Depersonalized migrations: towards a hospitable society

Abstract

At this precise moment, although we are not aware of it, it is possible that thousands of people are fleeing their homes to protect their lives from direct death or to, through work, survive and improve their quality of life, as referred an immigrant woman from South America we were able to interview: My father, as far as I know, always hit my mother. He may not have physically assaulted us as daughters, but he did verbally. These are things that mark you a lot psychologically, then, of course, there comes a point where it is not normal, but you do not have that courage to do something, you do not have the courage to get out of the situation. I came to Spain at the age of 27 and said, either I do something or I kill my father with one blow. The last time, it was when I made the decision to come because he gave her a very strong beating, which could even have made her invalid or something. So I suggested to my mother that we were leaving the house. Maybe we weren't going to have many comforts or I had the option of coming to Spain and working and then getting my mother and daughter out of that situation. My mother told me that yes, that she would come to me and take care of my daughter, and that is how she came to me. We must reflect here on a specific type of migratory flows, recorded from the constitution of a world-economy (Wallerstein, 2007) and the emergence of nation-states in Europe, referring to migrations of an economic nature and more specifically to movements from South to North for reasons of survival, to improve the quality of life. The description of this type of migratory flow is structured based on the role played in recent centuries by two parallel processes: the gradual construction of a capitalist world-economy and the emergence of a new political architecture of mutually hierarchical nation-states.