Pontifical Counsil for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People

XV Plenary Session

Migration by sea.

Rev. Fr. Beniamino Rossi, c.s.
Superiore Padri Scalabriniani d'Europa
Svizzera

Introduction

In the last few decades migrations have assumed a truly planetary character: the globalisation of the economy, the market, and communications has, on one hand, accelerated, blown up and made the migratory flow more complex. On the other hand, it has involved nearly all the countries around the globe.

This is not the place either to investigate the causes that produce modern migrations or to draw a historical picture of the migrations by sea.

I would only like to recall that immediately after the conquest by the European powers of vast territories in the Americas and Africa, and many Asian territories, forced emigration, specifically by sea, increased. From the beginning of the XVII century up to the first decades of the XIX century, we are in the age of the “slave trade”, justified by the view that considered the human person as a merchandise, a factor of production and development.

1. The Great European migratory saga.

The end of the “slave trade” (after the 1830’s) coincided with the outbreak of the industrial revolution in Europe. As England approved the law abolishing slavery, in the mines of Wales, in the mechanical and textile industries of Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London, a proletariat which, under many aspects, was living a condition of true slavery was coming up.

There was an increase in the processes of urbanization and concentration of the population in industrial zones, with heavy flows of internal migrations in all the main European nations (England, France and Germany) as well as in the European states themselves, according to the regional and national developments.

But it is also the age of unprecedented exodus, from Europe towards the new world. Never before in history did migratory movements of such imposing and continuous dimensions take place, as after the beginning of the 19^th century.

On one hand there was the void caused by the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery that had to be filled, as in the case of the USA and of Brazil. But it was also a question of exploiting the mineral resources, of an organised and systematic agricultural exploitation of vast unpopulated territories (as in the case of Argentina, Brazil, the USA itself and Canada). Finally, particularly in the USA, the industrial revolution demanded a concentration of manpower which could not be found within the territory and necessarily had to be imported.

This migration for work purposes, as opposed to "forced" migration of the earlier age, seemed to be free and spontaneous, at least apparently. Of course, one should not forget the mechanisms of allurement and also recruitment on the part of the countries of immigration, as well as the mechanisms of expulsion from countries or regions in endemic crisis, let alone the political pressures that migration flows undergo in the countries of emigration themselves.

I do not want to delay from discussing the mass phenomenon that marked the European history at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century, in which the sea, the oceans are the great protagonists, the great routes along which more than 50 million migrants moved, particularly towards the Americas, and which later determined the birth and the development of the new American societies.

Allow me, nevertheless to run through that history at least through the citation of a few passages from the writings of the Blessed John Baptist Scalabrini, the Apostle of the migrants, regarding the causes of the emigration and which seem to have preserved their dramatic reality.

“Emigration, in almost all cases, is not a pleasure but an inevitable necessity … The great majority, so as not to say the totality of those who leave their country to go to distant America … do not run away from Italy out of an aversion for work, but because they have no jobs, and do not know how to live and maintain their own families.

"The changing conditions of the times and of civil life, the growing needs not in proportion to wealth, the natural desire to improve one’s position, the agrarian crisis that has heavily weighed on our farmers for years, the enormous burden of public taxes falling on agriculture and the small industries, crushing them … and we have the causes of the emigration…" (L'emigrazione italiana in America.Osservazioni, Piacenza 1887).

Since the very beginning, Msgr. Scalabrini fought a fierce battle against the agents of emigration whom he defined as “dealers of human flesh”.

“It is a duty to support the freedom to emigrate, but it is also a duty to oppose the freedom to cause emigration: it is the duty of the ruling classes to procure for the masses of the proletariat a profitable use of their energy, to help them overcome misery by directing them to look for a profitable job, but it is equally their duty to hinder that their good faith be exploited by greedy speculators…". (L'Italia all'estero, Turin 1899).

"By the greedy speculation of the recruiters, they are usually sent to places where the polluted air kills or are employed in degrading jobs, because the agent's business improves according to the scarcity of manpower and the difficulty of recruitment. And the lack of manpower, whether it be to render land worthy to cultivate or to do public works, comes about in those places where death reduces the number of workers, and terror, which drives away the survivors, makes it always necessary to have new victims who are unaware of the danger…" (Draft bill on Italian emigration. Observations and proposals, Piacenza 1888)

“… The agents of emigration have led a considerable number of emigrants to Brazil, to substitute the already insufficient manpower needed in agriculture and rendered quite scarce by the abolition of slavery. Thus, in New York, the so-called patron system, condemned by a Bill of the Senate of the United States, gathered together an immense number of emigrants attracted by thousands of promises, shamelessly exploited and then abandoned, to make place for the newcomers, new victims of corrupt earnings. … And as ignorance and poverty make them easy victims of the agents of emigration here in their homeland, so also over there isolation and misery make them easy prey of speculation, always and everywhere without a pitiful heart, and there more than anywhere else…" (First Conference on emigration. Piacenza 1891).

Scalabrini also describes briefly the hardships experienced by the migrants during the various stages of their adventure.

“Stowed in the hold worse than animals, in numbers much more than those permitted by the regulations and the capacity of the steamboats, they make the long and arduous journey literally piled up, with much damage to the morals and health as everyone can well imagine.

And when they arrive at the desired port, the sad tale of their troubles is anything but over. Often tricked by cunning arts, dazzled by a thousand false promises, forced by need, they bind themselves with contracts that are a true slavery, and the boys, by begging, find themselves on the road of crime and the women thrown into the abyss of dishonour…" (the Italian emigration in America)

2. The “sea carts” and trafficking of clandestine migrants.

If the migration flows during the period between the two wars greatly decreased, it exploded again after the Second World War. During the fifties, the sea and the oceans became the principal way for migration. But it remained so only for a short while, quickly substituted by other more rapid means of transport between the continents (air transport) and between nations (transport by railway and road.)

Migration flows no longer departed predominantly from Europe, but the migration sources multiplied more and more. From the nineteen-sixties, the political, economic and financial world scenario seemed more and more to be a kind of a “global economic village”, even though it was still divided into two by the economic-political blocks that compete for world power (the well-known “cold war”). Local problems of all kinds are evermore connected with global problems, in an increasingly vaster and more profound "universalization" process: from human rights, to problems related to work, to health, to agricultural development and hunger, international security, commerce, development plans …

In the economic and financial field, one country alone is no longer capable of carrying out programmes independent of other countries in the same area and even of the development of world economy and finances: the national economies are conditioned by and depend on international and trans-national factors.

In the last thirty years there has been an acceleration of the migration flows and their globalization, as we have mentioned in the introduction of this talk.

The increase of emigration is confirmed by some estimates of the U.N. Whereas in 1965 international immigrants were calculated to be around 75 million, they were approximately 120 million (including the refugees) at the beginning of the 1990’s, and at the beginning of 2000, the number of immigrants had increased to around 150 million (with about 50 million refugees). This means that, from the 1960’s to this day, the immigrants in the world have more than doubled, with an annual growth rate of 1.9 % (higher than the rate of population growth in the world which is 1.8%). Female emigration, which constituted 48% at the beginning of the l990’s, is fast increasing today, especially following the irregular flows: it is a phenomenon that is not destined to stop (United Nations, 1998, 9. 39).

In the actual phase, the most alarming phenomenon is clandestine migration and among them, the “trafficking of clandestine migrants”.

It is in this context that the route of the sea is used once again. In fact, part of the trafficking of clandestine migrants takes place precisely there, "by sea". If one excludes the problem of the “professionals of the sea”, that is, of seafarers (a theme that has already been dealt with this morning), what remains today of the enormous passage of the migrants through the maritime routes of the past ages is almost exclusively only the maritime transport of clandestine migrants.

We are dealing here with a “micro phenomenon” that nevertheless must be inserted in a more articulated context, connected both with the “new slavery” as well as with the “new mafias”, which are harvesting fabulous earnings from such trafficking.

During the Cuban crisis, at first, and at the end of the war in Vietnam, we got used to seeing boats overloaded with desperate people who were trying to flee in search of liberty and hope. These were Cubans who were afraid of the Castro regime that was being established in Cuba. They were also Vietnamese, many of whom were particularly involved with the Americans or, at any rate, were aware that the situation would end up with the arrival of the new Vietkong communist regime.

The dramatic and sad tale of the “boat people” started.

A lot of these boats sank with their loads of people and despair; a lot of them were chased away from the beaches where they landed and had to continue on a new adventure.

The news reports now speak of new boats, ranging from the "sea carts” to the rubber boats and motorboats, that plough the Mediterranean (especially towards Spain, Greece and Italy) or carry clandestine migrants and many desperate people who seek their fortune or political asylum in the various Asian countries, or in Australia. In 2000, according to Spanish police data, more than a thousand people died in the attempt to reach the Iberian peninsula: hundreds of deaths were the price paid by the boats piloted by Albanian boatsmen. The "sea carts" that approached the coasts of Calabria are loaded with people who are exhausted, ill, dying and even dead. It is impossible to count the number of ships that sank with their load of sailors (mostly Filipinos) or migrants.

The tale of the “boat people” continues, and seems destined to continue.

1. Modern migration and the new slavery

In his book entitled “Schiavi. Il nuovo traffico di esseri umani (Slaves.The new traffic of human beings)” (Rizzoli, Milan 1999, pp. 13–14), Piano Arlacchi begins as follows: “On the wave of the globalisation of communications and of markets, as well as of economic growth and the development itself of civil rights in the richer countries, during the last three decades the chains of slavery have multiplied and densified. It is not a question of survival, or of horrid weirdness, but of great human suffering, greatly increased by the greed of those who look for profit without paying attention to limits or the means for its attainment.

"According to Anti Slavery International in London, there are more than 200 million human beings who are in chains today. The figures of the past … pale in comparison with the dimensions of present-day slavery. In less than thirty years from the beginning of the 1970’s up to this day, the trading alone of women and children, destined for sexual slavery in Asia, is estimated to be about 30 million individuals. If we add to this the 100 million children who, according to the International Labour Office, today suffer the wildest and most degrading forms of exploitation, we get the number of one of the most devastating and disregarded plagues of the present age.”

In fact, modern slavery is manifested in two ways: sexual slavery and economic slavery.

Even if the new forms of slavery are not to be identified with migration flows, it is clear that particularly a part of the clandestine immigration is closely connected with these new forms of slavery.

• As regards sexual slavery, it is to be kept in mind that, today, there are no legitimate forms of sexual slavery and that no code of law allows sexual exploitation. Yet, there is a continuous increase in extreme forms of enslavement in the commercial circles, as part of an industry of sexual jobs articulated in various ways. In recent decades, the market for sexual services has grown. The more the human rights of the victims are violated, the higher are the profits of the middle men from these services and their prices when sold to customers. The world market of women and children, reduced to servitude for the purpose of satisfying the desires and perversions of a paying and indifferent clientele, has assumed alarming proportions.
• “In the brothels of Manila and Nairobi, by the roads of Rio and New York, in the bars of Amsterdam and Bangkok, in the buses, in the railway stations and in the hotel rooms in every part of the world, millions of children are at the risk of sexual exploitation, or are already trapped in the million-making sex industry" (World Congress against the sexual trade and exploitation of children, Stockholm 1966).
• Beside the child-slaves, we find a whole range of young women bought and sold according to archaic or advanced ways (from the market squares, to ads in the newspapers, to specialized catalogues on the Internet): women a little older than adolescents, almost children, whose virginity and freedom are appraised and traded by careful and cruel exploiters, who are sure that from the services of human beings who are stripped of their dignity, they can draw profits over and over again. Girls for entertainment, for massage, for the evening, women for rent for hours, days and weeks; Services as escorts, for representation, for aesthetic and spiritual care… “We are in a zone of the world economy where the circulation of the human merchandise has abolished every geographical and legal border and where supply and demand meet in a global Babel, that does not care for the race, the values and the sentiments of the persons" (P. Arlacchi, op. cit., p. 87).
• If the population of the exploited is composed of the most vulnerable categories, the population of the exploiters is more and more often composed of criminal groups of various extractions and from some of the most powerful and well-known criminal organizations in the world (like the Japanese Yakuza, the Chinese Triads and the Russian mafia). Besides, the spread of sexual slavery is also tied up with the ambiguity of and the gaps in the laws on prostitution and trafficking of clandestine immigrants in many countries.
• Sexual slavery is prosperous in all countries, especially in those where there is sexual “tourism”. Some Asian countries are famous under this aspect, like Thailand (where in the recent past sexual tourism was given publicity even in tour agencies) and the Philippines. But sexual slavery has now become an “export merchandise”. As we shall see later on, the sex industry feeds on migration flows, including and above all on clandestine migration (according to the various countries), of women and children.
• As regards the economic slavery, “unlike the slaves who broke their backs working on huge land properties or on the plantations of the new world, the contemporary slaves are not even considered part of the capital of the enterprise: precisely because there are no legal means for asserting their possession, they are not the object of any long-term investment …, but, as every other factor of low-cost production, they are considered completely interchangeable" (P. Arlacchi, op. cit., pp. 123–124).
• Economic slavery resumes and continues the old institution of “servitude by debt” which has continued existing in many countries: a loan or an advance payment of a salary is given to a person or to a family, and the debtor has to work for the creditor till the entire debt is paid. In reality, he falls into a trap, from which very rarely he succeeds in getting free after a short time, since work relationships are organized (with succeeding loans and succeeding debts) in such a way that restitution in a reasonable period of time is impossible. Besides, this slavery is practically invisible, since the enslavement is not official. It starts from a private contract (often not written), that is not caught by checks, by censuses and statistics. According to the Gandhi Peace Foundation, in India, at the beginning of the 1980’s, there were at least 2,240,000 enslaved workers.
• Up to this day, economic slavery is enforced in many countries, above all with regard to child labour. Often the parents themselves, oppressed by misery and debts, turn to entrepreneurs or middlemen so that they would hire one or more children with compensation. But there is a real organization of middlemen, who offer a poor family a job for a son or a daughter, with a compensation, or a total or partial remission of debts contracted. At times, it is not extreme need that encourages this act of selling, but rather the illusion that, with a professional experience, the child can have a better future. And it is precisely this kind of an ambiguous legitimization that makes the eradication if this scourge difficult. Bound to their master by the loan that they received, the “servants by debt” are at the mercy of the former. They become suppliers, without any value and immediately replaceable, of low-cost manpower for the production of merchandise to be sold in the local and international markets. Around 20 % of the 250 million of children forced to work in the third world are employed in the manufacturing and mining industry, in construction and in services, and many of them are “servants by debt.”
• The growing restrictions on migration flows, imposed in all the developed countries in the last twenty years, have favoured the return into use of an institution that made it possible for thousands of Europeans to reach America in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the transfer-exploitation of millions of Asian workers in the colonies during the following century: “contract servitude” reappeared on a large scale and it involves both the regular and clandestine immigration. Some years of “contract servitude” is often the price to be paid to be able to carry out a clandestine transfer to the United States or Europe or the Asiatic countries of immigration. Through the debt mechanism (the advanced payment of money to pay for the trip), every year thousands of irregular immigrants are forced to work to be able to pay back, maybe with substantial interest, the cost of their trip to the west.

Conclusion

In my complete presentation, I analysed the statistical data on trafficking of clandestine migrants especially in Asia and from Asia, and in Europe.

Against exploitation and “trafficking” and against the crimes committed against minors, manifold initiatives have been undertaken by national and international organs. Especially in the course of the 1990’s, important agreements were made by various countries involved in the phenomenon: the “Declaration and Agenda for Action” at the 1996 Stockholm Conference, the “Resolution against the trafficking of human beings” of the European Parliament of 1996, followed by the Convention of The Hague in 1997.

In December 1998, the General Assembly of the UN had created an "ad hoc" committee for the elaboration of a “Convention of the United Nations against organised trans-national criminality”, which was promoted in Vienna, in December 1999. The committee approved the convention in July 2000 and the Protocol on the trafficking of persons (particularly women and children) and on the trafficking and illegal transport of migrants, in October 2000. In November 2000, the General Assembly formally adopted these instruments, signed in Palermo on 15^th December 2000.

From these conventions repressive actions sprang up and a coordinated effort of state-level interventions, as well as legislative adjustments, which will however require a lot of time and further effort, are being produced.

In the European union two complementary programmes are already in action since the end of the 1990’s, with the objective of combating "trafficking": the “Stop” programme and the “Dafne” programme. "Trafficking" is subdivided into five phases: the first four phases (recruitment, journey, landing in the country of destination and exploitation) are the areas of the “Stop” programme; the fifth phase concerns active reintegration into the civil life of the persons involved in trafficking and is the area of intervention of the “Dafne” programme.

The results obtained are essentially two: an important work of stimulating public opinion regarding the phenomenon of trafficking (especially through a series of conferences and meetings, the clarification, even theoretically, of its meaning and the various realities connected with it) and an action towards the convergence of the systems of laws of the various countries of the European Union that are committed to the work of inserting penal laws against the traffickers.

Still at the legislative level, the Countries of the European Union made laws on the principle of extra-territoriality in the crimes against minors and the Europol was instituted. Among its various areas of intervention are also crimes connected both to illegal immigration and to "trafficking".

We are aware of the fact that there is a need to direct the huge human and economic resources in two directions:

• To oppose a “business” that is producing conspiracy and complicity among the trans-national criminal organizations, it is necessary to undertake a common action, that goes beyond the individual national and local spheres. The question must be faced at the continental and international levels.
• No project in favour of the victims of the abuses of power can leave aside their recuperation, reintegration into social life and rehabilitation: simple repatriation evades the problem, while protection and security for the future are necessary (on the part of the institutions) so that the victim may feel capable of reacting and freeing himself.

Exploitation of the past (slavery, exploitation of the past migrations) seems a distant memory, but instead the ancient evils reappear under other forms even in our age of globalisation, and, under many aspects, they appear to have increased, at least quantitatively if not qualitatively.

But the situation of sin in which modern migrations continue to be immersed is the world that the Father loved and continues to love so much, and in which he wants to build his Kingdom. The Christian vision of history comes exactly from this positive project of the Father.

A saying of Msgr. Scalabrini comes to my mind: “The way of ideas is desperately slow, most especially when they involve interests and passions, but it is continuous when the ideas proposed are just and truly useful. Let us therefore insist so that every slowness may reach the destination, on the condition that fatigue does not win over those who carried the ideas.” (Second Conference on Emigration, Turin 1898)