Last week my wife and I spent three days in Venice. For me it was a return visit.
Fifty-two years ago, I traveled there twice with a very dear friend. So, this time round brought back a flood of happy memories.
My 2024 visit was highlighted by hours spent at the Biennale art exhibition in and near the city’s Arsenale Gardens. It’s theme was “Stranieri Ovunque” (Foreigners Everywhere).
The displayed sculptures, paintings, films, fabrics, and other objets d’art celebrated rather than lamented the planet-wide population exchanges we’re all witnessing. The displays elicited deep reflections on contemporary debate about immigrants, borders, and attempts to keep “foreigners” out of Europe and the United States.
It all made me think not only about immigration, but about colonialism and reparations.
On the one hand, across the entire world we’re witnessing seemingly irresistible waves of immigrants traveling from the global south to Europe and the United States. On the other hand, those former colonial powers are contesting such movements in the name of preserving their (predominantly white) cultures and economies from foreign invaders.
The colonial powers are worried about being “replaced” in their own countries.
Attempts at preservation evoke restrictive measures such as laws, walls and increased militarization of borders. They also involve propaganda campaigns that villainize immigrants from the former colonies as invaders, criminals, and agents of economic destruction bent on taking jobs from their working-class victims.
More specifically, the propaganda would have e.g., “Americans” believe that immigrants cause their economic problems such as unemployment, job loss, and lower wages. Such reasoning has it that in our 2024 population of 350 million people, U.S. economic problems are created by 12 million of the poorest people in the world seeking refuge across “our” sacred borders. 12 million is about 3.4% of 350 million. Economically speaking, that’s an insignificant percentage – especially when those involved have virtually zero political power.
So, the concern immigration raises is not only absurd, it also misdirects public attention from the real causes not only of our economic problems and of immigration itself. Those causes include colonialism and capitalism with its practice of offshoring the very jobs that once created a prospering middle class in Europe and the United States. In other words, current economic problems are and have always been caused by the richest people among us rather than by the poorest.
More precisely, it’s all associated with colonialism – i.e. with the centuries’ long practice of western Europeans invading and plundering the homelands of those now seen as threatening Europe and the United States.
Recall that the last 500 years have seen “westerners” migrating to the Global South (Africa, Latin America, and South Asia), stealing its land and treasures, and enslaving its peoples while often taking up residence and in the process destroying economies, cultures, indigenous art, and languages.
The further result has been the creation of “underdeveloped” countries whose purloined wealth fueled the economic development of Europeans inhabiting lands (like England) that are by comparison small, resource poor and sparsely populated.
Additionally, the industrial “development” supported by the colonial system has caused an unprecedented warming of the environment that has taken its worst toll in the Global South. There formerly productive agricultural land has been robbed of its fertility by the resultant changes in temperature and rainfall as well as by forest fires.
The very existence of entire island nations is threatened by rising sea levels caused by global warming.
Likewise, invading capitalists drove peasants from their subsistence milpas and small farms through colonial practices that precisely ignored property lines and borders while often redrawing them altogether.
Additionally, “foreign aid” in the form of food giveaways and subsidies to giant agricultural firms consistently made it impossible for small indigenous farmers to compete with their invaders from the north. How can a local farmer sell her crops in the face of “foreign aid” (dumping) whose very purpose is to drive her out of business?
And when local populations tried to remedy such problems by electing governments to meet their own needs rather than those of their exploiters, the latter either initiated regime change or directly fought wars against them — all to reverse people-centered programs in the name of fighting socialism and communism.
So now the shoe’s on the other foot. Floods of people from Latin America, Africa, and South Asia are returning the favor. Whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re voting with their feet to demand reparations for the wealth the colonialists stole from them.
In other words, whether to give reparations for the plunder of colonialism is not up to the colonizers to decide. The exploited are at our doorstep to take back what was unjustly stolen. They are the deciders.
And there’s no stopping them. You can pass all the laws you want. You can build your walls.
You can militarize your borders.
But those we’ve wronged are still going to come. And they’ll bring their languages, clothing, foods, religions, music, art, and large families.
The Great Replacement is inevitable. The Great Replacement is just. It’s karma. The chickens are coming home to roost.
What goes around comes around.
The earth belongs to everyone!
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