Fringe-Dwellers

Everywhere I go, I see them.

Next-door to the 5* hotel I stayed at in Moscow last week, dozens of migrant workers from former socialist states, living in tiny airless boxes alongside the building they were constructing.

On the way back from the airport in Paris, small towns of cardboard and canvas shanties squeezed in besides the highway.

In the fields surrounding the rustic villages of Sicily, hundreds of young African men hiding in ruins and trying to find work.

In California and Florida, tourists on their way to happy Disney adventures tearing past thousands of illegal migrants picking fruit in the sweltering heat.

In Southampton, Long Island, maybe the richest village in the world, dozens of Latinos standing by the side of the streets seeking day-work.

Thousands of Africans hiding in the hills in the south of Spain, fighting with newly-unemployed locals, all desperate for work, any work.  Thousands of Afghanis holed-up outside Calais, risking their lives for a smuggled crossing of the English Channel.

Walls, trenches, borders, patrols, helicopters, drones, night-vision, heat-sensors.  Legal, semi-legal, grey-state, illegal.  Documented, undocumented, contracted, uncontracted, temporary, short-term, immigrant, asylum-seeker.  No end of terms to help us pigeonhole these people.

I don't mean emergency-relief tents in Haiti.  Not civil-war displaced persons UN camps in Darfur.

I mean everyday, where you live.   Maybe you see the fringe-dwellers too.

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Image © Peeter Viisimaa

Comments

[William P Atkins]

Yes Todd I see them too. Now what are we doing about it?

[KK]

I love this post, it's so true! Right under our noses and we drive past it every day. People want cheap tomatoes and strawberries and don't want to think about how they can be so cheap.