A Global Vision of Migrations

“From the various regions of Italy,” Bishop Scalabrini wrote in 1899, “a considerable number of peasants and workers emigrate every year. They scatter throughout the world looking for work, some for a limited period of time, others to settle permanently among foreign people of a different religion, tongue and customs. This exodus, consequence at times of real economic necessities, is often the work of emigration agents intent on speculating on the poverty and gullibility of others.”¹¹ First of all, the causes of temporary and permanent migrations must be identified in the countries of origin. Emigration is an important fact not only because of the number of persons involved, but also “for the social questions it raises, for the economic malaise of which it is a symptom.”¹² Of the various types of emigration listed by Bishop Scalabrini: internal, political, i.e., for reasons of conquest and colonization, and for trade and for agricultural settlement, he focuses on the latter.¹³ The emigration push comes from population growth, a lack of resources to feed its citizens, from a bad public administration that causes agricultural and industrial crises and imposes excessive taxes. To hunger and unemployment, Bishop Scalabrini adds other push factors: easy transportation, the natural desire to improve one’s condition and the fascination with owning land and finding fortune in the Americas.¹⁴ Potential migrants therefore must be accurately informed and the necessity to emigrate should be prevented

by promoting all forms of social and economic development “as relief from poverty, cooperation in eliminating abuses and injustices, by teaching the unskilled many beautiful and useful things without ever tiring. . .” through initiatives of mutual assistance and social security, by assuring a just salary to workers, by fighting usury, by establishing cooperatives of production, consumption and mutual insurance, by introducing new technologies and agricultural systems.¹⁵ Emigration “is part of the complex social question that so much troubles the present century,”¹⁶ observes Bishop Scalabrini, and without its solution there will be no way out. Therefore “laws are not enough to heal the wounds that afflict our emigration, because some of these are strictly linked to the migration experience, others derive from remote causes that escape the action of legislation.”¹⁷ In particular, “police measures do not stop, but turn away the masses of migrants from ours to other ports, thus making the exodus of our countrymen more painful and more expensive.”¹⁸

The State has the obligation to intervene with its laws and its institutions so that migrations may reach their natural purpose. Bishop Scalabrini goes beyond immediate historical circumstances and sees the necessity of migrations as “a natural, providential fact,” a necessity and a permanent phenomenon. “In almost all instances emigration is not a pleasure, but an inevitable necessity; by impeding it, a sacred human right is violated; by abandoning it to itself, it is made inefficient . . . it is a genuine expression of existing social conditions.”¹⁹ As a law of nature, emigration is an inalienable human right. The Bishop therefore affirms repeatedly the freedom to emigrate, but not to force people into emigration, and the obligation of the State and of the private sector to manage and protect it.²⁰ In this way, “in everything that concerns emigration, religious, civil and national, public and private interests cannot be separated without damage... protection and planning of emigration... is carried out through legislative, religious and humanitarian action, and it is therefore the concern of the Government, the clergy and of all persons

of good will of any party.”²¹ On this convergence of action, besides the fulfillment of his pastoral duties, Bishop Scalabrini sees “a practical means, a beginning of that pacification of consciences” necessary in the Italy of his time still divided by the question of the temporal power of the Pope and the consequent conflict between Holy See and the Italian government.²²

In practice, Bishop Scalabrini fought against emigration agents he defined as merchants of human flesh and real traffickers of slaves, but sees emigration in a positive light if guided and sustained in its spontaneous movement. Emigration turns into a “safety valve that sets a balance between wealth and the productive ability of a people, a source of well-being for those who leave and those who remain since it alleviates the land of an excessive population and increases the value of the remaining workforce.” Besides, “it opens new ways to commerce, facilitates the diffusion of the findings of science and of industries, melts and perfects civilizations and it enlarges the concept of motherland beyond physical boundaries by making the world the motherland of man.”²³ Bishop Scalabrini doesn’t underestimate nor leave in the background the tragedies of emigration and speaks with force and deep empathy, but he never loses sight of the providential plan that, besides “the high social purpose to which it was destined,” makes emigration an instrument “to spread everywhere the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ.”²⁴ He would write to the Holy See in 1905 that emigration is “always an instrument of that Providence that looks over human destiny and guides it, even through catastrophes, toward the ultimate goal, that is the perfection of man on earth and the glory of God in heaven.”²⁵

The interpretation given by Bishop Scalabrini combines a realistic analysis of the painful and degrading consequences of forced emigration with the indication of innovative ideas like giving a protagonist role to migrants, acknowledging their right to information and to freedom of movement and the duty of the State to protect without coercing, and pointing out the substantively positive contribution of migrations and of

their transnational function in opening society toward the future. His vision, however, extends over wider horizons more pertinent to his mission as pastor. He saw his mission fulfilled in the task of preserving the faith of the migrants in their new environment and of supporting their social and religious creativity.