I saw the kind of Europe I want to live in during a small scene on a train from Bologna to Florence in Italy on Saturday (6 June), after listening to top US officials telling us we should be angry and cruel toward immigrants.
In the incident, the train conductor found a man of Indian appearance who was travelling without a ticket.
He was young, tall, and handsome, but rake-thin, fatigued, and with far-away, downcast eyes. He was also physically compliant, but grimly silent in the face of the train guards’ questions.
I presume he felt embarrassed, but I think there was more going on: if he was in Europe illegally, it meant that when the guards handed him to police on the platform in Florence, he might be put on the path to deportation – and God knows what he went through to get here in the first place.
Last year, I saw guards on the Spanish-French border, with guns and dogs, frog-march a black family, with children, off a train, force them to sit on the platform, and empty their personal belongings out of suitcases onto the floor, while all the other passengers watched the whole thing, compounding their indignity and shame.
