Writer and thinker Umberto Eco, on the threshold of the third millennium, reflected on how migration differs from immigration and why Europe will inevitably turn into a multi-colored continent, whether we like it or not. Today, on the wave of mass migration from Syria, his view of the interaction of peoples is especially interesting.
“Unless the course of events for some reason turns sharply back (since everything is possible), we must prepare and expect that in the next millennium Europe will begin to resemble New York or many states of Latin America. New York vividly refutes the idea of a melting pot. Many cultures coexist in New York: Puerto Ricans and Chinese, Koreans and Pakistanis. Some groups have merged (Italians with Irish, Jews with Poles), others exist separately: they live in separate quarters, speak different languages and observe dissimilar traditions. Everyone is tied to everyone by obedience to common laws, and everyone uses a certain standard service language of communication — English — which everyone knows unsatisfactorily. Please note that in New York, where the so-called «white» population is about to be in the minority, 42% of whites are Jews, the other 52% have a wide variety of roots, and the so-called wasps (White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants ) are a minority among them (for Poles, Italians, Hispanics, Irish and many others are Catholics).
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In Latin America, depending on the place, the situations are the most varied. Somewhere the Spanish columns crossed paths with the Indians. Somewhere, say in Brazil, also with Africans, the so-called «Creole» languages and nations were born. Even using racist concepts of «blood», it is very difficult to distinguish what the roots of a Mexican or a Peruvian are: European or native, not to mention immigrants from Jamaica.
So, this is exactly the future that awaits Europe, and not a single racist, not a single nostalgic reactionary can do anything about it.
For further discussion, let’s try to delimit the concept of «immigration» from the concept of «migration».
Immigration is the movement of someone (or even many, but some of them are statistically irrelevant) from one country to another (examples: Italians or Irish immigrated to America, or Turks nowadays to Germany). The phenomena of immigration can be controlled by political means, limited, encouraged, programmed, or taken for granted.
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With migrations, things are different. Stormy or peaceful, they are always like natural disasters: they happen, and nothing can be done. During some migrations, representatives of an entire people gradually move from one area to another. And it is not so much important how many of them remained in the original territory, how important it is to what extent they changed the culture in the territory of arrival. Great migrations from east to west are known, then the peoples from the Caucasus influenced both the culture and the biological heredity of the Western nations. The migrations of the so-called «barbarians» are known, which flooded the Roman Empire and gave rise to new kingdoms and new cultures, nicknamed «Romano-barbarian» or «Romano-Germanic». European migration to the American continent took place, both from the eastern coast far and wide, to California itself, and from the Caribbean Islands and Mexico to the south and south, along to Tierra del Fuego itself. Although this settlement was partly politically programmed, I still call it migration, because the whites who came from Europe did not adopt the customs and culture of the locals, but founded a new society to which even the locals (those who remained alive) had to adapt.
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We know interrupted migrations, for example, the advance of the Arab peoples to the Iberian Peninsula. We know the forms of programmed, targeted, but no less influential migration of the population of Europe to the east and south (which led to the formation of the so-called post-colonial nations), in which migrants radically changed the culture of autochthonous peoples. The phenomenology of types of migration has not yet been developed, but it is clear that migration and immigration are fundamentally different things. We are dealing with simple immigration in cases where immigrants (admitted into the country by political decision) to a large extent assimilate the customs of the region where they ended up. And we have migration in those cases when migrants (from whom it is impossible to defend the borders) radically change the culture of the area where they settle.
Against the backdrop of the XNUMXth century, which saw crowds of immigrants, in our century it is difficult to qualify many phenomena. The ease of movement is indescribable, and it is extremely difficult to determine whether we are dealing with immigration or migration. Of course, there is an unstoppable movement from south to north (Africans and immigrants from the Middle East to Europe), the Indians flooded Africa and the Pacific islands, the Chinese are present everywhere, the Japanese, in the form of their production and economic structures, are also present everywhere, although physically not removed en masse.
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How to distinguish immigration from migration if the whole planet has become a space of continuous movement? I think it’s possible to distinguish. As already mentioned, immigration is amenable to political control, but migration is not; Migration is a natural phenomenon. As far as immigration is concerned, one can hope to keep immigrants in the ghetto so that they do not mix with the natives. In the case of migrations, ghettos are unthinkable and cross-breeding becomes uncontrollable.
The phenomena that Europe is still trying to perceive as immigration are actually migration. The third world knocks on the doors of Europe and enters them, even when Europe does not agree to let it in. The problem is not to decide (politicians like to pretend that they decide) whether it is possible to go to school in Paris in a veil, or how many mosques should be built in Rome. The problem is that in the next millennium (I am not a prophet and I do not undertake to name the exact date) Europe will turn into a multi-racial or, if you prefer, multi-colored continent. Whether you like it or not, it will be. And if you don’t like it, it will still be so.
For more details, see «Migrations, Tolerance and the Unbearable» in U. Eco’s book «Five Essays on Ethics» («Symposium», 2000).