The
Fear of Newcomers
Migrants Newspaper
Ivana Keser
Immigrant, Alien, Migrant,
Migrant Worker, Refugee, Asylum Seeker, Quota Refugee, A Returning
Migrant - Expatriate are official names for the people
for whom Immigration Politics was created. While the immigrant,
according to the categories of the United Nations, is a general
concept used to describe "all the persons who have immigrated
to the country", for ordinary people migrants-regardless
of intentions and status-are always and only strangers. And
a stranger is every traveler who comes today and may stay
with us tomorrow. "What makes people strangers?"
is the question that I pose to the people who left their places
of their own free will, which, for lack of other terms, they
called homes. Displacement, assimilation, tolerance, ethnocentricity,
prejudice, cultural stereotypes, ethnic discrimination, xenophobia,
racism, are all notions which migrants face, to a more or
less extent, everyday. Only idealists or black sheep leave
their countries. People everywhere are equally indisposed
towards action, remaining fixed and inactive there where they
find themselves, up until some force compels them to move.
There are people who are prone to repose and those who are
prone to motion, but the basic question which strikes me is
not why people migrate but rather why don't they? When speaking
about the law, people today often have considerably less freedom
to move across national borders than do goods and capital.
In the age of accelerated globalization attention should be
turned to the difference between fiction and reality. Reality
repeats itself while reason always prevails in fiction. Delbrück/Zolberg's
idea of the Open Republic can also be added to the contribution
of fiction, which, in the era of all the more increasing migration
of worldwide proportions, the concept of a nation-state is
deemed to be obsolete. The Open Republic implies an acceptance
of citizens of different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds,
with equal rights for all. The migrants, with whom I have
been carrying on a dialogue via e-mail during the last year,
are all located in different parts of the world. They have
temporarily or permanently achieved a desired goal. Their
motivation for going to the foreign countries is most frequently
based on the search for new experiences, better professional
possibilities, the need for change, or search for like-minded
people. The newspaper-in-making entitled Migrants
is my dialogue with the ten people who share the experience
of more than one address, located most frequently on a foreign
continent.
Ivana Keser (HR)
Artist based in Zagreb, Croatia
ivana.keser@mail.inet.hr
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