Tag: Europe
Migrants’ Rights Network: Walls and borders
Alan Anstead
Are walls and tighter border controls the answer to the big questions on immigration? Do they achieve what their advocates set out to do? Or should the world aim to return to a time when less xenophobia and more trust in people was the order of the day?
Soon after his inauguration President, Donald Trump signed orders to start building a wall between Mexico and USA. There is an existing fence along most of the 2,000 mile border with some 17,000 US Border Protection officers patrolling it. But is as much the anti-migrant, xenophobic attitude and intentions that led to this presidential order as the physical barrier itself. A brief history of border and city wall building does not provide comfortable bed-fellows or successful examples for the president.
Not new
Walls to keep people out (or in) are not new. In AD 122 Roman Emperor Hadrian started to build a wall between England and Scotland to keep the Scottish Picts and Ancient Britons out. There never was a real threat from them.
In 1940 Nazi Germany built a wall around part of Warsaw in Poland to keep Jews inside the ghetto, many to be exterminated in the Genocide. The ghetto was levelled in uprisings in1943. After the Second World War the Berlin Wall was built by communist leaders to stop East Berliners in the communist controlled half of the city crossing to West Berlin. Berliners from both sides tore it down in 1989.
Dialogue
In 1969 a fence was built between the Protestant and Catholic parts of Belfast in Northern Ireland to maintain peace. It didn’t work. Much more effective was dialogue between the different parties to find a peaceful solution.
More recently, walls have been built by mayors in Czech, Slovak and Romanian towns to keep Roma out of the ‘white’ parts of the conurbation. These have been dismantled soon after construction following NGO protests.
In many people’s minds, very stringent immigration controls act as virtual walls. ‘Fortress Europe’ is a term used by many to describe the sheer difficulty for a non-EEA/EU national in entering the European Union. The UK has also significantly increased the red tape and for many limited the possibility, for someone from a non-EU state entering the country.
No pre-WWI borders
It was not always so. Before the First World War there were no walls or fences (discounting Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China). In fact, believe it or not, there were no borders. No visas. No passport controls.
The Austrian author and playwright Stefan Zweig made this observation: “Before 1914 the earth belonged to the entire human race. Everyone could go where he wanted and stay there as long as he liked. No permits or visas were necessary, and I am always enchanted by the amazement of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I travelled to India and America without a passport.”
He goes on: “Indeed, I had never set eyes on a passport. You boarded your means of transport and got off it again, without asking or being asked any questions; you didn’t have to fill in a single one of the hundred forms required today. No permits, no visas, nothing to give you trouble; the borders that today, thanks to the pathological distrust felt by everyone for everyone else, are a tangled fence of red tape were then nothing but symbolic lines on the map, and you crossed them as unthinkingly as you can cross the meridian in Greenwich.”
Xenophobia
And: “It was not until after the war that National Socialism began destroying the world, and the first visible symptom of that intellectual epidemic of the present century was xenophobia—hatred or at least fear of foreigners. People were defending themselves against foreigners everywhere; they were kept out of everywhere. All the humiliations previously devised solely for criminals were now inflicted on every traveller before and during a journey.
He concludes: “You had to be photographed from right and left, in profile and full face, hair cut short enough to show your ears; you had to have fingerprints taken—first just your thumbs, then all ten digits; you had to be able to show certificates—of general health and inoculations—papers issued by the police certifying that you had no criminal record; you had to be able to produce documentary proof of recommendations and invitations, with addresses of relatives; you had to have other documents guaranteeing that you were of good moral and financial repute; you had to fill in and sign forms in triplicate or quadruplicate, and if just one of this great stack of pieces of paper was missing you were done for.”
Can we return to the times of less xenophobia and more trust in people? It would take very strong political will and leadership.
It is possible if we all forget ‘wall mentality.’
Read original posting here.
This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.
Donald Trump and the post-election European horror story
We don’t mean to scare you with this tweet below. But it’s interesting to note how the Donald Trump’s rise to the US presidency is bringing out the absolute worst in Europe.
While 2016 was a year that ushered in a new era of uncertainty thanks to Brexit and Trump, we must not despair and permit the flagrant opportunism of far-right politicians to dictate what Europe is.
The Guardian published a story Saturday where the region’s far-right leaders saw 2017 as the year when Europe “wakes up.”
One could fairly ask wake up to what? More discrimination? More attacks against our culturally and ethnically diverse roots as Europeans? More white privilege? More police surveillance and abuse?
From left to right some pretty scary far-right European politicians from left to right: Harald Vilimsky of the Austrian FPÖ, Matteo Salvini of the Italian Lega Nord, Gert Wilders of the PVV of Holland, Marine Le Pen of Front Nationale, and Germany’s Frauke Petry of AfD.
Folks, these politicians don’t have a clue about how to make Europe function as a region that respects and makes diversity work. They will fail and fall flat on their faces if they get power.
Continue reading “Donald Trump and the post-election European horror story”
We have the means to challenge and beat xenophobia and fascism in today’s Europe
Even if we should be concerned about the rise of xenophobia and fascism, which disguises itself with populist anti-immigration rhetoric in Europe, there’s one matter that should worry us the most: silence and apathy.
Tomorrow, the referendum in the United Kingdom on whether to stay in the European Union isn’t only a vote for or against but on how much space Britons will give to anti-immigration rhetoric and demagoguery.
Throughout Europe, we have seen countless examples in Hungary, Denmark, Poland, United Kingdom, Finland and others of how xenophobia and creeping fascism have challenged our values for a culturally diverse, socially equal and just Europe.
When challenging the very forces that aim to take us back to an all-white Europe that only existed in rhetoric and myth, it’s important to keep in mind that size doesn’t matter.
The most powerful weapon that we have as activists is our sense of social justice and our never-ending dedication to challenge the very matters that populists and fascists don’t want the public to know about their ugly truth.
Latin America has seen its fair share of social injustice and violence. In Argentina, where I was born, we lived through one of the bloodiest dictatorships in our history during the so-called dirty war (1976-83) era. Back then, it was relatively easy for a military dictatorship to shut the country off from the outside world; landline phones didn’t work, censorship and self-censorship were rampant.
Continue reading “We have the means to challenge and beat xenophobia and fascism in today’s Europe”
Asylum seekers have exposed Europe’s schizophrenia and bigotry
Nothing could depict better Europe’s schizophrenia and hypocrisy concerning asylum seekers than what happened recently in eastern Germany, where a building that was going to house them was ablaze and cheered by some onlookers, according to the BBC.
Writes the BBC:
The fire in the town of Bautzen [eastern Germany] in the early hours of Sunday morning destroyed the roof of a former hotel, which was being converted into a migrant shelter. Police said some of the crowd tried to prevent firefighters from extinguishing the blaze, which destroyed the roof.
Stanislaw Tillich, the premier of Saxony, described those that impeded firefighters and the police from doing their work as “criminals.”
If that wasn’t enough to make you wonder, in Clasnitz we saw a frightened refugee boy crying as the passengers in the bus are jeered by neo-nazis.
Continue reading “Asylum seekers have exposed Europe’s schizophrenia and bigotry”
Migrants’ Rights Network: 2015 – The year when immigration became an indissolubly European issue
Don Flynn*
Halfway through December seems like a good time to sketch out some ideas on what 2015 might come to mean in a history of immigration which has yet to be written.
My provisional take is that it will come to be seen as the year in which the movement of people into and out of the country became finally and indissolubly Europeanised. There are circumstances in which we could easily imagine this to be a good thing, with progressive, forward-thinking governments working together to see how the movement of people is going to play its role in promoting sustainable growth and the welfare of populations, while at the same time cementing human rights and fairness right the way across the system.
Sadly this isn’t the way in which immigration has been considered by governments for a long time. The resulting dysfunction has meant that Europe has become associated in the minds of many with turmoil and threat. The image of desperate refugees landing on the Greek islands; the bodies of children washed up on holiday beaches; people pushed back by thuggish police action on the borders of Hungary; or the migrants living in the squalor of the ‘jungle’ camps in Calais will probably be the abiding memories of the past year for many.
Failure to anticipate the inevitable chaos
The truth is that these chaotic scenes have arisen for reasons which have less to do with the sheer press of numbers than with the utter failure of the European authorities to anticipate the inevitable flow of people away from the war zones which now stretch in great conjoined arcs across the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and into North Africa.
Institute of Race Relations: A secret punishment
An important new report by Medical Justice, ‘A Secret Punishment’ – the misuse of segregation in immigration detention, highlights the human damage caused by the use of segregation in immigration detention, as well as its political purposes.
Arriving at Heathrow Airport in 2011 on a family reunion visa, 24-year-old ‘MD’ expected to be reunited with her husband – a refugee whom she had not seen in three years. Instead, she was questioned by an immigration officer and, after becoming confused by the questions, subsequently detained in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre. She did not leave until nearly a year-and-a-half later, by which time her mental health had deteriorated to such an extent that she was deemed to be ‘lacking capacity’ under the Mental Health Act. In detention she had sliced open her forehead with the top of a sardine tin, cut her face and stomach with broken pieces of china and attempted to strangle herself with a telephone cable. She self-harmed at least eleven times between August and November 2011, the response to which was to handcuff her, restrain her and remove her from association with other detainees. The High Court later ruled that what she been though amounted to ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ under Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which also covers torture.
That segregation – the isolation of an individual for up to 23 hours a day – can amount to torture is now established. 
It is a ‘secret punishment’ according to Medical Justice. Their report documents the scale of damage caused by segregation by examining their own casework with people who are or have been detained. It also draws on what little external scrutiny exists – most notably the inspection reports from HM Inspector of Prisons (HMIP) and the annual reports of the Independent Monitoring Boards (IMB).
Continue reading “Institute of Race Relations: A secret punishment”
Migration Pulse: What the refugee crisis says about race in Europe
Omar Khan*
While many Europeans have felt growing humanitarian concern on being confronted with images of desperation among refugees seeking entry, across the continent a large minority have suggested any sympathy is misplaced.
Some arguments about the refugee crisis focus more on practical concerns – that encouraging people to come to Europe will lead to greater danger, or that we cannot afford to take more than a few hundred or thousand. These concerns don’t really respond to the horrible conditions and even poorer economies of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey where most refugees are currently living in camps, but they at least recognise shared humanity and European values.
Questioning their humanity
Some rejectionist responses, however, question the humanity of the refugees or our (Europe’s) obligation to do anything to help them. These rejections flirt to variously open degrees with two sorts of claims. First is the denial that all human beings have equal moral worth. In discussions of racial discrimination the focus is often on the labour market or criminal justice system, and on the socially unequal outcomes that Black and minority ethnic people experience across Europe. Such evidence should be more widely understood and directly combated, but the basic denial of our shared humanity is arguably the foundational harm of racism. Our continued inability to address historic violence and racism is so damaging not only because it leaves us ignorant of our own history, but also because it fails to recognise the deep pain and indignity suffered by millions of people, an indignity that apparently is still happily flouted by some of Europe’s leaders and publics.
A second claim is less overtly racist, but more widely affirmed, namely that there is (or should be) an ethno-religious account of who counts as ‘European’. Democracy, equality, liberty, fraternity, humanitarianism: all these are nice values, the thought goes, but what really counts is if you’re a white Christian. A more sophisticated version of this claim might be that Christian Europeans are uniquely suited to or committed to values of tolerance, humanitarianism and democracy, but proponents obviously don’t think undemocratic or intolerant white Christian people should be expelled from or denied citizenship by Europe’s different nation-states. However this sort of view is expressed, the key point for us is that Syrians or Eritreans could never become British or Hungarian even if they are the most committed democrats.
Vocal politicians
Central European politicians are most vocal and also publicly criticised for such views. But it’s not only the Hungarian Prime Minister who thinks that ethnicity and religion matter more than values. A significant proportion of Europeans now vote for far-right parties and so fail to affirm ‘European values’. This isn’t simply an ‘Eastern’ problem; when asked to imagine a prototypical Norwegian or Dane, it’s not only nationalists who will conjure up a blonde-haired blue-eyed individual. And despite the undoubted progress we’ve made in Britain, there’s a sense in which thugs from the English Defence League are more ‘English’ than a London-born Black person.
Continue reading “Migration Pulse: What the refugee crisis says about race in Europe”
Finland Bridge: What threatens us?
Everything that puts Europe in harm’s way today is in some cases more challenging to Finland: geopolitical uncertainty in Russia ranks high on the list as does populism, anti-immigration sentiment, near-flat economic growth, high unemployment, rising poverty and nationalism.
It’s clear that when you have enough of the latter, people are going to get pretty edgy and angry. But since I’m an optimist that believes in Finland and the Finns, I’m hopeful that things won’t get too much out of hand politically and force us to commit the same mistakes of the past.
Time is still on our side.
Migrant Tales (January 26, 2013): Making torture and hate acceptable
Migrant Tales insight: It always amazes me how the United States and the media conveniently forget that torture has been used by many administrations as a means of scaring and getting information from its imagined and real enemies. Torture isn’t a recent interrogation technique used by the CIA and did not appear after 9/11. That is why linking the American Psychological Association (APA) to the CIA in making torture a more effective tool in interrogation is vital to ensure that the United States or any government prohibit such an outlandish practice.
Writes the Guardian: “For more than a decade, the American Psychological Association (APA) has maintained that a strict code of ethics prohibits its more than 130,000 members to aid in the torture of detainees while simultaneously permitting involvement in military and intelligence interrogations. The group has rejected media reporting on psychologists’ complicity in torture…”
___________________
Even if the media in the United States speaks of torture as something recent, the truth is that it has been going on for a very long time. These type of barbaric interrogation techniques were widely used in the last century in regions like Latin America. The CIA and the United States trained and promoted torture and state-sponsored terrorism in places like the School of the Americas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4eLYXJIZfg
Torture is not only a part of my history, but the legacy of millions of Latin Americans, Africans and Asians who are gripped today by drug wars, violence and poverty. Matters have got so bad in the underdeveloped world that people are ready to risk their lives to migrate and work for slave wages.
One has to connect the historical dots when looking at undocumented migrants and immigration in general. It’s the same story taking place over and over again: we colonize, enslave, pillage, support dictatorships; we reap the greatest profit by promoting poverty and underdevelopment in these regions.
Continue reading “Migrant Tales (January 26, 2013): Making torture and hate acceptable”