Abstract
In several countries of immigration today, especially in Europe and North America, the “new” non-European immigrants are seen as more problematic than the “historic” immigrants from Europe. Anti-immigrant movements and politicians generally deny that they are racists, alleging that the new immigrants do not accept western values, and that their cultural characteristics impede integration and produce antidemocratic, sexist and even terrorist attitudes. This article presents historical evidence that this characterization of the new immigrants, as if they were bearers of an insuperable alterity, completely unrelated to the countries of immigration, is only made possible by two forms of social amnesia: the forgetting of the treatment suffered by many immigrants from the European periphery in the past and the forgetting of the colonial and neocolonial past of the countries of immigration. In the past, several immigrant groups from the European periphery suffered hostility and stigmatization in the principal immigrant receiving countries. We also need to take the colonial past into account, in order to understand changes in migrant streams and the representations of the new immigrants, many of whom did not arrive in great numbers earlier, because they were excluded by racist immigration policies. We distinguish between overseas and continental empires, which often incorporated conquered peoples as national minorities and arbitrarily divide nations, redefining as “immigrants” or “illegal” peoples who migrate within their own territories. We argue that historical and colonial amnesia does not only correspond to the psicological need to delegitimate the new immigrants; it is also institutionalized in places and institutions of memory, which exclude from public memory the painful integration of immigrants from the European periphery and the colonial and neocolonial relations between the countries of immigration and the places of origin of the new immigrants.
Keywords
Immigration; Racism; Colonialism; Social memory