Today we celebrate, along with all our migrant brothers and sisters, the day against racial discrimination. We march in Athens, a city that depends mostly on migrant hands for manual labour, that being for private or for public profit.
Migrants arrive in Greece by passages that leave many behind. Almost every week there is another incident where innocent lives were lost at sea. Still less than a year after the Pylos boat sinking, where more than 500 people lost their lives, the coast guard seems to be walking free.
Migrants from the middle East and central Asia risk grew up in countries affected by the financial regulations and the military conflicts that the West has supported and instigated. The same applies to Africa, where the states are hugely in debt to their former colonies, unable to claim their financial independence after their political struggle. People crossing the borders in that way are the lowest of the low of the working class, clinging in a state between life and death in exchange for food and shelter.
The European Union vastly profits from this mass of people willing to work under the worst conditions. They become its builders and cleaners, while the class mobility in western Europe makes sure that their children will remain at the margins of society. The ghettos are an outcome of this reality, city-landscapes in the benefit of the bourgeois class, reassuring that the most exploited will live their lives in alienation.
Athens is a fine example of a city creating ghettos for the worst exploited. It is becoming a city divided between touristic attractions, big urban projects signaling that it is a European destination, but also carefully imprisoning migrants in neighborhoods that lack services and maintenance. In this way, ghettos are being formed inside the city, where migrants feel they belong, cast out as a lower class.
The detention centers in the islands and the mainland are sound examples of the modern stance of Greece and the EU against asylum seekers. People are getting detained for no reason and are being kept there without their will, all justified by some legal background, are signs of the disgraceful state and its policies. Migrants have no legal representation; they barely have a roof and a portion of food. All this perfectly hidden, away from the eyes of tourists, the big industry of the Greek state.
Our role is to mobilize this population and build a strong organization of migrants, uniting them under a banner for working rights, human conditions, and better pay, without racial discriminations. The Left has the duty to fight on the side of this population and call the Greek working class to fight on the side as well, against the common enemy, the Greek government and the Greek bourgeoisie.
This year’s demonstation is affected by the ongoing genocide in Palestine. There global imperialism is establishing the new status quo exterminating and imposing a military regime built on mass murder. We welcome the Palestinian struggle in Greece and around the world. We fight in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance to take down the military machines of this world and establish peace among peoples.
The hands that build this world have the right to own it!
AMG – anticapitalist migrants greece
