Transnationalization now!

06.Nov.08 - Transnationalization is not a slogan. Transnationalization is a process, and it is a project. Inside and outside Europe, migrants move from one country to another one, looking for a better future, refusing subordination and exploitation. Crossing the borders, migrants are transnationalizing the world. This process is already taking place, that is why the transnationalization of migrants' struggles, against the border regime, must become a project too.

While they move, migrants are also self-organizing themselves both on a local and on a wider level, to appropriate their rights, building political communication and alliances with other social movements. The strikes of migrant workers and the struggles inside and outside the working places and the detention centers, the mobilization of refugees and asylum seekers against deportations and the Dublin II regulation, the local experiences of solidarity and organization within some social centers, the bridges between Europe and Africa, which would be improved in Paris on October 17 an 18, the campaign against Frontex, which tried to connect European struggles and the ones outside the borders, against the borders and their selective inclusion: all these experience are real, they are taking place right now.

However, all these struggles are not already connected, nor their transnational dimension is already given. Local, national, legal differences are so much borders opposing the transnationalization project. Political communication and organization is still a problem, and the visibility of these processes likewise. We want to take these difference seriously, to keep them within a process of political communication and organization focused on the selective function displayed by the contemporary border regime, on the political centrality of migrant labor within the whole process of precarization, on the struggle for a permanent and unconditioned legalization of all migrants!

We know that, every day more, borders are producing differences and hierarchies. Within the working places, migrant workers are blackmailed, they are forced to accept the worst wages and job conditions if they want to renew their residence permits. Moreover, a growing number of undocumented migrants are well accepted so far as they are necessary to the labor market. They are, paradoxically, a regular, illegal labor force, to be detained and expelled when they are not anymore necessary, like a cleanex. In this way, the border regime and the migration policies become a crucial lever for the precarization of labor as a whole: they multiply differences and divisions, so that even the organization of struggles and the communication between migrant and non migrant workers becomes much more difficult. If this is not enough, refugees and asylum seekers are experiencing another kind of legal cage: the Dublin II regulation sharply reduces their possibility to move and to improve their life conditions, trying to force them to silence and invisibility, when not to detention or death. The European border regime is a crucial instrument for the production of these differences and hierarchies. The militarization of the borders, the patrol of the Mediterranean area and of the eastern Europe, the readmission agreements, the homogeneous system of control which Europe is trying to develop through Frontex, all this facts must be read as instruments of selective inclusion and recruitment of migrant men and women, whose movements everyday threaten the borders themselves.

Yet, this is not impeding migrants' struggles. Rather, what is at stake today is the transnational connection of these struggles.

Some steps have already been made: the three common European days of action promoted by the European Social Forum were crucial in stressing the necessity of a struggle which was able to go beyond the national borders. At the same time, they were not up to the challenges raised by the European management of the borders and of migrant labor force. The transnational chain of action was an attempt to build a common space where all these differences could express themselves sharing a political frame. It was an important step forward, but it was not enough. The transnationalization is an ongoing process that we want to develop, facing difficulties and obstacles.

We believe that the struggle of migrant workers against the exploitation of migrant labor must be transnational, and that we have to be able to link these struggles with the one against the precarization of labor.

We believe that the struggle against the border regime, against Frontex, against detention and deportation, and against the Dublin II regulation, should be brought on by bridging European movements with the ones outside the eastern and southern borders. That is why we support the Euro-African networking. And we believe that the borders are not only at the border, so far as they are also the controls, raids, the differences and the hierarchies that migrants are experiencing every day.

We believe that a permanent and unconditioned legalization of all migrants must be the common demand to be promoted against the exploitation of migrant labor and the border regime.

These are the starting points of our project, and to follow it we have to improve political communication, we have to find out feasible ways of cooperation and organization on a transnational level, we have to build up political bridges in order to cross the borders without denying differences, difficulties, obstacles. One thing is clear: transnationalization is already going on. We have to be up to the challenge.

Frassanito Network; Tavolo Migranti – Italy; All Included – Amsterdam; Justice for Janitors Global Campaign; No-one is Illegal Hanau; NoLager – Bremen; REDI (Network for Immigrants Rights) – Spain; CAIC (Campaign against Immigration Control) – London; Network for Social Support to Immigrants and Refugees – Greece; Fels (Für eine linke Strömung) – Berlin; CADI – Italy; AFVMC – Douala/Cameroon;

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