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Humanity’s hundreds of millions of migrants, each and every one of us who live the many different forms of human mobility, we constitute a social subject of worldwide and protagonist character, through our jobs and professions, through our efforts as citizens in seminars, debates, interchanges, reflections, marches and demonstrations. We know that this historic and human task will only be carried out, if we make ourselves the protagonists of our history and the architects of our common destiny. We are the inhabitants of one and the same dwelling place – the planet Earth and its surrounding universe. From this basic fact, and from no other authority, emanates the right of all, men and women, to live, transit, reside and to work with dignity in it. To propose that migration is consubstantial to the human being and that walls, objectively, are not sustainable and that they have to be traced and follow other paths is an indispensable, enlightening point to begin at.

The “Neoliberal” Capitalist context and content of the globalization presently at hand, very often operate like a selective mechanism for worldwide, human mobility, which tends to reproduce a characteristic of this globalization itself in some migratory policies – that of including some and of excluding many. This reveals a more and more acute conflict, of which migrants are the most evident indicator; from the historical appearance of the sovereign Nation State as of the sixteenth century to the appearance of what we presently live, the greater sovereignty of the international, human community, in order to establish a minimal and inalienable respect of the Human Rights of all. Above and beyond everything else, migrants are an indicator of the conflict and the necessity of change for the development of humanity in times of growing, multi-dimensional inter-connection of all peoples and nations. They are the objective evidence for the need for redesigning the treatment of migration as a part of redesigning World governance, which implies tackling the task of overcoming the institutional residue of the modern Nation State and redesigning the criteria of identity, belonging and citizenship.

The massive migratory compulsion, an expression of historical, structural phenomena, tends to appear together with the corruption of public institutions and the “black industry” of migration, which, according to various evaluations moves between 15,000 and 30,000 million dollars annually (the second largest generator of illegal money in the world). This is the huge business of the disappearance of human beings, the victims of which are estimated to be two million people each year, through the compulsive disappearance of migrants in search of a country of destination as the only possibility of survival or of improvement of life. The conversion of borders into spaces of encounter and the humanization of migratory flows and interchanges is the only viably alternative when faced with those growing threats. This conversion of the borders can only have sense for the redesign of governance if it has as a future, programmatic horizon the gradual construction of large geographic cultural areas of free circulation, residence and work, that is to say, of spaces of regional integration in large unit blocks of countries which occupy a large and common geographic and often cultural territory.

Furthermore, those migrants granted an amplified citizenship in their countries of origin and of destination are also a prototype of a “regional citizen,” as an emergent reality and normative horizon in many of the geographic cultural spaces which have been established. At the subjective level of their identity and belonging, migrants also are in transit. They “continue to be” members of their societies of origin, although simultaneously they “are,” in fact, members of their society of residence. This has to do with identity and belonging that do not stop being one in order to then become the other, but rather that are added, collected and enlarged. This concrete enlarging of citizenship into a double belonging constitutes the potential, viable basis of an even larger, regional and universal citizenship. The fundamental operative criterion is to gradually homologate and to homogenize the norms and to establish an institutionality common to those countries of the integrated space, starting with the diversity and community of existing instruments, which make regional citizenship effective, by reproducing this model in all the dimensions of citizenship that become necessary (education and professional training, validation of degrees, political and labor rights and rights to children’s education, … etc.)

In the dominant economic model, characterized by the increase of world wealth, of inequality and exclusion as far as rights to and opportunities for wellbeing are concerned, today’s labor migration acts as a mechanism that in fact redistributes the world’s growing economic wealth. However, this “in-fact redistribution” is, in and of itself, insufficient and still occurs as if forced by the circumstances, unnoticed, perhaps even silenced, and in collision with the residue of the norms. Here, a multiple strategy of the redesign of world economic governance and of the migration which interacts with this governance are needed, in order that the factual redistributive character of today’s worldwide migration is recognized, made explicit and institutionalized. The inclusion of compensatory redistributive mechanisms for those economies which are less developed and initially more susceptible to integration should be able to be included as a standard in the agreements and treaties of regional integration, thus leveling out the grades of wealth in the entire integrated area, and should be able to assume the co-responsibilities concerning migration by those countries presently the receptors and creditors given their privilege and administration of structures of inequality in relation to economic policy.

The worldwide labor market, in which capital moves in a deterritorializing logic and dynamic, does not operate the same way with the workers, who perceive that they are subject to restrictions without an equivalent or complimentary freedom of circulation, because of which a growing current of migrant workers find themselves with the necessity of moving in and across the territories of Nation States, and so often loose their quality of human beings and rights. To make the governance of migration sustainable, it is indispensable that the function of the adjustment of transnational labor markets is legalized and abided by; and for now, against the residue of norms, allowing the opening of the labor markets and free movement between the signing countries. At present, migrants are often partially included. Reducing them to nothing more than work integration, even though this is a minimal recognition of work rights, violates their Human Rights, and thus weakens the entirety of the democratic system and generates exclusion, risks and resentments which will bring about unexpected negative consequences for all of society. Migrants and their families should be allowed to exercise, in conditions and opportunities of full equality with the local receptor population, all rights, economic, social, of health, education, housing, social security and recreation etc. as a sustainable guaranty of healthy integration.

In order to turn migration into a living cultural wealth, full of opportunities and hopes for all of humanity, we must strengthen our pluri- and inter-cultural abilities and overcome racism, and xenophobia as expressions of backwardness of human conscientiousness. In every day life, migratory flows are outlining a new world for everybody, and changing the way of thinking about and living culture, and heading towards a growing, human pluri-identity. Ignorance, incomprehension and the negligence of States as well as of ample sectors of the population continue to regard migration as avoidable wreckage of human dignity and happiness. It must be explicitly and unmistakably stated of all levels and segments of society that all forms of racism and cultural intolerance are forms of human degradation. Each and every human community can only consider itself healthily as a historic process of mixture, naturally occurring over time, and which cannot be the basis of negative judgment of any particular identity. Therefore, the paradigm of “unity in diversity,” in which particular identities, upon encountering others, enter intact, should be assumed. Even though these problems survive and even worsen at times, the advances in communication, in commercial, financial and cultural interchange, and the migrations bring about that there are better opportunities for overcoming this ignorance and lack of comprehension of the processes and dynamics of cultural diversity.

We are willing to bet on the growth of the full consciousness that no culture or identity is more or better than any other, that they are different forms of the same thing – that is, how a human community sees the world and understands itself. We should understand that any sustainable project of human community, that is to say, of legitimate and responsible world governance can only be attained, if it includes local, national, regional and international legal mechanisms which sanction racist, xenophobe and discriminatory behavior, while they promote train and educate public functionaries, the leading elite and the population in general in the consciousness of these realities and implications.

It is, therefore, indispensable to advance being conscious that, fear of the other and cultural intolerance are certain paths to loss and poverty, and that tolerance, strengthening and the expansion of the best of the subjective and collective diverse, can only be the minimum first step towards the enriching action of enjoying the difference and that “the other” is a question about oneself, because where we are alive and where we exist as the architects of our destiny is in the search for the answer.