ECLESALIA
There are moments when keeping silent ceases to be prudence and becomes complicity. The time we live in is one of them.
While Europe moves forward in implementing the new Migration and Asylum Pact and several States tighten their border control policies, initiatives continue to appear seeking to regularize the situation of thousands of foreign persons who have been living, working and silently sustaining our societies for years. Two dynamics that seem to walk in opposite directions, but that reveal the same reality: Europe still has not decided how it wants to look at the migration phenomenon.
It is not a matter of denying the complexity of human mobility nor the responsibility of States to order migration flows. Governing migration requires planning, international cooperation and clear norms. However, something very different is allowing fear to become the criterion by which we interpret people. Because when fear occupies the center of public debate, dignity begins to shift towards the margins. And it is precisely there that a fog appears that should be dispelled.
A fog carefully fed by simplified narratives, interested headlines and discourses that reduce human lives to figures, files or statistics. A fog that converts people into administrative categories and faces into percentages. A fog that favors social polarization because it is simpler to discuss numbers than to be challenged by a concrete story.
Perhaps the greatest risk of this time is not solely the hardening of certain migration policies. The deeper risk consists in becoming accustomed to looking without seeing. To hearing without listening. To constantly speaking about migration without ever heeding the voice of those who live it.
Migrant persons appear every day in political debates, but very rarely do they have the opportunity to narrate their own story. Others speak for them. Others interpret their decisions. Others use their suffering to sustain opposing ideological positions. Meanwhile, their narratives remain invisible. And when narratives disappear, dehumanization begins.
This reality acquires a special dramatic character when we speak of adolescents who arrive alone on our shores. They represent the most vulnerable face of this ethical crisis. They did not choose the place where they were born. They did not provoke the wars, the persecutions, the hunger or climate change. They did not draft the laws that now condition their future. However, they are those who bear on their shoulders the consequences of all those decisions.
For years I have had the opportunity to accompany and recognize many of these minors in Sicily. I do not write from a theoretical reflection nor from an ideological position. I write from the experience of walking alongside adolescents who have crossed the desert, survived the sea and arrived on our shores with a backpack much heavier than any luggage.
I also write from the responsibility that the legislation itself attributes to those of us who accompany their educational and human processes. Because the guardianship of a foreign minor does not consist solely in guaranteeing a roof or resolving administrative procedures. It means protecting rights, promoting their integration, ensuring schooling, language learning, access to healthcare, building relationships, progressive autonomy and, above all, offering a stable presence that restores trust where too often only uncertainty has existed.
That is why it is concerning to see how, all too often, administrative procedures end up prolonging themselves for months while the lives of these young people remain frozen. Each delay in a referral towards a resource appropriate to their age and educational needs means much more than a bureaucratic delay. It means lost adolescence. And the time lost during adolescence never returns.
It is difficult to understand that there are trained professionals, available communities and structures specifically designed to accompany these minors while certain procedures remain blocked between offices, authorizations and administrative silences. Effective protection cannot depend solely on the good will of those working in the field. It needs agile institutions, coordinated and capable of responding with the urgency that the vulnerability of a minor demands.
Dispelling this fog also means daring to raise our voice. Not from permanent confrontation. Not from easy disqualification. But from the ethical responsibility that is born when we know the names, share the stories and understand that behind each file there is a life awaiting an opportunity.
Silence has never protected the most vulnerable. History teaches us precisely the opposite. That is why our communities, our associations, our parishes, our educational centers and our social institutions cannot limit themselves solely to managing resources. We are also called to generate a different culture. A culture capable of dismantling prejudices, of offering spaces for encounter and of remembering that integration never begins with a document, but with a relationship.
It is not casual that Pope Francis has wanted to place from the beginning of his pontificate the migrant reality at the center of his pastoral gaze. His visit to the Canary Islands, one of the great gateways to Europe, and his journey to Lampedusa, converted into a universal symbol of suffering in the Mediterranean, possess enormous prophetic force.
They are not merely two geographic destinations. They are two moral frontiers. Two places where Europe contemplates itself.
In the Canary Islands, the Pope directed words that should resonate far beyond Christian communities: “I want to bow before your dignity”.
He did not say that he was bowing before their economic utility. Nor before their administrative situation. Nor before their nationality. He bowed before their dignity. And that difference changes everything.
Because human dignity never depends on a residence permit, a crossed border or the nationality inscribed on a passport.
As believers, this conviction does not arise from a political option. It arises from the Gospel. Jesus never first asked where a person came from before approaching them. He never conditioned compassion on origin. He never converted vulnerability into suspicion. He always looked at people before labels.
Perhaps that still remains today the greatest challenge for our societies. To look at people again. To recover names. To listen to narratives. To build public policies that know how to harmonize security, legality and human rights without sacrificing any of these pillars.
Europe needs norms. It needs coordination. It needs responsible management of human mobility. But it needs, above all, not to lose its soul. Because no legislation will be fully just if it forgets the concrete face of those it seeks to protect.
As long as there continues to be a minor waiting for a referral that never comes.
As long as a family remains trapped between uncertainty and hope.
As long as the Mediterranean continues to be the scene of avoidable shipwrecks.
As long as there are people forced to live between shores.
We will continue to have the responsibility to dispel the fog.
Not to feed confrontations.
But to recall, with serenity and firmness, that every society ends up resembling the way it treats those with the least capacity to defend themselves.
And because, in the end, Europe’s credibility will not be measured by the height of its borders, but by the depth of its humanity.
IÑIGO GARCÍA BLANCO, Marist Brother,
SYRACUSE (ITALY)
Eclesalia