Interview with Samanta Brahaj and Victoria Salaza Cruz from VOICIFY

How would you describe yourselves and your organisation?

We are young people with lived migration experience. Too often, we are (only) labelled as Young Refugees, Exiled, Migrants, Asylum Seekers, or Undocumented (YREMASUD). But before anything else, we are human beings with voices, stories and potential.

VOICIFY – The European Forum for Youth with Lived Migration Experiences, represents 40 member organisations across 17 EU member states, reaching more than 100,000 YREMASUD.

VOICIFY is the first-ever European self-representative structure led by young people with lived migration experiences. We strengthen the capacities of our member organisations and advocate for their rights and interests at the European and international levels. We build skills, amplify voices and transform lived experience into collective power, so that policies, narratives and opportunities truly reflect the realities of young people on the move.

How do you see the situation of people on the move and/or the communities you advocate for in the countries you’re advocating from ? And how do you see things across Europe more broadly?

In Belgium, the situation is a stark microcosm of the EU’s political failure. We are not witnessing a simple administrative crisis; we are seeing a political choice to govern through manufactured precarity. The deliberate underfunding of the asylum system, the practice of detention and the bureaucratic labyrinths are not accidents. They are tools of migration deterrence. This system is designed to exhaust, demoralise and ultimately dissuade people from claiming their rights. It is a form of bureaucratic violence that maintains a racialised underclass, a pool of exploitable labour, while the state performs public commitments to human rights just a few kilometres from its institutions.

Across Europe, this is even more explicit: the consolidation of a “fortress Europe” through a policy of neo-colonial externalisation. The EU is not just building walls; it’s financing, training and equipping third country regimes to act as its border guards, outsourcing the dirty work of repression and containing the human consequences of conflict and inequality far from European sight. This is a deliberate strategy to circumvent international law and sanitise the violence of border control.

Furthermore, the criminalisation of solidarity is a deliberate tactic to break the bonds of civil society. By prosecuting people for offering food and shelter, the state seeks to redefine basic humanity as a criminal act. This creates a chilling effect, isolating those on the move and attempting to strip them of their community.

Our position as VOICIFY is that we will not be neutral in this political project. We are a political force ourselves. We organise not for inclusion in this broken system, but for its transformative dismantling. We advocate for a post-nation state identity and the decolonisation of our laws. Our ultimate goal is our own dissolution in a Europe where borders no longer define humanity and where our voices are no longer marginalised perspectives but are central to crafting a just and co-liberated future.

In such a difficult context when it is easy to lose hope, what motivates you to keep doing this work?

What keeps us going, even in the face of an increasingly violent border regime, is the simple truth that our lives, and the lives of our communities, are not abstractions. We are not motivated by optimism, but by responsibility, by memory, and by the refusal to accept a world where some lives are treated as expendable.

Many of us have survived the very policies we are fighting against. We know what it means to be trapped by a border, to be reduced to a file number, to have our futures negotiated in diplomatic meetings we will never enter. We carry the stories of friends who never made it, of families torn apart, of futures interrupted.

But what sustains us most is the community. Every time a young person steps into a meeting room and realises their voice can shape political agendas; every time a member organisation wins a small local victory; every time we see YREMASUD supporting one another despite a system designed to isolate us, these moments are acts of resistance. They remind us that the border may be powerful, but so is solidarity.

We are motivated by the understanding that change has never come from the centres of power; it has always come from the margins. And we know that every policy we challenge, every narrative we shift, every young person who finds their political voice, brings us one step closer to the world we are fighting for: a Europe where dignity is not conditional, and where freedom of movement is a right, not a privilege.

What would you say to people living in Europe with passport privilege, silently watching all this unfold?

The first step toward change is breaking that silence and fostering a profound, personal empathy.

To those watching silently and to everyone living in Europe with the privilege of a powerful passport, we would say: “Your passport isn’t just a document. It is a privilege and responsibility. A privilege that you can freely cross borders to be at a loved one’s hospital bedside, to celebrate a milestone, to offer comfort in a time of grief, or to simply come home. It is a privilege so fundamental, so deeply woven into the fabric of your life, that you likely never have to think about it.”

Now, we’ll ask you to do just that: think about it, and then, imagine… Imagine the phone call. It’s the one you would rather never receive. Your mother is critically ill. A sibling has been in a terrible accident. Your dearest friend is begging for your support. Your heart, your entire being screams to go, to be there NOW.

Now, in front of your shock and fear, you are met with an insurmountable wall: a visa restriction. You must fill out forms in a language you don’t understand, secure appointments months away, prove you have enough money, prove you won’t ‘overstay’, and plead your case to a disinterested official behind a glass. You are forced to choose between breaking the law to be with your dying mother or obeying it and living a lifetime of regret and guilt.

For millions of people, this is not imaginary; this is the brutal daily reality. A reality created by our current migration and asylum system. But we must all start thinking about its deeper structure: The border as a mechanism of exclusion. When we see these inhumane policies, we see the active, political choice to exclude people based on their origin, to treat their need for safety and their desire to be with loved ones as a threat rather than a universal human impulse. The border is the physical and bureaucratic manifestation of that exclusion.

This is what we mean when we talk about “passport privilege.” It’s the privilege of being included by a system designed to exclude others. It’s the privilege to have your humanity recognised while the humanity of others is questioned at a line on a map. Your privilege is also a responsibility. Because your silence is a quiet endorsement of this exclusion.

So, when you see these policies being debated, we urge you not to see a distant “migrant crisis”. See a father who cannot reach his children, a partner separated from the love of their life, a family being torn apart by rules they had no hand in creating. Your privilege is a luxury that others pay for with their dignity, their safety, and their most precious relationships. Uphold your responsibility and use it, not as a shield, but as a tool.

SPEAK UP! Challenge the polarising narratives and demand that our governments uphold human dignity, not violate it.

What sort of Europe (and possibly world) would you like to see in the future, and what do you think it would take to make it a reality?

The Europe we work towards is one where an organisation like VOICIFY is obsolete. We envision a post-nation state Europe as a political space where belonging is not dictated by a passport or borders, but by shared humanity and a commitment to collective liberation. This means a Europe that had radically divested itself from its current framework. It is a Europe without Frontex, without detention centres and without the racist, colonial logic that treats certain human beings as a threat based on their origin. It is a world where migration is recognised as a natural, historical constant, not a crisis to be managed.

To be brutally political: this requires the dismantling of the fortress. It’s not about adding more humane policies to the same violent structure. It’s about tearing down that structure and building a new one. Making this a reality takes a fundamental power shift. It requires redistribution of political agencies.

For more information about VOICIFY, please visit their website.

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