The Movement That Made Us

For most of human history, migration was not a political choice. It was a condition of existence. People moved out of necessity, curiosity, survival. Movement was not an exception to be regulated, but the ordinary process through which societies took shape. Civilization, as we know it, was born on the move.

The Greece we continue to call the cradle of Western civilization did not emerge in isolation. It was the product of constant crossings—Anatolian, Levantine, Mediterranean influences layered over time. In its myths, its narrative structures, its vision of the world, traces of the East are unmistakable. Homer himself—a figure elusive, almost placeless—is claimed by multiple peoples. Not as an object of dispute, but as shared memory from a time when stories traveled even before people did.

When the Greeks moved toward Italy, they did not export a finished civilization. They created hybrids. The colonies were spaces of mutual transformation, not replicas. Rome, which would come later, made a principle of this approach: absorbing, reworking, including. There is no pure Rome, just as there is no original Greece. Our roots are far older than our borders.

The criminalization of immigration is a recent phenomenon. It begins when the nation-state turns identity into property—something to be protected and policed. Borders, porous for centuries, harden. Crossing them is no longer a human act, but an administrative violation. What had long generated exchange and innovation is gradually rewritten as a threat.

Today we celebrate a past built on encounters, yet struggle to accept a present that repeats the same dynamic. We speak of Europe as the “old continent,” as if it were fragile or besieged, when in fact it is the result of continuous mixing. Immigration does not interrupt European civilization; it represents its historical continuity.

The real question, then, is not whether movement endangers our identity.
It is whether a civilization can continue to evolve while denying the very movement that created it.

(Cover photo: Claude Lorrain, public domain)

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