The Corridor Is Not a Kindness. It Is a Contract.

The engineering of the migration corridors is finished enough to celebrate, and so we celebrate it, which is human and also a little dangerous. A corridor that carries water to 116 million registered migrants is a magnificent object. It is not, by itself, a moral one. What makes it moral is the contract underneath it — who pays, who is exempt, who audits the meter — and that contract is being drafted this week in ordinary council rooms with no cameras. I have watched enough relief become entitlement and enough entitlement quietly become extraction to distrust any pipe unaccompanied by an ordinance I can read. The Global Concordat Council likes the word "framework." Frameworks are scaffolding; scaffolding comes down. What stays is the clause. So my plea to the councillors drafting past midnight is unromantic: write the exemption before the emergency tariff lapses, not after. A corridor is a promise made in concrete. The terms are still in ink, and ink can be revised. Revise it toward the thirsty.