Immigration

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

by Toula Drimonis

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

by Katie Dancey-Downs

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    [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.
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A call to end border violence in Europe

by Katie Dancey-Downs

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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

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [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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To become a citizen or not? Long-term U.S. permanent residents consider their options in the age of Trump

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => The search for home can sometimes clash with the need for security.

Like many Canadians, I grew up with my nose pressed to the window of American life.

This was especially true in my case, because my mother was born in New York City and her mother in Chicago; my great-grandfather was a Chicago developer who built one of the city’s first skyscrapers. My American cousins intimidated me: they included an ambassador, a Harvard archeologist, even a bullfighter. One of them was married to a woman who flew her own small aircraft.

I wanted to be like them — bold, adventurous, successful — and to understand what made them tick; I wanted to flee the quiet, polite country I was born and raised in, where ambition and strong opinions were frowned upon.

Canadian newsstands offered 80 percent American content and I knew the names of Buffalo’s suburbs, Lackawanna and Cheektowaga, because their television broadcasts reached Toronto. I caught deeper glimpses of American contradictions while attending University of Toronto, during a life-changing exchange week at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We attended a black Baptist church service where the preacher inveighed against abortion and the ladies waved paper fans. We listened to a black UNC administrator describe his life there…and begin to weep.

As someone from a multicultural city, Toronto, and a country where abortion isn’t demonized, both were shocking. Nor had I before imagined the daily toll that racism could play. It all deepened my curiosity about the U.S. even further, making me more determined to find a way to live there.

At 25, I won a fellowship to Paris, traveling Europe for eight months, then was a newspaper reporter in Toronto and Montreal, where I fell in love with a McGill medical student from New Jersey, soon to graduate and return south for residency.

I was able to follow him to the United States, although we were not married, because I was the daughter of a U.S. citizen, applying for “better work opportunities.” After I had taken an AIDS test, undergone a security check and been fingerprinted, an official at the consulate in Montreal interviewed me. I wrote, for a column in the national daily, The Globe and Mail, in 1988:

“The vice-consul asked me surprisingly little. When she approved my visa, after a brief but lively conversation, her enthusiasm and warmth were infectious. Even the guard wished me luck. I felt I’d been invited to a terrific party. I was handed a brown envelope, stamped, signed and sealed. My future was in my hands.”

And so I left behind a perfectly good country, one with excellent and heavily subsidized university education, cradle-to-grave healthcare, a wide, deep social safety net, and a Constitution that promised “peace, order and good government” rather than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

For years, Canadians had often guessed I was American, which is a veiled insult that means too bossy, too direct, too nakedly ambitious. I wanted faster decisions and a wider playing field, not the endless foot-shuffling of risk-averse fellow Canadians and a career limited to a handful of major cities.

I’d thought American was more egalitarian than it is, but that turned out to be silly idealism. When I dared suggest to someone at Dartmouth that I audit classes there, since we were in the middle of nowhere for the next four years, pre-Internet, the university administration refused. How about part-time study? Also no.

As I began to try to make sense of my new home, I read two seminal works of the early 1990s that explained the shadowed side of John Winthrop’s 1630 vision of America as a much-admired “city on a hill”: the first was Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here, about two boys growing up in a decrepit Chicago housing project during the 1980s; the second was Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, a study of two school districts, divided by wealth and class, which were allotted wildly unequal resources by the American way of funding education through housing taxes. This was a key difference between my experiences in Toronto and Montreal.

In Hanover, a local social worker told me about the grinding poverty she saw on muddy backroads, the battered trailers with plastic on the windows, while Dartmouth’s most privileged students raced their shiny sports cars through town and dropped enormous sums in its few stores. There is poverty in Canada; this is particularly true for the shamefully neglected Indigenous people. But the shocking inequality of the United States, where the three wealthiest Americans collectively own more wealth than the bottom half of the population (while the middle class struggles to pay for healthcare and university tuition), is absent; Canada has its billionaires and millionaires, but they tend to be more discreet about their good fortune.

First American lesson: Prove you’re rich! Income inequality be damned.

I wanted my career back, so we moved to suburban New York, where I’ve lived ever since. After two years of marriage, my husband left and I started my American life yet again, without children. I’d insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement, which enabled me to survive financially and keep my home.

Second American lesson: Know your legal rights and be ready to fight hard for them.


Third American lesson: A tough lawyer is often your new best friend.

Single and lonely, in 1998 I answered a personals ad in a local alternative weekly — which brought a convicted con man into my life, who wreaked emotional havoc and cost me several thousand dollars.

Fourth American lesson: In a country so diverse, re-invention is easier. In a huge and mobile country, less fussy about one’s origins, he simply traveled east and started victimizing anew.


Fifth American lesson: Some Americans are wildly impressed with self-confidence and happily defer to material signs of success; before he was caught in Chicago, the conman had posed as a doctor and as a lawyer.

In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.

In 2002 and 2003, while researching my first book, I traveled to Ohio, New Orleans, Massachusetts and Texas to interview 104 men, women and teens about women and gun use, asking whether they owned a firearm or whether one had shattered their life. I spent three days learning how to fire a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol, which gave me the street cred to speak with suspicious gun owners; their first question to me was always the same: Do you believe in the Second Amendment?

Sixth American lesson: It’s as if the Constitution’s ink were still wet, so often is it cited. And every time I ask someone about their concomitant responsibility to the common good I might as well be speaking Greek, so hollow does the phrase ring in a nation addicted to the primacy of individual rights.

I survived the financial crash of 2008, thanks to my second husband’s secure job and my work in a part-time retail position for $11/hour, an experience that was the subject of my second book. In two-and-a-half years, while selling $600 ski jackets, my hourly wage was raised by only 30 cents. The store’s wealthy customers recoiled in shock if I replied to them in French or Spanish. They automatically assumed anyone working at a low-level job couldn’t possibly be as well educated or well-traveled as they.

Seventh American lesson: A low-wage job de facto signals low status. One customer tossed a quarter at us, barking: ‘Go to college!” Every one of our 15-member staff had done so, and two were military veterans. I saw firsthand what $11/ hour could buy. Almost nothing. With college costs so high, how could anyone flee? 


Eighth American lesson: The stunning cost of American post-secondary education breaks as many as it helps. Two of our friends in their early 30s, both from blue-collar families, are crippled by their college debts of $60,000 and $100,000. My annual tuition in mid-1970s Canada was $660 a year; today, it would be $6,000.

In a country professing such deep allegiance to “liberty,” American workers have no right to paid vacation, sick leave or paid maternity leave. Union membership is low, and the federal minimum wage has been stagnant for decades.

Since Donald Trump’s election, our Canadian friends have shifted from asking: “Will you come home?” to “When will you come home?”

I struggle to find a response, even as I realize that most of my reasons for staying are predicated on privilege. I am an educated white woman, in good health; I have work, savings in the bank, and a gainfully employed husband who is also in good health. If I were poor and lived in a rural area, Canada’s social safety net might appear much more appealing than it does from a pretty and prosperous town within easy distance of New York City.

Until we can afford to retire we need well-paid work, which, even in the worst of times, is more plentiful for us where we live now. My experience of trying to do business with Canadians has been frustrating: often they murmur encouragingly and then disappear, true to an aspect of the national character that places value on avoiding potential conflict.

The U.S. feels more foreign now than it did when I first made it my home, nearly 30 years ago. It is tainted by mass incarceration, racism and daily violence. Shooters armed with automatic weapons have massacred thousands and schoolchildren practice “active shooter drills.” In a nation that never shuts up about “productivity,” retailers sell us scented candles to relax. No one seems to notice the contradiction.

Soon, there will be more than 100,000 dead from COVID-19; meanwhile, the White House administration’s chaotic responses are a deadly roulette wheel.

I love our historic, lovely Hudson River town and its ready access to the pleasures of Manhattan --- although they are temporarily off limits during the pandemic. The fact remains; unless we move to a rural, isolated area with poor medical access, we can’t afford comparable Canadian housing and my home city, Toronto, has become both violent and expensive, with tiny teardown houses selling for $1 million.

I loathe Trump and fear four more years of this nightmare.

I enjoy our life here— while knowing how deeply its systems punish so many others.

It’s a moral thorn.

Stay?

Go?

I still don’t know.
    [post_title] => America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?
    [post_excerpt] => In the decades since, I’ve often wondered about my “ghost life.” What if I’d stayed in Canada? When I visit, I find that I miss the civil conversation, the more generous public policies and, most of all, a national culture that is not poisoned by right-wing terrorism.
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America is home but Canada is safer: after 30 years, and despite a fulfilling personal life, is it time to leave?

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => More people are currently fleeing war and extreme poverty than at any time in history, but those who try to help often face criminal charges

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that 839 people have already died in 2019 trying to cross the Mediterranean. In 2018, the number of dead or missing was 2,277. At its height in 2016, 5,096 people died at sea. These are desperate people fleeing war and extreme poverty. But no state will take responsibility for them. 

Yet even as international accountability for human rights violations becomes a hollow joke, there are people who have taken it up themselves to dedicate their lives to rescuing and helping refugees, no matter what the personal cost. These are idealistic people who also have a firm grasp on reality: they know they cannot save the world, but they believe that capitulating to helplessness is not an option.

Salam Aldeen is the founder of Team Humanity, a Danish nonprofit dedicated to helping refugees who made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to the Greek island of Lesbos. A Dane of Iraqi-Moldovan descent, Salam flew to Lesbos in 2015 to begin sea rescue operations two days after seeing the now-iconic image of Alan Kurdi, the three year old Syrian boy whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey. Alan and his family had been trying to reach Europe in an inflatable raft.

In January 2016, Greek authorities arrested Salam and four other humanitarian volunteers after they responded to a distress call from a group of refugees on a sinking rubber raft. The arresting officers accused them of crossing into Turkish waters with the intent to traffic refugees into Greece. Salam spent 48 hours in jail, and then two more years on trial, with prosecutors seeking a life sentence. The five men were acquitted of all charges in May 2018 and Salam immediately went back to work, this time building a women and children’s center adjacent to Moria, a notorious refugee camp on Lesbos that is known for violence and horrifying conditions. Moria was built for 3,000 people but shelters more than three times that many, mainly Syrian refugees and Afghan asylum seekers. 

The Team Humanity center is a reprieve for the 1,500 women and children who use it daily. “All women and children are welcome,” Salam said, noting that 11 is the cutoff age for boys. There’s a playground, and space for people to gather to dance, listen to music and watch movies. The center is funded entirely through private donations from all over the world. The money goes toward providing camp residents with necessities like food, diapers, winter clothes, and underwear. Salam gets wistful when he talks about building a school. “I don’t have funds for chairs and tables.”

On August 11th, the night of the Muslim festival of Eid-al-Adha, a group of men attacked the women’s center. “It was Eid, Ramadan had finished and everyone was happy. People went out. But then some troublemakers started making problems,” Salam says. 

https://vimeo.com/355385248

Salam described a scuffle between camp residents, which included a drunk man, volunteer security people restraining him, and a woman who screamed and pretended to faint. “It was all over quickly, Salam says. “She fainted for attention, it was a joke, and the drunk guy apologized.” But then, he says, a rumor started in the camp that someone had hit the woman. Salam estimated that between 100 to 200 men from Moria showed up, angry. There were only 26 volunteers working at the time, with additional women and children inside. When some men began to climb over the fence, Salam chased after them with sparklers and they ran off. 

https://vimeo.com/355385512

The local Greek police took an hour to arrive. “They don’t want to help. They don’t want us to be there. They want us to suffer so we go home,” Salam says. 

On August 14th, the Greek police returned, this time to rearrest Salam. “The police said the fireworks that I used to protect us were illegal,” Salam says. “They held me for over two hours, and at the same time brought someone in to report me for hitting him. I don’t know what they promised him for that, but it’s so corrupt.” 

He doesn’t expect the harassment will stop. Salam says he received a letter from the United Nations last week, also sent to the Greek government, which condemned the legal actions taken against Salam and the criminalization of humanitarian aid. Still, his biggest hope is for celebrity intervention — a “We are the World” moment to capture international attention.

Salam Aldeen is not the only humanitarian volunteer facing legal charges for aiding refugees. Pia Kemp, the German captain of a ship that was impounded for rescuing migrants at sea, recently announced she was turning down a medal from the city of Paris. Addressing the mayor of Paris, Kemp wrote in a Facebook post, “Madame Hidalgo, you want to award me a medal for my solidarian action in the Mediterranean Sea, because our crews 'work to rescue migrants from difficult conditions on a daily basis'...while you raid protests and criminalize people that are standing up for rights of migrants and asylum seekers. You want to give me a medal for actions that you fight in your own ramparts." Kemp reportedly faces 20 years in prison in Italy on charges of aiding in human trafficking.

There is no humanitarian exception to the European Union Directive that criminalizes aiding illegal migration. The burden of hosting refugees and asylum-seekers falls heavily on Mediterranean countries due to the Dublin Regulation, an EU law which states that people seeking asylum are the responsibility of the first European country they land in. At the same time, whistleblowers in the Greek government have accused the state of misappropriating EU funds meant for refugees, and awarding inflated contracts to local businesses. As Salam put it, “Finance crisis, bullshit, I see new cars. They didn’t have them in 2015, now they do.”

In Denmark, Salam’s home country, the government’s laws and rhetoric are increasingly anti-immigrant. In 2016, Denmark passed the controversial “jewelry law,” which allows the government to confiscate valuables from refugees to pay for their care. The law has not been enforced, but the symbolism remains. “I’m ashamed that Denmark doesn’t take refugees. That’s why I’m here helping people. I’m trying to show that it’s not every Danish person that feels this way,” says Salam. 

In 2018, Arizonan geography teacher Scott Warren was charged by Border Patrol with three felonies for aiding a pair of Central American migrants. His trial resulted in a hung jury. Federal prosecutors have refused to drop the charges since the mistrial, and plan to retry Warren on two felony harboring charges in November.

Warren’s case, like his European counterparts, failed in court because prosecutors could not prove intent to commit a crime. Still, Warren’s arrest is part of an escalating attack on humanitarian volunteers, who for years have put out jugs of water for dehydrated migrants traversing the desert along the United States’ southern border.

Migration flows will increase as the planet warms and regions become uninhabitable. The post-World War II liberal order, built upon freedom of movement and freedom from persecution has failed. The Refugee Convention was not written to account for massive influxes of people fleeing widespread violence and climate change. Permanent impermanence has been normalized - the most obvious example being Palestinian refugees, who were placed under their own UN agency in order to sidestep UNHCR. 

Ironically, during World War II, Syria played host to thousands of European refugees. Now that the tables have turned, Europeans are treating the refugee crisis like a game of hot potato, selling out basic principles in order to keep Muslims out. What began with a 2016 deal to return refugees to Turkey was followed by an even worse deal with Libya. 

In America, our government has behaved no better. Just this week, the Trump administration announced a new policy that would allow for indefinite detention of migrant families and children. Meanwhile, Haitians who have lived for decades on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) now face deportation since the Trump regime denied them renewal. 

The crackdowns are real, and until new institutions are constructed to provide accountability, legal or otherwise, we’ll return to the same solutions humanity has used throughout history. 

There’s a Jewish teaching, naaseh v'nishma, which means “we will do and we will hear.” If somebody shows up to your doorstep, feed them, give them a bed, and ask questions in the morning.

Tyrants have always used vulnerable populations as pawns in their games with one another. But there have always been people willing to sacrifice their bodies and voices for others. 

Salam and his family arrived in Denmark in 1992 after fleeing civil war in Moldova, but he insists that his past is irrelevant to what he’s doing now. “Everyone can do what I do. No money in the world can give you the feeling you get when you’re saving a human from drowning. I can’t explain it to you because it’s something insane. Giving a baby back to their mother after pulling them from the water, that is something I’ll never forget. People if they want to do something — know one thing — don’t think that you will get something back, but you’ll get peace with yourself. That feeling when you help somebody, this is your reward. You’ll understand, I did something good. Because one day, maybe it’s you who is going to run.”
    [post_title] => 'Saving lives is not a crime': when ordinary people sacrifice everything in the name of humanity
    [post_excerpt] => Tyrants have always used vulnerable populations as pawns in their games with one another. But there have always been people willing to sacrifice their bodies and voices for others. 
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‘Saving lives is not a crime’: when ordinary people sacrifice everything in the name of humanity

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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Theresa May was the only one willing and able to take on the job of trying to clean up the mess the boys made, but it was an impossible task.


Things started going downhill in the United Kingdom about 38 months ago. Well, it could be 41, if you really want to be precise. In February 2016, then-Prime Minister David Cameron announced that there would be a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The choice was between “Leave” and “Remain.”  At the time, the widely-held assumption was that the Remain campaign would win, with Cameron staying on for a few more years, and then eventually handing the reins to another Conservative politician of his choosing.


The results of the June 23, 2016 referendum shocked liberal Britons in particular and the world in general, just as much as the election of Donald Trump shocked Americans and the world four-and-a-half months later.


It is now August 2019 and Britain is getting ready to leave the bloc without a deal. Boris Johnson, the new prime minister and one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, has said a hard Brexit is his wish. Johnson replaced Theresa May on July 24, after she resigned in light of her failure to broker a deal to exit the EU that would satisfy her own party.


Remain voters feel ignored and unhappy; soft Brexit voters feel things are going too far and are unhappy; hard Brexiteers do not believe that Britain will leave the EU and are unhappy. The country is fractured and no person or party looks capable of bringing everyone together again.


David Cameron, meanwhile, is getting ready to publish his memoirs, which he reportedly wrote in a bespoke £25,000 ($30,000) shed, complete with wood-burning fireplace and sofa-bed, in the garden of his “quintessentially English” Cotswolds home. So, what went wrong?


The main answer, as it often is, comes from the hubris of men. First Cameron, with his unearned confidence, called the referendum to quell internal disagreements in his party. He was certain that he would win, and then he did not.


As the Remain campaign discovered slightly too late, a country that had just gone through six years of savage cuts to public services did not take kindly to the architects of said austerity warning them that if they voted to leave, there might be less money in the coffers. Many banks warned they would leave Brexit Britain, but such threats were not exactly convincing to those on the breadline, who had little hope of becoming more prosperous anytime soon.


The Remainers were convinced they would win easily, and were not ready for the Brexiteers’ intense, relentless and occasionally disingenuous approach to campaigning. Instead, they spent too much time trying to counter dubious claims about the EU, and not enough reminding people why the EU was a good thing for the country.


As one writer put it in the aftermath, “In confronting populist demagoguery, it isn't enough to attack its promulgators. To get people to turn out and vote in your favor, you also have to give them something positive to rally behind.”


That the debate was overwhelmingly male had something to do with this disastrous turn of events, perhaps. In May 2016, Labour grandee Harriet Harman hit out against the lack of female voices leading the referendum campaigns; she quoted a study, which found that only 16% of television appearances on EU issues had been women. She was largely ignored.


A month later Leave won, by 52% to 48%, and no-one quite knew what to do. After all, damaging over-confidence had not been a side-specific issue; when Conservative MPs Boris Johnson and Michael Gove gave their victory speeches on June 24th, they looked terrified.


It is now clear that senior figures in the Vote Leave campaign had spent little time preparing for what would happen if they were to win, instead running a campaign conveniently promising all things to all people. Do you want Britain to be a buccaneering nation, ultra-liberal and open to the world? Brexit can make that happen. Do you yearn for the Britain of the past, and wish your country could shut itself from the world, and from the people wanting to move to the islands? There’s a Brexit for that — and so on.


David Cameron, who was a Remainer, resigned from his office and retired from politics after the Leave campaign won the referendum that he had called. Within weeks Theresa May, who was also a Remainer, replaced him. She was not quite the best candidate, but she was the only one willing and able to take the job.


Boris Johnson, the face of the Vote Leave campaign, wanted to run for party leadership. But Michael Gove, the other face of Vote Leave, stabbed him in the back; Gove ran instead, and the party didn’t back him. The boys had made a mess and as is so often the case, a woman had to come in and pick up the pieces, much to the glee of the boys in question. As May won, one male Conservative MP welcomed the news with a hearty “here comes Mummy!” Dry heave is appropriate.



[caption id="attachment_1324" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Boris Johnson addressing the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester on October 4, 2011.[/caption]

This is where things could have picked up; the moment when the country could have come together. In a different world, May would have announced that the result of the referendum had been close, and that it called for a Brexit that kept Britain close to the European Union, in order to honour the winning side without alienating the others. Even if unenthusiastic about the compromise, Brexiteers could have rallied around her and accepted their narrow margin of victory, and Remainers could have gracefully accepted their defeat and constructively worked with those who had beaten them.


This, of course, is not what happened. Already in a tough position, May made her own life worse by pandering to the harder Brexiteers and, perhaps overcompensating for her Remainer past, all but ignoring everyone else. The Brexit fanatics used this opportunity to harden their lines every step of the way, while shellshocked Remainers floundered, and failed to do much but yap from the sidelines.


This is when things started to get steadily worse. Entire books could be written about what happened between the summer of 2016 and the summer of 2019, but in short: May called an election to get a bigger majority in Parliament and was instead left with no majority at all, the hard Brexiteers kept voting against the Brexit deal May got because they thought it wasn’t a hard enough Brexit, everyone else wasted more time arguing about whether they wanted no Brexit, a second referendum or a soft Brexit than doing anything else, and in a day of “indicative votes” (test votes), MPs showed that not a single Brexit outcome had a majority in the House of Commons.


If you want to picture it, it was a bit like one of those scenes in cartoon where the unlucky main character slips on a banana peel, stands up, steps on a rake, stands up again and then walks straight into a glass door, on repeat, for three years.


Still, the themes remained similar. There was the hubristic assumption from Remainers that as Brexit negotiations would get worse, enough people would fling back to their side (they didn’t), and the hubristic assumption from Brexiteers that all problems with the negotiations would simply fade away if people started believing in Brexit enough (they didn’t).


In a way, the natural conclusion to all this was always going to be Boris Johnson. The former London mayor is a serial cheater, has an unknown number of love children, no principles to speak of, and is interested in little but power. What he excels at is boisterous self-confidence, and an ability to speak with conviction on anything he believes would be useful for him to talk about. His gaffes are frequent and his blunders dangerous, but to his fans he represents the one true Brexit believer who can deliver on all those impossible promises. As has become received wisdom in Britain, it is sufficient to believe in things very hard in order to make them come true; he may not be fond of the comparison, but Johnson is the Tinkerbell of Brexit, Lost Boys very much in tow.


What happens now remains unclear; Johnson won on a platform of leaving the EU on the October 31st deadline “do or die.” He insists that leaving without a deal is not something he wants, but he will not bring May’s deal back to Parliament for one last go, and there is not enough time to negotiate another deal and get it through the Commons. Still, he believes something will happen therefore it must be true.


Members of Parliament, meanwhile, insist that they will stop Johnson from going for no-deal, despite the awkward fact that there is not much they can do about it. Still, they believe — well, you get the point.


As Westminster tribes keep fighting to see which will make the best Icarus, the country they govern remains entirely split along the lines drawn on June 23rd. Where you stand on Brexit is now as important (if not more) than which party you usually vote for, or any other characteristics identities are usually built upon.


It did not have to be this way, of course. The opportunities for healing were always going to be rare and complex, but they did exist and no-one took them up. After all, doing so would have involved coming to terms with reality, unpleasant and imperfect as it may be. Forty-one months on, Britain stands on the brink of destroying itself for no reason; by the time its economy tanks and it scrambles to rebuild its relationships with the EU and the rest of the world, it will be too late for anyone to be the bigger person.


Given the wider context, it might be unwise to suggest Brits now turn to culture from the continent for advice, but they could do worse than revisit the most famous scene from the cult French movie La Haine: “Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz9vgtXq_Hs



    [post_title] => How less-than-great men brought Britain to its worst hour
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How less-than-great men brought Britain to its worst hour

by Marie Le Conte

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    [post_content] => Grassroots groups are organizing to protect undocumented immigrants.

In Passaic, N.J., a teenager refused to open her front door when awakened at 1 a.m., and hid with her parents through the small hours of the morning. In Houston,  Texas, a teenager’s post on Facebook alerted neighbors in a largely Hispanic community to the presence of four Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in fatigues and bulletproof vests. ICE agents were also rebuffed in Brooklyn, N.Y. In Nashville, a group of neighbors formed a human chain to help shield a father and son from ICE agents as they walked from their truck to their home.

In response to President Trump’s threats to deport undocumented immigrants en masse, immigrant rights organizations mobilized to inform immigrants of their rights, by spreading information sheets on social media, and passing out flyers out in particularly vulnerable communities. What’s more, they’ve been joined in this effort by Democratic politicians and presidential candidates: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was out distributing Know Your Rights flyers; multiple New York City lawmakers attended a rally protesting the raids; the Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore has provoked the ire of federal agents by standing with the L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti as he informed residents that they don’t have to open the door to ICE agents unless the agents have a warrant.

Although the massive raids never materialized as promised, immigrants are more informed and better prepared than ever. And bystanders are also more informed and angrier than ever.

“The unapologetic publicizing of these threatened raids activated a different level of consciousness for allies not directly impacted,” Ambien Mitchell, an advocate at the New Sanctuary Coalition in New York City, told The Huffington Post’s Angelina Chapin. “Citizens are more outraged now than ever.”

“Allies developed sophisticated tools on all ends,” Sarah Cullinane, the director of immigrant rights organization Make The Road New Jersey, told Chapin. “I think this new level of sophistication arises from the constant and repeated threat to immigrant lives.”

Activists have been preparing for these raids since June, when they were first announced by the Trump administration and then subsequently postponed. The L.A. Raids Rapid Response Network run by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) hands out copies of a judicial arrest warrant to immigrant families so that they can compare that text to the text of documents that ICE agents may hand them, to verify that the document is in fact a legal arrest warrant, CHIRLA’s Shannon Camacho told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. Adelina Nicholls, from the Georgia Latino Alliance of Human Rights, said that they have visited with or spoken to more than 25,000 people across the state.

However, knowing your rights has its limits. A widely-shared video of ICE agents breaking a car window and dragging out the occupant aroused widespread outrage, but subsequent reporting revealed that the agents had a warrant and acted lawfully. (Although that report did not address an eyewitness’ claims that the agents threatened to shoot her when she asked about a warrant.)

Even if the promised large-scale raids have yet to materialize, the constant threat has created a culture of fear and anxiety for immigrant communities and their allies. Undocumented people worry about going to work every day, but have no choice if they want to continue to pay rent and other bills.

“Raids didn’t happen this weekend to the scale people were expecting them, but just the fear of knowing it could happen, it really terrorizes and traumatizes people in neighborhoods," Daniela Alulema, director of programs for the Center for Migration Studies in New York, told NorthJersey.com. "And that was reflected when you saw restaurants, churches and public places that are usually filled with people, they were just empty.”

Stacy Torres, a sociology professor, noticed a similar lull and depression in Oakland. “On the first day of planned immigration raids across the country last Sunday, eerie quiet settled over Fruitvale, the heavily Mexican and Central American neighborhood where I live in Oakland, Calif.,” she writes.

“Normally bustling places were deserted and somber. The feeling of a community holding its breath hung like a fog. Few vendors roamed the sidewalks selling raspados, ice cream and sliced mango. Missing were the mothers I glimpse from my porch walking with young children toddling alongside or babies expertly wrapped in cloth bound to their backs. The baseball diamond and playing fields of Brookdale Park remained empty. Finally, around 8:20 p.m., with the sky still tinged with faint light, the park filled with children and a group of men playing soccer on a neighboring field. The fog of fear had lifted, allowing everyone to burn energy pent up after a day of hiding.”

Although the threat of violence — the forced expulsion of immigrants is a kind of violence — may make some Americans feel big, places are being hollowed out whether people are forced to leave or not.
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Living in terror of the knock on the door

by Jessica McKenzie

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