An opportunity running away

I do not feel like translating my own blog another time, this time into English. Probably what I wrote in Spanish or Czech has been said by tens of thousands of people in the last days. Let's go straight to the statistics. I have found two tables on the internet. The first one shows the GDP of countries from the largest figure to the smallest, according to four different sources. In the second one, we can see the gross number of immigrants per country, again from the most to the least. I have found there seem to be a correlation between these two in the first 14 positions:

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_immigrant_population

So it seems that many flags are repeated. The economically more advantaged countries seem to be those which got the largest amount of immigrants in recent history. In fact, among the first ten, half are repeated: USA, Russia, Germany, UK and France. If we add another four positions from the ranking, a total of 10 coincidences are found, with Canada, Australia, Spain, Italy and India being added to the list. That makes 10 out of 14, which is slightly over 70%. Afterwards, the correlation is much less clear, just to appear clearly again in the bottom positions.


I can think of an opposite situation of what we are living now: when Spain decided to kick whole cultures off its borders, some centuries ago, which was the beginning of the end for its Empire. On a smaller scale, similar examples can be found in Modern History too - but that is still a very sensitive topic in some cultures, so let us leave it that way for the time being. Feel free to do your own research or reach your own conclusions.

It would certainly be more than welcome if we could have some stronger support, control, and clear laws from a United Europe, as well as infrastructures and a proper guidance for a satisfactory integration of the new comers. But even so, this process is, most probably, going to be enriching, and not only culturally. We only need to protect the values that all of us, old residents and new residents, want from Europe: solidarity, respect, tolerance, protection, culture...

Hopefully, we will not be making slaves out of the new comers, those slaves that certain countries have made out of their own citizens to be near the top of the GDP list. Hopefully they will be citizens in equal conditions, happy to be in Europe, maybe feeling proud Europeans. Or is this a Utopy?

We have a unique opportunity to show who we really are, on which side we are, what are our values; to learn and become better; to be more than mere witnesses; to become part of the history book we once were studying. Yes, it may all as well end up with Europe being ruined or bombed or sunk or painted in pink. In between, we can choose whether to fear the future or to live the dream.

What do you prefer?