World Refugee Day: 120 million people are forced to leave their homes

In 2023 beyond one million asylum seekers (Eurostat data) presented the application for protection in Europe for the first time, with an increase of 20.1 percent compared to 2022. Ismu Ets Foundation. But as he points out the UN Refugee Agency the real extent of flows towards Italy and Europe continues to be overestimated. Indeed «75% of refugees are welcomed in low- and middle-income countries. Last year, just under 160 thousand people landed on the Italian coasts.” They are women and men, boys and girls who are fleeing from wars, unprecedented violence such as ethnic persecution, rape, trafficking, but also drought and natural disasters caused by climate change. People we often can’t even give a name to because we don’t know their stories, we discover them in a photo while walking along the borders of Europe, or on a boat with their hands raised towards the sky asking for help. They walk for months, crossing the desert, the mountains, clinging to the trucks that cross Europe.

They continue to die in the Mediterranean, as we have tragically seen in recent weeks and continue to see every day. «One of the solutions», underlines UNHCR on the occasion of the World Refugee Day 2024 which occurs on June 20th, «I am the working corridors: safe and regular routes that allow refugees, in possession of certain professional skills, to enter and stay in another country to work. Thanks to these paths, refugees can be safely admitted to a third country based on a concrete job offer or a labor shortage in a specific sector, satisfying their protection needs and safeguarding their rights”. Words that today, a few hours after the death of Satnam Singh, the Indian worker who was the victim of an accident at work on a farm in Latina, dumped in front of his house while bleeding and with an arm severed (and resting on a fruit crate) without being taken to hospital, make this story even more dramatic. Because if being able to legally and safely escape war and violence should be a right, working safely should be a certainty everywhere in the world.

«I really hope that the new European Parliament guarantees the right to asylum. And it can only be done in solidarity. That is, talking about anything but invasion. If anything, defense of rights” underlined Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, president of the CEI, guest at the Luiss University of Rome. «Every time rights are questioned it is dangerous for everyone. Not just for someone. Always. That cemetery that is the Mediterranean is a sea that has become a monster sea more than our sea. Where there seems to be no one to care. Sometimes we are afraid refugees are portrayed as enemies. Like danger. It’s exactly the opposite.”