No One is Illegal! May Day of Action, 2009. Flickr/Tanya Liu. Some rights reserved.Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people have come to our towns and cities in the last week seeking a safe place to live. They escape dire economic and political situations, and many have lost all they had in violent conflict, loved ones and their homes. We want to welcome them.
Welcoming and hosting newcomers must be intelligently imagined and enabled. It needs to go beyond the violence of an ‘integration’ that makes newcomers solely responsible while placing them in hostile conditions. We need forms of welcoming that enable respect and friendship. Rather than the verticality of ‘us’ helping ‘them’, we need to welcome people in a way that enables mutual relations and the construction of a new ‘we’.
In recent weeks, we have seen that civil society has the tools to welcome newcomers in this way. People arriving have not only encountered the violence of our borders, but determined acts of solidarity by thousands of Europeans. This mostly logistical support has revealed a capacity and will to engage in a sustained welcome.
