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As hate speech towards immigrants rises in Europe and the United States, it becomes essential to recall a historical truth that many prefer to forget: Europe has long been the main source of emigration from the world.
Millions of Europeans have once left their land, driven out by poverty, hunger and war, to seek fortune in other countries, often at the cost of the violent and genocidal spoliation of Indigenous Peoples of America, Australia and South Africa.
The ironic history shows us that those who today denounce immigration were yesterday migrants.
When Europe ran away from its own demons
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, over 50 million Europeans left the Old Continent.
The causes were multiple:
- The wars of religion which ravaged Germany, France and Central Europe, ruining entire regions;
- The famines and extreme poverty related to agricultural crises;
- The political and religious persecution in fragmented and intolerant kingdoms;
- Lpopulation growthwithout sufficient economic opportunities, particularly in rural areas.
In GermanyThe wars of the Holy Empire and the misery of the Palatinate led thousands of families to emigrate to North America in the 18th century.
In IrelandThe Great Famine (1845-1849) killed more than one million people and caused a massive exodus to the United States.
The European migrants of the time left with the same distress as today's refugees in Africa or the Middle East: they fled death, hunger, war, poverty.
America: land promised for one, tragedy for the other
A continent already inhabited
When they approach the American continent, European settlers discover structured societies, strong indigenous nations: Iroquois, Cherokees, Sioux, Navajos, Apaches.
But for newcomers, these peoples are only obstacles to conquest. The colonists import with them an ideology justifying their business: civilize and evangelize land they judge « wild ».
Migrants Become Settlers
The English, Scottish, Irish and German flock to the Thirteen Colonies.
In PennsylvaniaIn the middle of the 18th century, the Germans formed up to one third of the population. They settle, cultivate, prosper, often on lands torn from the Amerindian peoples.
The Homestead Act of 1862 offers millions of hectares to settlers, free of charge, provided they are exploited for five years. These lands are actually confiscated from Aboriginal nations.
The Indian Removal Acts of 1830 legalize the deportation of thousands of Native Americans to the West. The famous « Track of Tears » (Trail of Tears) will see thousands of Cherokees perish.
The young America, a land of European immigration, was thus built on the systematic destruction of its first inhabitants.
Australia: The Terror Nullius Lie · Global Voices
Colonisation born from deportation
In 1788, the first British fleet landed at Botany Bay. Australia becomes first a colony, then an installation space for free settlers.
To legitimize this occupation, the British Crown invents a legal concept: terra nullius, « land ». In other words: since Aboriginal people do not have land ownership in the European sense, their land can be confiscated « legally ».
Silent extermination
Settlers took pastures, cut down forests, and displaced indigenous populations. Hundreds of large-scale massacres have been identified from Tasmania to Queensland.
Aboriginal people were decimated by weapons, hunger, imported diseases and child abductions: the infamous « Stolen Generations ».
We'll have to wait 1992 for the High Court of Australia, in the case MaboFinally, acknowledge that these lands were not empty and that their inhabitants had rights.
South Africa: Codified dispossession
From 1652the first Dutch settlers, Boers, establish themselves in the Cape of Good Hope. Then came the British, eager to control this strategic road to India.
For more than a century, Cape Town Wars between settlers and peoples Xhosas.
The conquest is accompanied by the establishment of segregationist land laws which will culminate with the Native Land Act 1913, reserving less than 7% of the territory the black population.
Apartheid, long before becoming a political system, was first territorial and racial logic born of colonization.
History's irony: those who were migrants today denounce immigration
The greatest paradox of our time is that countries built by European migrants are today those where the hatred of immigrants is the most virulent:
- To United StatesThe descendants of Irish, Germans, Italians and Poles demand walls on the Mexican border;
- In Europe, the countries that have exported millions of migrants to the world today brand the fantasy of the « Large replacement ».
Yet if we were to talk about « Large replacement » It was a historic event when Europeans colonized America, Australia or South Africa:
- Demographic changethrough extermination or forced assimilation of indigenous people;
- Economic replacementby confiscation of land and resources;
- Cultural replacementby the imposition of the European language, religion and institutions.
History as an antidote to fear
Migration is a natural movement of humanity.
Europeans have fled poverty, war and intolerance; as African, Asian or Middle Eastern migrants today.
To refuse to accept the other is to forget that one was himself welcomed somewhere.
That is to deny the collective memory, that of the crowded emigrant ships leaving Hamburg, Rotterdam, Le Havre or Liverpool, loaded with desperate but hopeful men and women.
When history turns like a mirror
Europe and America today must remember that they are the result of exoduses and brewings.
The migrants yesterday built the nations today, sometimes at the cost of the disappearance of other peoples.
Historical amnesia feeds political arrogance.
It is not pointless to recall here a symbolic episode: During an official visit to Washington, the German Chancellor gave Donald Trump a copy of his grandfather's birth certificate, Friedrich Trump, Born in Kallstadt, Bavaria.
A malicious but deeply correct reminder: the grandson of a German migrant became president of a country built by immigrationwhile holding a speech hostile to Mexican and Muslim migrants.
This diplomatic wink says a lot: History never forgets. She looks at us, and reminds us that before building walls, her ancestors crossed oceans.
