Migrants take part in a march against racism and xenophobia in a protest in Lisbon in January this year – Photo by Cabanas Photos

The recent wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that has taken hold in certain sectors of our political life deserves serious reflection, but above all, it deserves in-depth study. Such misguided behavior is never simple, and therefore trying to understand it is not something we can leave to occasional commentators—who, incidentally, generally do more harm than good, ending up, voluntarily or not, poisoning public opinion that is ill-prepared for political debate and almost entirely uninterested in citizenship. It is easy to poison people like this, as we see, hear, and read so often. Until we have access to such studies on the root causes of what is happening, we must at least act with common sense and humanity. And with historical depth, which always leads to interesting conclusions.

For now, attention must be drawn to the waves of illegal emigration of Portuguese from the mainland—the “jumpers,” etc.—who saved families and more families from abject poverty and snatched our citizens from the clutches of unspeakable regimes. In other words, illegal emigration occurs for economic and political reasons. This memory must be present in the attitudes we take every time a bunch of wretches wash up on our shores. But what is happening on the mainland, although politically decisive, because we are an autonomous region and do not take certain decisions, may not appeal to the people of the Azores. If this is the case, we will call them out… After all, what have we been doing here for half a millennium? Emigrating by any means, legal or illegal, whenever hunger knocks on our door, which is always. In fact, always. The US and Canada have witnessed waves of emigrants, some legal, but many illegal, who have stayed there.

Even today, the lure of the North American continent draws young and old alike in waves of seasonal emigration, simply because working in the Azores does not guarantee our daily bread. In other words, we have no memory. What can we have against immigrants who seek a better life with serious work in our lands? We should encourage such people to come. That’s all. Especially because if we want to engage in silly and false discourse about competition for jobs, we have to realize that many of our emigrants leave because they do not accept the wages paid locally, and we cannot ignore the statistics that point to the absence of local unemployment (what we have is technical unemployment, because it is below 4%).

Of course, importing labor makes it easier to keep wages at levels that encourage local emigration. But that is a problem to be solved in the union-employer-government trilogy. We await their arguments.

In Diário Insular, José Lourenço, Director, and Armando Mendes, PhD, editor-in-chief.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers in the Azores, giving the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the Azores a sense of the significant opinions on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).