Hi. How are you? Welcome back to one more day from the Canary Islands to the world with a new episode of this podcast about human rights or other curiosities. A pleasure to be here.
Hidden in our memory are those memories of our ancestors leaving the ports and coasts of the Canary Islands, like the famous sailboat “La Elvira.” They fled from the misery that frightened our land, heading for remote places, seeking a better future, which many achieved in Cuba or Venezuela.
We were the emigrants; now the phenomenon is the other way around. We are the ones who have become receivers of immigrants arriving by air and by sea... in small boats, the first one, with two young Sahrawis on board, being the one that appeared on the coasts of Fuerteventura, back in 1994.
When there is no longer hunger and basic needs are covered, either by having a job or by social services, we look, even more so in times of crisis, at the immigrant as an “enemy,” “the other,” “the one who takes our jobs,” “they infect us.”
Even prejudices range from general to particular races, as we tend to lump Arabs together, when their world is very diverse, from an open society like Lebanon to a more closed one like Iran, where religion and politics are mixed, or when we talk about Colombia and think about drugs... however, when we see a German, an Englishman or a Norwegian, because they are the three nationalities of tourists who visit us most, we call them "foreigners", simply because, more or less, they resemble us and spend their salary or pension here, as if immigrants, in their great majority, did not work, sometimes almost from dawn to dusk, in jobs that we do not even want, to which we have returned in times of crisis, and that have contributed to the state coffers being full to cover our pensions; likewise, some "compatriots" denounce that immigrants collapse the emergency rooms, something totally false, just ask any doctor; that immigrant children slow down education, when they speak as much Canarian as we do and, therefore, are fully integrated; However, perhaps due to the seasonal nature of our tourism, there are “foreign” students who need a translator in class because they do not speak any Spanish.
But now, with the crisis, we have returned to what was unthinkable a few years ago: emigration, with the exception that now, those who leave do so extremely well prepared and can do the work according to the studies they have completed.
That is why we must refresh our memory, since it is very hard for a person to be rejected just for the reason of being a foreign immigrant, without taking into account that it must not be easy to leave the country and the family, as happened to the Canarian emigrants in the first half of the last century.
Therefore, it is necessary to make an effort not to reject the unknown, the strange, the different, and try to learn something from it without being paralysed by fear. Certainly, a very enriching experience. Hence the importance of the work carried out by the various professionals of the social services.
And with this I conclude today episode, see you in the next one!
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario