Tag: Immigration

Freedom To Stay, Freedom To Move: An Interview With Harsha Walia

Harsha Walia has been involved in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist migrant justice movements for the past two decades. Her first book, Undoing Border Imperialism, offered a movement analysis of the foundational connections between migration, borders and imperialism, with insights into the grassroots organizing her work comes out of. Building on this, her latest work, Border and Rule offers a crucial resource for going beyond nation-based thinking about border regimes around the world and building an internationalist movement for their abolition.

In Border and Rule, Walia avoids comparisons of one border regime or another as “worse” or “better,” focusing on how borders are consistently a “method of capital” involved in seizing and holding territory and in the segmentation of the working class.

Global Migration Indicators Report Summarizes 2020 For Migrants

The Global Migration Indicators report by the International Organization for Migration is here, with an update on how COVID-19 affected migration around the world. The report says more than 2,300 migrants died while trying to get into Europe or within Europe in 2020. While the pandemic restricted mobility and reduced international migration, still, there were two hundred and eighty-one million international migrants in the middle of 2020. That is close to four per cent of the world’s population.

COVID-19 Health Care Immigration Migrants

Extinction Rebellion Blockade To Protest Nationality And Borders Bill

The activists locked themselves to each other and to the property’s gates from about 7am on Monday. The protesters, from XR Scotland and XR Glasgow, are calling on the UK government “to end its hostile environment policy towards migrants”. They said the demonstration has been organized in response to home secretary Priti Patel’s Nationality and Borders Bill passing through the House Of Commons.

Environment Extinction Rebellion Immigration Protests

UK Higher Education Workers Strike For Fair Pay, Working Conditions

In today’s episode of the Daily Round-up we look at the 3-day UCU strike by Higher Education workers across 58 universities in the UK to demand fair wages and job security; the re-imposition of the Migrant Protection Protocols by the U.S. and its implications for asylum seekers currently in Mexico and at the border; a report on rising hunger in the Latin America and the Caribbean region during the pandemic; and a Stand Earth report linking major brands like Nike and Adidas to cattle ranching operations fueling large-scale destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

Education Immigration Strike Worker Rights and Jobs

Media Don’t Factcheck Right-Wing Migration Myths

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked a bizarre question at President Joe Biden’s November 3 Press Briefing. The president seemed to misunderstand the question, which referred to potential settlements of a lawsuit stemming from the Trump administration’s notorious 2017–18 family separation policy. Biden bungled his response, apparently calling reports about the settlement “garbage.” Not surprisingly, the media ran with the story of Biden’s blunder. Doocy’s question, on the other hand, was mostly ignored or played down.

Immigration Journalism Media

Thanksgiving March To Free Indigenous Kids From Immigration Cages

An informal group of Northwest Indigenous warriors, headed by veteran Native rights protector Sid Mills, announced last week they plan to join a march in Southern California to demand the release of Indigenous children from immigration detention facilities. The four-day event, called The March for Freedom, will begin in Los Angeles on the National Day of Mourning, known to non-Native people as Thanksgiving, and will end on Sunday, November 28, at the Otay Mesa Detention Facility in San Diego.

Child Detention Immigration Indigenous Rights Thanksgiving

Defund The Global Climate Wall

Blinken’s sentiment was echoed by a report on the impact of climate change and migration from the White House earlier this month, one of a slew of reports as the U.S. prepared for the United Nations summit on climate change that begins in Glasgow on October 31. According to the report, “The current migration situation extending from the U.S.-Mexico border into Central America presents an opportunity for the United States to model good practice and discuss openly managing migration humanely, [and] highlight the role of climate change in migration.”

Border Wall climate crisis Immigration Militarization

Are Nicaraguan Migrants Escaping ‘Repression’—Or Economic Sanctions?

“Record numbers” of migrants are coming into the United States from Nicaragua, according to Newsweek (7/29/21), which blames the increase on “arbitrary arrests and human rights abuses” by the Nicaraguan government. Former Sandinista leader Sergio Ramírez, writing for El Salvador’s El Faro (8/20/21), claims that “repression” by President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government is causing a “dramatic growth” in migration by Nicaraguans.

Reuters (9/2/21) agrees, describing the government “crackdown” as stirring a “fast-growing exodus” from the country. The Wall Street Journal (9/22/21) has also identified the “crackdown,” quoting a 19-year-old Nicaraguan who hopes to get asylum in the US as claiming that “in Nicaragua, our fate is prison or death.”

Immigration Media Nicaragua US Sanctions

Afro-Indigenous People In Honduras Are Being Forcibly Displaced

On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I want to tell you about my people, the Garifuna. We’re an Afro-Indigenous people, descended from Arawaks and Africans. Our ancestral territory spans the Caribbean border of Central America.

Latin American and Caribbean communities like ours are rarely noticed in U.S. media — except when we migrate.

In summer 2021, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris came to Central America and told would-be migrants: “Do not come .” More recently, photos of U.S. Border Patrol agents whipping Haitian refugees in the Texas desert brutally drove that message home.

This anti-migrant message is dehumanizing and wrong. But the truth is, many of us would love nothing more than to stay in our homes. It’s Washington that’s making it difficult.

Displacement Honduras Immigration Latin America

Haiti Aided Latinx Independence; Latinxs Return The Favor With Silence

In 1815, Spain’s defeat of Simón Bolívar’s revolutionary army in Venezuela nearly extinguished the dream of independence in South America. After the loss, Bolívar sought political asylum in the only free republic in Latin America: Haiti. At the time, Haiti was a safe harbor for revolutionaries and formerly enslaved Africans. Although the republic made promises to colonial powers that it would not intervene in freedom and independence struggles, Haiti continued to support rebellions, intercepted ships carrying enslaved people, and freed its human cargo. For Haiti, colonialism and slavery anywhere posed a threat to the republic’s own independence and humanity.

Thus, when a defeated Bolívar landed in Port-au-Prince, President Alexandre Pétion understood the significance of the man who led the liberation movement.

Haiti Immigration International Solidarity Latin America

Smart Borders Or A Humane World?

This report delves into the rhetoric of “smart borders” to explore their ties to a broad regime of border policing and exclusion that greatly harms migrants and refugees who either seek or already make their home in the United States. Investment in an approach centered on border and immigrant policing, it argues, is incompatible with the realization of a just and humane world.

Case studies from Chula Vista, California, the European Union, Honduras, Mississippi, and the Tohono O’odham Nation provide substance to this analysis. So, too, do graphics that illustrate the militarized US border strategy and the associated expansion of borders; the growing border industrial complex; the spreading web of surveillance; and the relationship between wall-building, global inequality, and climate change-related displacement.

Border Wall Human Rights Immigrant Rights Immigration

Appeals Court Blocks Judge Order, Allows Deportation Of Families

In a setback to migrant rights advocates in the United States, a federal appeal court has allowed the forcible expulsion of apprehended undocumented migrant families to continue. The ruling was passed by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on Thursday, September 30. It was a last minute ruling which blocked a prior ruling by a federal judge against the expulsions before it went into effect.

Thursday’s ruling was in response to the appeals filed by the administration of president Joe Biden against the order by district judge Emmet Sullivan of the US District Court for DC (District of Columbia) on September 16. The district judge’s order was stayed as a case against the current immigration policy is ongoing.

Biden administration Human Rights Immigration Legal System

Golden Gate Bridge Shutdown For Immigration Reform

As morning broke over San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge on Thursday, northbound traffic was brought to a halt when dozens of undocumented mothers, students and their allies risked arrest to engage in civil disobedience. Just before 7 a.m., protesters exited their cars, carrying banners and calling on Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Traffic piled up in the bridge’s northbound lanes as demonstrators decried the Democrats’ lack of action to pass meaningful immigration reform, stopping morning commuters for about an hour.

Deportation Immigrant Rights Immigration San Francisco

Haitian Rights Are Migrant Rights

The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly resolution in December 1990, took the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a step further, and other human rights conventions and treaties by the UN (United Nations) and the ILO (International Labor Organization), as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and was intentional to include migrants, both as they actively migrated and as they settled as immigrants, and categorized them as economic migrants, migrant workers, women, children who are particularly discriminated against, and therefore need their own targeted protection instruments that go beyond regions and intra and trans borders.

Haiti Immigration Racism

Black Alliance For Peace Condemns Biden Administration’s Order To Deport Haitians

When a white Fox News reporter used a drone to film the thousands of Haitian and other Black asylum seekers camped beneath a bridge spanning the Rio Grande and linking Del Rio, Texas to Ciudad Acuña, in the Coahuila state of Mexico, he immediately (and deliberately) brought a stereotypical image of Black migration: That of the teeming, African hordes, ready to burst the borders and invade the United States. Such images are as cheap as they are racist. And, typically, they erase the larger question: Why are so many Haitians at the U.S. border?

But before that question could be addressed, the Biden administration struck with a decisiveness not seen throughout its 9-month tenure in office in ordering Haitian refugees—many of them with legitimate asylum claims—to be summarily deported to Haiti.

Black Alliance for Peace Haiti Immigration Joe Biden

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