These days I often think “Has the world become better place since the fall of communism and Berlin wall?” Did the end of cold war and supposedly the “end of history” were able to deliver us to the Promised Land? The echoes from yesterday transmitting promises made by liberal economists seem to be frozen half way in opening all the borders and revitalizing worldwide economy. If only more open borders could breathe in more happiness into this world. Yet, today more than ever the borders are guarded and protected.
The division of the world into so called third and first has fostered enormous traffic into the latter one. People from impoverished countries are desperately seeking visas and statuses to move into the first world. Who can blame those whose lands are plundered more than ever, whose local industries are destroyed by multi-national capital, whose pasturelands are occupied by mining corporations. There an invisible path laden, the one that leads from countryside to the urban cities, the one’s traffic direction is one way. Peasants, nomads, farmers, moving into the vaults of giant cosmopolites. “What is worse than not being exploited at all?” they say…
The first world in response is shutting itself; taller fences over Mexican border, more visa restrictions for non-immigrant visas. How can the first world demand from its impoverished cousins to open up its borders, become liberal and secularized when its own frontiers are crystallized under growing prejudices, fear and neo-racisms towards immigrants?
