For freedom of movement and the right to stay

April 2nd, 2005
Call for a second European day of action
For freedom of movement and the right to stay

Last year a European Day of Action against detention centers and for the legalization of undocumented migrants was launched during the European Social Forum in Paris. A call was subscribed to by many different networks and groups, and on the 31st of January 2004 demonstrations and actions were held in more than forty European cities. It was an important day in the development of a networking process among migrants‚ struggles and activists on a European level.

This year we want to make a step forward. We propose to all European networks and social movements to join in the organization of a second day of action, to be held on April 2nd 2005, centered upon the claim for freedom of movement and the right to stay as an alternative to the European constitutional process.

When we talk about the European constitutional process we think first of all of its material dimension, that is of the way the integration process has taken place concretely in the last years. A European citizenship is in the making, and we must focus our analysis on the way the borders of this citizenship are constructed and managed, both in their external and in their internal dimension. Detention center for migrants have played and continue to play a key role in this process. Although they have taken different shapes in different countries, they are actually European institutions, within a unified framework which promoted even an externalization process of camps beyond the «external» borders of the EU - from the Balkan to Libya and Marocco.

Camps are the dark symbol of a migration politics which is not simply aimed at keeping refugees and migrants out of Europe, but rather at promoting a process of selective inclusion, also through illegalization, of the migrants. This process corresponds to the production of a hierarchy of rights as well as of legal and political positions, that lies at the core of the material transformations of citizenship in Europe and which is far from regarding only the migrants. And it corresponds to a new model of labor force management centered upon precarization and exploitation. The migrants are the subjects who experience in advance life and labor conditions that the whole workforce, certainly with different degrees, is beginning to experience in Europe. But on the other hand, their practices of mobility express a set of claims and demands which at the level of everyday life point to a different Europe. That is why we want to bring these interconnections and demands inside the Euro-May Day process and therefore call for a strong participation to the 1st of May 2005.

Freedom of movement is in this sense no ideological or merely rhetorical claim. We believe that freedom of movement encompasses different struggles of migration taking place every day throughout Europe: struggles for housing and legalization, struggles against racism and camps, struggles on the workplace, the struggles of women to free themselves from the patriarchal structure of their original but also of their arrival places. The second day of action is intended to stress the importance of these struggles and to provide a transnational framework for the deepening and multiplication of their plurality. We invite all groups, networks and social movements in Europe, not only the ones working on migration-related issues, to join this call and to mobilize for April 2nd 2005. On the second day of action we will emphasize the demands of the last year call.

Demonstrations, actions and struggles must take place everywhere in Europe on that day!

to sign (collective and associations)