Immigration and social transformation in Europe: the turning point of an era and its perspectives

Abstract

The shift from the continent of emigration to the continent of immigration marks the change of an era for Europe. Since 1945, tens of millions of immigrants have reached Western Europe, at first from other European regions, then from every corner of the world. Thus, a remarkable social transformation took place: the (ultimate) birth of multi-national, multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious societies. For a long time, governments and companies demanded that immigrants be only temporary, so as to have a mass of precarious, barely integrated, vulnerable workers. Such demand, strongly restated over the past few years, was fiercely opposed by immigrant populations, who responded with a wider social rooting. The same applies to the similar demand by the powers that be to impose on immigrants differential exploitation and any sort of discrimination, opposed by a long chain of struggles and upheaval. Over the course of decades, set on the background of the unsolved great crisis of 2008, this conflict has escalated, until the “question of immigration” has turned into a military question, to be fixed with the intervention of the navy and border police. This paper states that the stakes are now too high: either we go back to a model of society and state based on brutal “racial” and class oppression, or we go towards a society finally freed from any kind of oppression.