A view of houses, a water tank, a pump and a Warao meeting center in Janoko, a community that is home to 22 families of this Venezuelan indigenous people who migrated to Brazil. Together they acquired 13.4 hectares in Cantá, a municipality in the northern border state of Roraima, and with that land they have begun a process of insertion and autonomy in the host country. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BOA VISTA, Brazil , Dec 7 2022 (IPS)

A group of Warao families are, through their own efforts, paving the way for the integration of indigenous Venezuelans in Brazil, five years after the start of the wave of their migration to the border state of Roraima.

“It’s a model to follow,” said Gilmara Ribeiro, an anthropologist with the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), linked to the Catholic Church, which since 2017 has been helping indigenous immigrants from Venezuela, most of whom have refugee status.

Fifteen families acquired a 1340 square meter plot of land in the municipality of Cantá, population 20,000, and joined seven other families to form the Warao community of Janoko, inaugurated in May 2021. “Janoko” means house in their native language, while “Warao” means people of the water or of the canoe.

Makeshift dwellings made of wood or still under construction make up the village in which the Venezuelan indigenous people are trying to rebuild a little of the community life they had in the Orinoco delta on the Atlantic ocean, their ancestral land in the impoverished northeastern Venezuelan state of Delta Amacuro.

They are now creating a community like their old ones, in a wooded area 30 kilometers from Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, population 436,000.

The vast majority are Waraos, but there are also a few families of the Kariña people, who come from several northern Venezuelan states. Many of them traveled the 825 kilometers that separate the Orinoco delta from the Brazilian border of Roraima, in an almost straight line to the south, partly on foot and partly in buses or by hitchhiking.

Pintolandia ceased to be one of the shelters of the Brazilian Army’s Operation Welcome and the UNHCR and since March has become an unofficial camp for 312 Venezuelan indigenous people, lacking food and services, on the outskirts of Boa Vista, capital of the state of Roraima, in the extreme north of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Janoko is the dream that Euligio Baez and Jeremias Fuentes, “aidamos” or leaders in the Warao language, want to imitate in Pintolandia, where they were hosted by the Brazilian Army’s Operation Welcome with the support of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Precarious, unsanitary camp

Pintolandia, in a neighborhood on the west side of Boa Vista, has now become a precarious, unsanitary camp where 312 indigenous Venezuelans live. It was an official shelter in somewhat better conditions until March, when Operation Welcome decided to transfer the Venezuelan natives to another camp, Tuaranoko.

The population of the camp has continued to grow with the arrival of new migrants and it has become an irregular occupied zone, because almost half of its nearly 600 refugees refused to relocate and remain in the facility, a multi-sports stadium, where the indigenous people set up their tents and traditional woven “chinchorros” or hammocks.

“The new shelter is very far from the schools, and the children there have stopped studying. The 46 children here are still going to school. That was the first reason we refused to go,” Baez explained to IPS in a building without walls in Pintolandia, where health professionals from Doctors Without Borders provide care to the people in the camp.

In addition, Operation Welcome “does not respect our customs, does not consult us when making decisions” and does not allow anyone to enter the camp, he explained.

Euligio Baez, one of the “aidamos” or leaders, in the Warao language, of Pintolandia, on the outskirts of the Brazilian city of Boa Vista, is opposed to the relocation of members of the Venezuelan Warao people to a new shelter, because it would take the children away from their schools, without offering possibilities of economic and social insertion for indigenous immigrants and refugees in Brazilian society. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This is the case even if they are relatives or people from the organizations that help the refugees, such as CIMI and the Indigenous Council of Roraima, an organization made up of 261 communities from 10 indigenous peoples from the state.

Roraima is the Brazilian state with the highest proportion of indigenous people, 11 percent of the total population, who occupy 46 percent of its surface area in lands reserved for their communities.

Indigenous Venezuelans complain of threats and pressure to force them to move to the new shelter. Since September, they have been suspended from receiving food, which continues to be provided in Tuaranoko.

They collect aluminum cans, cardboard and other recyclable materials, and receive occasional help from social organizations and individuals, to have an income that allows them to eat and survive, according to Baez.

Leany Torres (R) and her daughter stand in front of the house in the Warao community of Janoko, where she is one of the ”aidamos” or leaders, in Warao, on this collectively acquired land in the state of Roraima, in the extreme north of Brazil. Her husband, Francisco Flores, is now building his father-in-law’s house next to theirs. The indigenous Venezuelan Warao people live in extended families that can exceed 100 members. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

No jobs or economic inclusion

“I’ve been here for six years, and nothing has been done to offer us an alternative for a better future, to support our projects. Those in charge know that we want land, they know our ideas and the anthropologists’ assessment of the situation,” Fuentes, a 32-year-old father of three, complained to IPS.

“A piece of land is essential. We are farmers,” he added.

“We want land to build a house, to grow food and plants for our traditional medicine, to raise chickens and pigs. A piece of land is the best solution for us,” said Baez, 38, who has seven children, after an eighth child died in Boa Vista.

The criticisms voiced by both leaders are strongly directed at the UNHCR, which assumed more direct management of the reception of Venezuelans, in view of the relative withdrawal of the Brazilian Army.

Operation Welcome and the UNHCR justified the relocation due to “irreparable infrastructure problems” affecting water and hygiene in the old shelters. And they argue that there was sufficient consultation with the Venezuelan indigenous people themselves before the move.

Diolinda Tempo, one of the few Venezuelan Kariña people in this majority Warao community, settled in the Cantá municipality in northern Brazil, where she produces casabe, a crunchy, thin, circular bread made from cassava flour, which she makes with a small mill invented by her father, Diomar Tempo. His cassava is the family’s source of income. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“Operation Welcome played a positive role in its initial assistance, offering documentation and food to Venezuelans arriving in Roraima, but it does not help people integrate in the broader community. There are almost no public policies to provide work and income alternatives” for the immigrants, said Gilmara Ribeiro in an interview with IPS at the local headquarters of the Catholic Social Pastoral.

But a good part of the responsibility falls on the municipal and state governments, “which have been totally absent” from an issue that directly affects their territories, she said.

The chaos has been overcome, but not the exclusion

Even so, the situation today is calmer and more stable than it was five or six years ago, when a wave of immigration hit Roraima, with many Venezuelans living on the streets and a rise in violence.

At that time, it was the civil society, indigenous, human rights and migrant and refugee organizations that mitigated the effects of the wave of Venezuelans fleeing hunger and alleged political persecution.

The meeting center is fitted with solar panels that provide electricity to the Janoko community of 22 Venezuelan families of Warao indigenous people. As the batteries store little energy and two of the eight are damaged, the electricity only lasts until 8 PM. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Francisco Flores, a 26-year-old Warao Indian, lived on the streets of Paracaima, a city of 20,000 people on the Venezuelan border, for the first few months after his arrival in Brazil three years ago, before being taken into a shelter.

At that time a policeman approached him, suspicious of his intentions. He then ordered him to leave using the Portuguese word “embora”, but with the local pronunciation which leaves out the first syllable. For the Warao people, “bora” is a plant that provides a fiber used in handicrafts. So Flores answered “I don’t have any bora” and the policeman attacked him with pepper spray.

It was not until his second year of living in the shelter that Flores managed to get a job in Boa Vista that has enabled him to save some money to build, on his days off, his house and that of his father-in-law in the Warao community of Janoko, where his wife, Leany Torres, 32, is an aidamo and lives with her daughter, niece, mother and father.

Janoko is home to 68 people from 22 families, 15 of whom have the right to the land, which, divided, means just 89.3 square meters for each family. There is little left over to grow cassava, fruit trees and vegetables, but the indigenous people manage to feed themselves and survive.

Their beaded handicrafts, made by Torres and her mother, or vegetable fiber baskets, a specialty of William Centeno, a 48-year-old father of three, are a source of income.

Diolimar Tempo, a 38-year-old Kariña indigenous mother of three, who was a primary school teacher in Venezuela, earns some money making “casabe”, a thin, crunchy circular cake made from cassava flour. Her father, Diomar Tempo, 58, invented the little machine that grinds the cassava to make the flour.

The mothers are pleased that their children attend the schools in the city of Cantá, where the local government provides a bus to transport the students.

They are pioneers in recovering some features of their way of life among the 8200 indigenous Venezuelans registered as immigrants in Brazil, 10 percent of whom are recognized as refugees, according to UNHCR figures.

Millions of immigrants in the United States benefited from the program known as Obamacare, but Medicaid, for low-income people, reduced benefits only to migrants with legal status in the country. CREDIT: Telesur TV

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 23 2022 (IPS)

Getting sick is one of the worst fears facing Jorge, a Salvadoran living in the United States, because without access to health insurance or public health programs, he knows he will not be able to afford the high cost of hospital care.

“It scares me to think about what would happen if I got sick, the medical services here are very expensive,” Jorge told IPS by video call. He preferred not to mention his last name for fear that, because he is undocumented, he could be traced and deported by U.S. immigration authorities.

Jorge, 56, left his native El Salvador, the smallest of the Central American countries, more than 10 years ago, where he worked as an English teacher. He went to the United States to forge a better future for himself."One night in a hospital, depending on the health problem, can generally cost 5,000 to 10,000 dollars." -- Emilio Amaya

“I came in search of the American dream, but that dream is now a kind of American nightmare,” he said, sitting on the side of his bed in the small room where he lives in the town of Silver Spring, in the southeastern U.S. state of Maryland.

Without the documents that would allow him to live legally in the U.S., Jorge is unable to find a better job, and must settle for working in a company that distributes vegetables, grains and other groceries to online buyers. He is paid 13 dollars an hour.

“I’m actually feeling a weird little pain here, in this part of my arm,” he added, and showed the area that has started to hurt.

According to him, the pain is probably due to the long hours he has to spend in a cold room, at a temperature of 4°C, because he is in charge of removing the products to be packaged and shipped.

Immigrants demand respect for their rights, including health care, during a demonstration in front of the State Capitol in Sacramento, California. CREDIT: Courtesy of the San Bernardino Community Service Center

Lacking health care in the world’s richest country

Like Jorge, many of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States face the harsh reality of putting their lives at risk by not seeking hospital services, primarily for two reasons.

First, because they know that the costs of these medical services are exorbitantly high, even for citizens and legal residents, and even worse for undocumented immigrants, who do not have well-paying jobs and are generally ineligible to participate in state or federal health care programs.

And second, because they are afraid to go to hospitals because they believe, not without reason, that the immigration authorities will show up to detain and deport them.

“The fear is not unfounded, there have been documented cases of people who came for medical attention and the hospitals called the immigration office,” Emilio Amaya, executive director of the San Bernardino Community Service Centre, told IPS.

But Amaya added that “We cannot say that this is a generalized practice, there have been isolated cases, but it is common in towns on the border with Mexico.”

His organization, located in the San Bernardino Riverside area of California, has been helping undocumented migrants since 2001, added Amaya, a Mexican who has lived in the United States for some 40 years.

Regarding the high cost of hospital services, Amaya added: “In general terms, regardless of immigration status, access to medical care is difficult and expensive.”

And it gets more complicated, he said, in the case of undocumented immigrants, since they do not go to the hospital because they do not qualify for public medical assistance programs for low-income people, such as Medicaid, or because of the aforementioned fear of being detained by immigration authorities.

In doing so, they put their health at risk.

The possibility of receiving medical coverage, he said, as a result of state or federal programs, depends on the state or city where one lives, since there is no national standard that applies across-the-board throughout the country.

And while undocumented individuals generally have difficulty becoming eligible for some form of public health care, such as the national Medicaid program, in some states, such as California, there have been positive steps toward greater inclusion.

“For years we have been working on a campaign called Health for All, which has been allowing anyone, regardless of their immigration status, to have access to public health services,” Amaya said.

He said that a few years ago, young people up to the age of 26, regardless of their immigration status, qualified for Medicaid, and last year a law was passed that gives medical coverage to anyone over the age of 55, regardless of immigration status.

“Now we are trying to extend this to any person regardless of age,” he said.

But “this is not the case in other states, such as Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, the Carolinas, where access to health care for the undocumented community is nonexistent,” he said.

Americans and immigrants call for a public health system that guarantees universal access and want Medicaid to cover migrants without resources, regardless of their immigration status. CREDIT: Telesur TV

An arm and a leg

Most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States come from four countries: Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, which face acute problems of unemployment, insecurity, lack of education and housing.

In the United States, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, a healthcare system dominated by the profit motive, driven by one branch of the financial industry – the insurance industry – reigns supreme.

“This is unbridled capitalism, in all its glory,” said Jorge, talking to IPS at 7:00 p.m. while at the same time preparing his food and other things, to get up the next day at 4:00 a.m., and start his up to 14-hour workday an hour later.

If you do not have an employer that provides health insurance, or if you are not a beneficiary of programs such as Medicaid, which is designed with state or federal funds to cover people with little ability to pay, the cost of medical treatment must be borne by you alone, and it costs an arm and a leg.

“One night in a hospital, depending on the health problem, can generally cost 5,000 to 10,000 dollars,” Amaya said.

An operation can run around 50,000 to 100,000 dollars, “and someone with cancer ends up half a million dollars in debt,” he added.

Hospitals are required by law to provide medical services regardless of immigration status.

But with no private insurance policy and no medical coverage, and with a bill to pay of several thousand dollars, these hospitals give people the possibility of paying for the service in monthly installments.

According to the Cable News Network (CNN), which cited a report released in July 2021 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 23 percent of immigrants in general and 46 percent of undocumented immigrants are uninsured, compared to just over nine percent of U.S. citizens.

Jorge told how a co-worker, an undocumented Guatemalan whose name he preferred not to give, suffered a hernia six months ago. He went to the hospital when he could no longer stand the pain, and the treatment cost him 12,000 dollars.

“Since then, he has that debt to the hospital, he hasn’t been able to pay a thing until now,” Jorge said.

The Guatemalan’s father-in-law, who he also did not identify, had an accident at work, falling from the roof of a house and suffering multiple fractures, said Jorge.

A metal plate to replace the broken bone, plus several therapy sessions, cost 400,000 dollars, he said.

Oscar, a Mexican immigrant who has obtained U.S. citizenship, told IPS that in 2004, having just arrived as a beneficiary of a legal temporary work program sponsored by a binational agreement, he sought help for stress.

An ambulance from one of the hospitals in Panama City Beach, the city in the state of Florida where he lived at the time, picked him up for medical assistance.

“They took an X-ray and an electrocardiogram, and I spent about two hours in the hospital, and for that they charged me 800 dollars,” said Oscar, 56, who works as a driver for the rideshare app Lyft and lives in Richmond, California.

The medical coverage included in Oscar’s contract only covered work-related accidents, he said, not other types of ailments outside the scope of work, although the stress was probably directly linked to the hotel work he performed.

Amaya, the director of the San Bernardino Community Service Centre, noted that despite the burden of having to pay debts for the hospital service received, the organization encourages undocumented individuals to seek health care.

“It is better to save your life by running up a debt you have to pay off in installments than to lose your life by not seeking the extremely expensive service,” he concluded.

Haitian cultural producer Bob Montinard and his French wife, Melanie, are seen at the Haitian food stand they run at the monthly refugee food fair in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, where the couple and their two children have been living since 2010 and where they created Mawon, an organisation dedicated to helping immigrants. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 2 2018 (IPS)

The war in Angola, the earthquake in Haiti, Venezuela’s political crisis and shortages and the political repression in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the main driving factors behind the recent waves of immigration to Brazil.

The largest and most populous Latin American country is no longer the major recipient of immigrants that it was until the mid-twentieth century, which gave it its well-known ethnic and cultural diversity, with large European, Arab and Asian inflows.

Brazil, with a current population of 208 million inhabitants, had only 713,568 foreign residents in 2015, equivalent to just 0.3 percent of its population at that time, according to the World Migration Report 2018 published in December by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

Almost nothing compared to Argentina and Venezuela, where immigrants represent 4.5 and 4.8 percent of the population, respectively, IOM Brazil project coordinator Marcelo Torelly told IPS.

But Brazil again became an attractive destination this century, especially in the current decade, when the number of foreign-born inhabitants grew 20 percent from 2010 to 2015, according to the IOM.

“The main flow of immigration is now South-South from Haiti, Africa and Asia, not the flows from bordering nations, and surpassing those from the North,” academic Leonardo Cavalcanti, scientific coordinator of the Observatory of International Migration (OBMigra), a joint studies group of the Ministry of Labour and the University of Brasilia, told IPS.

There was an upsurge after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which claimed more than 220,000 lives, displaced 1.5 million people and destroyed the local economy.

Tens of thousands of Haitians sought a chance to rebuild their lives in Brazil, making up the largest foreign group in the formal labour market since 2013.

Brazil already had close relations with Haiti prior to the earthquake. In addition to sending thousands of soldiers and being in charge of the military command of the multinational United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, between 2004 and 2017, it also carried out social projects in the Caribbean island nation.

Among the Brazilians killed in the earthquake was Zilda Arns, who brought to Haiti the experience of the Pastoral Care of Children, a Catholic organisation that she founded, and which was instrumental in reducing child mortality in Brazil.

Bob Montinard, a 42-year-old Haitian, was working in Port-au-Prince on disarmament, conflict mediation and reintegration projects for juvenile offenders after their release, promoted by the U.N. and the Brazilian non-governmental organisation Viva Río, when the earthquake destroyed his house and his left leg was broken as debris fell.

Worried about the malnutrition of their children – including their unborn baby – due to food shortages in their country, this Venezuelan woman – who asked to preserve her anonymity – and her husband decided to migrate to Brazil. They sold their home to finance their trip to Rio de Janeiro, where she received excellent healthcare in childbirth, her husband has already found work, and the children are impressed with the number of playgrounds. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Surgeries in France and the need for ongoing physiotherapy made him decide to move to Río de Janeiro, where he has lived since 2010 with his French wife and their children aged eight and nine, as a cultural producer and activist.

Last year he founded an organisation called Mawon, which in the Haitian Creole language means chestnut colour but was also the name given to black slaves who fled to freedom, like the “quilombolas” in Brazil.

“Mawon is neither black nor white, it is Creole, meaning escape and now migration, diversity, mixture, and against racism,” defined Montinard, explaining that the organisation is active in social issues, welcoming immigrants and helping them get settled in Brazil, and also has a business side.

“Migrants bring their culture, their food and their music. It is what they produce, share and sell in the destination country. Everyone wins: immigrants get an income, while they offer enriching knowledge for all,” he told IPS.

Cultural production is the best way to integrate immigrants, especially in Rio de Janeiro, he said while frying typical Haitian plantain snacks at a food stand.

Aryadne Bittencourt is legal protection agent for refugees in Caritas in Rio de Janeiro, a Catholic organisation that assists some 150 foreigners per week, to whom it provides a small financial aid stipend, job training and Portuguese language courses, to help them survive and integrate in Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

He was at the refugee food fair, held monthly in Botafogo, a Río de Janeiro neighbourhood, with support from the local Anglican church, which provides outdoor patios, from the Catholic organisation Caritas, and from the Local Board, a group that connects producers and consumers, to offer healthy meals at fair prices.

In recent years there has also been an increased influx of Africans, such as Congolese and Senegalese, as well as Syrians, while more recently there has been an inflow of Venezuelans, all fleeing poverty or violence.

In the past, the largest number of African immigrants came from Angola, a country that shares the Portuguese language, fleeing from the civil war that ended in 2002 after 27 years of conflict.

There are also economic reasons behind the shift in immigration flows, since the 2008 international financial crisis weakened the appeal of the United States and Europe, while Brazil’s booming growth offered many employment opportunities, said Cavalcanti, who is also a graduate studies professor at the University of Brasilia.

However, that scenario changed when Brazil fell into recession in 2015, and employment fell, which reduced the flow of immigrants, except for Africans. It also failed to curb the wave of Venezuelans, who, sometimes hungry, cross the border into the state of Roraima.

Garcia Malunza, 25, together with her year and a half old daughter, fled the war in Angola and took refuge in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which she left in 2006 to migrate to Brazil, “for personal reasons.” She sells African dresses and fabrics at the refugee fair held monthly in the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Botafogo. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

This was the case of the couple who, with two young children and with her pregnant, sold their house in Venezuela to travel overland to Roraima, and from there by plane to Río de Janeiro, where they were assisted by Caritas, which helps refugees and migrants in several Brazilian cities.

“We decided to leave because I didn’t have the food or vitamins to prevent my baby from being undernourished, and the children were only eating cassava and sardines. Our business went bankrupt because of inflation and we suffered threats because we were not supporters of the government,” said the woman, who preferred to remain unidentified because they still have family in Venezuela.

“I do not see any crisis in Brazil, nothing compared to what we experienced in Venezuela,” she said, praising the good treatment she received during her daughter’s birth, the possibility of freely buying enough food and “of living without fear.”

Initially they received aid from Caritas, equivalent to 95 dollars a month for a few months, and Portuguese language courses. With her husband employed in a hotel, she hopes to “settle down and provide a decent life for our children,” who love the many playgrounds and beaches that they were unable to enjoy in their country.

The IOM, which only opened its office in Brasilia in 2016, opened another one in 2017 in the capital of Roraima, Boa Vista, in the face of the humanitarian emergency situation arising from the mass flight of Venezuelans.

Its Displacement Tracking Matrix platform began to be used in that northern state in January, to help the Brazilian authorities manage the influx, with clear data on the immigrants, Torelly reported.

Of the 33,865 refugee claims in Brazil last year, 52.7 percent were filed by Venezuelans.

Refuge for political or humanitarian reasons offers a path to legal residency in Brazil. It has been the means of entry for about one-third of foreigners in recent years. But few applications are approved.

The National Committee for Refugees, the interministerial body responsible for the approvals, only granted refuge to a little over 9,000 people, and has more than 55,000 pending applications, according to Aryadne Bittencourt, legal protection agent for Caritas Rio refugees.

A new law, passed in 2017, aims to facilitate immigration and refugee status, but the way it is being regulated would tend to continue imposing obstacles, as does the red tape, she lamented.

By Roberto Savio
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 1 2015 (IPS)

In recommendations to German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the end of July, the German Council of Economic Experts outlined how a weak member country could leave the Eurozone and called for strengthening the European monetary union.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wants Greece out because he does not believe that it will ever be able to refund the loans it has received so far, and because he thinks it is question of principle to be strict. In an interview with Der Spiegel a few days after the historical date of Jul. 13, at the end of negotiations on Greece, he said: “My grandmother used to say: benevolence comes before dissoluteness.”

Roberto Savio

Explaining the recommendations of the Council of Economic Experts, however, its chairman Christoph M. Schmidt expressed another opinion. “To ensure the cohesion of monetary union, we have to recognise that voters in creditor countries are not prepared to finance debtor countries permanently … A permanently uncooperative member state should not be able to threaten the existence of the euro.”

This is the best illustration of Germany’s Europe. Any country which does not fit into the German scenario will have to quit. Europe is no longer a question of solidarity, it is all about fiscal and monetary considerations.

Germany now says that federalism has exceptions – whenever a member of the Eurozone is perceived to be challenging the rules of the monetary union, it will be subject to complete annihilation of its state sovereignty and national democracy. This is the kind of federalism that Germany has now proclaimed.

This German position on its vision of Europe, where political and ideal considerations are no longer the basis of the European project, has triggered a strong response from a normally obedient France.“We should all realise that the idea of Europe as a political project, based on solidarity and mutual support, is on the wane. Monetary union is no longer just a step towards a democratic political union”

President François Hollande, who appears to have suddenly woken up, has come out with a call to reinforce European integration through the establishment of a “Eurozone government”, which run in the opposite direction from that of Berlin.

Germany will of course go ahead and pursue its own course, but the Paris-Berlin axis which was conceived as the fulcrum of European integration has now been seriously weakened after Germany’s imposed agreement on Greece on Jul. 13. So we have now a major realignment.

France has been the country which has always blocked any substantial progress on European integration, by continually voting against any radical step towards integration in order to preserve as much of its national sovereignty as possible.

Now it is Germany which is intent on changing the course of integration, from a political project to a fixed exchange monetary system based on creditor countries – a system in which some democracies are more equal than others.

Schäuble has been reported as expressing concern over the European Commission’s increased political role, interfering in political issues for which it has no mandate. And it is a stark fact that the Jul. 13 Brussels agreement has sought to remove politics and discretion from the functioning of the monetary union, an idea that has long been very dear to the French, and now are the French who want more European integration as protection from a German Europe.

We should all realise that the idea of Europe as a political project, based on solidarity and mutual support, is on the wane.

Monetary union is no longer just a step towards a democratic political union, as Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand sought at the reunification of Germany, and the creation of the Euro.

We are, in fact, going back to a more toxic version of the old exchange-rate mechanism of the 1990s that left countries trapped in a mechanism which worked primarily for Germany, and which led to the exit of the British pound and the temporary exit of the Italian lira.

But the euro, as Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman says, “has turned into a Roach Motel, a trap that’s hard to escape.” Once you’re in, you cannot get out, and you have to accept the diktat of the creditors.

Another Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stigliz, who was Chief Economist of the World Bank, says that the current European policy of austerity at any cost, is like going back to a “19^th century debtors’ prison. Just as imprisoned debtors could not make the income to repay, the deepening depression in Greece will make it less and less able to repay.”

Of course, what is never said openly (except by Stigliz) is that in the Greek bailout one central reason for the extremism of the new package of conditions was to teach a lessons to a radical left-wing party, Syriza, and to the Greek people who had had the audacity to reject the calls from European leaders to vote against that party.

It is not by chance that countries like Poland, which were asking to be admitted to the Eurozone, have withdrawn their applications.  The euro has become a rallying political issue, with parties from all over Europe asking to withdraw. It has become the first line of action for those who oppose European integration.

Until now, the answer of European governments has been that withdrawal is impossible under the European constitution. But now that the German Council of Economic Experts has come out with a concrete proposal on how to do that, that line of defence is crumbling.

According to many analysts, Angela Merkel is playing with fire. Germany cannot remain a credible leader of a coalition of Northern and Eastern European countries and ignore the realities and needs of Southern Europe. This is unsustainable, even in the medium term.

Meanwhile, the world goes on. Within seven years India will have overtaken China as the most populous country in the world, while within a few decades Nigeria will have a larger population than the United States.

And Europe? Europe will have become the continent with most old people and lower productivity, and will have to face its four horses of the apocalypse:

• a solution to relations with Russia;
• common agreement on how to deal with the dramatic flow of immigrants, when countries are not even able to relocate 40,000 people in a region of 450 million;
• a real policy on the explosive Middle East and terrorism; and soon
• the request of United Kingdom for a new agreement on the European Union, or else it will exit Europe.

We can safely bet that those negotiations, which will be based purely on economic issues, will be the kiss of death for the original European dream. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 12 2015 (IPS)

It is sad to see how a continent that was one cradle of civilisation is running blindly into a trap, the trap of a holy war with Islam – and that six Muslim terrorists were sufficient to bring that about.

It is time to get out of the comprehensible “We are All Charlie Hebdo” wave, to look into facts, and to understand that we are playing into the hands of a few extremists, and equating ourselves with them. The radicalisation of the conflict between the West and Islam is going to carry with it terrible consequences

Roberto Savio

The first fact is that Islam is the second largest religion in the world, with 1.6 billion practitioners, that Muslims are the majority in 49 countries of the world and that they account for 23 percent of humankind. Of these 1.6 billion, only 317 million are Arabs. Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) live in the Asia-Pacific region; in fact, more Muslims live in India and Pakistan (344 million combined). Indonesia alone has 209 million.

A Pew Research Center report on the Muslim world also inform us that it is in South Asia that Muslims are more radical in terms of observance and views. In that region, those in favour of severe corporal punishment for criminals are 81 percent, compared with 57 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, while those in favour of executing those who leave Islam are 76 percent in South Asia, compared with 56 percent in the Middle East.

Therefore, it is obvious that it is the history of the Middle East which brings the specificity of the Arabs to the conflict with the West. And here are the main four reasons.“We are falling into a deadly trap, and doing exactly what the radical Muslims want: engaging in a holy war against Islam, so that the immense majority of moderate Muslims will be pushed to take up arms … instead of a strategy of isolation, we are engaging in a policy of confrontation”

First, all the Arab countries are artificial creations. In May 1916, Monsieur François Georges-Picot for France and Sir Mark Sykes for Britain met and agreed on a secret treaty, with the support of the Russian Empire and the Italian Kingdom, on how to carve up the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.

Thus the Arab countries of today were born as the result of a division by France and Britain with no consideration for ethnic and religious realities or for history. A few of those countries, like Egypt, had an historical identity, but countries like Iraq, Arabia Saudi, Jordan, or even the Arab Emirates, lacked even that. It is worth remembering that the Kurdish issue of 30 million people divided among four countries was created by European powers.

As a consequence, the second reason. The colonial powers installed kings and sheiks in the countries that they created. To run these artificial countries, strong hands were required. So, from the very beginning, there was a total lack of participation of the people, with a political system which was totally out of sync with the process of democracy which was happening in Europe. With European blessing, these countries were frozen in feudal times.

As for the third reason, the European powers never made any investment in industrial development, or real development. The exploitation of petrol was in the hands of foreign companies and only after the end of the Second World War, and the ensuing process of decolonisation, did oil revenues really come into local hands.

When the colonial powers left, the Arab countries had no modern political system, no modern infrastructure, no local management.

Finally, the fourth reason, which is closer to our days. In states which did not provide education and health for their citizens, Muslim piety took on the task of providing what the state was not providing. So large networks of religious schools and hospital were created and, when elections were finally permitted, these became the basis for legitimacy and the vote for Muslim parties.

This is why, just taking the example of two important countries, Islamist parties won in Egypt and Algeria, and how with the acquiescence of the West, military coups were the only resort to stopping them.

This compression of so many decades into a few lines is of course superficial and leaves out many other issues. But this brutally abridged historical process is useful for understanding how anger and frustration is now all over the Middle East, and how this leads to the attraction to the Islamic State (IS) in poor sectors.

We should not forget that this historical background, even if remote for young people, is kept alive by Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people. The blind support of the West, especially of the United States, for Israel is seen by Arabs as a permanent humiliation, and Israel’s continuous expansion of settlements clearly eliminates the possibility of a viable Palestinian State.

The July-August bombing of Gaza, with just some noises of protest from the West but no real action, is for the Arab world clear proof that the intention is to keep Arabs down and seek alliances only with corrupt and delegitimised rulers who should be swept away. And the continuous Western intervention in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and the drones bombing everywhere, are widely perceived among the 1.6 billion that the West is historically engaged in keeping Islam down, as the Pew report noted.

We should also remember that Islam has several internal divisions, of which the Sunni-Shiite divide is just the largest. But while in the Arab region at least 40 percent of Sunni do not recognise a Shiite as a fellow Muslim, outside the region this tends to disappear, In Indonesia only 26 percent identify themselves as Sunni, with 56 percent identifying themselves as “just Muslim”.

In the Arab world, only in Iraq and Lebanon, where the two communities lived side by side, does a large majority of Sunni recognise Shiites as fellow Muslims. The fact that Shiites, who account for just 13 percent of Muslims, are the large majority in Iran, and the Sunni the large majority in Saudi Arabia explains the ongoing internal conflict in the region, which is being stirred by the two respective leaders.

Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966–2006), successfully deployed a policy of polarisation in Iraq, continuing attacks on Shiites and provoking an ethnic cleansing of one million Sunnis from Baghdad. Now IS, the radical caliphate which is challenging the entire Arab world besides the West, is able to attract many Sunnis from Iraq which had suffered so many Shiite reprisals, that they sought the umbrella of the very group that had deliberately provoked the Shiites.

The fact it is that every day hundreds of Arabs die because of the internal conflict, a fate that does not affect the much larger Muslim community.

Now, all terrorist attacks in the West that have happened in Ottawa, in London, and now in Paris, have the same profile: a young man from the country in question, not someone from the Arab region, who was not at all religious during his teenage years, someone who somehow drifted, did not find a job, and was a loner. In nearly all cases, someone who had already had something to do with the judicial system.

Only in the last few years had he become converted to Islam and accepted the calls from IS for killing infidels. He felt that with this he would find a justification to his life, he would become a martyr, a somebody in another world, removed from a life in which there was no real bright future.

The reaction to all this has been a campaign in the West against Islam. The latest number of the New Yorker published a strong article defining Islam not as a religion but as an ideology. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the right-wing and anti-immigrant Lega Nord has publicly condemned the Pope for engaging Islam in dialogue, and conservative Italian pundit Giuliano Ferrara declared on TV that ”we are in a Holy War”.

The overall European (and U.S.) reaction has been to denounce the Paris killings as the result of a “deadly ideology”, as President François Hollande called it.

It is certainly a sign of the anti-Muslim tide that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was obliged to take a position against the recent marches in Dresden (Muslim population 2 percent), organised by the populist movement Pegida (the German acronym for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West”). The marches were basically directed against the 200,000 asylum seekers, most of them from Iraq and Syria, whose primary intention, according to Pegida, was not to escape war.

Studies from all over Europe show that the immense majority of immigrants have successfully integrated with their host economies. United Nations studies also show that Europe, with its demographic decline, requires at least 20 million immigrants by 2050 if it wants to remain viable in welfare practices, and competitive in the world. Yet, what are we getting everywhere?

Xenophobic, right-wing parties in every country of Europe, able to make the Swedish government resign, conditioning the governments of United Kingdom, Denmark and Nederland, and looking poised to win the next elections in France.

It should be added that, while what happened in Paris was of course a heinous crime, and while expression of any opinion is essential for democracy, very few have ever seen Charlie Hebdo and its level of provocation. Especially because in 2008, as Tariq Ramadan pointed out in The Guardian of Jan. 10, Charlie Hebdo fired a cartoonist who had joke about a Jewish link to the French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s son.

Charlie Hebdo was a voice defending the superiority of France and its cultural supremacy in the world, and had a small readership, which it obtained by selling provocation – exactly the opposite of the view of a world based on respect and cooperation among different cultures and religions.

So now we are all Charlie, as everybody is saying. But to radicalise the clash between the two largest religions of the world is not a minor affair. We should fight terrorism, be it Muslim or not (let us not forget that a Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, who wanted to keep his country free of Muslim penetration, killed 91 of his co-citizens).

But we are falling into a deadly trap, and doing exactly what the radical Muslims want: engaging in a holy war against Islam, so that the immense majority of moderate Muslims will be pushed to take up arms.

The fact that European right-wing parties will reap the benefit of this radicalisation goes down very well for the radical Muslims. They dream of a world fight, in which they will make Islam – and not just any Islam, but their interpretation of Sunnism – the sole religion. Instead of a strategy of isolation, we are engaging in a policy of confrontation.

And, apart from September 11 in New York, the losses of life have been miniscule compared with what is going on in the Arab world, where just in one country – Syria – 50,000 people lost their lives last year.

How can we so blindly fall into the trap without realising that we are creating a terrible clash all over the world? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Sub-Saharan migrant garbage collectors push their carts through the streets of Tripoli´s old town. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
TRIPOLI, Libya, Dec 18 2014 (IPS)

It’s easy to spot Saani Bubakar in Tripoli´s old town: always dressed in the distinctive orange jumpsuit of the waste collectors, he pushes his cart through the narrow streets on a routine that has been his for the last three years of his life.

“I come from a very poor village in Niger where there is not even running water,” explains the 23-year-old during a break. “Our neighbours told us that one of their sons was working in Tripoli, so I decided to take the trip too.”

Of the 250 Libyan dinars [about 125 euro or 154 dollars] Bubakar is paid each month, he manages to send more than half to his family back home. Accommodation, he adds, is free.

“We are 50 in an apartment nearby,” says the migrant worker, who assures that he will be back in Niger “soon”. It is not the poor working conditions but the increasing instability in the country that makes him want to go back home.

Thousands of migrants remain detained in Libyan detention centres, where they face torture that includes “severe whippings, beatings, and electric shocks” – Human Rights Watch
Three years after Libya´s former ruler Muammar Gaddafi was toppled and killed, Libya remains in a state of political turmoil that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war. There are two governments and two separate parliaments – one based in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk, 1,000 km east of the capital. The latter, set up after elections in June when only 10 percent of the census population took part, has international recognition.

Accordingly, several militias are grouped into two paramilitary alliances: Fajr (“Dawn” in Arabic), led by the Misrata brigades controlling Tripoli, and Karama (“Dignity”) commanded by Khalifa Haftar, a Tobruk-based former army general.

The population and, very especially, the foreign workers are seemingly caught in the crossfire. “I´m always afraid of working at night because the fighting in the city usually starts as soon as the sun hides,” explains Odar Yahub, one of Bubakar´s roommates.

At 22, Yahub says that will not go back to Niger until he has earned enough to get married – but that will probably take longer than expected:

“We haven´t been paid for the last four months, and no one has given us any explanation,” the young worker complains, as he empties his bucket in the garbage truck.

While most of the sweepers are of sub-Saharan origin, there are also many who arrived from Bangladesh. Aaqib, who prefers not to disclose his full name, has already spent four years cleaning the streets of Souk al Juma neighbourhood, east of the capital. He says he supports his family in Dhaka – the Bangladeshi capital – by sending home almost all the 450 Libyan dinars (225 euros) from his salary, which he has not received for the last four months either.

“Of course I’ve dreamed of going to Europe but I know many have died at sea,” explains Aaqib, 28. “I´d only travel by plane, and with a visa stamped on my passport,” he adds. For the time being, his passport is in the hands of his contractor. All the waste collectors interviewed by IPS said their documents had been confiscated.

Defenceless

From his office in east Tripoli, Mohamed Bilkhaire, who became Minister of Employment in the Tripoli Executive two months ago, claims that he is not surprised by the apparent contradiction between the country´s 35 percent unemployment rate – according to his sources – and the fact that all the garbage collectors are foreigners.

“Arabs do not sweep due to sociocultural factors, neither here nor in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq … We need foreigners to do the job,” says Bilkhaire, Asked about the garbage collectors´ salaries, he told IPS that they are paid Libya´s minimum income of 450 Libyan dinars, and that any smaller amount is due to “illegal subcontracting which should be prosecuted.”

Bilkhaire also admitted that passports were confiscated “temporarily” because most of the foreign workers “want to cross to Europe.”

According to data gathered and released by FRONTEX, the European Union´s border agency, among the more than 42,000 immigrants who arrived in Italy during the first four months of 2014, 27,000 came from Libya.

In a report released by Human Rights Watch in June, the NGO claimed that thousands of migrants remain detained in Libyan detention centres, where they face torture that includes “severe whippings, beatings, and electric shocks.”

“Detainees have described to us how male guards strip-searched women and girls and brutally attacked men and boys,” said Gerry Simpson, senior refugee researcher in the same report.

In the case of foreign workers under contract, Hanan Salah, HRW researcher for Libya, told IPS that “with the breakdown of the judicial system in many regions, abusive employers and those who do not comply with whatever contract was agreed upon, can hardly be held accountable in front of the law.”

Shokri Agmar, a lawyer from Tripoli, talks about “complete and utter helplessness”:

“The main problem for foreign workers in Libya is not merely the judicial neglect but rather that they lack a militia of their own to protect themselves,” Agmar told IPS from his office in Gargaresh, west of Tripoli.

That is precisely one of the districts where large numbers of migrants gather until somebody picks them up for a day of work, generally as construction workers.

Aghedo arrived from Nigeria three weeks ago. For this 25-year-old holding a shovel with his right hand, Tripoli is just a stopover between an endless odyssey across the Sahara Desert and a dangerous sea journey to Italy.

“There are days when they do not even pay us, but also others when we can make up to 100 dinars,” Aghedo tells IPS.

The young migrant hardly lowers his guard as he is forced to distinguish between two types of pick-up trucks: the ones which offer a job that is not always paid and those driven by the local militia – a false step and he will end up in one of the most feared detention centres.

“I know I could find a job as a sweeper but I cannot wait that long to raise the money for a passage in one of the boats bound for Europe,” explains the young migrant, without taking his eyes off the road.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Dec 4 2014 (IPS)

The fact that in a referendum Switzerland has taken a path that goes in the opposite direction from that of Europe is an unusual fact which calls for reflection, especially because Switzerland has taken a much more progressive path, while we all were accustomed to see it as a very conservative country.

On Nov. 30, Swiss citizens were asked to vote on a proposal for reducing immigrants to a maximum of 17,000 per year, compared with 88.000 in 2013. This was rejected by 73 percent of the voters, after a unanimous campaign by the government, industrialists and trade unions that without immigrants there would be serious problems in keeping the economy expanding.

Roberto Savio

It is worth noting that foreigners account for 23.5 percent of the population in Switzerland, compared with an average of 4 percent in Europe as a whole.

Another proposal in the same referendum called for dedicating 10 percent of Swiss international cooperation to birth control in poor countries in order to reduce their birth rate. It was clearly a racist proposal, and was also defeated. Swiss citizens have no right to decide birth policies in other countries.

While the Swiss were voting, British Prime Minister David Cameron was making public his proposal to drastically restrict European immigration. Europeans would be expelled if they did not find a job within six months. They would have work continuously for four years before having access to the country’s social benefits of the country. They would also face restrictions to their right to bring their families with them, even after finding a job.“The real problem is that Europe has a dramatic lack of real statesmen or stateswomen who are ready to go against the polls for the good of their country”

The same debate is going on in Germany, where the government is also carrying out a media campaign to popularise its bill of law which also contemplates the expulsion of European immigrants who do not find a job within six months. It is obvious that this will have a cascade effect in several other European countries.

In both cases, this is an attempt to undercut anti-European parties – the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) which is on the rise in Britain and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, although the AfD is not a threat like the UKIP and what Chancellor Angela Merkel is doing amounts to an act of populism.

There is a wave of xenophobia spreading throughout Europe. Marine Le Pen’s National Front is aiming to become the number one party in France. In Italy, the right-wing Northern League is growing by the day. Today there is a xenophobic and anti-European party in every country of Europe, with the notable exception of Spain, where the People’s Party has been able to make a right-wing party redundant.

What is striking is that all those parties are creating alliances and creating a pan-European rejection of the European Union. Marine Le Pen has just chaired a meeting in Lyon of seven extreme right-wing parties, like the Flemish Vlaame Belang in Belgium and the Dutch Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders.

What was even more striking was the presence of two leaders of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Among Europe’s right-wing parties there is growing support for Putin, and a Russian bank, the First Czech-Russian Bank with headquarters in Moscow, has just given a loan of nine million dollars to the Le Pen’s National Front.

The reality is that Europe is in serious need of young immigrants to remain competitive internationally, and innumerable studies show that immigrants have a positive impact on the economy.

In England, immigrants account for 4.3 percent of the population, their rate of employment is 78.8 percent, slightly higher than the British average (73.6 percent), and just 15 percent of immigrants request some kind of subsidy. According to a study by University College London, European immigrants who arrived in the United Kingdom contributed more than 20 billion pounds to the country’s public finances between 2001 and 2011.

Similarly, all national and European studies on immigration show that immigrants request less subsidies than nationals, are net contributors in terms of taxation, and take jobs that nationals no longer want.

According to United Nations projections, Europe has a deficit of 20 million people if it wants to keep the pension system viable, but this is not simply “politically correct” at this moment. The very small minority of immigrants involved in crime is what everybody sees through strong media exposure, and the parties which are making their fortune are calling for a white and pure Europe again.

Pope Francis speaks about ethics and solidarity with immigrants, but if parties are able to ignore economics, just imagine ethics!

The Spanish National Institute of Statistics has just released its latest findings, and they are in line with similar studies everywhere in Europe. In 1976, 676,718 children were born in Spain – 18.7 babies for every 1,000 mothers. In 1995, there were 363,467 births – 9.2 babies for every 1,000 mothers.

For every 100 Spaniards of working age, 27.6 are over the age of 64 – by 2050, this figure will be closer to 73. An even more extreme figure comes from the Population Division of the United Nations. If the Spanish borders were to be closed and nobody could enter or leave, and with the growing reduction in the number of women of fertile age, by 2100 the Spanish population would stand at around 800,000 people!

We have just to look to the United States to see the opposite policy. Every year, young people bring constant expansion to the labour force and the economy. Not even the most rabid Republican speaks of abolishing immigration, just of keeping it at a lower rate.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is riding the issue of immigration due his shrinking popularity, but in the opposite direction. He wants to legalise as many illegal immigrants as possible … and there are already 52 million immigrants.

The real problem is that Europe has a dramatic lack of real statesmen or stateswomen who are ready to go against the polls for the good of their country. The best example is the powerful Angela Merkel, who has never taken any risk or any difficult decision (except on abolishing nuclear power, and that only because of the general aversion after the Japanese tsunami).

Merkel’s comment on the law on restricting European immigrants was: “Europe is not a social union”. In other words, the flow of capital is protected, the flow of workers is not.

In all this, the European Commission has been silent on immigration. And now, its President, Jean-Claude Juncker, unmoved by the revelations on how he helped hundreds of corporations to avoid taxes in Europe with deals in Luxembourg, is now presenting a development plan to which the Commission would contribute just 10 percent and the remaining 90 percent would be funded by the private sector… and that is his landmark!

Europe is clearly committing suicide and people will find out when it has already lost its position in world competition … only then, maybe, will the difference between a statesman and a politician become clear. (IPS/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Immigrants in Russia could face a wave of violence following thousands of arrests in a crackdown on illegal immigration which has been condemned not only for human rights breaches but for entrenching a virulent negative public perception of migrants.

More than 7,000 people were arrested across Moscow – and more than 800 already served with deportation orders – under Operation Migrant 2014 which ran between Oct. 23 and Nov. 2 in the Russian capital.

The scale of the operation and methods used by the authorities has left international and local rights organisations outraged.

They say police used violence during raids on thousands of locations, including work places, markets, lodgings, hotels and people’s homes. They said that some migrants were forcibly taken from their families with no information given to relatives of where they were being taken.“Operations like this [Operation Migration 2014] only reinforce negative images of migrants in Russia and increase violence towards them. Once Russians see images of the raids in the news they will rally to support the government's actions” – Tolekan Ismailova, Vice-President of the International Federation for Human Rights

Some were deported without proper procedures being observed, according to local lawyers while others claim many of an estimated up to 100,000 migrants detained had money confiscated by police before being released without their detention being recorded.

Tolekan Ismailova, vice-president of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), said: “This is simply an institutionalised way of intimidating migrants and their families. The operation violates Russia’s international obligations to respect human dignity and ban the practice of arbitrary detentions.”

But beyond the rights abuses, the highly-publicised raids are, critics argue, also helping foment and entrench a xenophobic attitude to migrants in wider society that increases the risk of violence against them.

Ismailova told IPS: “Operations like this only reinforce negative images of migrants in Russia and increase violence towards them. Once Russians see images of the raids in the news they will rally to support the government’s actions.”

The warnings come amid hardening attitudes towards what some Russian MPs estimate to be as many as 10 million migrants across Russia.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s large cities have been a magnet for migrants, mainly from former neighbouring Soviet states. Wages on offer in cities like St Petersburg and Moscow are often enough for immigrants to support entire families back at home. In some Central Asian countries, remittances sent home from workers in Russia account for as much as one-third of national GDP.

But successful assimilation of those migrants has been limited for a number of reasons. Migrants, especially those from Central Asia, have tended to interact within their own communities while support from Russian authorities and representatives of their own states has often been weak.

Rights groups say local employers routinely exploit migrants, refusing to give  them proper contracts, leaving them with no rights, often working in poor conditions and for low wages. Many are de facto working and residing illegally, and unable to access health care and pension systems.

Their situation also forces many to live in bad conditions and fuels criminality and violence in migrant communities, leading to further arrests and a perpetuation of negative attitudes towards migrants in wider society.

Ismailova told IPS: “Central Asian migrants are harassed because there is a culture of racism in Russia that perpetuates the stereotype that they are ‘black’ and they do the ‘black’ work in Russia. Many Russians have prejudices against Central Asians.”

Attitudes to migrants hardened in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008 and have worsened considerably since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012.

Critics say that the Kremlin is pursuing a xenophobic and anti-migrant policy in an attempt to distract Russians from wider problems in society.

They point to Operation Migrant 2014 as just the latest in a string of recent highly-visible crackdowns seemingly aimed at reinforcing the public perception of illegal immigrants posing a threat.

Operation Illegal 2014, similar to Operation Migrant 2014, was conducted in St Petersburg from Sep. 22 to Oct. 10, resulting in charges being brought against 437 migrants. And just last month, draft legislation was heard in parliament which would increase the penalties for foreigners exceeding maximum stay periods in the country.

Rights campaigners also point to other methods being used to fuel distrust of migrants, including authorities’ encouragement of citizens to report migrants they suspect of working illegally to a special hotline which passes the information to the police.

According to Ismailova, “this is exactly the same strategy that was used by the KGB. It creates a sense of distrust among people and is a major obstacle against securing human rights for migrants.”

The raids, arrests, anti-immigrant legislation and rhetoric from public officials – last month Moscow’s mayor said that were it not for illegal immigrants Moscow would be the safest city in the world – are little more than a “PR exercise” designed to deflect attention from other issues.

Tanya Lokshina, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Moscow, told IPS: “With the ruble suffering an alarming drop, the government is apparently trying to divert people’s attention from concerns over living standards by turning their discontent towards migrants and, at the same time, demonstrating its own ‘effectiveness’  by attacking that ‘enemy’.”

Lokshina also said that “part of the problem with irregular migration is that employers don’t provide migrant workers with proper contracts. No one wants to work without a contract or permit – they do it because they have no other option. The government should ensure that migrant workers have contracts and relevant guarantees.”

Authorities have defended the need to tackle illegal immigration. They say that, among others,  illegal immigrants put a massive strain on state resources, particularly the health care system – migrants seeking medical help costs Moscow alone a reported 150 million dollars each year.

But rights campaigners say the government should be looking to strengthen migrants’ rights instead of enforcing repressive crackdowns.

They say authorities should give more notification to migrants to have residency and other documents in order before any raids are carried out and that a current three-month entry and exit visa regime for many migrants should be cancelled.

Even migration experts have openly questioned the policy of mass arrests.

Vyacheslav Postavnin, president of the Migration XXI Century foundation which cooperates with the Russian government working on migration policy, told Russian news agency TASS last week: “There are a lot of question marks around operations like this. I can see no quantitative value in them.

“Even if a thousand people were detained, there are thousands more that have not broken laws. The question is why were they arrested, taken away somewhere  and to some extent humiliated? What happens when it is found out that they are working legally?”

Others warn that the situation for immigrants is becoming increasingly fraught and there are serious concerns about the risk of violence against the immigrant community in the near future.

The Russian public holiday of Unity Day on Nov. 4 is often marked by massive nationalist and anti-migrant demonstrations in major cities and was last yearpreceded by violent riots in Moscow after an ethnic Azeri was alleged to have killed a Russian. Meanwhile, in St Petersburg, a migrant of Uzbek origin was killed during the national holiday.

When asked whether further violence against immigrants could be expected following the publicity around the arrests, Lokshina told IPS: “It’s certainly likely.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

‘Mare Nostrum’ – the largest search and rescue immigration operation ever carried out in the Mediterranean Sea – has become an issue of bitter brinkmanship between human rights groups and anti-immigrant lobbies.

At a higher political level, it has produced a tough negotiation between Italy and Europe, with the former asking for a European solution to immigration control in the Mediterranean.

Abandoned migrant boats lie lifeless opposite the port of Lampedusa, Italy, an island which experiences frequent migration from nearby North Africa. Credit: UN Photo/UNHCR/Phil Behan

‘Mare Nostrum’ was launched in October 2013 by Italy in the wake of a shipwreck south of the island of Lampedusa – the southernmost part of Italy lying 176 km off the coast of Sicily – that took the lives of 368 immigrants, mostly refugees from Syria and African countries.

The search and rescue operation is a military naval operation supported by the Italian Air Force and Coast Guard as well as civilian volunteers and medical personnel. It has operated in a vast area of the Central Mediterranean.

Between October 2013 and August 2014, ‘Mare Nostrum’ rescued over 115,000 people, mostly refugees, and transferred them to Italian territory. About 2,000 people are estimated to have lost their lives in the Mediterranean during the same period.

Human rights activists have praised the operation for rescuing refugees while its opponents have blamed it for producing a pull factor for immigrants and providing an illicit shuttle to Europe for them, making the job of traffickers easier.

The European Commission has now decided to flank the ‘Mare Nostrum’ initiative, although it has no intention of replacing it. After a meeting on August 27, European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmstrom and Italian Minister of the Interior Angelino Alfano announced a new Frontex operation to stand by Italy’s ‘Mare Nostrum’ operation in the Mediterranean.

One of the main roles of Frontex – the European Union agency for external border security that started operations in May 2005 – is to protect Europe’s external borders from illegal immigration and people trafficking.

Announcing the new operation, which has temporarily been named ‘Frontex Plus’, Commissioner Malmstrom called on European member states to translate “oral solidarity into concrete action” by contributing resources and means.Humanitarian organisations in Italy have been quick to criticise ‘Frontex Plus’, saying that its description is still vague and that its primary aim is not the rescuing of immigrants and refugees but the upgrading of border surveillance and deterrence.

Ska Keller, Green Member of the European Parliament  told IPS that the new operation is “the result of pressure extorted by Italy on Brussels, but not what Italy has been asking for. It’s true Italy is rescuing a lot of people but this is not their main concern, they will not necessarily be happy to continue with Mare Nostrum.”

Humanitarian organisations in Italy have been quick to criticise ‘Frontex Plus’, saying that its description is still vague and that its primary aim is not the rescuing of immigrants and refugees but the upgrading of border surveillance and deterrence.

Silvia Canciani, press officer of the Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration (ASGI), told IPS that her association is “extremely concerned” because the only certainty about the new operation “is that ships will patrol only in European waters, 12 miles from the coast”, meaning they will no longer venture into international waters, like ‘Mare Nostrum’, which operated 170 miles from the Italian coast.

She added that it is still unknown whether Italian authorities plan to postpone, amend or carry on with ‘Mare Nostrum’ as it is, but a withdrawal from the operation might have a direct consequence on lives being lost in the Mediterranean.

Other critical voices stress how conservatives in the European Union see an opportunity in the negotiations that will follow on the new operation to capitalise on the issue of returning incoming migrants to safe third countries or to their countries of embarkation.

In a blog commenting on the announcement of ‘Frontex Plus’, Italian law professor Fulvio Vassalo Paleologo, a well-known commentator on immigration issues in the region, observed that in their joint announcement “the word ‘rescue’ has disappeared from Alfano’s and Malmstom’s vocabulary.” He also noted that neither of them had made a single remark about the conditions immigrants face in transit countries.

Both could be indications that the European Commission is seriously considering pushing for the control of population influxes outside European borders.

One day before the Malmstrom-Alfano announcement, the Italian edition of Huffington Post published an article citing an anonymous source in the Italian Ministry of the Interior, who was present at negotiations for the new operations in Brussels, as saying that “many people in Brussels see Mare Nostrum as an informal ferry for migrants.”

The unprecedented flows Europe is going to face given the geopolitical crisis in the Middle East will enforce a change of policy, which will translate into trying to “manage the flows of refugees and migrants in transit countries before they are on board for Italy,” the source said.

For this, he continued “we must work to re-negotiate readmission agreements with countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco” and then stop incoming immigrants on board and not let them proceed to Italy “unless they have already started the procedures for refugee status and we have already made identifications before they are on board.”

The policy scenario in the Huffington Post article was vividly mirrored in an Italian Interior Ministry’s press release two days later, after a meeting between Minister Alfano and his French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve to discuss “illegal immigration in the Central Mediterranean”.

Notably the meeting took place only one day after the announcement of ‘Frontex Plus’ in which France is expected to be one of the most active partners.

In the ministry’s press release, the term ‘rescue’ is again absent and the definition of the aim of ‘Frontex Plus’ is to “ensure control and surveillance of the external sea borders of the European Union … according to the rules of Frontex.”

From the press release, it also appears that both the Italian and French ministers believe that the issue of immigration should increasingly be dealt with “as a foreign policy issue” with “more emphasis to be given to the role of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”, meaning the European External Action Service (EEAS) which implements the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy.

The two ministers also identified two key policy objectives to push for within the European Union: “the commitment of all Member States of the European Union to a strict application of the rules for the identification of illegal migrants provided by European legislation and the strengthening of cooperation with countries of origin and transit in the field of border surveillance, police cooperation and development aid to these countries.”

Frontex’s key role in a new operation could facilitate these objectives given that the regulation “establishing rules for the surveillance of the external sea borders in the context of operational cooperation coordinated by the European Agency for the Management of Operation Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the EU (Frontex)” adopted on April 30, 2014, includes provisions for the interception of incoming vessels in international waters and their return to third countries.

Many pro-immigrant organisations such as Frontexit (a campaign led by associations, researchers and individuals from both North and South of the Mediterranean on the initiative of the Migreurop network), the Belgian Coordination Initiative for Refugees and Foreigners (CIRE), as well as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists, have indicated highly controversial legal gaps in the regulation that could compromise the rights of persons in need of international protection.

In a joint briefing, the latter said that despite some positive aspects, other aspects fail to meet the requirements of international law, including refugee law, human rights law, the law of the sea and E.U. law.

When asked to comment on the nature of the ‘Frontex Plus’ operation, Malmstroms’s office said: “At the moment we do not have anything to add in addition to the statement made by the Commissioner last week. The Commission is working on the definition of the adequate operational area and the components of a larger joint operation which can be a useful complement to the Italian efforts.”

It is thus clear that ‘Frontex Plus’ will eventually only play a merely auxiliary role alongside Italy’s ‘Mare Nostrum’ operation, particularly so when the costs of the operation are taken into account.

‘Mare Nostrum’ costs Italy over 9 million euro each month, while the current entire 2014 budget for Frontex is 89 million euro, with only 55 of them allocated for operational activities.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Joaquín Roy
BARCELONA, Jul 14 2014 (IPS)

A few decades ago, even before the end of the Cold War and before and after Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House, analyses regularly referred to U.S. decadence. At other times, it was Europe’s turn for pessimistic descriptions, especially when it could not overcome its ambivalence over deepening integration, and above all because of the failure of its constitutional project. 

The West was in crisis. And now the pair are apparently going through a similar phase, with each one trying to outdo the other in inferiority.

The United States seems to be in the doldrums because of the apparently erratic foreign policy of President Barack Obama, who does not seem to be profiting from surmounting the legacy of George W. Bush’s actions in the Middle East.

Joaquín Roy

Obama’s agenda based on “leading from behind” is creating serious problems that would damage his re-election chances if he were eligible (which he is not).

Hillary Clinton may inherit this liability if she finally decides to run for the presidency. What is certain is that indecision in Syria, the disaster of Iraq’s disintegration and the still unsolved challenge of Russia in Ukraine, create a picture of the United States in international decline.“Both partners [Europe and the United States] are still the natural allies that could lead the world out of the crisis. And the future of both is welded to their role as immigration destinations” – Joaquín Roy

The European Union, for its part, does not offer a more hopeful scenario, and only if it is able to strengthen its institutions following the European Parliament elections in May will it be able to overcome the generalised forecast of a problematic future.

Gripped by the rise of populism and neo-nationalism and with its economy weighed down by inequality and lack of sustained growth, the European Union is a long way from offering alternative leadership and hope for the rest of the planet, and appropriately partnering the United States to beat the global crisis.

Yet curiously, this odd couple, which can be subsumed in what is generously called the West, can pride itself on an immense capital that is a basis not only for survival, but of sustained leadership for the rest of the world.

In both cases, a systematic humanitarian tragedy reveals their mutual strength and guarantees their future survival. Dramatic, repeated migration processes produce huge human capital flows to both Europe and the United States compared with other regions.

On the one hand, thousands of Latin American teenagers are invading the United States in search of a much better future than they are leaving behind in Central America, racked by crime, poverty and inequality.

On the other hand, the shores of Italy are being bombarded by desperate migrants cast up by traffickers, resulting in shipwrecks and deaths by suffocation. Elsewhere, attempts to take the Spanish border by storm in the enclaves in Morocco have ceased to call attention as newsworthy.

What do these apparently dissimilar scenarios reveal?

Quite simply, that the strength of these partners in crisis is based on their relatively powerful magnetism for migrants.

For all the present difficulties suffered by many European countries, the prospect of life in Europe is comparatively far better than in Africa or Asia, and even Latin America, in spite of the fact that many immigrants are returning to their countries of origin.

The future and the present of the United States – as it always was in the past – remains linked to the immigration pool. Hence, U.S. sectors that oppose migration reform are not only destined to fail, they are also currently rendering poor service to their country.

Both regions, now engaged in exploring a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement, are destined to surpass other world regions in terms of standard of living and future expectations.

Both partners are still the natural allies that could lead the world out of the crisis. And the future of both is welded to their role as immigration destinations.

Excerpt:

Credit: Nikos Pilos

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, May 28 2014 (IPS)

The evolution of immigration and border control policy in Greece and its interdependence with European funding suggests an agenda which has been decided above national legislatures with strong coordination between European political actors and economic interests, while ignoring the human suffering it produces.

Since February, the Greek authorities have taken another step towards harsher treatment of irregular immigrants by announcing a policy of indefinite detention until repatriation. Indefinite detention has been based on an opinion of the Legal Council of the Greek State and will be implemented even in cases where repatriation is not feasible.

Earlier this week, a Greek court considered the premises of this decision to be against national and European legislation and asked for it to be revoked. Authorities have yet to react to this decision.

Since the summer of 2012, when police launched a crackdown policy on irregular immigrants with ‘Operation Xenios Zeus’, administrative detention has been implemented on a massive scale, often applied for the maximum period of 18 months.

Now the opinion of the Council of State considers this extension to be not ‘detention’ but a restrictive measure for the benefit of immigrants who otherwise, if released, could be exposed to situations of danger.

“Prolonged and systematic detention is leading to devastating consequences on the health and dignity of migrants and asylum seekers in Greece” – Doctors Without Borders
Detention has been denounced as ineffective and inhumane by various international organisations and local NGOs. Doctors without Borders called the measure an “appalling sign of the country’s harsh treatment of migrants”.

In a new report published last month regarding living conditions in detention camps in Greece, the organisation warned that “prolonged and systematic detention is leading to devastating consequences on the health and dignity of migrants and asylum seekers in Greece.”

While attracting severe criticism, the Greek authorities show no intention of relaxing their harsh measures. On the contrary, the tendency towards stricter controls appears to be in line with the European Commissions (EC) guidelines and funding rearrangements.

In September 2012 , a month after Greece launched Xenios Dias, the implementing rules of the Return Fund were amended, introducing several changes, including the possibility of financing infrastructure projects such as renovation and refurbishment or, in case of specific needs, construction of detention facilities.

The Return Fund is the European structure that finances the majority of immigration control projects throughout Europe.

Further, last year the Commission proposed an amendment increasing the EU co-financing rate, among others, of immigration control-related projects to be covered by the European Return Fund and the External Border Fund (from 50 or 75 percent by 20 percentage points).

The amendment would not result in any increase in EU funding, but it would allow the Member States concerned to decrease compulsory national co-financing.

In the case of Greece, the compulsory national co-financing for projects could be decreased from 25 to 5 percent. The legislative proposal was adopted in spring 2013.

Danai Angeli, a researcher with Greek ELIAMEP think-tank that runs ‘MIDAS’, an immigration control policy cost-effectiveness research project to be concluded later this year, told IPS that the interdependence of Greek policy and EC support cannot be questioned.

“The practice of systematic detention would have been impossible without the support of European funds,” Angeli told IPS. “Without these resources, the focus in Greece would possibly shift to alternative solutions that would take much more into account a cost-effectiveness approach and detention would have never acquired the status of a political priority.”

Despite the obvious cost in human suffering, the policy of en mass detentions is not only the prominent choice in the EU but, according to Dr. Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, a migration expert at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies in Denmark, it appears to coincide with an agenda of militarisation and privatisation of border and irregular immigrant controls.

”Despite public statements condemning the humanitarian catastrophe at the EU’s external borders, the union has in fact never ceased its support for more and harsher border controls in the south-eastern European borderlands,” Pedersen said.

“We can view this double standard as a way for the union to continually make itself a relevant policy venue in a Europe, where anti-immigrant parties occupy an increasingly larger part of both national parliaments and the European parliament.”

In December last year, the European Commission announced the launching of EUROSUR, a major project that will allow constant surveillance of the Mediterranean.

Although it has been introduced by the EC as ‘a new tool to save immigrants’ lives’, it has been criticised by organisations and MEPs, including leading German member of the European Green Party  Ska Keller, as an instrument “to serve the battle against illegal immigration”.

Also in December last year, the Council of the EU produced a proposal “establishing rules for the surveillance of the external sea borders”, and ten days later the European Council’s annual summit set priorities in increasing effectiveness of the defence policy and operations capacities of the Union.

“EUROSUR is a prime example of what we can call regulatory capture, that is, processes of lobbyism and multi-level governance, where actors like private security and military companies, and of course the European Commission itself, are able to transform the border control policies of individual nation-states without having to engage directly with their national parliaments,” Pedersen told IPS.

In April this year, four months after the annual summit, the Greek Ministry of Maritime Affairs quietly initiated a tender to rent surveillance services for its naval borders at the Aegean sea.

The project envisaged compensation of 73,800 euros for 60 hours of surveillance over a period of two months, an average of 1,230 euro per hour, with 75 percent of the cost covered from European funds and 25 percent from national.

Privatisation of security services in three of the biggest detention centres in the country has also been planned, attracting major players from the private sector like G4S, the world’s largest private security firm, which has come under criticism for the treatment of detainees at its three U.K.-based asylum centres.

The costs, estimated to about 14 million euro annually, will also be covered mostly from European funds.

An Oct. 3 rally in Washington DC to end the government shutdown. Credit: Rep. Keith Ellison's office/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Oct 12 2013 (IPS)

Early on the morning of Oct. 1, Tapia* left her home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, took the subway into Manhattan and headed to the federal courthouse on Varick Street.

After spending years in a backlogged legal system, she was going to receive a place in line for a visa and green card that offered permanent status.“I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting, but something always happens." -- Tapia, who cannot travel to see her ailing mother in Mexico

“But when we got there all the courts were closed,” Tapia told IPS.

With the federal government shut down, courts that don’t handle detainees are mostly shuttered, leaving thousands of cases unheard. For asylum seekers or longtime immigrant residents like Tapia, missing a day in court means risking being thrown to the back of a line that can extend for years.

“There were many people there in my situation that day,” she said.

Tapia emigrated from Mexico in 1998 to New York City, where she lives and works as a cook while raising two children, both born in the United States.

“I’ve paid all my taxes and put myself through school,” she said.

Underlying all immigration proceedings is the latent threat of deportation.

“This delay makes me feel nervous and insecure, it shouldn’t be this way,” said Tapia.

The judge at her preliminary hearing – where defendants present evidence arguing their case warrants a final, master hearing – told her lawyer she would assign a “cancellation of removal” (COR) at a later date, when the master hearing could be scheduled.

COR is a status open only to immigrants who have lived continuously in the U.S. for at least 10 years without a felony arrest and whose deportation would “result in exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a citizen or permanent resident spouse, parent or child.

Tapia’s six-year-old daughter suffers from early learning disabilities and requires assistance. Her two-year-old son is not yet out of diapers.

A quota of 4,000 COR visas is replenished at the start of the federal government’s fiscal year on Oct. 1. Final, master hearings, like the kind Tapia had scheduled, can only take place when visa numbers are available. Once they run out, judges are only able to offer unofficial, off-the-record promises. Defendants, even if confident of a judge’s empathy, have to continue their disrupted lives while their immigration status remains up in the air.

Every October, the window for getting a place in line narrows, leaving more people in limbo. This year, lawyers expected visas to run out in a matter of weeks.

Immigration attorneys say that even before the shutdown, hearing dates for their clients were already being scheduled well into 2017. The time between hearings, unless a judge makes another exception to “squeeze someone in”, quickly adds up.

Three families represented by Cesar Estela, a Newark, New Jersey immigration lawyer, in COR proceedings have already missed their court dates. Estela says the shutdown only adds a perverse additional layer to an already overwhelmed system.

“Every morning a court will have 50 preliminary hearings in 2 or 3 hours,” said Estela. “If they didn’t do that many, the wait for court dates would be five years.”

In a cruel twist, Tapia’s master hearing was already postponed last October after New York City courts were closed due to Hurricane Sandy. Meanwhile, courts in the rest of the country assigned the remaining visas to other applicants.

So Tapia waited another year and scheduled her final hearing for the first day of the fiscal year, also the day the shutdown began.

“My client cannot move on from this hell,” said Tapia’s attorney, Sara Zeejah.

“Because of our system, even cases that are almost completed cannot be taken off the docket,” Zeejah told IPS. “She [Tapia] cannot travel to see her ailing mother in Mexico even though the judge wants to give her a green card.”

Tapia’s children, who are the basis for her claim, are still young. But immigrants caring for older, adolescent children worry that by the time they have their cases heard, their dependents could be over 21, the cutoff for COR.

After several preliminary hearings dating back to 2011, Filho*, a truck driver originally from Brazil, finally had his master hearing calendared for Oct. 4.

His son, who was 15 when Filho first applied, is now 17. With his hearing now cancelled due to the government shutdown, Estela, his attorney, is concerned.

“His next court date maybe in 2016, when his kid is 19,” said Estela. “If the visas run out in the first week, he might have to wait another year, and then he only has one more.”

If Filho’s case isn’t heard before his son turns 21, he could be deported.

In the meantime, Filho can’t leave the U.S. to visit his wife and daughter in Brazil. “I call my daughter five times a day,” an emotional Filho told IPS. “I’m afraid because all these people, like me, have missed their court dates. What if I have to wait another two years? I want to see my daughter.”

As lawmakers in Washington take a piecemeal approach to restoring government services, immigrants and their lawyers feel they aren’t even on the radar.

“I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting, but something always happens,” says Tapia.

Ting I. Li, an immigration attorney in Chinatown, NY, says all types of clients are affected by the shutdown.

“Next week we have a client who originally applied for asylum. While the case was pending, he married a U.S. citizen. To get a green card [through his wife] he needs a judge to terminate those proceedings first. So next week there is a master hearing for a judge to do that. But if the court is closed, the client can do nothing. They’ve already been waiting two years for this date; the next available date will probably be 2016.”

Another lawyer who spoke with IPS but did not wish to be named said court closures have made his job painful.

“One of my clients, a Nepalese man, was supposed to have a hearing that would finalise his wife and child joining him here. Because of the shutdown, it could be another two years. I don’t know what I’m going to tell him.”

*Clients in this story are referred to by one name only to protect their identities.

“We used to be seen as really useful, and now we’re a pain in the neck,” said Roberto Suárez, an Ecuadorian who was complaining about proposed fines or prison sentences that could target Spanish citizens who help undocumented immigrants.

A proposed reform of article 318 of Spain’s penal code states that anyone who intentionally and with a profit motive helps non-European Union nationals without the proper documents to remain in Spain, thus violating the laws governing the entry or stay of foreigners, would be subject to a fine or six months to two years in prison.

Anyone caught helping undocumented immigrants to enter or make their way across Spain would be subject to the same punishment. It would be up to prosecutors to decide whether to drop charges in cases in which the aim was merely to provide humanitarian assistance, by giving someone a ride, clothing, cash or shelter, for instance.

The proposed reform of the criminal code was approved by the Council of Ministers in October 2012, but has not yet been introduced to parliament.

Some 30 national and international organisations have launched the campaign “La hospitalidad no es delito” (Hospitality Is Not a Crime), to protest the possible prosecution of people providing aid to undocumented immigrants.

The groups complain that the reform would “criminalise” solidarity towards immigrants.

“For years we have been one of the cogs in the development of Spain, and today we are harassed and persecuted,” Suárez, the president of ASIMEC, the Association of Ecuadorian Immigrants in the southern city of Malaga, told IPS.

Mamen Castellano, the head of Andalucía Acoge, (Andalusia Welcomes), an NGO in southern Spain that works on behalf of immigrants, told IPS that under the proposed penal code reform, a taxi driver who gives a ride to an undocumented immigrant could be subject to prosecution for “facilitating transit”.

She also said people who rent a room to immigrants, thus “helping them remain in the country,” could face charges as well.

In addition, the groups taking part in the campaign complain that the decision to press charges would be left in the hands of prosecutors. They argue that the proposed bill should instead simply specify that people who were merely providing humanitarian assistance would be legally exempt.

The proposed article is “outrageous” because “it presumes that we are all guilty” unless a prosecutor decides otherwise, lawyer Jaume Durá, the head of the Valencia chapter of the Spanish Commission for Aid to Refugees (CEAR), told IPS.

He said “solidarity should not be demonised.”

“This is disrespectful towards immigrants who one way or another find ourselves in distant lands,” said Suárez, who has lived in Spain for 13 years. “Our only crime has always been, and always will be, to work and try to improve the lot of our families.”

Andalucía Acoge has been trying to get officials in different city governments to reject the “arbitrary” way the proposed penal code reform is written, Castellano said.

Some lawyers say the proposed reform would only be used to crack down on abuses against immigrants by people seeking to make a profit, by charging unfairly high rents, for example. But NGOs are demanding that the article be rewritten because it is overly vague.

The groups point to local governments and civil society organisations that are designing projects like housing assistance aimed at improving the social integration of immigrants, and argue that these efforts could open them up to prosecution if article 318 is reformed.

The article was originally designed to protect victims of human trafficking and other abuses. But its proposed modification could lead to legal action against people merely helping immigrants out of solidarity, the campaign web page warns.

In December 2012, lawyers, judges, university professors, priests and others who came together in the campaign Salvemos la Hospitalidad (Save Hospitality) began to collect signatures to oppose the reform of article 318. So far 54,000 people have signed the petition.

“This is the limit! They’re trying to turn immigrants into scapegoats,” said
Betty Roca, head of the area of migration and co-development in Psychologists without Frontiers, which forms part of the campaign to close down Spain’s Immigrant Detention Centres (CIEs) – “CIEsNo” – which has joined Salvemos la Hospitalidad.

“We can’t criminalise something that has to do with human rights,” Roca told IPS.

Human rights organisations have long criticised the conditions in which undocumented immigrants are held, basically as prisoners, in the CIEs.

Both the government of the right-wing People’s Party and the last administration, of Spain’s PSOE socialist party, “have taken a wrongheaded approach to the issue of immigration, stirring up fear, racism and xenophobia,” Castellano maintained.

Since healthcare reform was implemented in September 2012 by the administration of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, undocumented immigrants only have the right to free public healthcare in cases of emergencies, pregnancies, births, or for pediatric treatment.

In 2009, Salvemos la Hospitalidad criticised article 53 of the reform of Spain’s immigration law pushed through by then socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2011), which established fines for “promoting the illegal stay in Spain” of undocumented immigrants.

Castellano said it was “unfair” that “during a boom period we thought it was fine for immigrants to come, but now that there aren’t even jobs in construction or agriculture, they are being stripped of more and more rights.”

There are foreign nationals who had their papers in order as long as they had a job, but who lost their visas or permits when they became unemployed.

“We mustn’t forget that if there are undocumented immigrants, it is also because employers themselves took advantage of our ignorance of our rights and deceived us with false hopes that our situation would be regularised, because it was convenient for them to have employees off the payroll and to pay wages under the table,” Suárez said.

Spain is one of the European countries hit hardest by the global financial crisis. The country’s 26 percent unemployment rate is the highest in Europe. Spending has been slashed in areas like health and education, and social discontent has given rise to frequent street protests.

Spanish citizens are even moving abroad in search of opportunities. “Spaniards were also immigrants and were welcomed in many countries, where they strengthened the development of those places,” said Suárez.

Two Border Patrol agents and a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer stationed at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Credit: CBP Photographer Josh Denmark

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 8 2013 (IPS)

The United States government is spending more on immigration enforcement each year than it is on all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined, according to the first comprehensive look at how the country’s sprawling immigration complex has grown over the past decade.

Likewise, on a daily basis the U.S. immigration system has more people in detention – around 430,000 in fiscal year 2011 – than the entire federal prisons system.

These numbers have grown dramatically in the context of the United States’ massively stepped-up counterterrorism programmes in the aftermath of the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001. Yet as years of arguments among U.S. lawmakers over how to overhaul the country’s immigration system have remained inconclusive, the result of this deadlock has been the consolidation of an ‘enforcement only’ approach.

“No nation anywhere in the world has been as determined, has made as deep and expensive a commitment or has had as deep a reach in its enforcement efforts as the U.S. has had,” Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a Washington think tank, said here on Monday.

“This is a reach that spans from local courtrooms and jails all the way to the ability of would-be travellers to the U.S. to actually get on a plane – an extension of U.S. borders well beyond the country’s physical boundaries.”

Yet, Papademetriou cautions, “Make no mistake, it is indeed a system … in which the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.”

In the quarter-century since the U.S. Congress first passed legislation signalling a new, harder line on illegal immigration – the start of the ‘enforcement era’ – spending on immigration enforcement has topped some 219 billion dollars, according to a new report released by MPI on Monday, the first comprehensive look at how the many components of the U.S. immigration system have grown exponentially over the past decade.

“This report is a gamer changer, confirming that Congress should not spend any additional resources on immigration enforcement, especially when our budget is so constrained,” Don Lyster, Washington director for the National Immigration Law Center, told IPS.

“What is missing from this report is the human impact of the billions of dollars spent on immigration enforcement. Millions of families and communities have been ripped apart – parents separated from their children, spouses separated from each other – because of Congress’s singular focus on enforcement rather than on creating a process for immigrants to apply for citizenship. It’s time to change that conversation once and for all.”

Aggravated felonies

While the 1986 legislation put in place the groundwork for today’s system, the funding and implementation only really started to strengthen following the attacks of 9/11, when immigration enforcement became a cornerstone of the country’s new counterterrorism approach.

The result has been a “scored-earth policy towards illegal immigrants, especially those with criminal history,” Muzaffar Chishti, a co-author of the new report, said at a panel discussion of the report’s findings here on Monday. The new policies, he notes, have “unleashed an extraordinary nexus between the criminal justice system and immigration system, clearly unprecedented in any enforcement regime.”

Previously, the U.S. government tended only to deport immigrants who had committed major crimes. In 1996, however, the U.S. Congress added a new category that is only used in immigration law – “aggravated felony” – which has since come to include 50 crimes in nearly three dozen categories, many of which had previously been considered to be relatively minor or even misdemeanours.

The result has been an unprecedented increase in the number of criminal prosecutions for purported immigration violations. Between 2001 and 2009, criminal prosecutions for such transgressions rose sixfold, Chishti says, from 16,000 to 92,000 a year, while 50 percent of all federal prosecutions are now related to immigration.

According to the report, the five federal judicial districts along the U.S.-Mexico border, home to around 10 percent of the overall population, now make up nearly half of all federal felony prosecutions in the country.

Many worry that the incredible growth of the U.S. immigration system has outstripped any ability, on the part of the government or external observers, to offer substantive oversight.

“When agencies grow at levels of 20 to 30 percent in a budget year – and that has happened in some years in the last decade – the accountability mechanisms can never keep up,” Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and co-author of the new report, warned Monday.

“But in addition, these agencies are not terribly transparent, so the degree to which there may or may not be oversight taking place is not easy to determine.”

A formidable machine

Several trends have recently converged in the United States that have led many to suggest that Washington may now be closer to a major overhaul of its immigration system than at anytime in the past decade. Such trends include ongoing demographics changes in the country that have changed political considerations, as well as ongoing economic crunches that have forced a rethink on nearly all government expenditure.

“In this belt-tightening era, our government can’t afford to continue to spend billions of dollars on immigration enforcement without a national immigration strategy,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, here in Washington, said in analysis e-mailed to IPS.

“The border is as secure as it can get without a functioning legal immigration infrastructure provided by broad immigration reform. Congress should get to work right away on long-lasting, practical solutions that fundamentally improve our immigration process.”

Yet even as momentum gathers for a renewed immigration discussion here in Washington, change may not be as straightforward as some hope. Among other considerations, the machinery may have simply become too large.

Although President Barack Obama has said that comprehensive immigration reform would be one of the top priorities of his second term, his first term actually set a record for deportations – some 1.6 million in the last four years.

“Many have questioned why an administration devoted to comprehensive reform would remove the greatest number of people of any administration in U.S. history,” Donald Kerwin, executive director for the Center for Migration Studies, an educational institute, and co-author of the new report, said Monday.

“The fact is that the legal authorities, operational systems, enforcement programmes and financial investments since 1986 have made large-scale removals almost an inevitability. They’ve made high levels of enforcement an institutional priority – quite simply, the machinery is already in place.”

Panahi Gholamhousein (22), an Afghan refugee who spends his days in a room that is barely five square metres with his wife Zarmina (18) and their 19-month-old daughter Zahra, has hardly left his place in downtown Athens since he was beaten up and robbed nearly a month ago.

Extremist sympathisers in the Greek police force breed impunity. Credit: George Laoutaris/CC-BY-ND-2.0

The four attackers “unleashed their dogs on me”, he told IPS. The incident shook him badly, confining him to an apartment shared with many other irregular migrants living in squalid conditions.

The young family – who lost legal status some months ago after withdrawing their asylum application to Greek authorities in exchange for a return ticket to Afghanistan – embody the predicament faced by many migrants caught in a rising wave of xenophobia.

The last three years have seen racist attacks dominating the streets of Athens, spreading fast throughout the country.

Some experts blame the situation on the social stress caused by an extended period of economic austerity – unemployment rates are fast approaching 30 percent and approximately 25 percent of the Greek population now lives below the poverty line.

Last Saturday at 2 a.m. a group of three unidentified assailants used an incendiary explosive device in an attempt to burn Pakistani immigrants alive in their home while they slept.

Navit Navaz was awakened by an explosion from a flaming bottle of gasoline that landed on the edge of the bed. Navaz was subsequently brought to Thriasio Hospital and admitted to the intensive care unit with severe burns on his back and hands.

Two months ago Human Rights Watch released a report describing how gangs of Greeks carry out attacks against migrants with almost total impunity. Authorities are reportedly ignoring complaints, or discouraging victims from filing them at all.

On Jul. 23, the rape and attempted murder of a 15-year-old girl in the island of Paros by a Pakistani migrant worker, Ahmed Vakas, fueled a wave of attacks against foreigners during which Iraq Aladin, an Iraqi immigrant, was beaten and stabbed to death by five hooded youngsters on Aug. 12.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), along with 20 organisations that comprise the Racist Violence Recording Network, blamed the deterioration of social relations on the “the inability or reluctance of the law enforcement authorities to carry out arrests”.

Extremists on the rise

Many of the attacks are allegedly linked to the neo-fascist party Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) that entered parliament last June with 6.9 percent of the vote and is now climbing even higher in the polls.

So far the organisation has not accepted responsibility for instigating the attacks but continues to endorse racist initiatives. Thus far, only two violent attacks have been linked directly to the party, one against four fishermen at Perama and one in central Athens that involved a Golden Dawn candidate.

According to migrant communities more than 400 attacks took place last year alone, but very few people have been arrested and none of the perpetrators has faced justice.

Opposition MPs and activists claim that Golden Dawn supporters inside the security apparatus breed a culture of impunity.

The problematic relationship between the organisation and elements within the Greek police force provoked close attention two weeks ago when Golden Dawn supporters, along with two of the party’s official deputies, Giorgos Germenis and Panayiotis Iliopoulos, checked legal documents and attacked immigrants’ stalls at a church fair in Rafina, a small town northeast of Athens.

As legitimate members of parliament these deputies have immunity and cannot be arrested by the police.

Furthermore, the local police director failed to report the incident to her central command for two hours and claimed that the deployed forces were not “strong enough to intervene” despite her own description of the incident as verbal abuse.

Victims of the attack have denounced police for turning a blind eye to their vulnerability and the police director of Rafina has been suspended from service.

However, a pattern of impunity for such officials suggests that she might soon resume her post, with the possibility of a promotion.

Golden Dawn has promoted the events in a bid to present itself as a force that guarantees the interest and protection of Greek citizens.

Nikolaos Dendias, minister of public order and citizen protection and commander of all Greek security forces, has stripped Golden Dawn deputies of their police protection following these incidents and allegations.

In a symbolic move the organisation responded by suing the minister and since then it has continued to challenge of state authority – despite allegations from activists that members of the police force and extremists are working hand in glove.

Effective control over the security apparatus by the political leadership is an issue of acute concern according to Anastassia Tsoukala, a criminologist at Paris University XI and former advisor to the ex-minister of citizen protection.

In a recent article that appeared on the local ‘TVXS’ online news site, Tsoukala argued that there is ample proof of mutually beneficial relationships between low ranking policemen and extremists.

“According to information in our hands from the last national elections, a very big percentage of the police personnel share the same ideology as the perpetrators of racist attacks,” Tsoukala wrote.

The percentage of Golden Dawn voters that work for the security apparatus was estimated to be between 17.2 and 23.04 percent in 11 electoral sectors during both national elections last summer.

This relationship is a “danger to the pubic order” according to Tsoukala.

Antonis Liakopoulos, vice president of the Association of Attika Police Officers, responded to these challenges with the assertion that the abuse of authority is a common phenomenon among police forces around the world, “but one should not generalise over these cases”.

The real problem, according to Liakopoulos, is the large numbers of Greek officers who have suffered major wage cuts, and security structures that operate on budgets that are inadequate to support their basic needs.

“This is what makes the police ineffective and unable to offer safety,” he told IPS.

“In a society going through such an acute crisis, wherever police and state institutions fail to exercise effective control, other groups see an opportunity to promote their own agenda,” he added.

Still, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, in a speech to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council last week, highlighted Greek police ineffectiveness in addressing and preventing “violent xenophobic attacks against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in recent months”.

Dendias’ repeated promises to establish a special force to address racist violence are still pending. Prosecutor Ioannis Tentes has instructed police stations around the country to stop and, if necessary, apprehend members of the parliament if they become involved in unlawful actions.

(END)

Australia’s recent decision to move asylum seekers to offshore detention facilities has alarmed human rights organisations.

“Re-opening offshore detention centres could result in human rights violations, including potentially indefinite detention,” Pia Oberoi, advisor with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (HCHR) told IPS, despite that international human rights law requires that time limits be placed on immigration detention and that any detention should decided according to individual situations.

A spokesperson for the Australian government told IPS, “The government has been clear that under offshore processing arrangements, asylum seekers transferred to (detention facilities on) Nauru and Manus Island(s) will be processed in accordance with international obligations.” An interactive map of the area can be found here.

Even though some migrants coming to Australia by boat are not entitled to make a valid claim under the Refugee Convention, many are still protected under human rights law, such as victims of trafficking and stateless persons, including protection from refoulement.

The principal of non-refoulement in international law, specifically refugee law, concerns protecting refugees from being returned to places where their lives or freedoms could be threatened.

“The principle of non-refoulement has extra-territorial scope, meaning that Australia’s non-refoulement obligations are engaged when asylum seekers and migrants come under its jurisdiction or effective control, even if they have been intercepted on the high seas,” said Oberoi.

The decision to reopen offshore detention facilities was intended by the Australian government to deter future asylum seekers from coming by sea, a dangerous venture often attempted in undersized, overcrowded vessels. More than 100 asylum seekers have drowned attempting to reach Australia in 2012.

“Through regional processing and increasing the humanitarian intake, Australia is aiming to put an end to the tragic consequences of dangerous boat journeys by asylum seekers, and improve the prospects of those wishing to seek asylum in Australia,” said the government spokesperson.

Faulty logic

But Oberoi disagreed with this approach, explaining that “there is no empirical evidence that immigration detention deters irregular migration, or discourages people from seeking asylum”.

In a further effort to attract immigrants to apply through regular immigration channels, the Australian government has increased the country’s intake of natural migrants this year from 13,750 to 20,000, and has committed to taking in to 27,000 by 2017.

Ben Farrell from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Canberra told IPS that UNHCR would prefer “an arrangement which would allow asylum-seekers arriving by boat into Australian territory to be processed in Australia”.

Farrell said that the UNHCR believed in the efficacy of cooperative approaches in the region, noting that such strategies had the potential to grant asylum seekers protection without having to risk dangerous journeys across the ocean.

The policy of offshore detention was abandoned in 2007 by the Australian government heeding complaints that refugees were spending months on the islands before resettlement.

In 2011 a deal with Malaysia was planned whereby unprocessed migrants from Australia were transferred to Malaysia in exchange for processed refugees. However, the deal was rejected by the Australian High Court given that Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention.

“For a scheme like the one proposed with Malaysia to be legal, there must be no real risk of breach of Australia’s international human rights obligations and the Refugee Convention in the treatment of asylum seekers and migrants throughout the process in both Australia and Malaysia,” said Oberoi.

Australia is the UNHCR’s largest resettlement country on a per capita basis.

This month, 650 refugees have been picked up trying to reach Australia by boat. The annual number of arrivals by boat represents about two percent of Australia’s total migration.

As of March 2011, the average time spent in detention for asylum seekers arriving in Australia was 213 days.

Deportation is a devastating experience for a family, breaking it apart and leading to emotional and mental stress for its members. But a new report from the Centre for American Progress shows that such duress extends beyond families and into the larger community as a whole.

The report, “How Today’s Immigration Enforcement Policies Impact Children, Families, and Communities: A View from the Ground”, was put together by Joanna Dreby, a sociology professor at Albany University, and points to the short- and long-term effects that the deportation of illegal immigrants has on both family units and wider society.

Many in the Latino community are disappointed by U.S. President Barack Obama’s failure to push through comprehensive immigration reform. Credit: Valeria Fernandez/IPS

The United States deports roughly 400,000 illegal immigrants each year. Of these, a significant portion are parents of U.S. citizens, with children who were born in the United States. In the first half of 2011 alone, more than 46,000 parents of U.S. citizens were deported.

Although U.S. President Barack Obama recently enacted legislation that would allow children who were raised in the United States to apply for legal immigration status, deporting their parents continues.

Meanwhile, more than 16.6 million people in the United States currently live in “mixed status” families, in which one or more members is an undocumented migrant. A third of immigrant’s children live in such mixed-status families.

Unseen costs

For all parties involved, the effects of deportations on these families are emotional, psychological and economic.

Seth Freed Wessler, investigative reporter for the Applied Research Centre, a racial justice think tank, believes that “kids do better when they’re with their families”. During a discussion of the report at the Centre for American Progress here on Monday, he recounted tales of the separation of families, stories he characterised as “horrific”.

“When I interviewed these women, what I found was that once you have been deported, the child service agencies act as if you have fallen off the face off this earth,” he said. “There are very slim chances of reunification of children with their families.”

When parents of U.S. citizens are deported, their children are generally put into foster care. It may take years before they are able to reunite with each other. According to the report, every child that goes through the foster care system costs taxpayers 26,000 dollars.

“Every single parent I interviewed wants to stay here. They came here for a better life; they want to contribute to society, and they came here for their kids,” said Wessler, who believes that taking one’s children back across the border creates difficult adjustment issues for the children, who may not even know the native language.

Miriam Yeung, of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, recounted stories of mothers separated from their children while still breastfeeding. “In most cases, the man gets deported, leaving a single mother with her kids,” she said at the presentation. “This mother may never have worked before, and she now has to find employment right away.”

This is a vicious cycle, Yeung believes. If the mother cannot find work immediately and is herself undocumented, it may lead to self-deportation (when the family moves back to their original country) of the entire family.

While this may be relatively easy for the parents, children who are U.S. citizens may struggle to adjust. They may not know the language or find it hard to fit in culturally, which can result in emotional distress as well as poor performance in school.

Ajay Chaudry of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services interviewed 200 children, as well as officials with children’s services agencies and police and immigration officials, across seven states. He found that immigrant children lived in perpetual fear of being separated from their parents.

Of those who had been separated, there were lags in development and well-being, and often great economic repercussions. One woman he interviewed had moved eight times with her children after the deportation of her husband.

In addition, 42 percent of families with a deported member moved more than once in the first few months after the deportation.

Social and cultural implications

Dreby’s report also touched upon a fundamental problem that seems pervasive in immigrant communities. Immigrant children are often afraid of the police and view them in an extremely negative light.

They believe police officials are the same as immigrant officials, and often think that being an immigrant automatically makes you an illegal alien. They have also started thinking of the word “immigrant” as something dirty, and Dreby believes this serves to disassociate oneself from one’s own heritage.

“I interviewed a nine-year-old girl, and I asked her, what it was like being an immigrant?” Dreby said. “Her reply shocked me. She said that it was sad to be an immigrant, because she had seen a show on TV in which the police came and took the girl’s parents away, and the girl was left alone in a car.”

For Dreby, the answer is simple. The United States needs legalisation programmes that prevent parents of U.S. citizens from being deported.

Yeung also believes that public perception as to what constitutes an “American” family needs to change.

“We are a country of immigrants,” she said. “What makes an American family, really?”

The closure of one of Spain’s eight immigration detention centres on Wednesday was celebrated by human rights groups, which for years have denounced the prison-like conditions in the centres.

Outer wall of immigrant detention centre in Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

“We are pleased with the closure of the Centro de Internamiento de Extranjeros (CIE – immigrant detention centre) of Málaga, and we congratulate all of the organisations that took part in the struggle to achieve this,” Mamen Castellano, president of the NGO Andalucía Acoge (Andalusía Welcomes), told IPS.

The activist, who works for the rights of immigrants in the southern Spanish region of Andalusía, where Málaga is located, mentioned the “unnecessary suffering of thousands of people who were held there.”

The CIE in Málaga was closed because of its ruinous condition – a situation that was long protested by activists.

Castellano said people should not forget “the history of sexual abuse of female inmates by police, and of fires and suicides” in the Málaga CIE, which opened in 1990 in an old
military barracks in the poor neighbourhood of Capuchinos.

The Interior Ministry had ordered that the CIE be shut down because of the “ruinous state of the installations.” Over the space of 22 years, it housed 20,000 undocumented immigrants, and gained a reputation as the most inhumane of the country’s immigrant detention centres.

Spain’s immigration law states that the CIEs are “public establishments of a non-penitentiary nature, which answer to the Interior Ministry, for the detention and custody of foreigners subject to deportation orders.”

But non-governmental organisations, experts, and even government institutions say the CIEs are “prisons in disguise.” They also complain that undocumented immigrants are held up to 40 days in worse conditions than in prisons, after they are picked up for minor offences like traffic violations.

“Regrettably, the Spanish state will continue to confine human beings and deport them from this country, making use of the other CIEs, which are still open,” Salva Lacruz, head of political advocacy of the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR), told IPS from the southeastern city of Valencia.

Lacruz said “the closure of a CIE is always good news.” But she lamented that the decision did not form part of “a policy to dismantle the mechanisms of repression of immigrants.”

The CEAR is involved in a campaign to close down the CIEs – “CIEsNo” – along with human rights groups, organisations that fight racism and xenophobia, and community associations. The aim is the “unconditional closure” of the centres.

All aspects of the CIEs, from security to health care and meals, are controlled by the police, who manage the centres and administer the finances. In prisons, by contrast, police only carry out security duties.

In response to the wave of criticism about the way the CIEs operate, and after the deaths of two immigrants in the Madrid and Barcelona centres, Interior Minister Jorge Fernández announced on Jan. 31 that new regulations would be drawn up for the centres.

The draft regulations for the CIEs, whose name would be changed to “Centres for the Controlled Stay of Foreigners” (CECE), have been introduced in Congress and are expected to pass easily because the governing People’s Party holds an absolute majority of seats.

But the regulations proposed by the government of right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy have disappointed immigrant advocacy organisations.

“The new regulations leave the existing system fully in place and only include tiny glimpses of what the organisations were asking for,” Castellano lamented.

She criticised the fact that the police will continue to administer the centres, rather than simply being in charge of security and leaving the rest of the task to civilian functionaries.

Castellano said the proposed regulations “legitimate the decision-making power of the director of each CIE,” rather than creating “unified standards and guaranteeing respect for human rights.”

José Cosín, a Málaga lawyer, told IPS that the draft regulations “do not respect the fundamental rights of immigrants” and “ignore the minimum requisites outlined by the ombudsman and by human rights organisations.”

He also described the change in name proposed by the government as “hypocritical”.

And like Castellano, he complained that the centres would continue to be run by the police, “even though the immigrant inmates have committed no crime to justify their detention.”

Removal of the police from the inside of the CIEs would be “an advance in terms of guarantees for the rights of the inmates,” Lacruz said.

In the last two years, the severe economic crisis that has shaken Spanish society and driven up the unemployment rate to record highs has failed to curb the arrival of immigrants.

In 2011, there were 5.7 million foreign nationals, and one million foreign-born citizens, in this southern European country of 47 million people. An estimated 700,000 immigrants are undocumented.

That year, 5,443 undocumented immigrants came to this country, according to an Interior Ministry report, “Balance de Lucha contra la Inmigración Ilegal” (summary of the struggle against illegal immigration), published in February.

The biggest surge in undocumented immigrant flows in Spain occurred in 2006, when 33,737 entered the country.

According to official figures, 30,792 immigrants were deported in 2011, 629 more than in 2010.

Cosín said the closure of the Málaga CIE “highlights the harsh conditions to which we subject immigrants in Spain,” precisely at a time when the crisis is pushing Spanish citizens to emigrate, to escape the 24 percent unemployment rate.

“The closure of the centre where rape and other human rights violations have occurred is not a step forward,” because the immigrants have been transferred over the last few weeks to the CIE in the southern city of Algeciras, “where conditions are also worse than in the prisons,” he said.

Asia has surpassed Latin America as the largest source of new immigrants to the United States, according to a major new report that found that Asian-Americans also enjoy the highest incomes and best education of any racial group in the United States.

The 214-page report, released Tuesday by the Pew Research Centre, said Asian-Americans now constitute nearly six percent of the total U.S. population, or some 18.2 million people. That’s a more than five-fold increase since 1965, when immigration laws were liberalised to permit more non-Europeans to come to the United States.

Asian immigration has risen steadily since 1965, according to the report, entitled “The Rise of Asian Americans”, but the growth rate appears to have accelerated in the last few decades, with nearly three out of every four-Americans with Asian ancestry having been born abroad. Japanese-Americans are the only sub-group in which the majority was born in the United States.

“A century ago, most Asian Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination,” the report stated. “Today they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines.”

This shift is part of a trend that would seem to indicate that Americans are becoming more tolerant towards immigrants, especially Asian-American ones. A 2010 Pew survey found that among white Americans, 62 percent “would be fine” with a relative marrying interracially, particularly someone who is black, Hispanic or Asian, up from 51 percent in 2001.

Chinese-Americans comprised the largest sub-group of all Asian-Americans, with about four million people, or about 23 percent of the total. They were followed by Filipino-Americans (3.4 million), Indian-Americans (3.2), Vietnamese-Americans (1.74), Korean-Americans (1.71) and Japanese-Americans (1.3). Together, those six sub-groups are the vast majority of the total Asian population in the United States.

Traditional values: Education and hard work

“Many Asians come to the United States because they still perceive it as a land of opportunity,” Andrew Lam, an editor at New America Media, an umbrella group of ethnic news organisations, told IPS.

The report, based in part on recent telephone interviews in English and seven other languages with a nationally representative sample of more than 3,500 Asian-Americans, also found that Asian-Americans place significantly more emphasis on attaining higher education and working hard than other racial groups in the United States.

While 93 percent of respondents in the poll said they believed that Americans who hailed from the same country of origin are “very hard-working”, only 57 percent of those respondents agreed that the same held true for their American counterparts as a whole.

Asian-Americans stand out for their educational achievements, in particular. While 26 percent of the U.S. population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, the comparable figure for Asians is 49 percent – nearly twice as high – and 18 percentage points higher than white Americans. The more recent arrivals have an even higher percentage – 61 percent among adults aged 25 to 64.

Asian-Americans also stand out compared to their cohorts in their home countries. On average, about 26 percent of Japanese and South Koreans in the same age group have a bachelor’s degree, compared to nearly 70 percent of comparably aged recent immigrants from those two countries.

Financial and economic aspects

According to the Department of Labour, the unemployment rate among Asians as a group is less than in America as a whole. The Asian-American unemployment rate stands at about 7.5 percent, lower than any other demographic, including white (8.7 percent), black (16) and Hispanic (12.5) and lower than the national unemployment rate of 8.2 percent.

The view among various Asian groups can differ significantly in terms of education and income. Indian-Americans, for example, lead all other sub-groups in both categories. Americans with Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese ancestry suffer higher poverty rates than does the general public, while those with Indian, Japanese or Filipino origins have lower rates.

And while the median household income in 2010 for the general U.S. population was nearly 50,000 dollars, for Asian-Americans the median figure was 66,000, according to the report.

Findings from the U.S. Census Bureau fall along the similar lines: between 2002 and 2007, Asian-owned businesses increased 40.4 percent – nearly twice the national rate – amounting to 1.5 million total businesses, generating more than half a trillion dollars in receipts and employing nearly three million people.

“Asian-owned businesses continued to be one of the strongest segments of our nation’s economy,” said Census Bureau Deputy Director Thomas Mesenbourg.

Asians’ success, however, has no helped alleviate racial tensions. In April, D.C. Councilman Marion Barry was caught on tape making derogatory comments about Asian-Americans and their businesses.

“We’ve got to do something about these Asians coming in, opening up businesses – those dirty shops,” Barry said, after winning his city’s Democratic primary, “They ought to go.”

Census data compiled by Pew suggests that Asian immigrants outnumbered Hispanic immigrants at some point between 2007 and 2010. In 2007, about 540,000 Hispanics – both documented and undocumented – came to the United States, while only 390,000 Asians did so.

But by 2010, about 430,000 Asians – or 36 percent of all new immigrants – arrived here, compared to about 370,000 Hispanics.

The reversal appears to have resulted primarily from a decrease in Hispanic immigration, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis, when a combination of harsh anti-immigrant legislation at the state level, tighter border security, and the slump in the U.S. economy (especially its construction industry, where many male Hispanic immigrants have found work) discouraged many would-be immigrants from crossing the border.

The crash of a million-dollar Ferrari driven at high speed by a wealthy Chinese expatriate in the early hours of a weekend morning earlier this month has reignited the stormy immigration debate here, highlighting many Singaporeans’ resentment towards foreigners living and working in this small island nation.  

The deadly accident opened an old wound. The spate of online comments and media reports expressing anger towards Chinese residents was so extreme it prompted the Chinese embassy, in a rare move, to issue a letter – subsequently released to the Straits Times – urging its citizens in Singapore to be conscious of their conduct and abide by local laws.

In February, Forbes Magazine ranked Singapore the third richest country in the world with a per capita income of 56,700 dollars. This affluent island republic, covering just 640 square kilometres, is home to four million inhabitants, of which about 25 percent are foreign workers.

As a result, immigration has become a hot topic in Singapore, with increasing coverage in the local media since last year’s election, where the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) saw its share of the vote drop to its lowest level since independence, largely due to local opposition to the government’s liberal immigration policies.

“Central to the feeling of antipathy (towards foreigners) has been the issue of fairness (towards locals),” said former minister of parliament Viswa Sadasivan.

Local journalist Jaya Prakash argued that the number of foreigners in Singapore has reached an “unacceptable” level. He believes that the government is biased towards foreigners, allowing them to sweep up jobs that should be given to locals and fill places in schools meant for Singaporeans.

As a result, he said, the latter are forced to accept lower pay, for less desirable work, which ultimately results in a lower quality of life for many locals.

In an interview with IPS Sadasivan explained that the two most incendiary issues surrounding immigration are education and military service.

While all young Singaporean men past the age of 17 are required to spend two and a half years in the armed forces, foreign nationals are only obliged to send their sons, while the principal immigration applicant is exempt from compulsory military service.

Meanwhile, a growing number of Chinese and Indian nationals are being admitted to Singaporean universities while many eligible Singaporean students are denied access to higher learning institutions, a situation that has fueled widespread discontent.

“Singaporeans feel shortchanged,” Sadasivan noted, adding, “In many other countries such issues could become emotionally charged enough to topple governments.”

Tang Li, principal consultant of Tang-Asia Consultancy, argues that the root cause of ‘anti-foreigner’ sentiment can be traced back to 2004, when the government opened its doors to immigrants before putting in place the necessary infrastructure to efficiently handle the situation.

“Suddenly you had people competing for the same spaces in buses and trains, for housing and places in schools. When things started to get more crowded and less comfortable, frustrations turned onto the most visible target – the new arrivals,” he told IPS.

The number of foreigners surged after the government relaxed immigration rules in 2004, allowing thousands of people, mainly from places like China, India and the Philippines, to work in professional jobs while over 250,000 workers from other Asian countries entered ‘unskilled’ labour markets such as construction and domestic work.

Prakash pointed out that much of the local resentment stems from the S-pass scheme, a government programme that allows foreign diploma and degree holders to work jobs that pay a fixed monthly salary of at least 1,800 Singapore dollars (about 1,450 U.S. dollars). The minimum salary for a local graduate is usually 1,900 U.S. dollars a month.

The Tripartite Alliance for Fair Employment Practices, a labour watchdog, said in its annual report released last month that complaints about employers preferring foreigners over locals have, for the first time, topped Singaporeans’ list of grievances over unfair employment practices.

Singapore has a multiracial community that includes Chinese, Indians and Malays that have lived here for generations.

Sadasivan, who is an outspoken advocate of multiculturalism, said about the prevailing tension in the country, “Essentially what we are witnessing is a cumulative response to a pent up emotion of citizens feeling that their rights have not matched responsibilities; that their government has ignored their reasonable appeal for (a more) paced inflow of foreigners.”

(END)

Many Afghan refugees in Pakistan do odd jobs, like selling vegetables. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Feb 22 2012 (IPS)

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government recently launched a harsh crackdown on illegal Afghan immigrants who have been pouring across the border into Pakistan, going so far as to request federal government permission to deal with the situation, which has deep social and economic implications for the host country.

During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, about five million Afghans entered Pakistan through the porous 2400-kilometre-long border between the two countries.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Pakistan is home to 1.7 million documented Afghan refugees. Meanwhile, data compiled by Pakistan’s home and tribal affairs department found that the country was simultaneously playing host to 400,000 undocumented Afghans, many of who live in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), one of the Pakistan’s four major provinces.

For the refugees and immigrants, Pakistan is the only escape from a life of poverty and persecution.

Haji Dost Muhammad, an elder of the Afghan Refugees Jirga (tribal assembly), told IPS that many of his people could not return due to a lack of electricity, water and education in their home country.

“Our children have been born and brought up here and now they don’t want to go back as they are getting an education here. When the situation improves in Afghanistan, we will all go back,” he said.

But many Pakistanis, from government officials to local business owners, are frustrated by the weight of a refugee population that has encroached upon the local business sector and is allegedly responsible for a major surge in crime rates.

The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and police have so far failed to investigate undocumented immigrants under the country’s Foreigners Act.

A government official told IPS that the federal government should make arrangements to block undocumented Afghans from entering the country and make more of an effort to settle an issue that has been lingering for decades.

The home department recently briefed the provincial cabinet on the presence of refugees and unregistered Afghans in the region, concluding with a proposal to deport all illegal residents from the province, with the government’s permission.

However, in January last year, a Tripartite Commission – which includes the UNHCR, Pakistan and Afghanistan – agreed to extend Afghan immigrants’ stay by two years, owing to conflict in the sending country.

The government official lamented that these “vague” immigration policies were an impediment to a long-term solution.

“While the issue is being discussed by the inappropriate authorities (such as the Islamabad-based tripartite commission), the prolonged stay of Afghans has resulted in multiple socioeconomic problems in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” he told IPS.

He contended that since the people of KP and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are forced to suffer the consequences of rampant immigration – such as competing with cheaper labour – these provinces should have a say in the decision-making process; however, Islamabad has thus far ignored local voices.

A recent report by Pakistan’s home department found that, in addition to the refugees and immigrants in the North, approximately one million Afghans were illegally residing in Islamabad and other parts of the country, many of who were also running their own businesses.

In addition, the report said that Afghans had obtained false computerised national identity cards (CNICs) and used them to set up shops, maintain bank accounts and purchase property and vehicles.

“We have (found) that about 80,000 Afghans have obtained illegal CNICs. We are now very strict. We have taken action against hundreds of Afghans for getting fake CNICs,” said Jawad Ali of the National Database Registration Authority (NADRA).

“The Special Branch Police and Intelligence Bureau have also informed the government that refugees were involved in crimes,” police inspector Jala Khan told IPS.

According to official data, over 14,000 Afghan students were studying in various public and private sector educational institutions, while 470 Afghan prayer leaders have been identified.

Following numerous reports that these religious figures were promoting extremism and religious disharmony among various sects, sources said that 164 of them had been removed from their jobs. The ministry of interior recently gave police the green light to take immediate action against the remaining religious leaders.

Despite deploying a Border Management Force, the influx of Afghans through unfrequented routes continues unchecked.

So far, there is only one border opening at Torkham, which is not sufficient to facilitate the passage of hundreds of Afghan refugees everyday.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa home department proposed that the interior ministry open four additional entry and exit points along the Afghan border – at Nawa Pass in Mohmand and Bajaur agencies, Kharlachi in Kurram Agency, Ghulam Khan in North Waziristan Agency and Birmal in South Waziristan Agency – to regulate cross-border movement.

The home department also suggested that the ministry install a biometric system and set up joint checkpoints along the border to check illegal movement.

Representatives for the Afghan refugees, like Haji Dost Muhammad, insist that Afghan visitors in Pakistan are committed to abiding local laws. He went so far as to stress that those involved in crimes should be arrested and deported.

But for some, like KP’s law minister Arshad Abdullah, the problem is already out of control and requires swift action, such as immediate deportation of all illegal residents.

(END)