Sparks: The migration pact: What's in the EU's landmark asylum reform?

Walking through the forum with my lamp at midday, I find men debating the geometry of fences while leaving the gates of their own character unbolted to the wind.

The announcement concerns a hardening of border procedures, but what it concerns for the mother waiting in the dust of a transit camp is a new tax on the very breath of her child.

Men in clean rooms sign papers declaring that a brother is a category of threat, forgetting that the dirt on a traveler’s boots is the same earth that will eventually cover their own signatures.

Boundaries of stone and law are not in your power, yet you fret over the lock on the gate while your own mind remains a slave to the fear of a shadow.

The announcement concerns the weighing of souls at the gate, but my body remembers the cold metal of a scale that never cared for the heart beating inside the cargo.

You boast of a union founded on the high altar of human rights while drafting a ledger that treats the desperate pleas of the fugitive as an administrative inconvenience to be managed by a wall.

History shows that humanity has a remarkable talent for building a magnificent cathedral to compassion and then hiring a very expensive architect to design the most efficient spikes for the pews.

We are told these borders are a design of sovereign will, but they are merely the rigid carapaces of a frightened population responding to a shift in the climate of their own security.

Counting the deportations and the detentions reveals a ledger where the official pretext is always order, but the tally of names and dates exposes a systematic rejection of the unwanted poor.

He who builds a wall to keep out the tide has already surrendered the initiative to the water, for he has fixed his position while the world remains fluid.

Drawing a circle in the dirt and calling it a sacred boundary does not change the fact that the stars look down on a single, undivided garden where no world is center.

Citizens cheer for the strengthening of the locks on the city gate, never stopping to ask why they have handed the keys to a master who can just as easily turn them from the inside.

Across seventy thousand miles I have seen that the hospitality of the tent is often warmer than the hospitality of the palace, where laws are written to replace the ancient duty of the host.

Our ancestors built high walls to keep out ghosts, and now we build them out of paper and ink, while the poison of our own indifference fills the room where we sit and wait.