The Pope at the migrant pier: ‘Human dignity has no passport’

“Human dignity has no passport, nor does it lose its value when it crosses a border.” The Pope said this from the port of Arguineguin, a landing point for migrants on the Atlantic route. “Human dignity demands legal and safe routes, rescue and assistance, genuine cooperation against traffickers, effective protection for victims, and serious processes of reception and integration.” “If there is a right to seek refuge,” he adds, “there is also a right not to have to migrate: to remain in one’s own home without hunger, without war, without persecution, without corruption stealing bread from the poor and weapons destroying children’s futures.”

“Your plight must serve as a wake-up call: for the countries of origin; for the transit nations, called upon to protect and not leave the vulnerable in the hands of criminal networks; for Europe, which cannot proclaim human dignity whilst becoming accustomed to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic being graveyards without headstones; for the international community, called upon to engage in effective and persevering cooperation”. The Pope said this from the port of Arguineguin, the landing point for many migrants undertaking the dangerous journeys along the Atlantic route. It was at the port of Arguineguin that a mass disembarkation of thousands of migrants, left in precarious conditions for days, triggered a humanitarian crisis that led to the pier being renamed “the pier of shame”. “It is not enough to manage arrivals, distribute figures, strengthen borders or lament deaths once they have already occurred,” the Pontiff chides. “Every boat that arrives does not merely carry migrants; it brings with it a question: what kind of world have we built, if so many brothers and sisters must risk death in search of life?” “Dear migrants,” the Pontiff also says, “before I say anything else, I want to bow before your dignity. You are not numbers, nor are you files! You are people with a family and a home you have left behind, with dreams that no one has the right to scorn. But I also want to tell you that your lives must be protected. Do not hand over your lives to those who trade in them. Do not believe those who promise easy paradises in exchange for your bodies, your money, your silence or your freedom. Those false promises are ‘siren songs’; they are industries of death.”

“In biblical language, the sea can be a symbol of threat, darkness and chaos”, “even today there are monsters lurking in these seas: mafias that traffic in despair, traffickers who enslave women and children, and the indifference of many that allows the poor to be swallowed up by exploitation or oblivion,” the Pope continued in his first address in the Canary Islands, at the Port of Arguineguin. “Dear migrants,” he adds, “before I say anything else, I want to bow before your dignity. You are not numbers, nor are you files! You are people with dreams that no one has the right to despise!”

“Every human life is a blessing. No one can buy it, sell it, use it or discard it.” The Pope said this after listening to the testimony of a woman who had been trafficked, speaking on behalf of all women victims: “If others have put a price on your body,” says Leone from the migrants’ pier, “God has never stopped seeing you as a person of inestimable value. If they have treated you like a thing, the Church wants to tell you today: you are a daughter and a sister”, “your life does not belong to those who have hurt you, your body does not belong to those who have taken advantage of you”, and “you have a dignity that no one can take away from you”.