Dehumanization and remigration, geography of desperation and hope, grammar of the human as a perspective of believers. The panel on the “Refugee People” of the international meeting “Daring Peace” (26-28 October), organized by the Community of Sant’Egidio in Rome, focuses on these points. Migration and peace are deeply connected themes, as the Sudanese Said says: «War is the worst thing that can exist, it burns everything it touches. The wounds of war are difficult to heal, especially those that remain in the soul.” “If the world wants to say no to refugees – the panel repeats – say no to weapons”. According to the UNHCR, in June 2025 there were 123.2 million – never such a high number since the end of the Second World War – forced migrants due to war and generalized violence, 40% of whom are minors, 67% hosted in neighboring countries, often with low and middle income; not only the number of conflicts increases, but their duration, in many cases it seems that they never end. The majority of refugees come from Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan, followed by Congo, Myanmar, Gaza, Haiti, Somalia, Eritrea.
On the other hand, many choose fear of others, because – explains sociologist Manuel Castells – “neuroscience says that fear is the most powerful human emotion, often induced or manipulated by self-interested warmongers, from political demagogues to the military-industrial complex”. He himself, now a professor at the Californian University of Berkeley, was a migrant fleeing Franco’s Spanish dictatorship: «I had to renew my permit every three months – he recalls – I know what it means to be deprived of rights, to feel precarious because you have to ask to borrow time and space». If one is made alien, non-human, one becomes dangerous: “White supremacists, for example, are rooted in the dehumanization of the other.”
Making others alien is what many points of the new EU Pact on asylum and migration do. Maria Quinto of the Community of Sant’Egidio criticizes the choice of those “European countries that authorized the repatriation of Afghans to Kabul” and the states that decided to suspend applications for political asylum presented by Syrians after the fall of Bashar al-Assad. This last example represents how much the attitude of European countries has changed: in 2015 Europe, and in particular Germany, decided to welcome almost a million refugees in one year, mostly Syrians; since December 2024, however, asylum requests from Syrian citizens have not even been subject to individual evaluation. Quinto, taking as an example the human corridors program created by Sant’Egidio with Christians of different confessions, underlines how the European Pact “does not take the theme of legal entry and humanitarian admissions as central”.
The director of FutureMarco Girardo, quotes Hannah Arendt to indicate invisibility as the most radical form of exclusion and how looking and making others look is a first act of justice. With the “Children of Haiti” initiative, your newspaper wants to propose a paradigm shift, restoring centrality to a forgotten country that has one million internally displaced people out of ten inhabitants. An example of invisibility comes, in another panel, from Daniela Pompei, head of Sant’Egidio for immigrant services: “I visited a place where 3,000 people live, including asylum seekers, refugees, workers, and various irregulars.” It is “the runway” of Borgo Mezzanone in Puglia: «The camp is located on the runway of a disused military airport from the Second World War, in the middle of the countryside, isolated, inaccessible to view». To reach it, from the last bus stop, it takes an hour’s walk: “There are only makeshift shacks, there is no electricity, there are no toilets, there is no waste collection service.” Living in the camp are mainly young single men, a few women: «During the day until the first part of the afternoon the camp is almost deserted but then there is the return from work, the majority are agricultural workers. There are no Italians, there is no Italy, it’s no man’s land! The exact opposite of integration: “We asked ourselves how it is possible that a place like this exists in Europe.”
The director of Future try to explain it like this: «We have forgotten that we cannot import arms, or choose policies that play with the fire of feeling, dangerous identity shortcuts». He gives two examples: the “moral boomerang” with which European governments are making family reunification increasingly difficult and the spread of slogans about “remigration”, sending everyone back, without distinction. «But the slogan – says Girardo – does not stand up to reality: widespread needs in construction, agriculture, catering, care, millions of foreign workers who keep families and supply chains together». And words are never harmless: they dig fences, authorize contempt, sometimes violence.
Several examples of this dehumanization return to the panel, moderated by Marco Damilano, such as the 2017 Memorandum being renewed in recent days – “unacceptable” for the director of Future – with which Italy entrusts the rejection of migrants to the Libyan authorities who often collude with human traffickers; the British government’s Rwanda Plan, the attempt to empty Gaza of the descendants of the “1948 refugees” and the absurd Riviera project. As is typical of the interreligious meeting of Sant’Egidio, the panel tells at the same time the geography of desperation and the geography of hope. Khadija Benguenna, journalist for Al Jazeera, talks about being a refugee in Switzerland when terrorism claimed 250 thousand victims in Algeria in the “ten years of hell” between 1992 and 2002, and then brought attention to the situation in Palestine. Father Alejandro Solalinde of Hermanos en el Camino (Brothers on the Way) is instead the symbol of help for migrants in Mexico. Drug cartels beat him, threatened him and organized attacks on his refuge for migrants in Ixtepec. On one occasion the municipal authorities informed him that if he did not close the center within 48 hours, they would burn it down. But even when it was discovered that a killer had been paid to kill him, he chose not to remain silent. In Rome he accuses Trump’s aggressive and “aporophobic” policy – of hatred towards the poor – of destabilizing several Latin American countries and underlines: “In recent weeks, new caravans of migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras, Colombia and other countries towards the north have also reappeared.”
At the time of the dehumanization of migrants, religious traditions can support a humanizing gaze, as Methodist pastor Leslie Griffiths, MP and British representative at the European Court of Human Rights, says. For Girardo «the living tradition of the Church does not offer sentimentalism, but a grammar of the human. Not out of do-goodism: out of evangelical realism.” It is the line that Pope Francis summarized in the four verbs – welcome, protect, promote, integrate – to indicate ecclesial and civil responsibility. And Leo XIV, in the Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi youremembers that “in the poor the Lord still has something to say to us”: they are not a problem to be managed, but “travel companions” who reveal the truth of our social life and the extent of our democracy. «This – concludes the director of the CEI newspaper – is the conversion of the gaze: from categories to faces, from faces to responsibilities».
