Nothing about migration without migrants!

By Corredores Migratorios

This is a reflection written among several women who have belonged or belong to collective Corredores Migratorios, founded in Quito in 2018. While we come from different places, we are traversed by the experience of migration. Who isn’t? One of our main concerns is how to not subordinate ourselves to the administrative understanding of so-called “human mobility”, usually reduced to an ordinary matter managed by the state or international agencies. For us, it is migrant peoples who hold the main agency when it comes to deciding and responding to questions of migration, return, deportation, and refuge. 

Our reflections and processes date back many years. Here, we share a part of them on the occasion of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), which will be held in Colombia this September. What does it mean for this event to take place in a country shaped by multiple migration flows and forced displacement — for example, toward Ecuador?

In writing from our migrations and the political practice of hospitality, we present ourselves as bearers of knowledge. We believe that this experience creates perspectives that must be valued above the administrative understanding of the act of migrating. We also know that the testimony of our experience alone does not produce knowledge, but it must be listened to and studied without ignoring our existence. Then, it needs to be inscribed to society for us to be fully understood in our existence. If we defend the right to move regardless of borders, then public policy cannot start from a place of reform, but must recognize that today we migrate amid wars, racist exterminations, narco-multinationals, mafia states and a carceral system that is growing at an accelerated rate.

We do not want better prisons; we demand the disappearance of detention centers. We demand that the state recognise its complicity in creating the conditions that condemn many of us to an undocumented life. And we call on the state not to criminalize undocumented people.

We have very diverse origins. We are from various places in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador; we have shared our processes with comrades from Mendoza in Sucumbíos, from the Caribbean in Lago Agrio, from the Puruhá nation in Chimborazo. Despite the multidirectionality of our movements, the funds we can access demand that we separate ourselves. Migration funding systematically ignore our intercultural coexistence by offering us project funding limited to national origin, for example, “entrepreneurships for Venezuelan women only”. Migrations in Ecuador are multiple and diverse: women from Esmeraldas displaced by violence coexist with Venezuelan and Colombian women, but the administrative conception of mobility undermines these intercultural practices, as well as their necessary conflict and solidarity, often producing greater segregation.

When we speak of “public policy”, our first consideration is how to endow it with meanings that respond to the actual and real context. What would a public policy do in terms of the new interculturalities that we demand? We live among collectivity, neighborhoods, territories made up not only of the internal ethnic, racial or linguistic diversity of each country. There are other interculturalities, formed by and with migrant communities. There also exist the transnational cultures formed by the Ecuadorian migrants living in the United States, the queer migrant, sex-dissident, trans struggles, intersected by deep inequality. 

In Ecuador, we share life with hundreds of thousands of people from Colombia and Venezuela, the Muslim population is growing, there are children whose families came from Haiti and speak Creole-Spanish. While inclusion –as criticized by anti-ableist struggles– and integration still depend on good will and reflect hierarchical relations, perspectives such as unconditional hospitality and the transnational management of migration offer horizons that are politically more in tune with the present.

Many of us who migrate do so in search of security because peace was broken in the place where we were born. Sometimes the rupture was brutal, sometimes peace was broken silently, but the war against the poor, against women, against trans people, marks us. Contradictorily, the arrival of migrants is seen as a threat or a problem, this has become normal under certain criteria of public policy.

Today, thousands of racialized and migrant boys and young men are criminalized by states. In Ecuador, they have been extrajudicially executed, tortured by the military or recruited by criminal organisations. We cannot speak of a future or development without justice and protection for them. The violence they experience and reproduce being forcibly recruited will be harm done against girl and women.

Nor can we speak of integration without material conditions for a dignified life. The right to live under a roof; to take care of life through dignified work and effective access to health care; the right to education without discrimination; the right to preserve the language and culture of origin, must be seen as fundamental and concrete elements of coexistence. Thousands of people are excluded today from regularization processes because the process itself is selective and privative. It is not recognized that undocumented life exists and is growing all over the world.

Living in areas controlled by organized crime, as is the case in Esmeraldas, from where our colleague Karen is speaking, is a daily challenge for many migrants. Although migrants are associated with criminality, we share vulnerabilities with the local population, especially in areas abandoned by the state. It is no coincidence that Esmeraldas is a province with alarming rates of social violence and organized crime. Racism and rejection of the other also produce this violence, which does not distinguish “migrants” from “nationals” when it comes to the population that suffers by racism. By mentioning Esmeraldas, we affirm that we can no longer speak of migration without speaking of forced internal displacement. 

Our comrade Gladys Calvopiña, who organized and translated our text, writes from Toronto. In Canada, the isolation in which migrant women live due to language barriers is an enormous factor of exclusion and risk in the face of femicidal violence. Migrating in this case means integrating linguistically, going through a process of assimilation that requires not only learning the language, but also mastering a good accent. But hundreds of thousands of women do not have the conditions to learn English or French: they do not have time to learn the language because of their exhausting workdays, or the endless care work. This is an example of a context that is repeated in many others. Racism and isolation due to linguistic exclusion intersect with gender-based violence.

Social movements centered on migrations show us a way to change the cultures of exclusion for cultures of hospitality and solidarity. In our collective, when we ask ourselves, “Where is our life?” We answer, wherever we should live that life, but together and organized. Any public policy today must promote coexistence, not segregation by funds or indicators. These are reasons to make migration an essential critical perspective, just like gender or human rights. It is not a separate or secondary thematic area: it is a total perspective of reality. Forums and gatherings that fail to recognize the concrete reality of migration will arrive too late if they do not urgently place at the center the voices of those who, day after day, migrate, flee, or seek refuge, safety, peace, or the chance for a better life.