TRANSNATIONALIZATION NOW, sept. 2008

TRANSNATIONALIZATION NOW!

Transnationalization is not a slogan. Transnationalization is a process, and it is a
project. Inside and outside Europe, migrants move from one country to another one,
looking for a better future, refusing subordination and exploitation. Crossing the
borders, migrants are transnationalizing the world. This process is already taking
place, that is why the transnationalization of migrants' struggles, against the
border regime, must become a project too.

While they move, migrants are also self-organizing themselves both on a local and
on a wider level, to appropriate their rights, building political communication and
alliances with other social movements. The strikes of migrant workers and the
struggles inside and outside the working places and the detention centers, the
mobilization of refugees and asylum seekers against deportations and the Dublin II
regulation, the local experiences of solidarity and organization within some social
centers, the bridges between Europe and Africa, which would be improved in Paris on
October 17 an 18, the campaign against Frontex, which tried to connect European
struggles and the ones outside the borders, against the borders and their selective
inclusion: all these experience are real, they are taking place right now.

However, all these struggles are not already connected, nor their transnational
dimension is already given. Local, national, legal differences are so much borders
opposing the transnationalization project. Political communication and organization
is still a problem, and the visibility of these processes likewise. We want to take
these difference seriously, to keep them within a process of political
communication and organization focused on the selective function displayed by the
contemporary border regime, on the political centrality of migrant labor within the
whole process of precarization, on the struggle for a permanent and unconditioned
legalization of all migrants!

We know that, every day more, borders are producing differences and hierarchies.
Within the working places, migrant workers are blackmailed, they are forced to
accept the worst wages and job conditions if they want to renew their residence
permits. Moreover, a growing number of undocumented migrants are well accepted so
far as they are necessary to the labor market. They are, paradoxically, a regular,
illegal labor force, to be detained and expelled when they are not anymore
necessary, like a cleanex. In this way, the border regime and the migration
policies become a crucial lever for the precarization of labor as a whole: they
multiply differences and divisions, so that even the organization of struggles and
the communication between migrant and non migrant workers becomes much more
difficult. If this is not enough, refugees and asylum seekers are experiencing
another kind of legal cage: the Dublin II regulation sharply reduces their
possibility to move and to improve their life conditions, trying to force them to
silence and invisibility, when not to detention or death. The European border
regime is a crucial instrument for the production of these differences and
hierarchies. The militarization of the borders, the patrol of the Mediterranean
area and of the eastern Europe, the readmission agreements, the homogeneous system
of control which Europe is trying to develop through Frontex, all this facts must
be read as instruments of selective inclusion and recruitment of migrant men and
women, whose movements everyday threaten the borders themselves.

Yet, this is not impeding migrants' struggles. Rather, what is at stake today is
the transnational connection of these struggles.

Some steps have already been made: the three common European days of action promoted
by the European Social Forum were crucial in stressing the necessity of a struggle
which was able to go beyond the national borders. At the same time, they were not up
to the challenges raised by the European management of the borders and of migrant
labor force. The transnational chain of action was an attempt to build a common
space where all these differences could express themselves sharing a political
frame. It was an important step forward, but it was not enough. The
transnationalization is an ongoing process that we want to develop, facing
difficulties and obstacles.

We believe that the struggle of migrant workers against the exploitation of migrant
labor must be transnational, and that we have to be able to link these struggles
with the one against the precarization of labor.

We believe that the struggle against the border regime, against Frontex, against
detention and deportation, and against the Dublin II regulation, should be brought
on by bridging European movements with the ones outside the eastern and southern
borders. That is why we support the Euro-African networking. And we believe that
the borders are not only at the border, so far as they are also the controls,
raids, the differences and the hierarchies that migrants are experiencing every
day.

We believe that a permanent and unconditioned legalization of all migrants must be
the common demand to be promoted against the exploitation of migrant labor and the
border regime.

These are the starting points of our project, and to follow it we have to improve
political communication, we have to find out feasible ways of cooperation and
organization on a transnational level, we have to build up political bridges in
order to cross the borders without denying differences, difficulties, obstacles.
One thing is clear: transnationalization is already going on. We have to be up to
the challenge.

septembre 2008

Frassanito Network
No-one is Illegal Hanau
Tavolo Migranti - Italy
All Included - Amsterdam
Justice for Janitors Global Campaign
NoLager - Bremen
REDI (Network for Immigrants Rights) - Spain
CAIC (Campaign against Immigration Control) - London
Network for Social Support to Immigrants and Refugees - Greece
Fels (Für eine linke Strömung) - Berlin