This week's theme of dying for a dream is quite interesting, since I lack the kind of ideological commitment that people willing to do so possess. However, as a social researcher, I understand those who do. It's no coincidence that people who have left my country (Venezuela), as well as other nations in precarious conditions, have done so believing they would have a better future in another land. A future that would feed their children, provide them with housing with all the basic services and all the other comforts they lacked in their country of origin.
That dream (which has left thousands of corpses in the Darién jungles, in the minefields of North Korea, in the narrow corridors of the Sahara, in rafts sunk after storms in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean Sea, as well as in other inhospitable regions of the world) has persisted because there are survivors who have managed to fulfill it.
However, that's not always the case. The dead become statistics, while the living, simply by surviving the journey, are a source of hope. The public narrative about migrants is often fueled by success stories: the one who started a business, the one who managed to send remittances, the one who found decent work. The danger of analyzing these migratory movements from the perspective of success, without considering the failures, is believing that as a migrant, you are guaranteed success and that you won't end up as one of the thousands of corpses registered by an international NGO.
By romanticizing the "dream" based solely on the survivors, we ignore that the system is designed for most to fail, turning the act of migrating into a game of Russian roulette where the cost is not only losing your own life, but also watching the family and friends who accompany you die, leaving you alone at the end of the road.
The problem I see is that this flight isn't just about escaping a bad situation; it's about expecting acceptance from a foreign nation, something they didn't experience in their homeland—an expectation that often clashes head-on with reality. Migrants aren't just seeking food or possessions; they also feel a psychological need to belong, to be validated as human beings with rights after having been rendered invisible in their place of origin.
But the promised land is almost never willing to integrate them. Upon arrival, the promise transforms into suspicion. The "foreign nation" from whom empathy was expected usually responds with xenophobia or a utilitarian tolerance: you're welcome as long as your labor is cheap and silent, but the moment you demand dignity or the system becomes overwhelmed, you become the internal enemy in the local narrative.
Currently, as I write these lines, the countries of the European Union are debating a law to send undocumented immigrants to a third country if they are not wanted back in their countries of origin. This proposal is not simply an administrative measure to reduce costs; it is an act of moral contempt and an externalization of blame. It reveals that the global order prefers to pay a third party to contain "the problem" on the periphery rather than bear the humanitarian cost within its own borders.
This presents a grave dilemma, because if this law is implemented, many of those who suffered hardships and lost loved ones and belongings during the journey to Europe will have to return to where they started: a land where they could barely survive, while the vast majority of the inhabitants of this paradise turn their backs on them and leave them to die in the darkness, dreaming of a better life that never came.
Translation from Spanish to English, and images created with Gemini AI.
Posted Using INLEO
