More than 30 000 people died since 2000 trying to join Europe. 30% of migrants come from the Middle East or North Africa, 30% from Sub-Saharan Africa and 11% from the Horn of Africa. In 2014, two thirds of the 5 000 deaths of migrants in the whole world happened at the doors of Europe. Mortality goes from 2% when they go through the Canaries to 6% when they go through Malta or Lampedusa. At least 3 000 migrants died in the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year. In the whole of Europe, parties of working class origin persecute foreign workers and respectable bourgeois parties compete in xenophobia with fascistic and anti-immigrant parties; fascist groups aggress migrants in Greece and Germany; those who denounced the Berlin Wall erect walls at the entry of Spain, Great Britain, Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece.

When borders close, migrations do not stop but become more risky. Refugees are assassinated by the European governments, these men in business suit and these women in tailored dress who indulge in talks, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes loathsome. If the governments opened their borders, the hecatomb would cease. The governments of the European states (those of the European Union but also those of Switzerland, Russia, etc.) close their borders to the poors coming from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan … while they open them, on the other hand, to the rich, to big capitalists, to their commodities, to their capital. They even persecute European citizens such as the Roma minority that the Nazis had attempted to exterminate at the same time as the Jews of Europe.

Human movements have always existed. Nowadays, 3.5 million British nationals, 1.7 million French nationals are emigrants: they live abroad, temporarily or definitively, for familial or professional reasons.

To preserve the interests of their multinational firms that exploit and plunder the whole world, the European and American governments allow themselves to intervene politically and militarily abroad. They protect the Islamist regimes of the Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.) that spread Salafism in the whole world, that finance Islamist reaction (Muslim Brotherhood, djihadists) and that refuse to receive migrants. The United States conquered Iraq and Afghanistan, France bombed Libya. When the population of Syria rose against despotism, Assad bombed his population, with the support of Iran and Russia. There resulted the chronic war in Afghanistan, in Syria and in Iraq, the appearance of a totalitarian regime (Daesh) … and millions of additional refugees. The latter are, in most cases, received by neighbouring countries: Lebanon (1.1 million Syrians), Jordan (0.6 million), Turkey (1.9 million) … The minority that migrate to Europe, often find themselves cornered in its poorest parts, to the South and East.

The closings of borders not only cause tragedies, they divide durably workers, weaken trade unions. Most migrants are students and wage workers, who move with or without their family. When they cross illegally the borders of the United States, the European Union, etc., they become undocumented people who, besides the permanent fear that is gnawing at them, are compelled to accept wages and working conditions that weaken the entire working class.

One must reconnect with proletarian internationalism, build a revolutionary workers’ international. In the whole of Europe, all labour unions, all parties of working class origin must demand: