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    [post_date] => 2022-03-10 22:04:05
    [post_date_gmt] => 2022-03-10 22:04:05
    [post_content] => 

Language around migration can be confusing, and the way it’s used can impact meaning. When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee?

Immigration. It’s a topic at the heart of political arguments and family dinner table rows all around the world. It drives tabloid headlines. But it’s an issue that’s poorly understood by many people. What makes someone a refugee, and what’s an economic migrant? Why do people leave their homes? How easy is it to cross a border?

This is your immigration cheat sheet — an introduction to how humankind migrates. It’s the why, how, and where. The emotional toll many have to face, and the opportunities others enjoy. The changing policies that are impacted by the world in which we live.

What is immigration?

Language around migration can be confusing, and the way it’s used can impact meaning. When is someone an immigrant? When are they a refugee? Meanwhile, the word migrant is often used as an umbrella term for everybody moving somewhere new, regardless of the reason — it isn’t specific to refugees. Here’s a breakdown of some key terms.

Immigration vs. emigration

The difference between immigration and emigration is about whether you’re coming or going. People immigrating are moving into a new country to live, where they become immigrants. Whereas emigration relates to those leaving.

People might also talk about net migration. This is a calculation to show whether more people are moving into a country, than out of it, affecting the overall population. If there are more immigrants to a country than people emigrating, it’s known as positive net migration.

Immigration vs. migration

Moving into a new place is known as immigration. Migration, on the other hand, is the actual act of moving. It’s when people (or birds) leave one location and journey towards another. People might cross multiple borders, or they might even stay in the same country and migrate to a different area.

Immigration under duress

Not all migration is through choice. Many people are forced to move away from their countries, leaving behind homes and loved ones. 

  • Refugees

There are 84 million people in the world who have been forcibly displaced, either within their own countries or beyond its borders. People forced to flee their home countries for fear of being persecuted are known as refugees, and they’re often at risk due to their political beliefs, religion, race, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or sexual orientation. They might be facing war or violence in their home countries. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, people are guaranteed the right to seek asylum in another country. They’re also protected from refoulement, where states must not return refugees to places where their lives or freedom would be under threat.

  • Asylum seekers

Refugees who have made an application to stay in a new country, but have not yet received a decision, are known as asylum seekers. They can only make that application once they’re in the new country. As of 2021, there are 4.4 million people waiting on asylum applications across the world. Some travel through several nations before making an application — there is no obligation for people to seek asylum in the first country in which they arrive. Asylum procedures can be complicated, involving interviews, lengthy legal processes, and even detention-like accommodation.

  • Trafficked people

Human traffickers take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. Those escaping risky situations, or deceived into believing strangers can find themselves in disastrous situations. Victims of human trafficking can be forced into sexual exploitation, slavery, marriage, or crime. It happens both across borders and within people’s home countries.

Immigration: a brief history

People have migrated throughout the whole of history, from early human movement out of Africa to periods of colonialism. It’s nothing new. But the ways migrants are treated and the factors that drive movement are ever shifting. Climate change is forcing more people to leave their homes, and technological advances mean those who want to work from anywhere often can. The Coronavirus pandemic forced countries to close their borders, and some governments used it as an excuse to turn away people.

Immigration laws

Here’s a snapshot of how immigration laws have changed in recent history, and the moments that made big impacts:

  • United Kingdom
  • During World War II, the UK took in around 70,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. British children from cities and towns, known as evacuees, were sent to live in the British countryside, or even in other nations, away from the threat of bombs.
  • After World War II, the country needed help rebuilding cities and staffing the healthcare system, and invited people from the Commonwealth to move to the UK. Those arriving from the Caribbean were known as the Windrush generation. They were automatically British subjects. However, in 2017, it became clear that the Home Office had wrongly deported commonwealth citizens, after destroying documentation which would have proved their right to live and work in the UK.
  • The introduction of the Immigration Act in 1971 put an end to Commonwealth citizens enjoying more rights in the UK than those from other nations.
  • In 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union. On 31 January 2020, Brexit came into force, putting an end to freedom of movement for British citizens in the EU.

  • The European Union and Schengen area
  • In 1951, six European countries joined together with the key aim of preventing further war and furthering economic growth. Through the European Economic Community, workers were eventually given the right of free movement in 1968.
  • In 1992, the European Union (EU) was created. Freedom of movement for all EU nationals was enshrined in law. Two years later, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Sweden were also included in free movement measures.
  • The creation of the Schengen Agreement means that citizens can now travel across 26 European countries (four of which are non-EU) without facing border controls. It is a passport-free zone.

  • United States
  • The United States has long been known as a country of immigrants. In 1892, the country’s first immigration station opened — Ellis Island.
  • The Immigration Act of 1924 brought big changes. Fears of communism were spreading, and many Americans wanted to separate themselves from other nations after the horrors of the First World War. Racism and discrimination increased and the new law limited migration based on nationality. In the same year, the US border patrol was established to stop illegal immigrants crossing into the country.
  • In 1965, the nationality-based quota system finally came to an end with the Immigration and Nationality Act.
  • During the Trump administration, the environment for refugees became more hostile. People were forced to wait in Mexico, and anyone traveling through other countries before arriving in the US was denied the right to claim asylum. Some refugees are sent to Guatemala in a “safe third country” agreement.

  • Japan
  • Japan has a reputation for strict immigration controls. For much of history, the country has been fairly isolated, with little mix of other ethnicities.
  • Between 1905 and 1945, a large number of people from Japanese territories migrated to the mainland - they were Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese. After World War II, controls tightened.
  • The 1952 Immigration Control and Refugee Act made it difficult for foreigners who wanted to live and work long-term in Japan.
  • By the 1990s the aging population was causing labor shortages, and some unskilled workers were given opportunities to move to Japan. Many other visa controls were tightened. 
  • In 2021, the government shelved a bill which would have allowed asylum seekers to be pushed back to their home countries when their applications were under appeal.

  • Uganda
  • During World War II, Uganda hosted around 7,000 Polish refugees. From this point, the country continued to welcome groups of people in need of refuge.
  • Uganda now has the largest number of refugees across the whole of Africa. It has an open-door policy, and people from neighboring East African countries arrive to seek safety. Refugees are given plots of land on arrival, access to healthcare and education, and the right to work - it’s known as a self-reliance model. This isn’t the whole story, and there are many challenges, but Uganda’s refugee policies are largely considered progressive. Nearly 1.5 million refugees now live in Uganda.

Immigration visas

Variations of passports and visas have existed throughout history, but up until World War I people could move fairly freely — although the opportunities might not have been as numerous. Following the war years and subsequent security fears, passports as we know them now came into being. 

In 1920, the League of Nations set a global standard for the documents. While Western countries were keen for these identity documents, many other countries were against the idea and saw them as restrictive. With the introduction of passports, came entry visas, with the same goal of national security. Just a year after the League of Nations meeting, the US introduced an act that put a quota on the number of immigrants allowed into the country.

How different nations approach immigration visas is constantly in flux. EU citizens don’t require visas to move to other EU states, while nations like New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are pickier in who they welcome into their countries. There’s a large expat population in Singapore, and depending on which country you come from, getting a visa could be fairly straightforward.

World events impact visa restrictions. The coronavirus pandemic means some countries require anyone entering to be vaccinated. Technological advancements and a rise in working from home have created changes too. Estonia, Cape Verde, and Barbados are just some of the countries offering digital nomad passports, allowing people to enjoy residency in a new place, while their career continues from a laptop.

What immigration is like today

  • United Kingdom
  • Immigration laws are in a state of flux in the United Kingdom. Since Brexit, this island nation no longer allows people from the EU to live, study, or work in the country visa-free, as was the case before. In the rest of the EU, citizens can move freely. 
  • Following Brexit, the UK has a points-based immigration system. 
  • The government wants to change the asylum laws and push back people arriving via irregular routes. Many are forced to cross the English Channel on dangerous boats or stowed in lorries, for a lack of a safe alternative.
  • The UK granted British citizenship to 146,483 people in 2021 and gave residence documents to 10,135 people from EEA (European Economic Area) countries. The nation gave protection to ​​13,210 asylum seekers in the same year.

  • United States
  • People who want to call the United States home must first get an immigrant visa. When they land on US soil, they become a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR), allowing them to apply for jobs and live in the country. After five years, they can apply for US citizenship.
  • There are different rules for immediate family members of US citizens, who have to meet certain eligibility criteria. Skilled workers can also get special visas on a temporary or permanent basis.
  • Refugees can apply to become LPRs one year after arriving or receiving asylum. They go through a complicated system.
  • 707,362 people received permanent residence status in 2020, a figure likely impacted by the pandemic. Previous years have usually exceeded 1 million.  29,916 people arrived in the US as refugees in 2019.

  • Japan
  • Japan is facing a labor shortage and a shrinking population. For a country long-averse to immigration, things might be about to change. The country plans to start welcoming skilled workers to stay in the country indefinitely. Until now, their visas have only been valid for five years and didn’t extend to family members. Many of the workers come from Vietnam and China.
  • The country operates on a points-based system for foreign professionals. Most people need a Certificate of Eligibility, applied for by their sponsor in Japan.
  • People between 18 and 30 can apply for a working holiday visa, which lasts for a year.
  • Japan has a low rate of accepting asylum seekers, compared to other wealthy countries. 
  • Japan welcomed 115,000 immigrants in 2018, which was around 15 percent more than the previous year.

  • South Africa
  • People who want to emigrate to South Africa can first apply for a temporary residence permit, before looking towards permanent residency. 
  • After working in the country for five years, people can apply for permanent residency. Those partnered with or related to a South African citizen can also apply, as well as some other categories.
  • South Africa has the largest number of immigrants in Africa — in total about 2.9 million, just under 5 percent of the population. 255,200 of them are displaced people.
  • Policies have become less welcoming to refugees in recent years, with 96 percent of all asylum cases rejected in 2019.

  • Sweden
  • Sweden is a member of the EU, which means that anyone within the Schengen area is free to live and work in the country. Non-EU/EEA citizens need an offer of work to apply for residency.
  • Different European countries have different refugee policies. Sweden had a welcoming refugee policy until 2016, and offered permanent residency visas to refugees. Since then, the number of applications being granted has declined. In 2021, the new government replaced the offer of permanent visas with temporary ones. However, the country continues to accept 5,000 quota refugees a year, who are people that UNHCR (the UN’s Refugee Agency) select to be housed in safe countries.
  • Sweden welcomed 82,518 migrants in 2020, which has steadily dropped from double that in 2016. The number is likely to have been impacted further by the Coronavirus pandemic. There were 12,991 new asylum seekers in the same year.

  • Saudi Arabia

Why people migrate

Whether choosing to set up home in a new country or forced to make journeys across borders, there are many reasons people migrate. Economic need or opportunity is a huge driver, while war and violence displace millions every year. People move to join family, study abroad, or retire. And throughout history and today, Indigenous communities have been forced from their native lands.

Migrating for economic reasons

Money is a huge driver of migration. Many people are forced to move, because of a complete lack of opportunity to earn a living in their region. Economic migration is often viewed as a choice, but poverty, dangerous working conditions, or food insecurity can mean some people have little choice but to leave their homes. For these people, migration is a case of survival. 

Others choose to migrate because they can earn higher wages in other countries, find more opportunities, or follow particular career paths. Professionals from all over the world take opportunities to make homes in new countries. 

Some migrant workers face economic insecurity in their own nations. For these people, the jobs on offer when they migrate are often the ones that nationals don’t want to take on. These industries can be unregulated and migrant workers are at risk of exploitation.

Demographic changes also impact migration. Aging populations come hand-in-hand with labor shortages, leaving a need for young workers. As of 2018, Japan is facing the greatest skills shortage in the world, followed by Turkey, Greece and India.

According to the World Migration Report 2020, there are 164 million migrant workers. They make up 70 percent of all migrants.

Migrating for safety reasons

There are 26.6 million refugees worldwide, with a further 48 million people displaced within their own countries, according to UNHCR. More than two thirds of these people have traveled from Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. In these countries and others, people face war, violence, and persecution. Syrians have witnessed executions in the street and had their towns and villages bombed. Politically-driven violence and food insecurity in Venezuela forces people to leave. The recent fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban has put people in serious danger.

In Ethiopia, the Oromo people face violence and persecution, as do other specific groups of people across the world. LGBTQIA+ people are often forced to leave countries that outlaw homosexuality, or face prison, violence, or even death. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, unrest and fighting between different groups means people are forced to flee. In some nations, citizens face mandatory military service. In Eritrea, that service sometimes becomes indefinite

In North Korea, human rights barely exist. There is no access to media from outside the country, famine is rife, and citizens are conditioned to devote themselves to the ‘Great Leader.’ Defectors have little choice but to put themselves in the hands of smugglers. If they are caught escaping, they face forced labor camps. China does not recognize North Koreans as refugees, and so those who are caught are returned.

Many people who become refugees for safety reasons are forced to choose between leaving family behind in dangerous situations, or putting their loved ones at more risk on perilous journeys. It is an impossible decision. For those making the journey alone, they may have to wait years for an asylum decision before accessing family reunification channels, where some can be reunited with their families.

Migrating for family reasons

Many people cross oceans to be closer to their families. Some refugees aim for specific countries because they already have family connections, which they hope will make integration easier. Others are the partners or children of migrant workers. Then there are people who have been apart from their families, and choose to reconnect with them: they might be caring for elderly parents, seeking comfort after changes of circumstance, or moving in with different family members. Some have new family ties — through marriage, long-term relationships, or adoption.

Depending on which country they’re applying from, some people with refugee status can go through family reunification channels to bring their loved ones into their new home country.

In 2018, around 1.9 million people moved to OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation) countries for family reasons. Around 40 percent of family migrants live in the US.

Climate migration

The climate crisis is a growing concern. So too is climate migration. As our planet heats up, geography and weather patterns are disrupted. Island nations like Tuvalu are witnessing rising sea levels before their very eyes and people are reluctantly making migration plans. Storms, droughts, and floods are battering communities across the world, forcing people to relocate. To adapt to climate change, people are moving. Most people are displaced within their own countries, others are crossing borders.

Papua New Guinea is one nation under threat from climate change. Between 2008 and 2013, 151,000 people were displaced in the country, and two thirds of those were due to environmental hazards.

In Peru, people’s livelihoods are impacted by climate change. Glacial melting and temperature extremes mean fishers and farmers are facing new challenges — as are the people relying on these food sources. People are forced from rural areas into cities. Many face floods, landslides, cold, and drought.

Australia was hit by bush fires in both 2019 and 2020, forcing thousands of people from their homes and causing huge destruction to the environment.

In 2020, 30.7 million people around the world had to migrate because of disasters. 98 percent of those disasters were caused by weather and climate.

Barriers to immigration

Immigration isn’t easy. Once geographical and emotional barriers have been navigated, there are those conditions imposed by governments. And when people are accepted into countries, they might face new challenges  — language and cultural barriers, racism, and finding work. The coronavirus pandemic has put another barrier in the way, causing backlogs and closing borders.

Government paperwork

For people who’ve been forcibly displaced, one of the first barriers to immigration can be a lack of passport. People who’ve fled their homes with nothing have difficulty proving their identity or crossing borders safely. When it comes to accessing jobs and education, it can be hard to prove education levels without physical certificates. Once people have applied for asylum, complicated processes, technicalities, or a lack of support can leave people with rejected claims or facing deportation.

Migrants who have relocated willingly are still at the hands of bureaucracy. Lengthy forms or restrictive visas can dissuade people from migrating, or they might be rejected for visas. For people on temporary visas in certain countries, accessing permanent residency can be a stressful process that takes years. I could mean staying in unpleasant jobs just to hold on to a sponsor, or paying out vast sums of money.

There are other pieces in the paperwork puzzle. Criminal record checks, medical reports, and vaccination certificates, to begin with. Couples and families might need to prove that they’re in genuine relationships.

Language

People applying for citizenship in some countries have to prove their knowledge of language and culture.

Asylum seekers can be acutely affected by language barriers. A lack of suitable translators leads to some claims being misinterpreted. People can be, and are, returned to unsafe countries due to being misunderstood or not being given enough opportunity to represent themselves. Accessing services and assimilating into wider society can also prove tough when people are learning a new language from scratch, all whilst dealing with the impact of trauma.

Financial requirements

Immigration can come with a huge price tag. Aside from the usual costs of moving home (along with flights and international haulage), there might be expensive visa fees.

Beyond this, some countries impose further financial requirements, like the salary that migrant workers need to earn. Those applying for family visas in countries like the UK and Canada might have to prove that they can financially support the people they want to bring over. In Australia, those applying for student visas need to prove that they can financially support themselves. In South Africa, anyone who wants a retired person’s visa needs to prove that they earn at least R37,000 (nearly $2,500 US) per month.

Restrictions on migrants

Migrants don’t always have the same rights as nationals. Asylum seekers in many countries are prohibited from working or studying while their applications are being assessed, which can make supporting themselves difficult, as well as impacting their wellbeing. Even though many have been through traumatic experiences, some asylum seekers are held in detention centers. They can be unsanitary and crowded.

In some countries, immigrants are required to pass a language test, undergo medical tests for things like Tuberculosis, or pay extra to access healthcare systems.

People arriving on some visas might be advised not to leave the country again — for example fiancé(e)s arriving on a family visa before the wedding takes place — or risk having to reapply. 

The future of immigration

The climate crisis, a health pandemic, and political tensions are all playing into how migration is changing. People stayed put as borders closed to stop the spread of a virus, while others were forced to flee their homes regardless. Technological advances offer greater opportunities for global citizens, while far right politics threaten freedom of movement. How countries respond to refugees is in constant flux, and there are at the same time both positive and worrying trends.

According to Move by founder of FutureMap, Parag Khanna, throughout history we humans have been driven to migrate by five forces: climate change, demographics, politics, economics, and technology. Climate change, now more so than in recent centuries, is going to have a huge impact on migration. It is already happening.

As the US moves further away from the Trump administration, which was famously hostile towards migrants, the UK closes its borders to many. The effects of Brexit are coming into being. Tension in Russia casts a shadow over Europe and beyond. And people left at risk in Afghanistan are still awaiting the refuge that so many countries have promised. 

Whether the world chooses to build more bridges, or more walls, is yet to be seen.

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A beginner’s guide to immigration

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The Phosphoros Theatre makes plays with, for, and by asylum seekers in the UK. Its amateur actors travel all over the country to perform, telling their own stories in the form of a fictionalized narrative. 

__

“On a chair on a ship in the middle of the ocean.”

“The bed I shared with my grandfather at home.”

“A sofa-bed in Belgium that I could hardly fit on.”

The characters on the stage have all been forced by their circumstances to sleep in uncomfortable places. As the lights come up, the audience learns that the actors are all asylum seekers and refugees who have come to the UK. In All The Beds I Have Slept In, produced by Phosphoros Theatre, they describe their perilous journeys from their dangerous home countries to a place they hoped would offer them freedom and safety.

Phosphoros’s plays emerge from the minds of its actors. To create this production, the company got together over a weekend, played drama games, and brainstormed. They had stories to share but needed a theme to anchor them. They realized that what their stories had in common was beds, in that all of them had once slept on proper beds at home but then, during their long journeys, they had moved from one strange bed to another. Often, they had had nowhere to sleep but the cold ground. On stage, that theme became a prop that was central to the action—sometimes a bed on wheels that served as a place to sleep or a place to talk. Sometimes, the bed was even a boat.

By the end of the creative weekend playwright Dawn Harrison had a wealth of material. During the writing process she checked in with the actors by WhatsApp to verify what kinds of expressions they might use, to make sure the dialogue reflected their voices accurately.

“A charpai on top of my roof in Afghanistan when it was too hot to sleep inside,” is how one of the performers, a young man named Syed Haleem Najibi, described his bed.

Syed is studying to be an engineer, while simultaneously touring with the theater company—which makes productions with, for, and starring refugees and asylum seekers. In theory one’s bed is a “place of comfort,” but this has not been the case for many of these refugees. “I've slept on the street, and I've slept in forests and fields,” Syed said. Going into this project “I understood the value of a bed,” he said, adding that the stories were “very personal. All the actors, he said, wanted to tell their stories in their own voice and “not the way the media or the politicians are showing it.”

Syed has been with the company since its first production in 2016, but All the Beds I Have Slept In has been his most emotional acting experience . Refugee audience members often approach him after his performance and tell him that they heard their own story in his words. “I'm representing all these people who don't have the opportunity to be standing on a stage like this and tell the stories the way they want to,” Syed says.

All the actors in the production came to the UK as teenage asylum seekers. They are used to telling their stories, but usually to lawyers, social workers, and interpreters who then retell their stories for them. Syed wants people in the UK to get to know refugees and hear their stories directly.

The message he wants to convey is that  “nobody would be willing to leave their family, leave their homeland, leave their friends, just like that for no reason. You don't leave home unless home is not safe for you.”

Missing home

“A blanket in the rescue ship that pulled me from the sea.”

When he arrived in the UK as a teenager in 2012, Syed was full of hope. He believed he had arrived in a country that would respect and recognize his human rights. But like his character in All The Beds I Have Slept In, who glosses over the difficulties of his life in the UK as he describes it to his brother back home over the phone, Syed’s experience was not what he had hoped.

Once in the UK, he discovered that he was at the start of another journey, this time through the bureaucracy—the asylum system, the care system, the education system. It was a “hostile” experience, he said. He had to fight for his rights, and his battle continues.

Being part of a touring theater company has changed Syed’s experience of living in the UK. He’s met people in every part of the country and has come to know a huge range of organizations that support refugees. And he has made new friends. He says he now has a new family called “Phosphoros.”

Nevertheless, said Syed, Britain does not feel like home. “I am constantly reminded that I don't belong here, by the system and by society,” he says. Compounding that feeling, the House of Commons recently passed the controversial “Nationality and Borders bill,” which, if approved by the House of Lords and passed into law, would make it harder for people to claim asylum in the UK. This bill could even allow the government to strip people of their citizenship without notice.

“It's shocking to hear that even somebody with British citizenship can be removed and sent back to their country of birth,” Syed says.

On a 2019 visit to Afghanistan Syed realized that his country no longer felt like home. People there saw him as a foreigner rather an Afghan. “I realized that I'm just a tourist in Afghanistan and I don't belong there,” he said. “I don’t belong anywhere.”

Afghanistan from afar

“In a stranger’s flat in Nice.”

During his previous life in Afghanistan, Syed went to school. But there was no future for him there, with seemingly never-ending war all around him. The extreme instability was impossible to bear, and so he decided to leave

In August, tensions in Afghanistan increased again when the U.S. pulled its remaining troops out of the country, leaving a power vacuum that the Taliban filled within days. Syed found it “heartbreaking” to watch this unfold from abroad, knowing his family was still there. He says that people he knows are now going weeks without their salaries and, unable to buy food, have become desperate.

Towards the future

 “A carpet in church the night before a spiritual celebration.”

Syed no longer sees a future in Afghanistan and is now focused on building his life in the UK. He’s studying sustainable energy engineering, and hopes to contribute toward ending the climate crisis.

But he’s also hoping that those who follow his path will have a better future. “I'm hoping to see a system, not just in the UK, but all around the world, treating migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers with dignity and respect,” he says.

Syed wants to continue acting with Phosphoros even as he starts his engineering career. He’s proud to use his personal experience as a piece of art, and education, to help people see refugees as human beings. To treat them with the dignity and respect they are so often denied.

In the play, a stranger offers kindness to a boy called Mohamed, who is continuing his journey towards the UK. He offers him a place to stay for the night. He buys his train ticket. It is this kindness that allows Mohamed to travel without fear. But the stranger doesn’t wait to be thanked. Instead, he said that he was going to get a coffee and strolled away.

“When he said he was getting a coffee, he meant goodbye.”

[post_title] => 'In our own words': refugee actors share their stories on stage [post_excerpt] => The Phosphoros Theatre makes plays with, for, and by asylum seekers in the UK. Its amateur actors travel all over the country to perform, telling their own stories in the form of a fictionalized narrative.  [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => in-our-own-words-refugee-actors-share-their-stories-on-stage [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3833 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

‘In our own words’: refugee actors share their stories on stage

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    [post_date] => 2022-02-03 01:15:03
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    [post_content] => Zemmour's racism and anti-immigrant positions are not new, but his misogyny reveals where the ideological fault line lies between the new and the old far right.

Éric Zemmour, a prominent French journalist and television personality who espouses extreme-right views, announced in November that he would be a candidate for president of the Republic. He doesn’t yet have enough signatures to run in the April election, but his potential candidacy has captured enormous media attention, revealing significant support from the far right and even from some subcultures of the moderately conservative right.

Zemmour has almost no chance of being elected president, though he might poach some votes from Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National (RN, or National Rally; formerly the FN, or National Front). Nevertheless, a trickle of ministers and smaller political parties continue to join his newly established Reconquête (Reconquer) party, even as he is involved in a series of high profile scandals involving several accusations of sexual assault, an extramarital relationship with a much younger woman, and three court cases on accusations of inciting racist hatred.

While he has won supporters for his extreme positions on Muslims and immigration, Zemmour polls low with women. Marine Le Pen has reorganized her campaign accordingly, and Zemmour —with seven accusations of sexual assault currently pending and more than a few misogynist tracts under his belt—was obliged, for reasons of realpolitik, to declare himself a “feminist, like the next man.”

A darling of the culture wars

Zemmour, 63, rose to prominence in the 1990s as a columnist and commentator. Back then he espoused a “union of the right”—i.e., a coalition of the moderate right Républicains and the far-right Front National (FN). He became a darling of the culture wars with his essay Le Premier Sexe (2006), a gender panic polemic on the purported “feminization” of men in France. The book—yes, its title is a riposte of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist book The Second Sex—sold over 100,000 copies.  He followed this with a novel, Petit Frère (2008), in which he attacked “anti-racist angelism," and then a trilogy that sold even better than Le Premier Sexe—Mélancolie française (2010), in which he recounts the history of France; Le Suicide français (2014), where he argues that the French nation has become degenerate since the student-led uprisings of 1968; and Destin français (2018), a sort of autobiography in which he describes various historical events that have influenced his worldview. He ends the final essay with a polemic against the growing influence of Islam on French society. Zemmour’s most recent book, La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (France Hasn’t Had Its Last Word), published in 2021, sold 165,000 copies within three weeks. Cherished by his followers as “an intellectual” and tolerated by others as a kind of maverick TV personality—a buffoon, perhaps, like the former journalist Boris Johnson, or like Donald Trump—Zemmour is, thanks to his many books, a frequent guest on television news and culture programs. He uses these prime-time opportunities to air his views on the decline of French society, the clash of civilizations, immigration and assimilation, national preference, and national identity. He is one of the figures responsible for bringing the “great replacement theory,” the fear that France’s “native” (white) population will be replaced by (brown) non-European people, into the mainstream discourse. Whilst lamenting the passage of France’s heroic age—Napoleon, etc.—Zemmour manages to align himself with both President Charles de Gaulle, who led the French resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, and the Nazi collaborator Marshall Philippe Pétain, Vichy France’s chief of state. This pairing is an ingenious move, presenting two historical figures who represented opposing political views as representatives of France’s lost past, when strong men took charge. Jean Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the far-right FN, made the mistake of expressing his support for Pétain while denouncing de Gaulle—at a time when de Gaulle was still an extremely popular figure in France. Zemmour expresses support for both men, which is novel.

A racist's racist

Zemmour is the son of Jewish immigrants from Algeria and is himself a practicing Jew who attends an Orthodox synagogue. That has not stopped him from aligning himself with the antisemitic far right, or from saying that Pétain was right to deport non-French Jews to concentration camps—because in doing so he saved some French-French Jews (of the 75,000 Jews deported from France, 72,500 were murdered) . Zemmour has transitioned smoothly from being an “outspoken” voice in the discourse around political correctness as it morphed into what we now call a “debate” on “cancel culture.” Today he is a comfortable anti-feminist, traditionalist, misogynist, homophobe, anti-abortionist, and a “critic” of the legacy of the social movements of the 1960s. He also deplores gender studies and writes in Le Premier Sexe that rape trials qualify as the “judiciary surveillance of desire.” In the months before he announced his candidacy, Zemmour reveled in several personal and legal scandals that further raised his public profile. In September Paris Match’s cover showed him frolicking in the sea with Sarah Knafo, his 28 year-old assistant and campaign manager, whom he has known since she was 13 years old (she is the daughter of family friends). Zemmour recently confirmed that Knafo is his “companion” and is pregnant with his baby, to the delight of the press, which speculates endlessly about Mylène Chichportich, his wife of 40 years: Is she suffering or indifferent as she stands silently at his side? While Knafo is something of a protégée to Zemmour, she is in her own right a perfectly terrifying and precocious extreme right militant. As a university student she was active in the FN and in a student association called Critique of European Reason, through which she got down with the sovereigntists and Euroskeptics, and met prominent right wing thinkers like Alain Finkielkraut. At 25 she did an internship at the French embassy in Tunis. She then authored a “handbook,” based on what she’d learned in North Africa about migration routes, on how to facilitate the deportation of undocumented migrants from France. His frequent trips in and out of court keep the press talking about Zemmour, too. His January 17 conviction for inciting racial hatred was his third. A judge fined him 10,000 euros ($11,400) for having said, on live television, that unaccompanied migrant minors “have nothing to do [in France], they’re rapists, assassins, that’s all they are, you have to send them back to where they came from.” Meanwhile, at one of his November rallies, Zemmour’s militia-style bodyguards beat up an anti-racist activist in a brawl reminiscent of Trump rally scenes.

A radical ideologue

French commentators have pointed out that the country’s media is falling into the trap of giving free publicity to Zemmour, just as the U.S. media made the mistake of broadcasting Trump’s rallies live without commentary and of reporting incessantly on his tweets, giving him massive free publicity on mainstream evening and cable news programs. Like Trump, Zemmour overwhelms the media with provocative soundbites, which are often in the form of attacks on journalists. As a result, media outlets are drowning in a sea of far-right madness—reporting and broadcasting Zemmour’s racist, sexist, and fascist comments repeatedly, without analysis or critique. The fact that Zemmour’s ideas are splayed bittily across television and internet platforms, and that only certain people read his books from beginning to end, works to obscure their character as a complete ideology. His misogyny, abhorrence for the student-led uprisings of 1968, dislike of modernity, and hatred of Muslims are connected and inform each other. A quick online search brings up a list of citations to go with each of Zemmour’s ideas, presented like an inventory of the contents of a bag belonging to the fasciste du jour. Zemmour deliberately muddies the extremism of his complete ideology by presenting his ideas in a willfully confusing, often “third positionist” manner— i.e., expressing right wing ideas in the language of left-wing ones. For example, in his books he offers a critique of the monogamous couple and, ostensibly, praise for polyamory. But this is not advocacy for free love. Rather, it is an expression of approval for a premodern society in which married men had multiple mistresses and in which women had no means of leaving an unhappy marriage. In French third positionism is roughly translated as confusionniste — which is a better term, perhaps, because the deliberate effort to create confusion is a salient and defining characteristic of contemporary fascism. Writing about Zemmour is challenging because it’s almost impossible to avoid the trap of either reproducing his ideas without comment, or presenting them with expressions of shock and outrage. In either case, the writer is amplifying Zemmour’s ideology, thus giving him yet more free publicity. Zemmour and his fellow far right television personalities have succeeded in shifting the Overton window of the French discourse. Fueled by the country’s growing and fertile climate of Islamophobia, which is partly a reaction to a series of high profile, violent terrorist attacks over the last six years, the center and center-right are now taking positions that were once considered far right. In a recent illustration of this shift, Macron’s government drafted and passed the Loi de Séparatisme, a law to “strengthen republican values.” The law targets and seeks to repress the Muslim community and its cultural expression, which conflicts with France’s aggressive secularism. As such, it is a populist attempt to exploit, or give lip service to, the idea that a cultural “great replacement” has happened, or is happening, in France. It is perhaps surprising that the extreme right—identitarian and antisemitic as it is—might choose Éric Zemmour over Marine Le Pen. Zemmour, though born in France, is the offspring of an Algerian-Berber Jewish immigrant family, while Le Pen is white and descended from France’s best-known fascist dynasty. Zemmour’s background has been a subject of conversation on fan forums for Papacito (a far-right influencer with a popular YouTube channel who supports Zemmour) and on gaming websites, where eager 20-year-old neo-Nazis agree that while his Jewishness is a bit of a problem, he’s kind of an Ubermensch.

The fault line in the far right

Physically, Zemmour cuts a slight figure, with, as Harrison Stetler put it, “massive ears folding out around [a] receding jaw.” He bears no physical resemblance to the towering Aryan figures of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, or to the topless horse rider Vladimir Putin. His possible success amongst extreme right voters — a smattering of ultra-conservative Christians, neo-Nazi groups, far right influencers, lapsed FN or Républicains voters—seems to be derived from his capacity to embody discursively a kind of straight talking, Trumpian masculinity (and whiteness), not seen in French politics since Jean-Marie Le Pen led the FN. He espoused a more overt brand of racism than that of his daughter Marine, the heir to the party’s leadership. Marine Le Pen, meanwhile, has in recent years made a dive for the center, trying to clean up her party and kicking out embarrassing family members such as her niece (who now wants to run with Zemmour) and her father, who infamously described the Holocaust as “a detail of history” and, as a French military officer, tortured people during the Algerian war. The effect of Marine’s efforts to take the party mainstream was to alienate her most right-wing voters, who have become disillusioned with her perceived political correctness. While Le Pen herself has said she is “against gay marriage,” she has also pink-washed her party in an effort to appeal to LGBT groups and even has several gay deputies. Recently Le Pen revealed that for the last five years she has been living in secret with a woman, her “childhood friend” Ingrid. “There are no men in my house, even the cats are female,” Marine said in a widely watched TV interview broadcast in early November. The critical fault line between Zemmour and Le Pen is, clearly, misogyny. Zemmour positions himself against a “cosmopolitan” political correctness that purportedly welcomes homosexuality and feminizes extreme right politics. Those who oppose Marine Le Pen’s leadership of the FN perceive her as having emasculated her daddy’s once-great party. One might wonder what is more prominent in Zemmour’s ideology—a hatred of women, or a hatred of Muslims and immigrants? But this would be the wrong question. Zemmour’s essay Le Premier Sexe shows his misogyny and his racism to be, if not interchangeable, on a continuum with one another. It shows the strong link between “theories” of feminization and the great replacement, which usually advances the racist theory that Muslims, Jews, and other non-white people will soon replace white people. It starts out as a great replacement theory about gender, advancing the idea that French men have become feminized through a culture that elevates “feminine values.” Men, he writes, are allowing themselves to be replaced by women and become total pussies, whereas a real man is a “sexual predator, a conqueror.” It is of course a polemic: his histrionic dismay at the purported fragility of contemporary French men is motivated by his belief in a naturalized masculine power (and violence), ready and waiting to be resuscitated. His essay is a spurious patchwork of loosely connected observations on advertising, football, cinema, sport, dubious “facts” and statistics, and hardcore conspiracy theories. He advances the theory that the purported feminization of men is due to the influence of “single mothers, sixty-eighters and feminists,” plus a homosexual conspiracy that wants to denaturalize sex and create a society segregated along the lines of gender. According to Zemmour, the plot is to eradicate male body hair because it would remind men of their natural “bestiality, virility,” and to set up conspiratorial alliances in cities between immigrants, single women, and gays. The speed with which he moves from roots to rootless cosmopolitans is, frankly, startling. By the end of Le Premier Sexe all this scattered madness joins up with his other great preoccupation—Muslims and immigrants. The great replacement of gender becomes just the great replacement, tout court. Hurtling through an account of the liberalization of divorce and abortion, he claims that French men have “laid their phalluses down,” thus declaring France “an open land, waiting to be impregnated by a virility from outside.” This has happened, he writes, because Christianity is a pussy religion. Outside of the Western world, he writes, men defend their dominant position “like a treasure” and refuse to align the “status” of their women with that of the Europeans. The argument is not simply that white French men are becoming more like women, but that they will be replaced by a masculine revolution of foreign (Muslim) men who are concentrated in France’s suburbs. Despite the book’s highly misogynistic character, which shows Zemmour’s hatred for women and especially feminists, part of his argument is that Black and Arab men, with their machismo and their desire to dominate, present a danger to…Western white women and feminists. Zemmour can claim as much as he likes that he is now a feminist. His entourage of female influencers, FemmesAvecZemmour (WomenWithZemmour), are flocking to make the same racist argument about women’s safety in an effort to make a feminist of old Zemmour. But Zemmour is quite different from other leaders. He manages to present himself as a real man, a man’s man, a man who speaks his mind, while remaining, a wily, self-satisfied intellectual who espouses a hardcore and explicit ideology. Whether he becomes a candidate in the presidential election or not, it’s quite clear that his prominence is symptomatic of a rightward shift in France, and in any case such extreme right mobilizing has already made its impact on the policies of the center. [post_title] => Softbois in France: a feminist perspective on the rise of Éric Zemmour [post_excerpt] => Zemmour's racism and anti-immigrant positions are not new, but his misogyny reveals where the ideological fault line lies between the new and the old far right. 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Softbois in France: a feminist perspective on the rise of Éric Zemmour

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    [post_content] => Forced sterilizations on detained migrant women is in line with the US's long, sordid history of eugenics.

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefed House Democrats on allegations concerning several gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, that a physician performed on migrant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia—allegedly without their informed consent. The incidents became public knowledge in September 2020, after a consortium of human rights groups filed an explosive report on behalf of Nurse Dawn Wooten, a whistleblower who worked at the detention center.

In a December 3 letter signed by the chairmen of the House Committees on Homeland Security and Oversight and Reform, legislators wrote: “We are concerned that Dr. [Mahendra] Amin may have been performing unnecessary surgical procedures to defraud DHS and the Federal government without consequences.” The letter, which is addressed to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, also requested information on the steps the Department has taken to review treatment Dr. Amin provided and ensure migrants receive proper medical care in the future.

The Conversationalist confirmed a December 15 DHS briefing with two committee staffers, both of whom declined to share additional details about the information presented. A staffer from the Committee on Homeland Security clarified that this was a DHS review of the Irwin County Detention Center and not a general review of migrant detention facilities, although Congress requested the Department to brief them on the matter months ago.

The December 3 letter says, “the Committee on Homeland Security requested a briefing on August 10, 2021, on DHS’s efforts to review the suitability of detention facilities. To date, DHS has not fulfilled this request. We ask that you ensure the Committees receive this briefing without further delay.”

On January 3, the DHS released a report that found “the facility’s chronic care, continuity of care, and medical policies and procedures to be inadequate” but did not find that unnecessary or unwanted hysterectomies had been performed. The report does, however, quote an ICE employee who alleges that there is a systemic issue in the ICE leadership that makes the agency “unwilling to listen to concerns or complaints about detention facilities.”

Nurse Dawn Wooten worked at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) for three years. She says that Dr. Amin, who was referred to as the “uterus collector,” had performed hysterectomies on at least 20 women without their consent. Many of these women did not speak English well enough to consent to the procedures or understand what had been done to them. Thirty-five women are now suing ICE over Dr. Amin’s abuse.ICDC, run by a for-profit prison company called LaSalle Corrections, also came under harsh scrutiny for their botched COVID-19 response, which sparked hunger strikes and protests among detainees early in the pandemic.

The Georgia-based advocacy group Project South filed the complaint, which describes a filthy, insect-infested facility with inadequate COVID-19 safety precautions, where staff refused to test symptomatic detainees and fabricated medical records. Detainees who protested the conditions were punished with beatings, pepper spray, and solitary confinement. Nurse Wooten told The Intercept that she was demoted after raising concerns with her supervisors.

“It is deeply concerning that neither DHS nor the private prison company running Irwin have yet to face accountability for the medical abuse that migrant women faced at Irwin,” Azadeh Shahshahani, the Legal and Advocacy Director with Project South said in an email statement to The Conversationalist. “This is setting an awful precedent. Congress and the Biden Administration must act now.”

The joint committee investigation subpoenaed LaSalle Corrections in November 2020 after the company refused to turn over medical records on the procedures Dr. Amin performed. Dr. Tony Ogburn, Department Chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, reviewed those records. He concluded that Dr. Amin’s care “did not meet acceptable standards.”

“My concern is that he was not competent and simply did the same evaluation and treatment on most patients because that is what he knew how to do, and/or he did tests and treatments that generated a significant amount of reimbursement without benefitting most patients,” Dr. Ogburn concluded in a November 2021 letter to the Georgia Medical Board.

Following pressure from lawmakers, activists, and advocacy groups, DHS Secretary Mayorkas announced he would sever ties with LaSalle Corrections in May 2021, though migrants were not removed from the facilities until September 2021—a full year after Project South filed Nurse Wooten’s whistleblower complaint with the ICE administration.

While these abuses came to light during the Trump presidency the lack of accountability continues under the Biden Administration, with migrant arrests now at a 21-year high. The current administration has ramped up deportations under a Trump-era health policy that allows the government to expedite the process without giving migrants the opportunity to apply for asylum. The government claims the rushed deportations are a COVID-19 safety precaution.

Under Title 42, the Trump Administration expelled 444,000 migrants. Under Biden, this number has already reached 690,000. COVID-19 still runs rampant in migrant detention centers and in prisons such as New York City’s Rikers Island, where more than one-fifth of the incarcerated population has tested positive.

Immigration advocates have been disappointed with the new administration. Since taking office, Biden has filed 296 executive orders on immigration, 89 of which have reversed actions taken by the Trump administration such as the travel ban on Muslim majority nations and construction of the border wall.

When Dawn Wooten stepped forward to make a whistleblower complaint about the medical abuses at ICDC, international headlines about “mass hysterectomies” sparked outrage and comparisons to Nazi Germany. Others placed the story within a long history of American eugenics that targeted Black, brown, disabled, and indigenous women.

“People with Spanish surnames were disproportionately sterilized during the period of peak eugenics in the 1920s through the 1950s,” says Heather Dron, a Research Fellow at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the University of Michigan.

During the twentieth century, U.S. states subjected over 60,000 people to sterilization without consent, with over 30 states establishing eugenics boards. State governments targeted minorities, the disabled, and others who did not fit into “social norms” for forced sterilization.

From 1929 to 1974 North Carolina ordered as many as 7,600 women sterilized— a majority of whom were Black women from low-income backgrounds. Margaret Sanger and Dr. Gregory Pincus exploited government birth control centers in Puerto Rico to subject one-third of the female population to sterilization procedures, often without their consent, purportedly to address “overpopulation” and poverty on the island. Under the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 physicians sterilized an estimated 25 percent of Native American women of childbearing age in a six-year period.

Adolf Hitler writes admiringly in Mein Kampf of eugenics policies practiced in the U.S. “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the United States], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State.”

Heather Dron’s research focuses on eugenic sterilization in California, where roughly 20,000, or one-third, of U.S. sterilizations were performed starting from 1909.

“There was a law on the books between 1909 and 1979 that allowed for the sterilization of institutionalized people housed in psychiatric hospitals, or in homes for what was then called the ‘feeble-minded,’” Dron says. “Sterilization was seen as a solution to all these other social problems. They saw it as a way to keep these people out of institutions.”

While eugenics laws in California have been repealed, sterilizations have continued. A 2013 investigation by Mother Jones revealed that 148 women in two California prisons were sterilized from 2006 to 2010.

“You get a similar dynamic there,” says Dron, referring to the recent ICE cases. “There were a few people who were performing a lot of procedures who seemed like they didn’t have a great ethical practice in general.”

There is no evidence to suggest that Dr. Mahendra Amin was motivated to perform these surgeries for anything other than financial compensation. Last month's letter from House Democrats expressing concerns that Dr. Amin performed these surgeries to “defraud the government” further supports this theory.

“It sounds like there’s some sort of incentive to perform surgical interventions because you’re paid per intervention and some people took advantage of that,” Dron says of Dr. Amin’s case. “But you have to read that with a little bit of skepticism because often we point to these bad actors and say it’s just them as opposed to a system that systematically thinks that people who are incarcerated shouldn’t have kids.”

The breaking news of hysterectomies performed on migrant women in ICE custody barely made it through one news cycle before news of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death broke just days later. Her death was followed by a swift Republican push to nominate a third Supreme Court Justice under Trump just weeks ahead of the 2020 election.

The media might choose to remember the hysterectomies performed at the Georgia ICE facility as a particularly egregious act that happened under a uniquely evil administration. That would be a huge mistake.

According to a December 2021 article in The Texas Tribune, the number of immigrants held in ICE detention centers has increased by more than 50 percent since Biden took office. Moreover, the investigation into Dr. Amin’s medical practice has been conducted on Biden’s watch.

Detentions have been accompanied by a spike in border crossings in 2021. Biden has downplayed this as a seasonal phenomenon while Republicans have pointed to plans to offer 11 million migrants a path to citizenship as cause for the surge. Others say the migrants are motivated by growing instability in their home countries. With less attention on the issue of migration, Biden has gotten away with his continuation of the “remain in Mexico” policy by pointing to Title 42, which has been extended twice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as a matter of public health.

Under the Biden Administration, we no longer hear overtly fascist rhetoric from the White House aimed at migrants, but detainees at ICE facilities continue to suffer from extreme medical neglect and abuse as COVID-19 cases soar.

In order to prevent us from reliving the past, we need to understand the circumstances that led us to where we are today. Ending Trump’s remain in Mexico policies, fulfilling a campaign promise to offer migrants a path to citizenship, and holding Dr. Amin and LaSalle Corrections responsible for their medical abuses would be a great place to start.

 
    [post_title] => The 'uterus collector': the surgeon who performed coerced hysterectomies on detained migrant women
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The ‘uterus collector’: the surgeon who performed coerced hysterectomies on detained migrant women

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    [post_content] => Throughout her journey, the 9-year-old Syrian refugee girl-puppet was greeted by both loving crowds and anti-migrant protesters. 

A huge crowd gathers outside the National Theatre in London’s Southbank. Children run around during the last moments of daylight. A choir stands ready. They are waiting for Amal. Heads turn and people point, as a giant puppet rounds the corner. As she walks into the courtyard, a solo voice sings out her name. The audience is silent.

Amal tentatively explores the crowd, peering into the faces in front of her. She bends down to touch a child’s hand, and an elderly woman appears to give her words of heartfelt comfort. The mood is electric. When Amal finally leaves the National Theater, the crowd follows her across Waterloo Bridge, accompanying her as she continues to her next destination. 

She might just be a puppet, but Amal represents something very real. She embodies a nine-year-old Syrian refugee, who has taken the same journey as many unaccompanied minors across Europe. Her name is Arabic for “hope.” Amal started her journey on the Turkey-Syria border, kicking off Good Chance and Handspring Puppet Company’s travelling festival, The Walk, and journeying 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) to find a home in Manchester, UK.

We were all invited to join Amal as she traveled across Turkey, Greece, and Italy, where she was met with both love and hostility. Amal has finally arrived in the UK, just as its government is proposing potentially hugely consequential changes to its immigration system, changes which could actually land those making dangerous journeys like Amal’s in jail. 

Thankfully for Amal, as she made her final steps across Europe, she was welcomed and given a home. Will the same be true for real migrant children?

Amal’s next steps in Europe

As Amal left Italy, to begin the final leg of her journey, she took her first steps through south-eastern France and into Switzerland. In Geneva, she played in the fountains outside the United Nations Office, and placed her hand on The Broken Chair, a 12-metre sculpture of a seat with a snapped leg, designed to raise awareness of the victims of landmines. There were many such poignant moments during The Walk. “The fact that this journey is based on a real route that many thousands of children have walked, and some have lost their life on, means that we are entrusted with a great responsibility to represent their stories in an honest and complicated way, showing the hardship but also the beauty of their journeys,” Amir Nizar Zuabi, artistic director of The Walk and Good Chance, told me.  “We take this responsibility very seriously, because we know that as big as Amal is, so is the impact of her journey.” Amal moved on from Switzerland, stepping next into Germany, home to the EU’s largest population of displaced people. When she arrived in Stuttgart, she made friends with a giant robotic puppet, part of the Dundu Family of German puppets that have brought together audiences internationally since 2006 with spectacular light and music shows. As nighttime arrived, Amal met more of the family, as they lit up the darkness. When unaccompanied minors like Amal first arrive in Germany, they’re taken into the care of the local youth welfare office, explains Jonathan Sieger, head of the Bürgerzentrum community center and executive board member of NGO Kölner Spendenkonvoi, which assists newly arrived refugees. These young people are then placed with relatives, a foster family, or a suitable facility, and they must be given a legal guardian, as is the case—although not necessarily the reality—across much of Europe. One of the main risks young refugees face, Sieger says, is developing long term trauma. “What we are lacking in Germany is general psychological treatment for refugees. Especially for unaccompanied minors, this help is crucial,” Sieger says. This same sentiment has been echoed by organizations across the continent.  Organizations like Bürgerzentrum are supporting young refugees to settle into their new homes. From its base in Cologne, Bürgerzentrum offers cooking workshops, theater classes, cultural events, and trips. Amal’s journey did not end here, but if it did, perhaps she would have found a warm welcome. As Amal bid farewell to Germany, she continued across Belgium, and then into France.

Walking through France

In the mountain region of Briançon, Amal embarked upon the treacherous path that many refugees have used to cross from Italy into France. She gazed at an exhibition of artwork made from the objects and clothes left behind by those who had traveled before her. In Paris, she saw the Eiffel Tower, and in Lyon she walked through the park with new friends. There was music wherever she went: brass bands, accordions, drumbeats. Amal was treated with dignity and celebration, but this is not always the reality for refugees in northern France. Police use violence and tear gas, which has been documented by Refugee Rights Europe and others. Safe Passage International is an organization helping child refugees reach safety and reunite with family, and it works across the UK, France, and Greece. In France, most of the people they support are sleeping on the street when they first come into contact with them. “Having fled war and persecution, there are thousands of children stuck on the streets or in refugee camps across Europe—nobody can call that safe for a child. Children are at serious risk of violence, exploitation and trafficking. These are children left in limbo and exposed to incredibly dangerous situations,” says the organization’s CEO, Beth Gardiner-Smith.  Amal then made her way to Calais flanked with cheers and flags. This is often the spot where people cross over to the UK. It was the people of the Calais Jungle, a refugee camp that the French government had destroyed in 2016, which served as the original inspiration for Amal. It was also the birthplace of an earlier Good Chance production, The Jungle, about the people who gathered at an Afghan café in the refugee camp. Despite all this, the Mayor of Calais objected to Amal passing through the area and refused to approve a permit. Like many young refugees before her, Amal crossed the English Channel to the UK. But unlike fellow young refugees, the company of Good Chance actors accompanying Amal crossed the water safely, with passports in hand and comfortable places to sleep on either side of the journey.

Arriving on UK shores

On a grey day toward the end of October, Amal finally stepped onto the shore in Folkestone, Kent, in the south-east of England. The actor Jude Law, who is an ambassador for The Walk, held her hand as she walked down the pier, where schoolchildren welcomed her and gave her a passport, blanket, and cookies. The day after Amal’s arrival, supporters flocked to Parliament Square in London to join the Refugees Welcome Rally, organized by a collective of refugee organizations. The protest took place in opposition to the government’s new “Nationality and Borders Bill,” which parliament is currently considering. The Conservative government has stated three objectives for this bill: 
  • “To make the system fairer and more effective”;
  • “To deter illegal entry into the UK”;
  • “To remove from the UK those with no right to be here.”
In her opening speech for the bill, Home Secretary Priti Patel said: “The British people have had enough of open borders and uncontrolled migration[...] Enough of dinghies arriving illegally on our shores, directed by organized crime gangs.” She went on to outline some of the proposed changes, which include a maximum prison sentence of four years for those “entering the country illegally” and additional powers for the Home Office’s Border Force.  The policies outlined in the bill contravene the UN Refugee Convention, which states that refugees should not be penalized for the manner in which they enter a country if they are coming from somewhere where their life or freedom has been threatened.  According to Safe Passage International, the UK government’s bill is aimed, foremost, at deterring migrants and refugees who wish to enter the UK, but fails to address the reasons people leave their countries. “The UK Government’s Nationality and Borders Bill will cruelly punish refugees who turn to us for compassion and safety, whilst doing nothing to break the business model of smugglers who exploit the lack of safe passage to the UK,” says the organization’s CEO, Beth Gardiner-Smith. “We urge this government to tear up these cruel plans and instead open safe routes for refugees seeking sanctuary in the UK.” There are currently no visas that would allow a person to travel legally to the UK and claim asylum.  “It’s deeply concerning that virtually the only way now for child refugees to reach the UK from France—regardless of their age, vulnerability, family links or community ties—is to risk a dangerous journey in the back of lorries or on dinghies across the Channel,” Gardiner-Smith added. If passed, the bill could see many asylum seekers deported to a third country, particularly those who have already traveled through what are considered “safe nations.” The government will introduce “reception centers,” which could resemble the controversial Napier Barracks, criticized for their “squalid” conditions. The bill also paves the way for keeping refugees offshore, where they are detained in so-called processing centers in a third country. Safe Passage International is calling on the UK government to allow entry to people seeking asylum in cases where they already have family in the UK. They also say the situation for refugees has worsened since Brexit because the EU’s Dublin Regulation, which provided the criteria for defining which country is responsible for examining a refugee’s asylum application, has not yet been replaced with a UK equivalent.  Thankfully, there is a strong network of local organizations across the UK supporting young refugees, like the Kent Refugee Action Network (KRAN). Daniel and Osama are two of KRAN’s youth ambassadors. They are also refugees; now they support people who are making the same journeys that they did.  Three years ago, KRAN started a Youth Forum, where young refugees meet to discuss different issues that affect them—like accommodation, education, and mental health. Youth ambassadors like Daniel and Osama act as a bridge between these young people and the organization. In the forum, young people often describe the contrast between their expectations and their experiences in seeking asylum in the UK. In most instances, they’ve faced challenges at every stage. These stories also highlight the essential role of organizations like KRAN and the Refugee Council, and Refugee Action. Despite the challenges he’s faced, Daniel has felt welcomed in the UK and does not believe the country’s new immigration plan represents the sentiment of the wider public. The bill is now in the report stage and awaiting its third reading, after passing its second reading by 366 votes to 265. With a Conservative majority, it seems likely the bill will pass. But there could be legal challenges to Priti Patel’s plan for a Border Force to push back boats carrying refugees.

Meeting Amal

Both Daniel and Osama met Amal in Kent. They described it as an extraordinary experience. “It really represents our stories, it represents the suffering that we have been through,” Osama says. “You have this emotional feeling when you see that people are coming just [to see] a puppet and [to give] their warm greetings.” At the beginning of this month, Amal finally found a home in Manchester. Local schools, refugee communities, and the Manchester International Festival created a spectacle for her arrival: a flock of puppet birds. As Amal moved among the crowd, a flight of swallows acted as her guide, their wings illuminated and flapping gently around Amal. These birds know migration too, making dangerous journeys every year between the UK and South Africa. “I know that the arrival into the UK specifically, though not only the UK, is not a simple one. Amal and the children she represents only start a much longer journey once they reach their final destinations,” The Walk director Zuabi says. Zuabi, nonetheless, has hopes for Amal, a puppet who represents all young refugees: “We are not born refugees, it is a circumstance, and this circumstance should be as short as possible.”  If the Nationality and Borders bill is passed, the future could look bleak for asylum seekers hoping for refuge and welcome in the UK. Already, the Border Force has been spotted practising sea push back techniques. Napier Barracks is still operating. But the open arms with which Little Amal has been welcomed and the persistent work of grassroots refugee organizations show that the British people care, and will stand up for their new neighbors. It’s there in Amal’s name—there is hope. [post_title] => Little Amal arrives in the UK as parliament considers a bill that would see her deported [post_excerpt] => Enthusiastic crowds greeted the 10 year-old unaccompanied Syrian refugee girl, even as parliament considered a bill that would make thousands of refugees ineligible to stay in the UK. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => little-amal-arrives-in-the-uk-as-parliament-considers-a-bill-that-would-see-her-deported [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3432 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Little Amal arrives in the UK as parliament considers a bill that would see her deported

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    [post_content] => Her message to the world: please don't forget the refugee children.

A little girl is walking alone from Syria to England. She is 11 feet and 6 inches tall.

Little Amal (Arabic for “hope”) is actually a giant puppet. She represents the thousands of refugee children who have been displaced from their home countries. This nine-year-old Syrian girl is now journeying from Turkey, across Europe, and to the U.K., as part of an 8,000 kilometer (5,000 mile)  travelling festival titled The Walk.

At the end of July, Amal began her journey as a “refugee” in Gaziantep, Turkey, home to half a million Syrians. People holding lanterns aloft surrounded her, lighting up the night. As she moved through the streets, Amal reached out to balconies where children stood watching, and gently touched their hands as they smiled down at her. Orbs of light sparkled overhead, and a choir welcomed her with song. Many of the people participating in the street theater were themselves refugees.

Amal is now halfway through this theatrical journey created by Good Chance, a theater company founded in the Calais refugee camps in 2015, in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company. Communities in Turkey, Greece, and Italy, where she’s continued her journey, have found different ways to welcome her — sometimes with love, and sometimes with hostility. But how close is Amal’s experience to that of real refugee children?

Setting off in Turkey

The rest of Amal’s journey through Turkey was likewise filled with celebration and theatrical wonder. In Adana, a flock of model birds accompanied her across the Taşköprü stone bridge, held up proudly on long sticks by both children and adults in the local community. She played with the children of Tarsus, who crowded in together for a chance to touch her hands. In the Kaleiçi Bazaar in Denizli, portraits of refugees who had journeyed through Turkey were projected onto walls as she appeared. “I think the most common reaction is wonderment, followed by curiosity. People have been receiving her very warmly in many places,” says Amir Nizar Zuabi, artistic director of The Walk and Good Chance. “One of the most astonishing things for me as artistic director on this project, was the true generosity and creativity that this evoked from people,” he says. “This project is only possible because of a network of thousands of people that have devoted time, energy, and their creativity to create these welcoming events along the way.” Turkey is a poignant place for this journey to begin. It hosts the biggest population of refugees in the world. The “best interests of the child” principle, part of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, is enshrined into law here, which means that all unaccompanied young refugees must, in theory, be given suitable accommodation and a guardian. But according to the Asylum Information Database (AIDA), many children are in fact abandoned by the state which doesn’t offer the protections they are promised. AIDA has also pointed out the state sometimes appoints inappropriate guardians, such as people without the right qualifications, or who aren’t a relative, leaving refugee children with no other choice but to beg in the street. Were Amal settling in Turkey, accessing education could also be a real problem. Approximately 400,000 Syrian children residing in the country are not receiving an education, according to Human Rights Watch and Turkey’s Ministry of Education, Amal, however, is not settling in Turkey. On her last day in the country, she stood on the shores of Çesme as the sun set, ready to take a boat to Greece. In these waters, many refugees like her have lost their lives. Zuabi commented on the potency of that moment, as Amal looked into the horizon, almost motionless.

Hostility in Greece

Little Amal’s journey in Greece was, at times, quite tumultuous. It began with music, with a whole community arriving to meet her off the boat in Chios and welcome her with song. But in other towns, she faced fury. “In a city called Larissa in Greece, she became a symbol of the refugee problem, she was shouted at and even violently attacked,” says Zuabi. Protesters threw stones at Amal. And in Meteora, people voted to ban Amal from walking through their village, because they did not want a Muslim child walking through a Greek Orthodox space. More violence was threatened against Amal in other towns and villages along her route. “From that moment, her appearances in Greece created a strong sense of solidarity. I think the reaction she induces is specific to the context of the country we are in, and even more specific to the city and the population we meet,” Zuabi says. “One thing I know for sure is that nobody stays indifferent.” 
In spite of the threats against Amal, people still came together to welcome her in Athens. While some events had to be cancelled, Amal took to a rooftop in Athens to meet locals. From this vantage point, Zuabi says, he could see people wiping tears from their eyes. On the Walk With Amal Instagram account people responded to the video of the violence with an outpouring of love and solidarity—more than double the number of comments than their other popular videos. There were messages like, “I'm so proud that I walked with you Amal, hand in hand with my children!” and “We want to welcome you, celebrate you and keep you safe.”  In Ioannina, Amal walked between the Katsikas refugee camp and the city centre. In the camp, Zuabi says there was a sense of pride; people felt celebrated. As she walked on, the local community presented lightboxes filled with messages of hope: “You are our rainbow” and “Step by step,” they said.  When unaccompanied minors arrive in Greece, they are detained in reception centres until they’ve been processed and a place in a shelter found for them, but backlogs mean they can be left waiting for months. Their accommodation is often unsuitable, and spaces are limited. Human Rights Watch has witnessed young people living amongst the general population of Greece’s Moria Camp, because the areas designated for children are beyond capacity. Some children have to fend for themselves, sometimes sleeping in the open despite the fact that, under Greek law, unaccompanied children should be placed in safe accommodations and placed under guardianship. Irida Pandiri is responsible for shelters for unaccompanied minors through her work with the Association for the Social Support of Youth (ARSIS), a Greek NGO that assists young people in difficulty or danger. She says the larger reception centres in which people are detained are simply not appropriate for children, in part because they cannot leave the facilities to go to school. Meanwhile, the guardianship promised to these young people is not provided.  “Guardianship, it is almost a joke in Greece,” she says. “When they are in the detention facilities, there are no guardians.” This, for ARSIS, is a crucial issue. Education is also a major problem, with Greek schools often reluctant to register refugee children; even in cases where registration is possible, Covid restrictions often prevent them from leaving the camp to attend. In order to make it to these reception centres, young refugees must come face-to-face with authorities hoping to send them back to Turkey. Their “welcome” to Greece is full of violence: their belongings are confiscated and they are frequently turned away, in clear violation of their human rights. Many such experiences have been documented by organizations like the Border Violence Monitoring Network and Refugee Rights Europe. Just as the response to Amal’s reception in Greece was mixed, so has ARSIS found its ability to do its work challenged by uneven support in various communities. “In the years since 2017-2018, in the areas where we are trying to establish shelters, unfortunately, the communities weren’t so welcoming,” Pandiri says. But ARSIS continues to support young refugees as best it can. The organization has eight centres for unaccompanied children across Greece, and they operate safe zones in some of the larger camps. Other NGOs also offer child protection services, legal advice, and recreational activities. As Amal took her final steps in Greece toward Piraeus Port, she was guided by more singing and live music. The protests in Greece were loud, but the welcome was louder.

Walking through Italy

Little Amal is now walking through Italy. She arrived in Bari, where an Italian nonna, or grandmother, arrived to give her guidance. This nonna, a puppet just a few inches shy of Amal’s height, pulled her for a hug and imparted upon her some words of wisdom. [caption id="attachment_3195" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Little Amal greeted by an Italian nonna, or grandmother, in Bari, Italy.[/caption] Italy has welcomed Amal warmly, but this experience might be far from the reality for actual young refugees. Andrea Costa is president of Baobab Experience, an organization supporting displaced people who have arrived in Italy. The organization is also a humanitarian partner of The Walk. “Italy—and I’m very sad to say this, because I love my country—is changing,” Costa said. Although it has traditionally welcomed foreigners, negative media coverage of migration and the rise of far-right politicians have led to a changed country, he said, adding: “It's pretty difficult for unaccompanied minors to make their way in Italy.” In Italy, solidarity with refugees has now been criminalized in a number of ways. In June 2019, Italy banned NGOs from carrying out search and rescue operations. In the area of Ventimiglia, several people have been charged for giving food to refugees, after a municipal decree outlawed the practice. “Before, people felt ashamed to be racist,” said Costa. But now, people who want to help refugees must do so surreptitiously.  Like Turkey and Greece, Italy has policies and procedures in place that are designed to protect unaccompanied children. They are given a permit to remain until they are 18 years old. They can’t be pushed back to other countries, they must be accommodated, and they cannot be detained.  But in practice, these rights aren’t always respected. As the coronavirus pandemic swept through Italy, the government used private ships to quarantine incoming refugees. According to a report from the Italian Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration (ASGI), some children were held on these ships for 10-15 days (although some people report this is far longer) before their ages were assessed. Human Rights Watch reported that children were being illegally pushed back from Italy to Greece, another abuse of rights. These are young people who have most likely already faced tremendous trauma. Costa describes Italy as a transit country for refugees. While many young people choose to move through the country rather than claim asylum, they are at risk. “We have an extremely high number of unaccompanied minors who don't want to stay in Italy, but want to go directly to France, to Germany, to Holland, to Belgium, because they know that even for minors, just like for all the other migrants, it's much better organized in other European countries,” Costa said. According to Human Rights Watch, many young refugees cite a lack of access to education and poor reception upon arrival in Italy as influencing them to move onto other countries instead. Baobab Experience is an organization composed of volunteers who care for young people at risk of falling into the hands of smugglers or human traffickers while they’re in Italy. They make sure these refugees have somewhere to sleep, something to eat, and are clothed. Recently, they joined a network of organizations helping to create safe passages so that, if those young people do choose to cross borders, trusted organizations can help on the other side, including in finding travel tickets at the best prices, rather than turning to smugglers. But there is another problem for unaccompanied minors in Italy—a cruel gift on their 18th birthday. As they make the difficult transition into adulthood, far from their home country and family, they are no longer guaranteed accommodation. Many of them lack the skills to make their way safely in the world, with no access to language or professional skills. “There are a lot of young people that really lose important years of their lives,” Costa says. This is why Baobab Experience provides English and Italian courses for young people. Despite all this, Costa remains optimistic about the future of refugees in Italy. He’s seen a change in younger Italians, who seem to be more understanding about their plight. Perhaps a new, more welcoming Italy is on the horizon. Meanwhile, Amal is continuing her journey through Italy, before she crosses into France. She’s just finished exploring the ancient landmarks of Rome; in Vatican City Pope Francis met with Amal, along with the children accompanying her on this leg of the journey. 
Amal’s welcome across Turkey, Greece, and Italy varied from country to country and village to village. Like the refugees whose experiences she’s enacting, Amal’s journey has only begun. Her last stop is the U.K., where the government is currently pushing through legislation called the borders and nationalities bill, which would deny asylum or aid to any refugee who enters the country through an unofficial port of entry—for example, by crossing the channel in a small boat. Under the provisions of the bill, Afghan refugees forced to escape from the Taliban could be jailed in the U.K. because they reached the country by routes that the U.K. government has decided are “illegal”—although, according to international law, there is no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. What kind of welcome can Amal expect when she arrives in October? In spite of the government proposals, many British communities promise a warm welcome to Amal and to refugee children. Camden Town has planned a birthday party for Amal, while several choirs will sing for her in the port town of Folkestone on the day she arrives in the U.K.. Anti-refugee sentiment has become more pronounced since Brexit, but many people have also become more vocal about their support for refugees. In the face of racism, changing government policy, and dehumanizing tabloid headlines, compassionate communities are needed more than ever. [post_title] => This is Little Amal, the puppet refugee girl on a European odyssey [post_excerpt] => Ferried from country to country by volunteer puppeteers, Little Amal has been greeted by choirs and dancers. In Vatican City, she was greeted by Pope Francis. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => this-is-little-amal-the-puppet-refugee-girl-walking-8000-kilometers-across-europe [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:12 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3193 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

This is Little Amal, the puppet refugee girl on a European odyssey

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    [post_title] => How the Soviet Jews changed the world: a graphic tale of tragedy and triumph
    [post_excerpt] => Soviet Jews played a critical role in the history of the USSR and, by extension, the trajectory of the Cold War and the history of the twentieth century. 
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How the Soviet Jews changed the world: a graphic tale of tragedy and triumph

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    [post_content] => Thousands of U.S. residents who were undocumented or on non-permanent visas fled to Canada during the Trump years.

Rodney* (not his real name) works as a machine operator at Canada Bread’s assembly line. To get to work each day he travels an hour by public transportation from his home in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood to a production plant on the other side of town. He alternates day and night shifts, bagging bread products for the city’s major supermarkets; barring a three-week mandatory furlough, he’s worked through the pandemic without a break. Rodney is both an essential frontline worker and an asylum seeker.

The 36-year-old former police officer left his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica in February of 2015 when he learned that someone had put out a hit on him and his family due to his work in a special anti-corruption unit. Someone shot his younger sister, who lives with their elderly parents.

She survived, but Rodney knew he had to leave the country in order to protect his family. He fled to Florida, and then moved to New York City, where an aunt lived. But refugee claimants faced an uncertain future in the United States; he wanted something better and more permanent. So, in March of 2018, he crossed the border to Canada.

“My aunt lives in Queens, so I took a Greyhound bus to upstate New York and then a taxi to Roxham Road,” he told me.

Roxham Road: the trickle that became a tsunami

Before 2017, Roxham Road was just a quiet street in the small town of Plattsburgh, N.Y., which is right on the Canadian border. In February of that year the Trump administration began implementing its cruel immigration policies and people who had been in the U.S. for years, either as undocumented immigrants or on non-permanent visas, began to flee—many of them to Canada. It was then that the Roxham Road border crossing gained international attention. This is the spot where many asylum seekers have crossed from the U.S. to Canada on foot, because a loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement, signed by both countries, exempts asylum claimants who cross at unofficial entry points from being turned back. People who enter Canada from the U.S. at an official port of entry are ineligible to make a refugee claim and will be returned to the U.S.; the bilateral agreement presupposes the U.S. is a safe country for asylum seekers. In 2017, the Canadian Council for Refugees joined in a legal challenge against the Canadian government, asserting that the U.S. was no longer a safe haven for asylum seekers. Canada’s Federal Court agreed, ruling that the agreement breaches constitutional guarantees of life, liberty and security. Prior to February 2017, says the Refugee Board of Canada, the number of asylum seekers coming from the States was in the hundreds. By September 2020, it skyrocketed to 58,625. As of this writing, roughly 16,000 claims have been accepted, 13,000 rejected, and slightly more than 27,000 cases are still pending. Research conducted by the Migration Policy Institute suggests around 40 percent of people who crossed that border left the U.S. “for reasons directly tied to U.S. immigration policies.” The Trump administration implemented policies that made thousands of desperate people feel they faced the kind of harm Amnesty International qualified as “catastrophic.” Illegal family separations; massive pushbacks of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border; cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of detainees; and indefinite detention in deliberately cruel conditions, often bordering on torture, of people who were treated like criminals only because they sought a better life. But while Canada’s immigration system looks better than its southern neighbor’s, it is still deeply flawed. For asylum seekers, the policies can seem capricious and even cruel. Rodney feels that the treatment he received at the hands of Canadian officials has been unjust. “When I crossed, they arrested me, searched me, looked at my documentation, and put me in a room where I waited,” he said. Hours passed until a bus transported him to a holding area, where he waited until 1 a.m. to be interviewed. The Canadian Border Services agent who interviewed him, he said, adopted a confrontational tone and made him feel that she was not assessing his request fairly. Rodney told the agent about documentation that included sworn affidavits from his family and newspaper articles about his undercover work with the police, but the agent didn’t seem to believe him. “She kept inferring that my sister being shot was an accident and not a deliberate attempt on her life,” he said.

Non-recorded interviews pose a problem

That interview is now being used to undermine Rodney’s claim for asylum. In the crucial Basis of Claim (BOC) document, upon which the Refugee Board decides whether or not to grant the applicant asylum, the agent wrote that Rodney had been instructed to destroy evidence during the course of his work as a police officer. Rodney denies having told the agent anything of the kind. But because the interview was not recorded, he is locked in a "he said/she said" situation. He did not even learn what the agent had written on the form until his hearing in September of 2020. “When the judge started asking me why I hadn’t disclosed this so-called information, I explained that I couldn’t omit something that I had never said.” He added that the judge also asked why the newspaper articles didn’t report his name, “when it should have been obvious that it had been omitted to protect me and my family.” Rodney does not understand why he was not allowed to see the original document at the time the agent took his statement. “It’s a statement that is essentially attributed to me, so why didn’t I get the opportunity to see what’s disclosed? I never saw it, I never signed it, and yet the contradiction between the Canada Border Services agent’s statement and my testimonial at the hearing is why my asylum request was basically denied, according to the judge.” Jacqueline Callin, a spokesperson for the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), confirmed that it was not the agency’s practice to record refugee claimants’ statements at ports of entry. But she did maintain that, while she could not comment on Rodney’s case specifically, CBSA rules stipulated that refugee claimants and their representatives should, in general, receive copies of the statement in advance of the hearing. But Rodney insists the CBSA never gave him a copy of his file. “I was only given certified copies of my birth certificate and my passport from the same CBSA officer who interviewed me at the port of entry,” he said. His original birth certificate and passport are still with the border agency.

Long-standing issues persist

Rodney’s lawyer, Perla Abou-Jaoude, said that the CBSA often ignores routine requests for access to applicants’ files. This “puts the applicant at a disadvantage,” she said “and could be rectified so easily”— if the government agency would simply make a routine practice of providing a copy of the applicant’s file simultaneously to their lawyer and the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). Recording the interviews, she said, would also be an effective way of ensuring transparency and accountability. Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR), a national non-profit umbrella organization, said that the absence of recorded interviews was a “long-standing issue” and one that the council has been trying to rectify for a long time. “You call a simple help line these days and you’re immediately informed that you’re being recorded,” she said. “Yet we’re not recording these important interviews when people’s lives are on the line, when [doing so] would allow the government to monitor the conduct of their agents? I don’t understand why they’re so resistant to it.”

Responding to complex questions under duress

Dench said the CCR’s position is that the task of asking these important questions and filling out the BOC should not be carried out by CBSA agents. “Asking such complex questions when people are tired, confused, and scared is questionable. We have repeatedly asked the IRB not to put too much weight on these initial testimonials, and for the most part, they don’t, but every case is different. Bottom line, the CBSA should not be conducting these assessments, and if they are, they should be recorded.” Abou-Jaoude also questioned a practice that has refugee claimants filling out complicated forms when they’re exhausted, frightened, confused, and sometimes unaware of what they’re signing because of language barriers. Mistakes during the initial declaration can potentially affect their credibility and chances. Rodney and his lawyer have filed an appeal and he’s now waiting to hear back. The process could take up to a year.

Working as a frontline worker in a foreign country

In the meantime, Rodney works. He has no family in Canada, and he tells me that he leads a rather solitary life. When I tell him that it sounds lonely, there’s a long pause on the other end of the line. His older sister, who was severely handicapped, passed away this past October. Rodney was not able to attend her funeral or be with his family in mourning. He worries about his parents who have health problems, and he sends what money he can afford back home. “I don’t make much, but I make sacrifices so I can help them.” When I ask him if he likes what he does, I can “hear” the shrug through the telephone. “I’m indifferent,” he said. “I work hard, and I always try to be professional. But I’m working to survive, so I can help my family.” When the pandemic hit Rodney was working the night shift at Canada Bread. Workers have been equipped with surgical masks and face shields, so he feels safe at the plant. And his company has provided him with a letter explaining his presence outside during Quebec’s 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. “The very first night the curfew was implemented I was stopped,” he said. “I was waiting for the bus early in the morning and a police car going in the opposite direction immediately made a U-turn and came straight at me. I showed them the letter.” I ask him what his first impression of Montreal was. “It’s a lot more French than I expected before coming here,” he said, laughing. “I’m slowly learning the language and I wish I could take classes and improve it, but work exhausts me. I often finish my shift at 1 a.m. and at that hour the bus doesn’t pass by too often, so I routinely wait an additional 45 minutes just to board it. Then, another hour to get home,” he trails off. With the hearing coming up, Rodney wants to share what happened to him. He wants people to understand that the system needs improving.

Canadian border agents under investigation

He’s not the only one who thinks so. In 2019, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians launched a review into the actions of the CBSA, following multiple reports of flaws within the agency, as well as multiple harassment allegations. CBC News reported that the agency had investigated 1,200 allegations against its own staff over a two-and-a-half-year period. “CBSA agents have a lot of discretionary power, but there’s no outside oversight of staff conduct, which can occasionally be problematic,” said Abou-Jaoude.  Dench confirmed that the CCR was very aware of the lack of accountability and transparency. Considering the power and scope border policing agents have, combined with allegations of serious misconduct that include unnecessary force, conflict of interest, and sexual harassment, one would think the government would welcome recorded interview sessions, since they would protect both the applicants and the agency’s reputation. “So much is at stake here— for me and my family,” Rodney says. “I have no recourse now. There’s a contradiction between [the CBSA agent’s] statement and my story and naturally the judge will take her word as being neutral and accurate. But what she wrote was inaccurate and there’s no way for me to prove it.” [post_title] => For asylum seekers, Canada's immigration policies can seem capricious and even cruel [post_excerpt] => Canada’s immigration system is better than the United States', but is still deeply flawed. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => for-asylum-seekers-canadas-immigration-policies-can-seem-capricious-and-even-cruel [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=2383 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

For asylum seekers, Canada’s immigration policies can seem capricious and even cruel

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    [post_date] => 2021-02-26 05:14:52
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-02-26 05:14:52
    [post_content] => The U.K. government's policy of housing asylum seekers in army barracks has caused a storm of controversy.

Every day and every night during his stay, Kareem* had to listen to the sound of far right extremists. They swore in English and Welsh, threatened the men living inside, and by night hurled rocks at the metal gates of the camp. 

“You’re not welcome here,” they told the asylum seekers.

This is the Penally Camp in Wales; formerly an army camp, it is now used to house newly-arrived asylum seekers. Kareem was taken there at the end of September. The experience, he said during a phone interview, gave him flashbacks—memories of torture and imprisonment that he had escaped and from which he sought refuge. “We are vulnerable people,” he said, adding: “We need someone to support us here in the U.K.”

With another national lockdown due to the pandemic, attacks from the far right eased. But anti-immigrant demonstrations outside the camp are not the only problem the men inside faced. Kareem said that when he arrived at Penally there were no interpreters; detainees resorted to communicating with camp management through gestures. He said security and management were racist and treated the men poorly. Access to medical care was patchy.

When asked if there were any social distancing measures, he laughed and said: “In the middle of a pandemic you’re in a room with five other people.” The only place people wore masks was in the queue for food. 

Kareem spent nearly two months in the camp before an NGO managed to secure his release, but plenty of others remain inside. The number of residents was recently reduced to around 100.

In England, behind the wire fences and red brick exterior of the ex-army camp, Napier Barracks has been the cause of controversy and protest since September 2020, when the U.K. Home Office started using it to accommodate around 400 men. A High Court judge ruled that  conditions in the camp were prison-like, unsuitable, and unsafe. Many of the asylum seekers housed there are survivors of torture, trafficking, and other traumas; and yet, there is little access to mental health support. There have been several reports of suicide attempts.

Public Health England warned the Home Office that Napier was unsuitable back in September 2020. In April 2021, a judicial review will examine claims from five asylum seekers that the accommodation is inadequate.

From inside Napier, photos shared with the NGO Choose Love show the true story. Garbage cans overflow into the corridor, with old food containers and plastic cups spilling out of black bags. In a hall, metal frame beds topped with plastic mats are lined against the walls, set up as a dorm room. The beds are around two metres from each other, but the men breathe the same air, in the middle of a global health pandemic. 

It didn’t take long for COVID-19 to race through the facility. On Wednesday the Home Office revealed that at least 197 people had tested positive, a shocking number that amounted to 50 percent of the total people held there and nearly double what the government had previously reported. 

Earlier this year a fire broke out in one of the blocks, thought to have been started deliberately. Nobody was hurt, but people say they were left without electricity, heating, and drinking water.

[caption id="attachment_2338" align="alignnone" width="1600"] A fire broke out in January at one of the barracks at the Napier facility.[/caption]

From within the camp, an anonymous man posted a message following the fire, in which he offered some compassionate insight as to the would-be arsonist’s motives. He wrote, “Each of us react in our own unique way when we are desperate and disappointed. Some may protest peacefully[…] some may lose control. I want you all [to] know that this was not something that we all can approve.”

Home Secretary Priti Patel was less compassionate toward the desperate person who set the fire. She tweeted: “The damage and destruction at Napier Barracks is not only appalling but deeply offensive to the taxpayers of this country […] This site has previously accommodated our brave soldiers and army personnel—it is an insult to say that it is not good enough for these individuals.”

In response to the assertion that accommodation built for soldiers was “good enough” for asylum seekers, Kareem said: “We had wars, we had bombs... all of the bad things that happened in our home countries. We came here to seek refuge and to settle in peace.”

Fighting to empty the barracks

Freedom From Torture  is one of two NGOs that have launched petitions calling for the barracks to be closed. As of this writing, more than 39,000 people have signed.  During the summer of 2020 there was saturation coverage of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel from France. Priti Patel said she wanted to make the route ‘unviable.’ At the Port of Dover, anti-immigration protesters, many of them football hooligans and Nazis, clashed with police—even as anti-racism grassroots groups showed up to express solidarity with the asylum seekers. And yet, compared to other European countries the U.K. saw relatively few people entering the country as refugees. Aalia Khan, Freedom From Torture’s media manager, told The Conversationalist: “A lot of asylum seekers have fled persecution and torture, and have made very dangerous journeys across the world, only to end up in the U.K. in the equivalent of a refugee camp created by the Home Office.” She said that the use of army barracks is part of a worrying trend of asylum seekers being used as political tools. Khan said, “We're absolutely appalled by the use of barracks to house very vulnerable people.: She added that the barracks were “not fit for human habitation,” whether the inhabitants were soldiers or asylum seekers.  When asked for a response to the situation at Napier, a Home Office spokesperson told The Conversationalist: “They [asylum seekers] are provided with safe, warm, secure accommodation with three nutritious meals served a day—all paid for by the British taxpayer. These sites have previously accommodated army personnel and it is wrong to say they are not adequate for asylum seekers.” MP Holly Lynch, the Shadow Immigration Minister, raised concerns about the barracks in a letter in December 2020, saying she was deeply concerned about unsafe living conditions. After the Government conducted an independent review, she asked for the outcome. But they did not publish the report, nor share their findings with her. "What on earth do the Government have to hide?” she asked. “It's clear that their lack of compassion and competence has resulted in an unacceptable situation in Napier Barracks, creating the perfect situation for COVID to be transmitted, putting at risk the people living in the former barracks, the staff and the neighbouring community. The U.K. Government must come clean and publish the report without delay."

Is this the future of the UK asylum system?

Until recently, the government planned to set up another camp for asylum seekers in the Hampshire Village of Barton Stacey, but those plans are now under review. Aalia Khan said she believed that the work of organizations like Freedom From Torture in exposing the terrible conditions in the camps has been effective in persuading the government not to expand further its policy of detaining asylum seekers in army barracks.  According to Home Office documents, the barracks were designed as a temporary measure. While only men are housed there, women and children are put in hotels, or in mother and baby units. “I don’t think that there's any need to house asylum seekers in barracks or in any building that's unfit for human habitation,” said Kahn, adding that with the pandemic lockdowns there were plenty of empty hotels that could have been used instead. In September The Financial Times leaked Home Office plans to implement an Australian-style offshore detention system, whereby asylum seekers would be taken thousands of miles from the U.K. and held on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. The Labour Party called the plan inhumane. The Home Office said they were looking at every option. Kolbassia Haoussou is the lead survivor advocate for Freedom from Torture. He has personal experience of the U.K. asylum system, and is a torture survivor. “One of the key elements of rehabilitation for me was feeling safe,” Haoussou says. Being held in military barracks would surely trigger trauma and do nothing to help the healing process. He echoed Khan’s observation about the asylum system having become politicized. For Haoussou, the basis of the asylum system should be about protection. “What we should do is find out how we can protect people, not how we can reject people,” he said. Following the U.K’.s exit from the European Union (Brexit), the future of the asylum system is unclear, and so too is the role that former military barracks will play. Accommodation is just one piece of the asylum system puzzle, but when it has the capacity to affect a person’s sense of safety so powerfully, the U.K. must make an effort to get it right. *Kareem is not his real name, as he wanted to remain anonymous [post_title] => 'Unfit for human habitation': asylum seekers in the UK are housed in filthy army barracks [post_excerpt] => Kept in dormitory-like conditions with no social distancing and one bathroom shared by dozens of people, COVID-19 raced through the barracks. In one facility that housed 380 asylum seekers, 197 were infected with the virus. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => unfit-for-human-habitation-asylum-seekers-in-the-u-k-are-housed-in-filthy-army-barracks [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=2331 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

‘Unfit for human habitation’: asylum seekers in the UK are housed in filthy army barracks

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    [post_date] => 2021-01-15 03:26:06
    [post_date_gmt] => 2021-01-15 03:26:06
    [post_content] => Refugees trying to enter Europe are encountering border patrols that turn them back with brutal violence, which rights workers say is systemic.  

It’s around midnight in the Croatian forest, and trees block out most of the moonlight. Five days ago, four men—one Palestinian and three Algerian—crossed the Bosnian border into Croatia, and they have been walking ever since. A few moments ago, they met an Iranian woman with two young children.

Suddenly four police officers appear, shouting: “On your knees, sit down, sit down!” 

The police search the men for their phones, and tell them to hand over their money. They force the men to strip, while the woman and children are separated from the near-naked men. One man, who tells this story to an NGO in November 2020, describes the police making a fire and burning the group’s jackets and backpacks, while one officer drinks whisky and throws out insults.

“He said weird words. I don’t want to repeat them. But I can tell you it was without any respect. He insulted my mother, my sister, everyone. Weird words,” he said.

This is what he claims happens next.

The officers found long branches in the woods, and used them to beat the men.

The group was eventually taken to a small lake near the Croatian-Bosnian border. Waiting for them are 13 or 14 men in balaclavas, and the man telling this story believes they are police.

“And then the fight started. The first one had to go there. ‘Get naked!’ and then they hit him. After. The second one: ‘get naked’ and then bam, bam, bam. Next one: bam, bam, bam. It was like war,” he said.

The masked men used branches, metal batons, and their fists. The mother and two children watched from a distance.

“Then they say to us: ‘now swim’. Just imagine. It was night. So dark and so cold. Then they started throwing big rocks in our direction into the water. Imagine. It was dark, the men had been drinking. What if a rock would hit my head?”

As the men get out of the water, they are forced to walk across the border, back into Bosnia. Behind them, the masked men fire their guns.

This story was recorded by the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a group monitoring human rights violations at the EU’s external borders. While this is the account of one person, it is not an isolated incident. Right across Europe, the evidence shows that refugees and migrants are being forced back across country borders. These pushbacks are not only illegal, they are often violent. 

The evidence is mounting

A new report from the End Pushbacks Partnership and non-profit project Refugee Rights Europe shows the extent of these pushbacks at both land and sea borders. There is evidence of violence on almost every border covered in the report. In Greece, video evidence shows the coast guard shooting into the water next to boats, in Slovenia far-right militias patrol the razor-wire fence borders, and in Turkey people have been shot as they try to cross into Greece. Violence aside, pushbacks go against everything the EU stands for. Under the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights, mass expulsions are prohibited. It’s also unlawful for anyone to be pushed back to a country where there’s a serious risk that they’ll face the death penalty, torture, or any other inhuman or degrading treatment. Beyond this, EU Member States must guarantee the right to claim asylum—a right that is rooted in international refugee law. Selma Mesic is the Greece and Balkans coordinator at Refugee Rights Europe, and she’s also part of the team behind the End Pushbacks Partnership, which has put together this report. She said it’s clear that these violent pushbacks aren’t the result of rogue officers. “This is systematic,” she said. “It’s really hard to imagine all of this being done on a random basis.” “Both by the number of people, but also the geographical reach of this trend, it seems entirely implausible that there are such common methodologies and tendencies happening across this many borders,” she said. Pushbacks are happening in the thousands. The vast number, Mesic said, means it’s impossible for this to be the work of a few rogue individuals.

Violence at sea

The land and sea borders between Turkey and Greece are common routes for people making their way into the Schengen Area, where there is officially no passport control between the 26 European countries, although some countries are exercising temporary border controls. On the Greece-Turkey sea border, like so many others in the report, evidence has been found of violence and illegal pushbacks. Much of this violence, according to the report, comes at the hands of the Hellenic (or Greek) Coast Guard. A video published by the BBC shows this playing out in real time. As people try to enter Greek waters on a small dinghy, people on the large coast guard boat shoot into the water, push at the dinghy with a pole, and create waves, rocking the overcrowded vessel. When asked for comment, a representative from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Hellenic Coast Guard sent an official response. 

“The officers of the Hellenic Coast Guard who are responsible for guarding the Greek and European sea and land borders have for months maximized their efforts, operating around the clock with efficiency, a high sense of responsibility, perfect professionalism, patriotism, and also with respect for everyone’s life and human rights. Their actions are carried out in full compliance with the country's international obligations.

As for the tendentious allegations of supposed illegal actions, we must emphasize that the  operation practices of the Greek authorities have never included such actions.”

When directed to the specific BBC video evidence, the Press Officer of the Ministry for Maritime Affairs, Mr Kokkalas, responded:

"This video was reproduced in March 2020, a period during which our country received a sudden, massive, organized and coordinated pressure from population movements to its eastern land and sea borders. This situation was an active, serious, exceptional and asymmetric threat to the country's national security."

In March 2020, pushbacks from Greece escalated. The global Coronavirus pandemic was sending the continent into lockdown, and Turkey had just opened its border with Greece in order to put pressure on Europe. Turkey is currently host to around 3.6 million refugees; in 2016 the EU and Turkey made a deal to put an end to dangerous sea crossings —a one in, one out policy with a financial incentive for Turkey to the tune of €3 billion. They agreed that for every Syrian refugee that Turkey took back from the Greek islands, the EU would resettle one Syrian refugee from within Turkey. But since then, there have been a number of disputes, including Turkey’s view that the EU has not kept their side of the bargain, and has not helped to manage the crisis in Syria. Opening the border meant more pressure on a struggling Greece, and more fuel for the fire of right-wing political groups in Europe. The Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, announced: “Our national security council has taken the decision to increase the level of deterrence at our borders to the maximum. As of now we will not be accepting any new asylum applications for one month.” “Do not attempt to enter Greece illegally,” he said. “You will be turned back.” A new trend also emerged, according to Mesic, where people are apprehended after they've landed on the Aegean islands, and are then pushed back. She explains that people are put into detention, and then taken back out to sea, abandoned near Turkish waters on small life rafts designed for emergency sea rescues. The rafts have no motors, and the people are left drifting in the ocean. All this has been detailed in multiple testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch. The people interviewed also said that Greek officers stole their belongings, including ID and money. The coast guard said they have rescued thousands of migrants. Among the Human Rights Watch testimonies, Hassan (not his real name), a Palestinian refugee from Gaza, said this:

“The Greek Coast Guard put us in a big boat. We drove for three hours but then they put us in a small boat. It was like a raft. It was inflatable and had no motor. Like a rescue boat they keep on big boats in case there is an emergency. They left us in the sea alone. There was no food or water. They left us for two nights. We had children with us.”

Alongside reports of pushbacks, there are also heroic stories of rescue, both from the coast guard and civil society groups. Refugee Rescue, the last search and rescue boat working from the island of Lesvos, worked for five years to save the lives of people crossing the Aegean sea. But the organization said it has had to suspend its operations because a deteriorating situation means their work is no longer safe.

The perpetrators of pushbacks

At the land border, a similar story is unfolding. Mounting evidence shows that people are not only being pushed back by authorities, but that unidentified masked men are playing a role in the process. “There's no clear understanding of exactly who they are,” Mesic said. “A lot of the testimonies given by victims of pushbacks, say they're apprehended close to the river, then they're driven on little motorboats across the river on towards the Turkish side. They tend not to speak, because, I would presume, they don't want to betray an accent or a specific language that they're speaking which could identify them.” Mesic said the men wear masks and black clothing. She believes it’s a deliberate attempt to make sure they can’t be identified. Countless claims of violence by Greek authorities have been collected by The Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN). In one report, they speak to a Moroccan man, who said he has been pushed back to Turkey seven times.  “If you come back to Greece, we will kill you.” These are the words he claims were levelled at him by a Greek officer, after he and his fellow travellers were picked up in Orestiada, a village near the Turkish border in July 2020. BVMN said the group was taken to a nearby police station, where their phones were confiscated, and they were given no food or water. The next day, they were taken to another police station, where officers threw water on them, stripped them, and, according to the man’s statement, beat them with metal batons. He added that they were not given any opportunity to claim asylum. When BVMN interviewed him a month later, the man still had bruises on his back. Police eventually took the men to the border and forced them to look at the ground while threatening them with guns. Masked men beat anyone who dared look up. “If you look at them, they can hit you until you die. They don’t care about this. We were so scared,” he told BVMN. They were forced across the river, back into Turkey. Greek police did not respond to requests for a comment.

A Europe-wide problem

The situation on the border between Greece and Turkey is just one example, and similar stories are playing out on borders between Schengen countries too.  In France, people have been pushed back to Italy for a number of years. The 515km (320 mile) border has essentially been closed since 2015, following terror attacks in the country when a State of Emergency was declared. However, some groups such as Anafé (National Association of Border Assistance for Foreigners) say these border controls are being used as a way to fight immigration. “It’s not something you’d expect. They’re both EU countries. You think they’d be more aligned with their human rights and fundamental rights provisions. But clearly not, because these pushbacks are happening at a high rate,” said Selma Mesic. The pushbacks typically happen after people are searched and arrested on trains or at train stations, and there are also claims of racial profiling. According to the End Pushbacks report, people are locked up in inhumane conditions; their personal documents are stolen and they are denied the right to claim asylum. Unaccompanied minors are also being pushed back. Several civil society groups report that authorities often change dates of birth on forms so that children (who are entitled to specific provisions and protections) are classed as adults. In fact, in 2018, Anafé brought a major class action involving 20 cases of minors being pushed back to Italy. They won the case. Beyond the violent pushbacks happening on European borders, is the problem of chain refoulement, where people are forced back across multiple borders. Through this practice, their lives are put in even greater danger. On the Italian border, people are being pushed back into Slovenia, and then further along the Balkan route. They are forced into Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Serbia, where they often face inhumane conditions. People face police violence, homelessness, and destitution. Their right to seek asylum is often violated. Mesic explains that along the Balkan route, people are apprehended, driven to the border, and handed over to the equivalent officials on the other side. Many countries, she said, are leaning on their readmissions agreements to claim that everything is being done within the law. “It’s really easy to poke holes in that, because there are a lot of fundamental rights that are not being respected—the right to seek asylum, the right to have an interpreter or to receive information about your rights. Some of these rights are actually covered by readmissions agreements, but they're not really practised,” she said.

Raising the alarm

The groups behind this report are calling for urgent action. Together, they’ve set out a list of EU advocacy demands. “We need effective access to asylum registration on both the EU external and internal borders, and to make sure that the safeguards and the right to asylum are upheld, because with the pushbacks happening, the right to asylum is gravely undermined,” Mesic said. The group also wants to see an end to illegal detention practices, to end racial profiling, and to see a respect for the Schengen border code. They also want assurances that agencies, particularly European border and coast guard agency FRONTEX, are being held to account. They want to know that this work is carried out in line with the EU’s human rights obligations. “The European Commission must hold member states to account,” Mesic said. She said that all the rules and guidelines are already in place, but that there don’t seem to be any consequences when they are broken. The Schengen border code and the EU charter should provide the right protections, but the rules, based on the evidence, are not being respected. [post_title] => A call to end border violence in Europe [post_excerpt] => There is evidence of violence on almost every border covered in the report. In Greece, video evidence shows the coast guard shooting into the water next to boats, in Slovenia far-right militias patrol the razor-wire fence borders, and in Turkey people have been shot as they try to cross into Greece. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-call-to-end-border-violence-in-europe [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=2255 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

A call to end border violence in Europe

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    [post_date] => 2020-10-22 17:38:21
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    [post_content] => Sixty years after James Baldwin fled to Europe to escape his native country's racism, Americans are once again leaving to seek a better life.

Election day in the U.S. is November 3, but some Americans have already voted with their feet, fleeing a country whose values have become anathema to them: racism, police violence, the bizarre fantasies of QAnon, exorbitant living costs and daily anxiety of life under a Trump administration.

The U.S. government does not collect data on Americans who leave the country, but estimates that 8.7 million live abroad. A website with information on how to leave says that since May 2020 it has seen its traffic surge by 1,605 percent, or sixteen fold, for Americans seeking information on which countries are open and how to move.

Even if Trump loses, it appears that none of them will be rushing back.

“We do not plan to return to the U.S., regardless of the election outcome,” said Corritta Lewis, who moved in August with her wife and their year-old son to Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Like Tiffanie Drayton, a Black American writer whose June 12 New York Times Opinion piece about “fleeing” America to Guyana went viral, Ms. Lewis sees no future in the United States.  “A new president doesn't change the systemic racism, police brutality, wealth gap, and overall experience as a black woman in America. It took hundreds of years to build a society of oppression; that won't change in four.”

They left, she said, “due to the increased racial tensions, police encounters, politics, and overall safety. My wife and I are two Black women raising a biracial son, and we didn't want him to live in a country where his parents are harassed by police for being Black.” She continued, “On more than one occasion, we have been stopped and questioned by police for no reason. His first interaction with police scared him to the point that we cried for almost five minutes. It broke our hearts… We were simply two Black women in a nice neighborhood, taking a morning walk.”

“We haven't felt this free in our lives,” she added. “Mexico will probably be our home for the next several years… As the election approaches, I watch in horror and am scared for my family still in the States. I don't have confidence that things will get better anytime soon.”

For Black Americans, the choice to flee police brutality, racism and income inequality is compelling. For others, economic pressures can feel just as overwhelming. Why spend more than you have to for a safe and healthy life?

Tim Leffel, 56, and his family, chose Guanajuato, a colonial city in Mexico, in 2018; he has written a book explaining how to move abroad to more than 20 countries. “Our daughter is 20 now, but she went to school in Mexico for three years: one of elementary, two of middle school. Private school, but all in Spanish,” he said.

“We had no reason to stay in the U.S. and keep paying inflated prices for rent, healthcare, and other expenses. We own our home outright in Mexico. Living in Trump's America was becoming more stressful and unpleasant every month, so why pay a premium to put up with that deterioration?”

“It's doubtful we'll move back,” he adds. “The U.S. is just way overpriced for what you get, especially in terms of healthcare, the worst value in the world for self-employed people like me. If a new president and congress can get us to universal healthcare, different story.

For travel blogger Ketti Wilhelm, 30, being married to an Italian means moving back to his country of origin. Wilhelm has spent much of her life living and working outside the U.S. She and her husband have no children and can work remotely. “We'll most likely move back to Milan, because my husband's family is near there, and we both have friends and connections there.”

“Our motivations are political, but it's also about much more than that,” said Wilhelm. “It's what the politics means for living in the U.S.: minimal vacation time, no family leave, no pension, health insurance stress and massive health care costs. Not to mention safety concerns – guns, white supremacy, and mass shootings. All of this is because “socialism” is a dirty word in the U.S., whereas in all the other countries I've lived, it's just part of a modern, well-run and equitable society. There are other ways of living, both culturally and politically, and in plenty of ways, I think they're doing it better elsewhere.” Her recent blog post offers 11 ways to live and work overseas.

Working as an E.R. physician in training horrifies medical student Alex Cabrera, 30, who lives in Reno, Nevada. Now in his final year of medical school and taking an online degree in public health, he sees patients every day whose care, he knows, can medically bankrupt them—even with insurance. “It’s so hard to live here! Wages aren’t going anywhere, unemployment benefits have been cut, people have no health insurance and the rent here for a one bedroom is $1,200.” He recently drove a friend his age to her new home in Victoria, British Columbia and saw another leave for France.

He’s desperate to flee. “I feel like I’m screaming into the void. On one side, you have Donald Trump who just makes it up as he goes along and Biden promising to improve and expand the A.C.A. (Affordable Care Act), which the Supreme Court plans to overthrow.” He wanted to find a medical residency abroad but is resigned to doing his training in the U.S. for the next four years. “As a physician, it’s almost hard to practice medicine in this country when everything is about profit and patient care is secondary. I’m so tired of this system.”

Because the United States remains a global hot spot for exponential transmission of the novel coronavirus, most countries are no longer allowing its citizens to enter without a pre-approved visa. Exceptions among the European countries include Croatia, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Ukraine. “However all European countries are accepting and approving applications for resident and work visas for U.S. citizens,” says Cepee Tabibian, founder of a website with information for women over 30 who choose to leave the U.S. “They can't [currently] travel to most European countries,  but they can still apply to move right now,” she said. And prior knowledge isn’t an issue, she adds. “You'd be surprised how many people move to a country they have never been to or have maybe visited once in their life.”

Tim Page is one. A Pulitzer-winning music critic and journalism professor at the University of Southern California, he boarded a flight from New York to Belgrade a few months ago, arriving to live in a place he’d never seen. He owns a house in Nova Scotia, but the Canadian border remains closed to Americans and he was deeply disturbed by the U.S. government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. He wanted out.

“I'd had some students at USC who came from Belgrade and who kindly adopted me on Facebook and took me out once I had begun to acclimate myself,” he says. “My welcome was a warm one, and this may have been the most beautiful and radiant autumn I've experienced since childhood. It's a fantastic walking city and built in so many layers…I feel very much at home.”

“I'm unmated, I have no dog, my children are grown and doing well. I communicate with my friends through video conversations, phone calls, email, and I keep a nervous eye on developments in the States through on-line television. It's a much gentler life and, at 66, I appreciate the order,” Page adds. The rent for his one-bedroom apartment is $400 a month.

“I'll stay until I want to return,” he says. “Social Security has just kicked in. I have dear friends in Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam and London whom I'd love to see when things open up a bit, but life is startlingly less expensive here and I think this will likely be "home base" for me in Europe for however long I stay. I'm much more at ease than I've been in a while.”
    [post_title] => 'Another Country,' redux: Americans are (again) moving abroad to seek a better life
    [post_excerpt] => For Black Americans, the choice to flee police brutality, racism and income inequality is compelling. For others, economic pressures can feel just as overwhelming.
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‘Another Country,’ redux: Americans are (again) moving abroad to seek a better life

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    [post_date] => 2020-09-03 19:43:41
    [post_date_gmt] => 2020-09-03 19:43:41
    [post_content] => Being able to vote is rarely the reason people choose to become citizens.

It’s an election year, the most momentous of this century, possibly for the U.S., in the last 50 or 60 years. Eager to vote, many residents are rushing to apply for and win citizenship, with 126,000 ready to take the oath that will offer them a plethora of new privileges.

Millions more are not.

The process is neither simple nor quick, as Amy Zhang recently wrote in The New York Times: “filling out a 20-page application, paying almost a thousand dollars, organizing piles of supporting documents, planning my life around five years of residency requirements and waiting another two — as well as F.B.I. background checks, InfoPass appointments and a civics test.”

Other obstacles prevent some long-time residents from making this move. If a naturalized foreigner, (even the word “naturalized” being one that some find abhorrent), repatriates or permanently leaves the U.S., they’ll still owe income tax to the U.S. government until or unless they renounce their American citizenship or even their green card.

But being able to vote is in fact rarely the reason people choose to become citizens, said Nancy Foner, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She’s an expert on immigration and author of 19 books on the subject. “They mostly want citizenship for instrumental reasons,” Foner said. “They don’t want to get deported. If they’re citizens, they can sponsor their parents and minor children. Very few people become citizens because they want to vote.”

Having full citizenship does offer important protections, she said, like losing anxiety over “a change in laws. There’s a fear about that.”

The very high cost of acquiring U.S. citizenship – which has risen 83 percent lately — is an inhibiting factor, she adds. “The expense is very high! [rising to $1,170 as of October 2.] And some people are unsure of their English and the test they have to take.”

Thanks to current policies under Trump, “citizenship rates are not that high,” Foner said. “They’re higher in Canada which encourages citizenship and offers classes while the Trump administration is actively discouraging it.”

No matter how long they live in the U.S., often married to an American, maybe raising their American-born children, some remain determinedly faithful to their original roots and passport. Fiona Young-Brown, 47, a writer who lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her American husband, grew up in England, her accent still strong after 22 years in the U.S. A global traveler who met her husband when both were teaching English for three years in remote areas of Japan, Young-Brown first came to the U.S,  in 1993 as an exchange student at the University of Iowa. Coming to live in the U.S. has offered her professional opportunities and social freedom she knew she couldn’t have found in class-conscious England, she said.

“I grew up in a working-class town and we were always working class, living paycheck to paycheck. I’m the first college graduate in my family.” Watching American TV in the 70s and 80s “it always seemed so glamorous and exciting, just this place where you make your own future, a blank slate where you were free to re-invent yourself,” she adds. Even at 13, she wrote to the U.S. embassy in London about how to obtain a visa.

She had attended a local prep school in England as a child on full scholarship, but the inevitable class differences reminded her daily how inescapable they were. “America was going to be a place where that wasn’t an issue,” Young-Brown said. That proved to be true, but her initial optimism has faded.

Today, even after decades in the U.S., and a thriving writing career, she’s still not interested in citizenship. “America is definitely not the same as when I got here,” she said. “It’s become a much crueler country, much meaner, with more delight in kicking people who are down. It’s not a place to dream but a place you’ll struggle, and you’ll never make it anyway. To take citizenship at this point feels like an endorsement of all this shit that’s going on. To wave a little flag would feel hypocritical and completely tasteless.”

If she were single, she said, “I would have left a long time ago,” but her husband has deep roots in Kentucky, parents in poor health and, now with Brexit, she faces a much more complicated path to repatriation.

For Kevin McGilly, a 55-year-old gay married Canadian in Washington, D.C., there’s a powerful attachment to the U.S. in the form of the Black teenager he and his husband are adopting. Although he’s lived in the U.S. for many years, he still takes “existential pleasure in being Canadian. The two countries look similar, but underneath things are very very different.” Now at a point in their careers they enjoy more mobility, he and his husband have seriously discussed whether or not to return to Canada. “If Trump’s re-elected, it’s a very serious prospect,” he said.

Taking citizenship, as anyone considering it quickly learns–even if you can retain dual citizenship—means literally formally renouncing allegiance to your country of origin. “I love this country and am grateful,” he said of the U.S., but he doesn’t want to take a further step “because of what you do to become a citizen – stand in front of a magistrate and take an oath to abjure your former country. That stopped me cold. I’m not going to say I’m no longer Canadian, even if it’s pro forma.”

Other requirements were off-putting as well, he said, like having to list all the groups you’ve ever belonged to and every country you’ve visited and when. “It’s ridiculous!” And you have to swear that you’re not a Communist, a “1950s language” McGilly calls silly in today’s era.

And yet, he wishes he could vote, as he calls himself “a political animal” – instead channeling his energies into canvassing and registering voters for the candidates he believes in.

The first time Inge de Vries Harding, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, came to the U.S. she was only three-and-a-half, when her Dutch father got a job in San Diego, and she has spent most of her life living in the U.S. But at 16 she also spent three years living in the Netherlands because her brothers were then 18 and 19, and her mother said, “there was no way her boys were going to fight in Vietnam.” Living in Holland was difficult after being so accustomed to American freedoms, she said, and she was relieved to return to the U.S., where she trained as a pediatric nurse, married an American and had two sons in the U.S. In 2015 and 2016 she “very seriously considered” moving to Vancouver, Canada, thanks to its “very different mindset” but there were too many practical obstacles.

Now, still refusing to take U.S. citizenship, Harding remains rooted by family in the country. “For me it’s very simple,  I have children and grandchildren here. I’m not  going anywhere.” The few times she considered becoming a U.S. citizen she was put off by  “too much pomp and circumstance.” She has since been inhibited again by the “fairly large expense. I sometimes wish I could vote, but not enough to take that step. You actually have to denounce your country. I can’t do that! I’m proud of my Dutch heritage.”

For immigration attorney David H. Nachman, managing partner of the New Jersey firm Nachman, Phulwani, Zimovcak (NPZ) Law Group, P.C., people who cling to their cultural roots — even after decades living in the U.S. —form a large part of his practice.

“It’s related to how people feel about their cultures. None of my Japanese clients want to become citizens because it goes against their culture. Japanese are fiercely nationalistic and the French are the same way. Even getting a green card is seen as giving something up of their heritage so they don’t want to do that,” he said.

To help these clients, Nachman can offer options like an E-1 or E-2 visa, which allows permanent residence to those who can produce a solid business plan, show sufficient capital to invest in it and eventually grow their business enough to hire Americans.

“The vast majority who don’t want citizenship plan to work here temporarily and then go home,” he said.
    [post_title] => To become a citizen or not? Long-term U.S. permanent residents consider their options in the age of Trump
    [post_excerpt] => Taking citizenship, as anyone considering it quickly learns–even if you can retain dual citizenship—means literally formally renouncing allegiance to your country of origin.
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    [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13
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To become a citizen or not? Long-term U.S. permanent residents consider their options in the age of Trump