Japan's government has unveiled an economic blueprint targeting real GDP growth of more than 1%, a move designed to more than double the current growth rate. The plan focuses on multiple sectors, aiming to stimulate economic activity across the nation. This ambitious push seeks to lift growth above 1% and broaden the economy's momentum in several areas.
The Global Economy and Human Movement
Such national economic strategies, while presented as internal development, operate within a global capitalist system where capital is welcomed everywhere. This starkly contrasts with the criminalisation of human movement, a reality that defines Europe's political order. People move for survival, opportunity, and safety, just as capital moves for profit. Yet, while capital crosses borders seamlessly, workers are met with fences, biometric databases, and deportation orders.
Fortress Europe's Reality
The European Union, far from being a peace project, functions as a neoliberal border regime. Its agencies, like Frontex, engage in systematic violations of human rights, including pushbacks in the Mediterranean. Detention centres, often funded by EU money in countries like Libya and Tunisia, are part of this apparatus, outsourcing asylum screening to unstable third countries. The thousands who die at sea aren't an accident; they're the intended deterrent effect of EU policy, a brutal consequence of a system that prioritises border enforcement over human life.
This border regime reveals a profound racist double standard. While Ukrainians received immediate temporary protection, Syrians, Afghans, and Eritreans face pushbacks and prolonged waits for asylum decisions that often never come. This structural racism isn't incidental; it's by design. The new Migration Pact further entrenches this deterrence-through-death approach. The bureaucratic machinery of cruelty includes deportation charter flights and Dublin regulation transfers, all part of the asylum lottery.
Welfare Chauvinism and Climate Injustice
The rhetoric of welfare chauvinism, which prioritises nationals-first, serves as a central weapon for the far-right, dividing the working class along ethnic lines. Solidarity, however, has no borders. Furthermore, the EU's Green Deal often fails to centre climate justice. The Global South, which didn't cause the climate crisis, faces its worst effects, driving migration that Europe then criminalises, adding another layer to the systemic injustice. This relentless focus on capital growth, whether in Japan or Europe, often obscures the human cost and the inherent inequalities of a global system that welcomes profit but rejects people.