At the beginning of March, as Transnational Migrants Coordination, we held a public assembly with the participation of activists and migrants from the US, Mexico, Italy, Slovenia, Serbia, Germany, Belgium, and Greece. Together, we took a collective stance against the current attack on migrants unfolding in the context of a world war. Migrants are the mass of men and women who reveal the emptiness of the nationalist and patriotic rhetoric used by belligerent governments. They are the mass of men and women who, by crossing borders, challenge – and in fact make impossible – their complete closure, promised by racist states. They are the mass of men and women who, through their movement, flee from the war and often resist the attempts of governments to enlist them into the armies. This is why fighting for freedom of movement today also means fighting against war and its underlying logic.
While the EU seeks “unity” behind an extremely expensive rearmament plan – making the willingness to go to war the paradoxical guarantee of European democracy – what we see behind the so-called “European values” is a reality made of racism, violence, and brutal hierarchies between locals and migrants. As Ursula von der Leyen was announcing her plan to rearm the EU, the European Commission – already behind the racist Pact on Migration and Asylum – proposed common regulations for faster and more efficient deportations. While Trump continues to deport hundreds of migrants to Latin America, Netanyahu carries out a genocide and pushes forward its plan for the “voluntary evacuation” of Palestinians, and the Western Libyan government fosters raids, mass arbitrary arrests, murders, and collective expulsions of people from Africa. In this scenario, the «democratic» EU offers nothing but institutional racism, increasingly coordinated and normalized, pushback, and a systematic attack on the right to asylum.
We won’t be silent, but we need to strengthen transnational coordination, communication, and struggle. Across and beyond Europe’s borders, we want to organize against a transnational border regime that seeks to govern and repress the ungovernable movement of migrant women and men. While dealing with the social and economic consequences of the wars it is actively supporting, the EU continues to blame an artificial internal enemy: migrants, who are made to bear the cost of cuts to public services and wages. In Italy, Meloni’s government has repeatedly tried – without success, despite the support of other European governments – Freedom of Movement for All: End the War, Stop Deportations – to deport asylum seekers from the so-called “safe countries” to repatriation centers in Albania. In non-EU countries like Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the externalization of borders continues to trap or deport migrants on behalf of EU governments. In Germany, the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has promised tighter border controls and pushbacks, forcing asylum seekers to wait in a third country outside the EU and repatriate migrants to Syria and Afghanistan.
In this historical phase of world war, crossing borders and practising the freedom of movement that European governments are trying to suppress is the most powerful weapon migrants have. Against every systematic attempt to regulate or brutally curb it, we reclaim freedom of movement. The desire for freedom and a better life is stronger than any racist international rule imposed through violence.
Our struggle doesn’t stop at the borders. The lives of migrants within Europe are also under constant attack: they are offered nothing but exploitation in “essential” sectors—from agriculture to construction, logistics to care work—and cuts to subsidies. From Serbia to Italy to Belgium, undocumented workers are constantly blackmailed, forced into undeclared jobs, and used as cheap labor. In an age of austerity, migrants are excluded from social welfare, housing, and healthcare, with migrant women especially facing worsening precarity.
Even though new laws — across Belgium, Italy, and the US — seek to criminalize protest, strikes, and pickets (especially when led by migrants), we do not stay silent. In the US, we are organizing against Trump’s deportations. In Germany, thousands marched against the fascist drift and racism of the government. In Italy, we are mobilizing against Meloni’s repressive migration policies and deportations. Everywhere, migrants keep crossing borders in spite of all the violence thrown at them. On March 22, thousands of anti-racist activists and migrants took to the streets across the world to challenge far-right, racist migration policies.
We must keep building our transnational coordination. We must refuse to let migrants pay the price of war. We demand an end to war, but not at the cost of deportations, evacuations, expulsions, the erosion of asylum, welfare, and wages — not just for migrants, but for everyone. We demand open borders for anyone seeking safety and freedom of movement for all those who refuse to enlist in the ongoing bloody war and struggle for a better life.
Contacts: transmigrcoordination@gmail.com
website: https://www.transnational-strike.info/articles/migrants-struggles/
