We exist tour project emerged from the urgent need to portray the drama of migration caused by poverty, war, injustice and the climate catastrophe from the perspective of its real protagonists: the refugees.
We believe that the usual approach to this problem isoften Eurocentric and simplistic. From this perspective, the real concern of the societies in which immigration takes place seems to be how the arrival of these people materially affects our lives.
On the one hand you can see how the so-called "western states" concentrate the problem on the influx of people arriving. This is accompanied by a distorted narrative about the impossibility of receiving these people and a narrative of general phenomenon of insecurity, which is completely wrong and supported by the relevant media with biased information and fake news. In this way, they convince public opinion of the legitimacy to close borders and make admission-, support- and rescue-operations more difficult, while creating fear and hatred in our societies. In this way, they also justify their covert actions on the various existing migration routes, influence the border controls of the different countries that migrants cross, and thereby promote the spread of mafias for human trafficking, with whom they are often in direct contact. In this way, they also transfer responsibility to the coastal regions of the southern Mediterranean, which public opinion then considers to be the main cause of the situation.
On the other hand, we believe that besides the purely humanitarian approach that defends the "poor" 's right to emigrate and the necessary reception policies in "rich" countries, we have other fundamental aspects that we should focus on: these are the real causes that cause people to migrate. It is important to understand that refugees do not "come" to our countries, but "flee" from their own countries. They are fleeing the misery and wars that rich countries in a criminal way are causing, to keep control over the natural resources that feed our consumer- and affluent-society. In addition, the most conservative sectors of our society respond to purely humanitarian approaches by exploiting the fear that has arisen and promoting hate speech and racism. In this way, they portray people as a threat, who are in fact the main victims of a privileged lifestyle, namely ours, which is based on aggressive and immoral geopolitics, regardless of justice or human dignity.
We exist tour project is therefore trying to get people to think and act, trying to use the empathy or antipathy that everyone could feel towards migratory movements, to focus the debate on the global South. But further south of the borders imposed by Europe and the USA: to Africa, Asia and Latin America. We want to talk about the reality of the places of origin from which the refugees are fleeing. But above all, about the reasons that compel them to leave their homes and families, and what main role we and our states play in all of this. Because the poverty and violence from which the global south suffers has no "accidental", "biological" or "cultural" origin: the causes are political, economic, social and climatic and have their origins in the relationship that the global north has imposed on the global south for more than 500 years. Because the opposite of poverty is not wealth, but justice.