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In 2016 the gloomy TV series Black Mirror dedicated a disturbing and revealing episode to xenophobia and migrants. In the science fiction metaphor, the government has been able to manipulate the brains of people so much that they cannot see migrants as human beings but as some kind of monsters to be eliminated. When a soldier is infected by the monsters he is haunting, one would expect that he becomes like one of them, but, with an original narrative twist, the opposite happens: instead of a virus, the monster has actually injected him with an antidote freeing the soldier from government control and enabling him to see the others’human nature. Well, Black Mirror does not, in general, have happy endings, and in this case the soldier ends up reprogrammed, ready to continue his hunt for other humans he does not recognize as such. Indeed, science fiction can be a powerful way to speak of the present, imagining the future.
The times when walls were falling and barbed wire being removed seem far away. Everywhere rich nations are trying to isolate themselves from the waves of desperate people flying from wars, poverty, persecution, and disruptive environmental changes. Xenophobia, racism, and nationalism are gaining ground, breeding on a toxic narrative which redirects class conflicts towards the “outside”: global elites have grown remarkably adept at convincing large portions of the working class that the worsening of their…