The real wall is not geographical

The migrant does not cross borders: they reveal them. They do not destabilize countries, but fictions. They do not threaten our security, but the illusion that we were ever homogeneous. Their face does not demand compassion—it demands responsibility.

Borders exist precisely where we most insist on denying them: not between nations, but in our perception of the other. The migrant does not destabilize economies, but certainties; they do not threaten resources, but the illusory homogeneity with which we upholster our inner selves. Their true crime is not crossing geographic lines, but transgressing the boundaries of our self-understanding.

The “irrevocable freedom” that Levinas (2002) attributes to the foreigner functions like an inverted mirror: while we reinforce physical walls, it is our mental constructs that collapse. Paradoxically, the more we try to protect our collective identity from the “invader,” the more we reveal its fictional and fragile nature. The migrant exposes the contingency of the values we believed to be universal and eternal.

Today, we desperately try to reduce the migrant to a statistic, a media tragedy, or an abstract threat. Anything but recognize them as the bearer of a face that, in Levinasian terms, imposes an ethical responsibility prior to any political construct. Physical fences are mere symbols of deeper boundaries we refuse to examine.

References

Levinas, E. (2002). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Leyte, Trans.). Sígueme. (Original work published in 1961).

Psychotherapy

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