Acquarius

Once upon a time, a bunch of hopeful youngsters wrote a song to celebrate the incoming age of the Aquarius. It goes a bit like this:
When the moon is in the Seventh House; and Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions [...] and the mind's true liberation.

Sounds ironic that the same name is shared by a boat carrying 630 souls to a cherished new dawn; a boat that was stopped for days in the middle of the Mediterranean sea because of bureaucratic negligence and the undying persistence of the US vs. THEM dichotomy. 
Luckily enough, my host country decided to break the circle. Unfortunately, my so-called home country was the one which refused to make a step forward. So I'm publishing a letter of Mr Del Grande, which I translated to English, expressing my and our frustration at the populistic tactics engaged once more by narrow-minded people who managed to seize control of our beautiful home. 

Letter to the Head of the Italian Home Office Mr. Salvini:
I confess that on one thing I agree with Salvini: The Libyan route must be closed. No more tragedies at sea, no more easy money to the Libyan organised smugglers. I also dream of a Mediterranean coast with zero landings. But the problem is how to get there. Having ten years of experience and research on this subject, I would like to give an advice to the minister, because I believe he is repeating the same mistakes of his predecessors.
Naval blockades, rejections at sea, detention centres in Libya. The recipe has been the same for years. Pisanu, Amato, Maroni, Cancellieri, Alfano, Minniti: everyone tried. And every time it was a failure: billions of euros lost and thousands of deaths at sea.
This time it won't be different. For the simple fact that at the base of everything there are two market laws that continue to be ignored. The first is that demand generates the offer. The second is that prohibition supports organised criminal groups.
In other words: as long as someone is willing to pay the journey from Africa to Europe, someone will give them a chance to do so. And if airlines don't, then criminal organisations will.
We live in a globalised world where workers move from one country to another looking for a better wage. Europe, which for decades has imported cheap labour in large quantities, has signed free movement agreements with dozens of non-European countries over the years. These are the countries where most of our migrant workers come from: Albania, Ukraine, Poland, the Balkans, South America. Nonetheless, Europe itself continues to prohibit African workers from legally emigrating to its territory. European embassies in Africa have stopped issuing visas or made it almost impossible to get one.
We have come to the point that the last and only way from Africa to Europe is via Libyan smuggling. Libyan mafias now have the monopoly over mobility in the central Mediterranean sea. They can move up to thousands of passengers each year with a turnover of hundreds of millions of dollars; but also with thousands of deaths.
Yet it has not always been like this. Did we really forget that landings didn't exist before the 90s? Have you ever wondered why? And have you ever wondered why in 2018 instead of buying a plane ticket a family should pay the price of their own life to get to Europe on a wrecked boat? The reason is very simple: until the 90s it was relatively simple to get a visa in European embassies in Africa. As Europe stopped issuing visas, the smuggling took over.
So, if Salvini really wants to put an end, as he says, to illegal smuggling, reforming visa regulations is a better solution than walking the road of his predecessors. Do not send our secret services to Libya with cash briefcases to bribe illegal smuggling organisations, hoping for them to change their way to make business and turn us into a guard dog. Do not build other overseas prisons with Italian taxpayers' money.
We paid those taxes to see welfare funded! To open nurseries that aren't here. To build popular houses that aren't here. To fund an education system and health system that they are instead dismantling. To create work. Once this is changed, we'll stop making war to the poor. We will have a common goal to fight for. How many public kindergartens would have been opened if those billions of dollars hadn't been spent on bribing some Lybian mafia bosses?
Mr. Salvini, don't waste time. Let those six hundred immigrant land on Italian ground and instead of mounting a fight against NGOs, call the Foreign Minister to set up improved visa regulations with African countries instead. Introduce a visa to search for work, enhance the sponsoring system, approve family reunification. And if you're already at it, negotiate with the EU so that these regulations are approved in the Schengen Area as a whole. This way people would be able to look for work across Europe, rather than being locked away because of a stagnant immigration system.
I still don't understand how a twenty-something years-old in Lagos or Bamako should spend thousands of euros to cross the desert and the sea, be arrested in Libya, tortured, sold, see travel companions die and arrive in Italy maybe after a year, penniless and traumatised. I don't understand, as with a proper visa he could have bought a plane ticket and spend the rest in our markets to find a job. Exactly as five million other migrant workers in Italy have done: they have arrived from Romania, Albania, China, Morocco, and they have rolled up their sleeves. Exactly as did five million Italians, including me, emigrating abroad these decades.
One hundred thousand people who have been waiting for years to have a residence permit that we already know has a 50/50 chance to arrive. For these migrant workers, there is no political asylum. But there is no provision for repatriation either, because there are too many and because there is no cooperation with their countries of origin; so they are forced to work in black to survive.
Mr. Salvini, give all of them a residence permit for humanitarian reasons and a travel title with which they can exit this political limbo and sign a work contract, whether in Italy or Germany. If work is in Germany, Denmark or Norway, there is no point in forcing people into limited boundaries only for bureaucratic reasons. We must demand free movement within Europe for immigrant workers as well, as we cannot afford to have more privileged citizens and lower level citizens. We owe it especially to ourselves.
Many of us have children; we know they'll grow up in a cosmopolitan society. Right now their best friends in kindergarten are Arabs, Chinese, Africans. To avoid this reality is a time bomb for tomorrow's society. Maybe we didn't notice, but WE is already an US. We and them is antiquated speech. A speech that might still sound logical to some old nationalist ears, but that my children would never understand.
Legalize emigration between Africa and Europe, issue valid working visas throughout Europe, dismantle the Libyan illegal monopoly to make the Mediterranean a sea of peace rather than a plentiful grave. Or maybe the death toll isn't large enough yet?

Quote Gabriele del Grande. Thanks for laying out in words what most of Italian expats and Italian residents think.

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