Chronic. It only took a few days. Under the shock of Russian aggression against Ukraine, the words to designate women and men who flee their country in order to escape misfortune or death have changed dramatically. Finished “The crisis of migrants”, hello “solidarity with refugees”. The war at the gates of Europe has changed ways to see and policies in many areas: energy, defense, sovereignty. The paradigm shift on immigration, too, is spectacular.
A long time ago the figures of the “asylum seeker” and that of the “immigrant”, clearly distinct from the time of the cold war or Latin American dictatorships – the first “political”, the second “Economic” – had scrambled. The gradual narrowing of legal routes of immigration, the multiplication of conflicts in the Middle East and Africa has transformed into “asylum seekers” many of those once called “immigrants”. Hence the adoption of the term encompassing “migrants”. The application of the 1951 Geneva Convention, which reserves the refugee status to any person “fearing with reason to be persecuted because of his race, his religion, his nationality (…) or his political opinions” is becoming increasingly complex, in a context where oppression and misery are often inseparable.
Walls and fences
The European Union, taking between its willingness to slaughter its internal borders and the requirement of each State to conserve the sovereign mastery of asylum, torn between the East and the West and between stories of Different immigration, has never managed to agree on a common mechanism for the examination of asylum applications. Hence the walls, fences and policies – except in Germany in 2015 – aimed at blocking the road to Syrians, Afghans, Africans, to try to keep them in Turkey or North Africa.
And now Ukrainians, victims of a war of aggression such as the continent has not seen since 1945, resurrectly, typically European, the “refugee” of the post-Second World War, victim Nazi barbarism or Soviet oppression. The irony of geography, they defer in hundreds of thousands, in the countries of Eastern Europe so far the most hostile to the reception of refugees from Africa or the Middle East. This foot of history has succeeded, on March 3, to an unpublished decision of the European Union, with the potentially considerable consequences.
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