of the organization is the recording of previous structural changes and thus of previous interactions. In other words, all living beings have a history. The living structure is always the recording of an earlier development. Given that the structure of an organism at any point in its development is a record of past structural changes, and that each structural change affects the future behaviour of the organism, this implies that the behavior of the living organism is dictated by its structure.

From this biological generalization, it emerges that social networks according to Luigi and Capra, present the same general principles as biological networks. There is an organized set with internal rules that generate both the network itself and its boundary (a physical boundary in the case of biological networks and a cultural boundary in social networks). Every social system - a political party, a business organization, a city, or a school - is characterized by the need to support itself in a stable but dynamic way, allowing new members, things, or ideas to enter the structure and become part of the system. These new elements that have just been added will generally be transformed by the internal organization (i.e. the rules) of the system. The observation that the “biological”, or organizational model, of a single cell, is the same as that of an entire social structure is really significant. It suggests a fundamental unity of life and therefore also the need to study and understand all living structures from such a unified perspective. In short, the simplest criterion of autopoiesis is to see whether the system is able to maintain itself on its own thanks to the self- generated processes that take place within its borders, which is itself self-produced.

Conclusion: What to do and Where to Start?

It is widely accepted that the concept of social capital needs to be carefully defined if it is not to be used only to stimulate reflection on growth. One of the most well-known and representative definitions can be found in Putnam’s book, whose impact has been considerable: “Social capital... refers to the characteristics of social organization such as trust, norms and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated action [16].

Social capital can play a decisive role in the reconstruction of local identities and the return of trust in the perspective where Individuals are the true wealth of a nation. Development must therefore be a process that leads to the widening of opportunities for everyone. Its fundamental objective is to create an environment that offers people the opportunity to live long and healthy lives, to acquire the knowledge that will help them in their choice and to have access to the resources that ensure a decent standard of living. For it makes it possible to consider development as the process by which the real freedoms of persons increase’. It is by pursuing political, social, and economic freedoms that we promote a society in which each person can be the agent of the formulation and realization of the values they pursue, as well as their beneficiary. The goal of development is not the pursuit of any state of «gross national happiness» but the possibility for everyone to pursue multidimensional happiness, thanks to individual and associative freedoms. Happiness is not definable, but the freedom to pursue it. It is therefore on the basis of freedom that development can be measured. Freedom is central for two reasons: because it is the global criterion for assessing the merits of any action, and because it is the most effective social state to enable each person to contribute himself or herself to the pursuit of his or her fulfilment. Promoting development means not only satisfying the needs of people but also contributing to creating them, by working to build a critical awareness among individuals that allows for an adequate set of expectations, values, goals, and ambitions. Any migration policy that does not take this into account is doomed to failure.