Recently we have witnessed too many and too frequent horrible episodes in the Mediterranean sea. One month ago an overloaded boat sank in the waters of Lampedusa, like many others before, harvesting at least seventeen lives (among them, twelve women and two minors). But it’s likely that the deaths are many more: if the boat contained 400 people as reported, around 200 are missing in the open sea.

This and many other events teache us a lot about the extreme urgency of new and more open laws about immigration in our continent, and a more concerted approach by the whole Union to fight smugglers and help migrants to reach the borders of “Fortress Europe”.

Over the last twenty years around 20.000 migrants have lost their lives in the Mediterranean Sea: the tragedy is shocking, so why are we waiting so long? Why Europe is still so reluctant to open its gates and ease a safer transition of people — women and children in particular — running away from wars, dictatorship and extreme poverty?

There are some sad and self-righteous reasons, but I’d like to focus on one in particular, because it’s a bit more elusive and has vaster consequences. That is, the contradiction at the heart of contemporary advanced liberism: capital can go anywhere, cross any border; while humans cannot. They are seen as a danger: it is feared that there is no way not to “accommodate” them — a too generic, falsely philanthropic term — but instead to frame them in the right place in the system; again, to give them some job and make them somehow useful.

From this point of view, they risk to become useless gears of an already saturated market; they can create fear and instability in the social fabric, thus threatening the sacred and fragile machine of profit and growth.

For this reason, liberism at all costs may turn out to be a good justification for the racist reactions that its political equivalent, liberalism, would harshly criticize. The more I think about, the more it seems to me that those who doubt the legitimacy of a foreigner as a foreigner on the European ground does not have any kind of theory to back that. That is, it does not refer to cultural or geopolitical issues, it does not frame the issue arguing about the sans papier issue or the legality of the concept of border.

For the man on the street, the judgment is reduced to simple, even if often well hidden, contempt: he who criticizes the presence of immigrants is just disgusted by them — because they are different, because they do not speak our language(s), because they are poor, because they stink, because the ones who come here are all criminals and so on. He hates them and therefore does not want them “at home”: in the Fortress.

To this brutality, liberism offers involuntarily an alleged “theory surplus” that may mask it: for example, the ever-repeated fatigue of “absorbing immigrants” into the labour system (“They come here where there is not even work for us!”). Sure, this is an extremely serious issue and only a very naïve leftist thought can think to clear it with a simple fiat: but it should be analyzed with solid arguments and with the aim of solve it, considering first of all that we are an harbor — no matter how in crisis — for people living a far worse condition.

And the very fact that this could be dismissed as a simple “ethical concern”, whereas global politics shouldn’t be dealing with ethics at all, is a proof of how Western democracy is trapped into cynicism and needs to find new moral foundations.

But the point is that the racist next door — the common, shrouded racist with whom you could interact everyday — brandishes this liberist gospel like a weapon, instead of taking it as an argument. He actually does not need it to support his thoughts about immigration; because I suspect that they are not well-formed thoughts. They’re a blind reaction, based on a system of power where social inequality is kind of rooted into a geographical prejudice. And as long as he does not acknowledge it, any objection you will bring to refute it will not truly help: we are far beyond the game of reasoning, because for him “immigrants are evil” — period, and barriers must be reinforced.

This pure hatred lies behind many forms of alleged theoretical justification; and it’s a pure hatred that must be fought, not only because it obstructs all needed changes in the relationship between Europe and North-African immigrants, but also because it will always be ready to become state violence. It’s time to end this lef-to-die policy.