Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

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Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 26, 2016 7:43 am

Soapy's blog

Syrian and Latin American refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

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children imprisoned at a facility in Dilley Texas

Obama speechifies about the plight of Syrian refugees, but his administration’s treatment of refugees from Latin and South America says more than anything.


Donald Trump Jr. recently made headlines by making a tweet which compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles. “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem.”

Liberals responded to Trump Jr’s tweet with impassioned statements about the humanity of the refugees, with former Obama campaign staffer Jason Sparks tweeting, “10s of thousands of Syrian children have been killed in the war. They aren't Skittles. They're children. Like yours.” Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted a picture of a traumatized Syrian youth with the words, “Hey @DonaldJTrumpJr, this is one of the millions of children you compared to a poisoned Skittle today.” High profile Obama supporter John Legend responded to the tweet by writing, “There's a tiny chance that anyone could be a murderer. Get rid of everyone now!!! #trumplogic.”

The media framed the controversy over Trump Jr.'s tweet as a debate between liberals who support refugee rights, and conservatives who oppose them in favor of security. What is not discussed is the question of how both liberals and conservatives treat refugees coming to the US from Latin and South America.

This this a perfect example of what Noam Chomsky calls “worthy” and “unworthy victims”. The “worthy” victims are the ones mistreated by groups the US is opposed to and therefore receive our support. The “unworthy” victims are the victims of our crimes, and they are treated as nothing more than a nuisance. In this case, the Syrians make perfect “worthy” victims. They are the victims of Bashar al Assad and various jihadi groups opposed to him. And since the US claims to be opposed to both jihadis and Assad (who is backed by Russia so double political points there), Syrian refugees are “worthy”, as they are the victims of our enemies. Thus Obama has championed their cause, urging Congress to increase the number of Syrian refugees allowed to receive asylum in the US, and addressing the United Nations saying, “And together, now, we have to open our hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home.”

Contrast this with the Obama administration's treatment of refugees coming here from Latin and South America. For example, refugees from Honduras started coming to the US in the 1980s , when Honduran death squads on the CIA’s payroll began terrorizing the population. Violence worsened through the 1990s and 2000s with free trade agreements and the US led drug war, and spiked dramatically in 2009 following the US backed military coup which overthrew the left leaning government.1. As murdered Honduran political activist Berta Caceres has pointed out , the 2009 coup was successful largely because of the support it received from the Obama administration, most notably Hillary Clinton’s State Department. The coup led to a new round of (to use Dawn Paley’s term) “social cleansing”, with Honduras claiming the #1 spot in murders per capita. As the situation deteriorated, the number of Honduran families and unaccompanied minors entering the country illegally spiked, with 18,000 unaccompanied minors crossing into the US in 2014 alone. One minor from Honduras, named Oswaldo, described to interviewers the experiences which led him to flee Honduras

1998 – I was born in Honduras
1 year old – They killed my father
4 years old – They killed my grandfather
5 years old – They killed my uncle
7 years old – I went to school
8 years old – They killed my other uncle
8 years, 9 months – They shot my uncle
13 years old – I graduated from 6th grade
14 years old – They killed my uncle
15 years old – They shot at me
16 years old – We moved in with my uncle
16 years old – I left for the United States


Rather than take responsibility for his role in forcing minors like Oswaldo to flee Honduras, Obama instead responded to the increase by placing blame on the parents of the unaccompanied minors. In his July 2014 speech on the issue of unaccompanied minors crossing the border Obama remarked, “their parents need to know that this is an incredibly dangerous situation and it is unlikely that their children will be able to stay. And I've asked parents across Central America not to put their children in harm's way in this fashion.”

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Obama also requested $3.7 billion from Congress for additional detention centers, border control agents, and immigration judges saying, “we intend to do the right thing by these children.”

Additionally, Obama urged the passage of legislation that would hire 20,000 more Border Patrol agents. This, despite the fact that the Border Patrol operates with impunity and treats its detainees with callous brutality. An ACLU complaint filed with the Border Patrol on behalf of 100 children alleges widespread,

verbal, sexual and physical abuse; prolonged detention in squalid conditions; and a severe lack of essential necessities such as beds, food and water. The complaint describes Border Patrol agents denying necessary medical care to children as young as five-months-old, refusing to provide diapers for infants, confiscating and not returning legal documents and personal belongings, making racially-charged insults and death threats, and strip searching and shackling children in three-point restraints during transport.

Children referenced in the complaint, many of whom fled violence and persecution in their home countries, include:

• H.R., a seven-year-old boy, was severely developmentally disabled and suffering from acute malnourishment when he was apprehended, but CBP held him in custody for approximately five days without any medical treatment. He was eventually hospitalized and underwent emergency surgery.

• D.G., a 16-year-old girl, was detained with adults. When CBP officials searched D.G., they violently spread her legs and touched her genital area forcefully, making her scream.

• M.R., a 15-year-old girl, traveled from Guatemala with her two-year-old son. Both M.R. and her son became sick while in CBP custody, but M.R.’s requests for medical attention were ignored or dismissed for approximately five days, until she and her son were finally taken to a hospital.

• K.A., a 14-year-old girl, had her asthma medication confiscated by CBP officials and proceeded to suffer multiple asthma attacks in the filthy and overcrowded CBP holding cells. After the first asthma attack, officials threatened that they would punish her if she were faking.

• C.S., a 17-year-old girl, was detained in a hielera (freezer) in wet clothes. Her clothes did not dry for three and a half days due to the frigid temperature in the holding cell. The only drinking water available to C.S. came from the toilet tank, and the bathroom was situated in plain view of all other detainees with a security camera mounted in front of it.


Children detained in these horrible conditions tell interviewers that upon their return to their home countries they fear they will be murdered or raped by the people who made them flee. And as appalling as these stories may sound, the sad reality is that the children who are detained by the Border Patrol are often luckier than the ones who die or are forced into sexual slavery or gangs along the way. Apparently Obama’s definition of “doing the right thing by these children” is to force them to flee their homes, and then after a torturous journey to the US border, apprehend them, imprison them in horrifying conditions, and then ship them home to face the violence they fled. If children are treated like this, one can imagine how adults are treated.

It might give pause to some liberals to consider these uncomfortable realities. Unfortunately, they seem to take little notice of the world’s unworthy victims.

1. Paley, Dawn. Drug War Capitalism



http://libcom.org/blog/syrian-refugees- ... -refugees-“worthy”-“unworthy”-victims-25092016
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 26, 2016 1:37 pm

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinio ... -0023.html

Why the UN Meeting Is No Friend to Refugees

By: Harsha Walia

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Syrian residents wait to receive food aid distributed by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency

Published 30 September 2015


Resolving the refugee crisis requires understanding displacement and migration as central to anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles.

Today, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is convening a high level meeting on migration and refugee movements at the U.N. headquarters. While the U.N. has raised the alarm on the ongoing refugee crisis for decades, it ultimately buttresses the right of powerful Western countries to manage and control the movements of migrants and refugees through quotas, intrusive screening systems, expedited deportations, and treating migrants as commodities to meet market needs.

Managed Migration

One of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) proposals ahead of the EU Summit last week was to strengthen the mechanisms of deportation (or what they call “humane return”) for those deemed not in need of protection. As migration policies around Europe and North America become more exclusionary and rates of criminalization and detention are on the rise, this proposal reinforces the division between deserving and undeserving and between refugees and so-called bogus economic migrants.

As Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole writes, “Migrants are welcome. Some of the refugees become migrants, once the immediate danger is past. Some migrants become refugees, caught in an unexpected vortex of malice. Don’t let yourself be spun into a language of hatred and exclusion, at this hot moment in which it’s deemed OK to support refugees but still condemn migrants. I say refugee, I say migrant, I say neighbor, I say friend, because everyone is deserving of dignity.”

While asking industrialized countries to accept more refugees, the U.N. has also pushed for increased funding and structural support for refugee-hosting countries in the global South that would, essentially, keep refugees from heading West. One of the only concrete commitments to emerge from the U.N. General Assembly is not any systemic policy change but a commitment to increase funding for humanitarian agencies. Nineteen countries are donating US$1.8 billion to U.N. agencies with an emphasis on work to improve basic conditions in refugee camps.

Most importantly, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has repeatedly made comments on the need for long-term commitments to “manage” migration and “governing” refugee movements in an efficient manner. This is part of the U.N. and the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) model of managed migration, which is to facilitate “orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration.” While safe is not defined, orderly and regular are defined as migration that keeps within prescribed legal channels and includes the implementation of identity management systems, measures to better secure borders, and opening up legal avenues to migration that “match” migrants to labour market needs.

This emphasis on legal migration helps us to understand why the refugee crisis, though ongoing including astounding rates of fatalities over the past decade, is suddenly a crisis for the West because of the scale of those moving irregularly, without sanction, towards the West.

Humanitarianism as Imperialism

The humanitarianism of the U.N. falls short not only in its superficial liberalism, but because it actually creates more refugees.

Take, for example, the U.N.’s adoption of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine in 2005. Spearheaded by Canada over the past 15 years, the doctrine legitimizes and legalizes diplomatic, financial and military state intervention. Prominent examples of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine include foreign involvement in the coup in Haiti, deployment of U.N. peacekeeping troops to Sudan, and NATO attacks on Libya.

This doctrine is, of course, asymmetrical; responsibility to protect is a justification used by powerful states pursuing their geopolitical interests in countries in the global South. Oxford researcher Chris Abbott notes, “It is the politically and militarily weaker states of Africa, and the strategically important states of the Middle East, that will face the threat of ‘humanitarian’ interventions.” Or as author Anthony Fenton puts it more bluntly, “The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a new name for the old concept of humanitarian intervention, or humanitarian imperialism.”

Most recently, Responsibility to Protect has been mobilized to intervene in Syria, including United States, Canada and Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes in Syria. However, aid workers in the region point out the obvious – that airstrikes kill and displace more people. Nearly half of Syria's population has been displaced with over 4 million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries and 7.6 million internally displaced persons.

Instead of opening borders to refugees, political leaders in the UK, France, Australia and Canada are offering escalating military action as their humanitarian solution to the refugee crisis.

We will gladly bomb your country for humanitarian purposes but you are unwelcome to come fleeing over here with your family. — Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) September 9, 2015


Resolving the Roots of the Crisis

There are 59.5 million people displaced around the world, the highest level of displaced people ever recorded. Patterns of displacement and migration reveal the unequal relations between rich and poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its racialized others. It is not a coincidence that those who are dispossessed and displaced from their homes, lands, communities and families are those bearing the brunt of global imperialist and capitalist forces. It is not a coincidence that those dying along the shores of Fortress Europe, in the blistering desert along the U.S.-Mexico border, or in detention centers around the world, are those bodies deemed illegal, undesirable and disposable because of the color of their skin, gender identity, and inability to assimilate into a hegemonic way of life.

all around, and creeping

self righteous, let’s say it, fascism,

how else to say, border,

and the militant consumption of everything,

the encampment of the airport, the eagerness

to be all the same, to mince biographies

to some exact phrases, some

exact and toxic genealogy.


—Dionne Brand, Inventory

Resolving the refugee and migration crisis, therefore, requires understanding displacement and migration as central to anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-oppressive struggles. The U.N.’s proposal for better management of migration will not solve this crisis. Fighting dispossession so no one is forced to leave their homes and breaking fortressed borders so people can migrate safely in the search of equality is the only just solution.

As officials in high-level meetings discuss quotas on our bodies and humanities, debate how to better govern our misery, posture on whose drones will kill more efficiently and whose walls are the highest, we must affirm a vision for self-determination. A vision for self-determination where we can live free from cages, militaries, borders, reserves, segregation, toxic industries, corporations and sweatshops. A vision for self-determination that dismantles hierarchies based on race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship and ability. A vision for self-determination over our own bodies, lives, cultures, lands, and labor. To be a friend to migrants and refugees is to affirm the self-determination of the dispossessed, not the sovereignty of powerful states.
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 07, 2016 11:03 pm

The Struggle Against Racism and ‘Fortress-Europe’ and the Fight for Popular Sovereignty

ImagePanagiotis Sotiris
December 1, 2016
http://spectrezine.org/struggle-against-racism-and-‘fortress-europe’-and-fight-popular-sovereignty]spectrezine







We must include migrants and refugees in the people, politically and institutionally in the sense of full social and political rights but also ideologically in the terms of how we define the “us vs. them” in our societies. We need to redefine the people –or even the “nation”– as the unity in struggle of all the subaltern classes. This is an answer to “identity politics” than chauvinism in the name of “secularism," and an answer to neo-liberal cosmopolitanism.

, ,


The refugee crisis has demonstrated the deep crisis of the European Union. For the past years not only it has not been able to deal with the arrival of a large number of refugees and migrants, but has resorted to the deadly, murderous policies of “Fortress Europe”. The result has been thousands of dead refugees and migrants in the waters of the Mediterranean.

Some people say “there are too many refugees in the world”. Is this true? Well, numbers don’t add up. In 2015 the total number of migrants was 232 million, in a global population of 7.4 billion. Regarding refugees in particular, the numbers are indeed increasing. But are they “too many? We are talking about a total of 65.3 million displaced people in the world of which 21.3 million (2015 figures) fall within the definition of ‘refugees’ of which 5.2 are Palestinians. There are 10 million stateless people and 3.2 million asylum seekers. These are big numbers in terms of human tragedy, but definitely not huge in the sense “we cannot cope with them”.

Almost half of refugees come from 3 countries: Somalia (1.1 m.), Afghanistan (2.7m.), and Syria (4.9). And according to 2015 figures, they do not mainly come to Europe. In 2015, the countries that have received the largest numbers of refugees are: Turkey (2.5 m.), Pakistan (1.6 m.), Lebanon 1.1 (m.), Iran (974.000), Ethiopia (736.000), and Jordan (664.000).

Is this the biggest refugee crisis in Europe? No, after WWII the total number of refugees and displaced persons exceeded in Europe perhaps 10 or even twenty million. Is this the biggest refugee crisis for a single country or region? No that was after the partition of Pakistan from India when there was the most massive move of refugees and displaced persons.

But deaths are high, especially in the Mediterranean. In the passage from Africa to Italy the possibility to be killed is 1 in 23….

These big movements of refugees can be explained by the form contemporary imperialism has taken. On the one hand, we have the consequences of imperialist wars and interventions, either directly or indirectly. Imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with sanctions before them created situations of failed economies and state infrastructures that led many people to leave their countries in order to avoid war and misery. Western fuelling of ethnic divisions, religious conflicts and tribal hostilities only made things worse. On the other hand, many corporations in Europe favour the idea of a divided labour market, with a large segment of the work-force facing over-exploitation, extreme precariousness and poverty. In this sense, poverty and war have been forcing people to leave their countries only to find extreme poverty and violence in their destinations.

Racism and xenophobia are important elements of these processes because they guarantee the divisions inside the working class and make sure that a large segment of the working class remains trapped in a very precarious situation, unable to have full social rights and with the constant danger of being arrested and deported.

But people will continue to arrive, as long as imperialism, war and poverty continue to force them to come. What can we do? Far Right but also EU says “keep them out”. “Safeguard borders”. “Increase security”. “Send more navy vessels and increase patrols”. However, these do not stop refugees and migrants; they just make things more dangerous….

In the US-Mexico border there is the world’s most advanced and deadly wall and security system in place against migrants. So far it has not really reduced arrivals.

Now if they arrive how we treat them? The Far Right and the EU say “treat them as illegal aliens”, “restrain them”, and “put them in detention centres”. But they also mean “keep them illegal so that they can be cheap labour”. The cynical logic of the Far Right but also of European governments is that illegality is a way to make sure that they end up in conditions of overexploitation and precariousness.

So what can we do if we want to remain within a class and internationalist perspective?

First of all we fight against imperialism and war and poverty so that people do not have to leave their countries. Not because we “do not want them to come”, but because it is good that people get a better living in their countries. It is better to have prosperity, peace and employment in more countries of the world.

Secondly, guarantee safe passage for asylum seekers and refugees. The fact that to arrive in Europe you must first be in danger of drowning is extremely paranoid and murderous. The right of safe passage and arrival at destination are basic human rights. Refugees know where they are going, they do not just drift. Keeping them stranded or imprisoned in Greece or Italy because of closed passages and borders can only make things worse. And plans like deportation from Greece and then relocation from Turkey are simply not working. Since August 2015 a large number of refugees arrived in Europe. And as we all know, Europe has not been destroyed.

Thirdly, give refugees and migrants their full rights. Give refugees asylum, recognize migrants’ rights, and guarantee that they have access to social protection. Illegality creates precariousness and over-exploitation, by means of an institutional division of the working classes. Fight against inequality. For example, when corporations bring subcontractors with workers from other countries with lower wages using the ability to pay at the rates of the countries of origin, we must struggle against the racist / Far Rights cries to “keep foreign workers out” and answer that “everyone working here should take the wages being paid here and enjoy the same workplace and social protection and have the same rights” and organize them in unions.

Fourthly, fight racism and xenophobia and create new communities based upon common interests against islamophobia and all neo-colonialist and racist ideologies, including neo-imperialist theories of “clash of civilizations”.

Let’s see now some of the questions that have been raised in the discussion.

First, we must say no to all “conspiracy theories”. Migrants and refugees are not here because of a conspiracy from European bourgeoisies. They are here because they need a better future and because they want to escape war, persecution and poverty. European bourgeoisies can take advantage of their arrival but only if the vicious circle of illegality and institutional racism is in place. Migrants and refugees are our class allies; they are not the instrument of the enemy. It is capitalists that make labour market more flexible and precarious not migrants.

Secondly, we must deconstruct so-called “security questions”. No, refugees are not “Islamic Terrorists”. An “Islamic terrorist organization” that would send operatives through Libya and expose them to the danger of death in the sea, would be a stupid terrorist organization, suitable only for a Monty Python’s film. In contrast, we know that such organizations have managed to recruit large numbers of alienated European citizens exactly because they have faced exclusion and racism.

Thirdly, we must refuse neo-Malthusianism. There is no sense in talking about there are “too many people” in our countries. With an alternative social paradigm we can have growth and redistribution and actually need more people to work.

Does this mean that we propose a “no borders” policy? No, in fact we need borders. We need borders in order to keep predatory finance out, to keep foreign capital wanting to dismantle the economy out, to keep imperialists out. And also to make sure that there is no capital flight, that there are not enterprises relocating to other countries, that there is no wealth been siphoned out of the country. But we also need borders to open them and welcome refugees and migrants!

Fourthly, we must fight against islamophobia. Today in Western Europe the attacks against refugees and migrants represent a neo-colonial attempt from the part of European bourgeoisies to wage class war against a great part of their working class in the name of the danger of extremism, “radicalization”, and terrorism. In fact, this is a form of internal colonization, France being the most tragic example. Today, a large percentage of working-class and popular strata in Europe are Muslim. They are treated as second class citizens, or, worse, like the enemy. We should not tolerate this. Laws about clothing in schools or beaches are not a defence of democracy or the secular state; they are class strategies against migrants and Muslim workers.

How does this relate to questions of popular sovereignty? I said before that solidarity and internationalism mean closed borders to capital open borders to solidarity. This is an act of sovereignty. Now in more general terms: we support the idea of popular sovereignty against European integration or “globalization”. We defend popular sovereignty because it transforms the nation-state into a terrain of democratic struggle. It helps the potential formation of a collective will of the subaltern classes in a revolutionary socialist perspective. It is at the level of that nation-state we can create a broad alliance around a program of social transformation, a new “historical bloc”.

However, this has to do with a political conception of the political body. It has to do with the people, not in the sense defined in the constitutions but as the alliance of the subaltern classes in their struggle for a better future. It has nothing to with historical identities or lineages. We must include migrants and refugees in the people, politically and institutionally in the sense of full social and political rights but also ideologically in the terms of how we define the “us vs. them” in our societies. We need to redefine the people –or even the “nation”– as the unity in struggle of all the subaltern classes. This is a much better answer to “identity politics” than either chauvinism and neo-colonialism in the name of “republicanism” and “secularism” but also neoliberal cosmopolitanism that denies the possibility of a radical and emancipatory popular “common sense”, favouring instead a world where there are only corporations and individuals, not forms of popular will.

Can we do it? Well, we can. In Greece, one of the most hopeful developments of last year has been the immense movement of solidarity to refugees and migrants. An important part has been the occupation by the movement of buildings like schools or hotels. I will refer to the example of the City Plaza Hotel in Athens. It is self-managed with refugees and people from the solidarity movement work together. Such occupations prove that you can have refugees in decent condition without great cost. Above all, such occupations prove that we can indeed create a different community of common struggles. They prove that we can live together. They prove that we can create together a people in struggle!

The text above, by Greek Popular Unity activist Panagiotis Sotiris, is a transcript of his speech at the No Euro Forum held in mid-October in Chianciano Terme, Italy, 16-18 October 2016.
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Thu Dec 08, 2016 1:31 am

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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Thu Dec 08, 2016 1:42 am

Malcolm Turnbull’s US Deal Proves His Brutal Refugee Policies Didn’t Work

The deal with America is a way out for a government obsessed with cruelty and unable to resolve the contradictions it created, writes Max Chalmers.


Three years after the initiation of Operation Sovereign Borders, four years after Australia recommenced the transfer of refugees to Nauru, and 15 years after John Howard ground people rescued by the Tampa into political capital, Australia’s refugee policy remains a mess of contradictions.

Last weekend, flanked by military staff and his Immigration Minister, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that the United States had agreed to take some – though it’s not clear how many – of the refugees currently trapped on Nauru and Manus Island.

If the deal is not blocked by the incoming Trump administration, it will be welcome.

The overwhelming majority of those assessed on Manus and Nauru have been found to be refugees in need of protection. Instead of being given the chance to restart their lives they have been detained for years in a process that threatened to stretch out eternally.

Children have witnessed their parents endure torture and in turn torture themselves. Grown men have seen the violence of uncertainly drain life from their friends and the active abuse of those tasked with their care. Even after release from detention, the people on Nauru and Manus have faced a future all but devoid of hope.

Turnbull has now offered to restore it with one hand while withdrawing it with another, announcing a 20-year Nauru visa, potentially extending the amount of time people can be held on the tiny island state. And yet the American component of the deal does offer the chance to break the gridlock that Labor and the Coalition jointly established. It represents a major divergence from the previous policy of total deterrence.

Finally, the camps could come to an end.

The destinations the Coalition had previously tried to establish as settlement locations included Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, and the Philippines, on top of Papua New Guinea. What they have in common is their undesirability. These are states where political persecution flourishes, corruption is rife, overcrowding and the lack of resources are critical problems, health outcomes are poor, income levels are low, and travel warnings from the Australian government are severe.

It’s no coincidence: The plan was to deal with two problems at once by sending refugees to third party countries, thus avoiding refoulement (though still putting them at great risk), while keeping the deterrent factor high to anyone thinking of getting on a boat.

While Turnbull’s talking points on the new deal have been the same ones we have heard now for years – people smugglers, Labor’s failures, deaths at sea – the new course subtly admits something far bigger.

The policy of deterrence, of causing human beings to suffer in order to stop further asylum seekers getting on boats, has failed.

There was always a question about what would happen to those on Manus and Nauru, a question no-one, least of all Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, could answer satisfactorily. The obvious answer was that they should be settled in Australia. Yet both major parties dodged this conclusion, afraid to admit that their ‘be cruel first, ask question later’ strategies had been designed on the hop and were fundamentally untenable.

How the hell were developing nations going to take an influx of refugees needing intensive resources and assistance to integrate? No-one cared to answer.

Neither party had reason to think such slavish adherence to ‘toughness’ would actually bring resolution. Human Rights Watch’s Elaine Pearson explained and critiqued this succinctly in her response to the US announcement:

The Australian government’s intransigence and short-sighted immigration policies, based on political rather than humanitarian motives, have caused immense suffering to people fleeing persecution in their homelands and who were locked up on Nauru and Manus.

As they turned to toughness, both Labor and the Coalition tried to position the policies of offshore processing and offshore settlement as not merely preferable but necessary. They acted as if there was no alternatives to their positions, as if you had to choose between cruelty offshore or deaths at sea. Don’t support the camps? How dare you condone the drowning of children!

They continued to make this case in the face of credible and consistent accusations of child abuse, and unrelenting waves of self-harm. They sent gay men to places where homosexuality is illegal, and women to nations that criminalise abortion. They let inadequate medical supplies kill Hamid Kehazaei. Opposing any of this was said to be immoral.

The argument that offshore settlement was the only way to help prevent deaths at sea therefore helped create the ridiculous perception that a racist policy fuelled by suspicion of non-white refugees and migrants could be transformed into a reasonable and humanitarian enterprise.

The tension between the messages ‘we’re worried about drownings’ and ‘we’re harming those who don’t drown’ failed to irk a public conditioned to mistrust people who seek refuge by boat.

And still, this policy turned out to be an emphatic failure, even if you exclude the wellbeing of asylum seekers from the equation.

Australia effectively bribed Cambodia to the tune of $55 million, but virtually no refugees agreed to move there. That’s hardly surprising when you consider the problems they faced at home would have likely been replicated in the autocratic state, which itself boasts a terrible record on the treatment of refugees.

Very few have ventured out into Papua New Guinean society, a place where there is also good reason to think they will not be safe. The other deals simply never came to pass.

This paradox of trying to help settle people while needing to treat them cruelly left the Abbott and then Turnbull governments paralysed, as Peter Dutton fumbled around haplessly for a resolution. The abuses on Nauru and Manus pilled up. The outrage grew. Something had to give.

Even as conservative commentators crowed, you could see the end coming. By mid 2015 Nauru’s political leaders had become so bent that New Zealand and the US openly pressured them to reform. Australia remained quiet.

The centres became ‘open’ on both islands and a court challenge in PNG made the detention centre illegal. In documents leaked to New Matilda in 2015, a senior member of the Department of Immigration said then Minister Scott Morrison was “shit worried” about the potential for massive violence on Nauru. He too realised that keeping people there was dangerous.

Detention was falling apart, how could people be settled?

The obvious resolution became clear once more: let these people come to Australia. Stubbornly, the government refused.

In changing course, Turnbull has now effectively admitted that, aside from being unjust, the bipartisan strategy of devastation and disincentive was untenable as a policy. The government’s wholehearted commitment to cruelty hamstrung it, blocking the most obvious solutions at every turn.

So now the Coalition has taken a way out that helps it maintain political credibility with the fanatical hardliners, and a general public sick of hearing about the issue. It has given in to resettlement in an Australia that is not Australia. It has held its promise that no-one would make it to Australia while giving in to the fundamental point: refugees will be resettled somewhere safe.

Turnbull has said the deal is a one-off, but that begs further questions. It seems most likely that Border Force is now committed to turn back every boat regardless of who is on it, a practice it had more or less followed already. What happens to people who are not screened out is anyone’s guess.

The deal has highlighted the incoherence and contradictions at the heart of Australia’s refugee policies, while offering Turnbull’s government a final chance to place the 1,600 or so people they dumped indefinitely in the Pacific.

If the deal is scuttled by the sociopathic new American President, the Coalition will only have itself to blame. The real victims, once again, will be the men, women, and children they have captured and detained.

It’s never been about their wellbeing. As far as Australia’s political leaders are concerned it’s okay if brown people on boats end up in safety. Just so long as they don’t end up as our neighbours.


https://newmatilda.com/2016/11/18/malco ... idnt-work/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Fri May 11, 2018 8:25 am

Harsha Walia: “Racism, Austerity and Precarity: Canada’s Role in Shaping Anti-Migrant Policies”

While much attention is focused on Trump and American anti-immigrant measures, the reality is that the US looks to countries like Canada to model its border walls and deportation policies on. Migrants and racialized communities face systemic barriers to labour rights, permanent residency, and dignity in Canada. With escalating white supremacy as a stark reality alongside the national myth of multiculturalism, how do we challenge structural racism and neoliberalism as systems that operate across state-constructed borders?

Harsha Walia is a cofounder of the migrant justice group No One Is Illegal, author of the award-winning book Undoing Border Imperialism, and Project Coordinator at the Downtown Eastside Women's Center. For the past two decades she has been involved in grassroots community organizing for migrant, racial, gender and environmental justice. Trained in the law, she has made numerous presentations to the United Nations on Canadian immigration and detention policies. Harsha is a recipient of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives Power of Youth Award, Westender's Best of the City in Activism Award, and named "one of Canada's most brilliant and effective organizers" by Naomi Klein.



https://vimeo.com/267833008
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby Jerky » Fri May 11, 2018 3:08 pm

There was an echo of the "unworthy" refugees (economic or otherwise) in today's comments by White House chief of staff John Kelly, in his defense of of Trump and Co's brutal new tactics in fighting "illegals".

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/n ... ts-w520182
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 14, 2018 8:04 am

The refugee camps in Greece: One person’s experience

Image

Paternalism vs. working class solidarity
This view is related to the paternalistic attitude that many of the volunteers and NGO workers have in the camps. For them, it is often a matter of “helping our poor brown brothers”, and they don’t recognize that many of these refugees are revolutionaries who have a lot of important experiences that we all need to learn from.

Jo also commented that more solidarity is needed between different refugees, and also that the Greek working class could play greater role. One of the ways this could be done is through more concrete actions to meet demands – strikes, sit-ins, etc. to get the state to respond.

Mood among Syrian refugees
Among Syrian refugees there tends to be a mood of exhaustion and defeat, but they also see events in Syria as part of a long process that could continue. The mood also varies from day to day. “It’s hard to keep hope when your families are being murdered….” Jo said. “The answer [for a renewed struggle] might be in the diaspora….. People are so exhausted…. But people have organized against the Assad regime in the streets in Athens… for opening the borders and for opening the camps…. Stand against the Assad regime as well as nihilistic Islamic groups like Daesh.”

Anti-capitalism
We asked Jo how much there is a view that the heart of the problem is capitalism itself. She commented: “It’s not the dominant view… (but) they will talk about the neoliberal policies of the Assad regime. They will talk about inequality, and how the was one of the catalysts for the revolution. And they see solidarity (with) the European working class.”

She went further, explaining that there is needed a political struggle to clarify that neoliberalism is simply a symptom of the crisis of capitalism itself. This view “is not the majority…. the majority will tell you that the revolution was for freedom…. it was against people being tortured to death.”

Image
Bashar (left) and Hafez (right) Assad.
Hafez seized power in a coup aimed
against the left of his party –
the Baath Party.


Socialism
We asked whether “socialism” is associated with the Assad regime. Jo replied: “It can (make it difficult to raise the idea of socialism) but I think that’s part of the political struggle — to define socialism and to define anti-capitalism…. Many (refugees) who were involved in the struggle would not reject the idea of socialism or of anarcho-communism. They will reject Ba’athism.”


https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/06/13 ... xperience/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 6:29 am

Harsha Walia: “Racism, Austerity and Precarity: Canada’s Role in Shaping Anti-Migrant Policies”

https://vimeo.com/267833008

While much attention is focused on Trump and American anti-immigrant measures, the reality is that the US looks to countries like Canada to model its border walls and deportation policies on. Migrants and racialized communities face systemic barriers to labour rights, permanent residency, and dignity in Canada. With escalating white supremacy as a stark reality alongside the national myth of multiculturalism, how do we challenge structural racism and neoliberalism as systems that operate across state-constructed borders?

Harsha Walia is a cofounder of the migrant justice group No One Is Illegal, author of the award-winning book Undoing Border Imperialism, and Project Coordinator at the Downtown Eastside Women's Center. For the past two decades she has been involved in grassroots community organizing for migrant, racial, gender and environmental justice. Trained in the law, she has made numerous presentations to the United Nations on Canadian immigration and detention policies. Harsha is a recipient of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives Power of Youth Award, Westender's Best of the City in Activism Award, and named "one of Canada's most brilliant and effective organizers" by Naomi Klein.
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 19, 2018 9:16 am

https://loveandragemedia.org/2018/06/18 ... san-shire/

“Home” – A Poem by Warsan Shire

Image
"Refugees: La Sagrada Familia" by Kelly Latimore

by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.

you only run for the border
when you see the whole city
running as well.

your neighbours running faster
than you, the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind
the old tin factory is
holding a gun bigger than his body,
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one would leave home unless home
chased you, fire under feet,
hot blood in your belly.

it’s not something you ever thought about
doing, and so when you did –
you carried the anthem under your breath,
waiting until the airport toilet
to tear up the passport and swallow,
each mouthful of paper making it clear that
you would not be going back.

you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.

who would choose to spend days
and nights in the stomach of a truck
unless the miles travelled
meant something more than journey.

no one would choose to crawl under fences,
be beaten until your shadow leaves you,
raped, then drowned, forced to the bottom of
the boat because you are darker, be sold,
starved, shot at the border like a sick animal,
be pitied, lose your name, lose your family,
make a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten,
stripped and searched, find prison everywhere
and if you survive and you are greeted on the other side
with go home blacks, refugees
dirty immigrants, asylum seekers
sucking our country dry of milk,
dark, with their hands out
smell strange, savage –
look what they’ve done to their own countries,
what will they do to ours?

the dirty looks in the street
softer than a limb torn off,
the indignity of everyday life
more tender than fourteen men who
look like your father, between
your legs, insults easier to swallow
than rubble, than your child’s body
in pieces – for now, forget about pride
your survival is more important.

i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home tells you to
leave what you could not behind,
even if it was human.

no one leaves home until home
is a damp voice in your ear saying
leave, run now, i don’t know what
i’ve become.

but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 20, 2018 7:05 am

Fascism in Australia: An interview with slackbastard

Ani: While neo-fascists seek an escalation of violence against refugees and visible minorities, the Australian state is already exceptional in its brutal Mandatory Detention policy. Can you tell us about Australia’s refugee policy, and about the refugee solidarity movement?

Andy: It’s certainly the case that the Australian state does a good job of brutalising asylum seekers, but its exceptionality may be rather short-lived, sadly, as governments and parties in Europe now look to Australia for cutting-edge methods of controlling population flows. These policies and programs have proven inspiring to the continent’s far right. In general, the policy of mandatory detention, inaugurated in 1994 under the Keating Labor government, has enjoyed bipartisan support ever since, and the Australian public largely supports the measures adopted to penalise those asylum seekers who arrive on Australia’s shores by boat. Occasionally, some noises in opposition will emanate from back-benchers, but it seems as though there are no real cracks in the parliamentary facade, and so the policy will remain in place for some time to come. Of course, some Australians celebrate the state’s cruelty, and workers in the detention industry — which, like other government services, is now semi-privatised — notoriously posed with Hanson at a Reclaim rally in 2015. On the flip side, the relocation of the concentration camps from the cities to rural areas and then to other islands — and the various, generally crackpot schemes hatched in conjunction with regional governments for them to accept some portion of Australia’s inmates — could be read as being a reaction to resistance within the camps, as well as a rational desire to keep torture out of public sight. Currently, the refugee solidarity movement is largely confined to the conduct of periodic rallies and protests, the effects of which are generally minimal outside, perhaps, of keeping the abuse of refugees and asylum seekers in the public mind. Other, related campaigns have sought to attack the underlying infrastructure of the detention industry, especially through divestment campaigns, and specifically by seeking to have union superfunds withdrawn from the industry. This has met with some limited success and lukewarm support from the labour movement, which remains dominated by the ALP. A relatively recent project is called ‘Can’t Stand Buy’, which seeks (or sought) to harness acts of civil disobedience to escalate the economic and social costs of maintaining the regime. It generated some media attention, but not mass public participation. In general, the XBorder blog is a useful resource — one which also attempts to situate the regime within a global complex of institutions and political arrangements — and the ‘RISE: Refugees, Survivors and Ex-Detainees’ organisation in Melbourne is a unique presence in the ‘refugee solidarity’ movement, with both it and the imprisoned journalist Behrouz Boochani continuing to be important voices of protest.


https://fightback.org.nz/2018/06/06/fas ... ckbastard/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 21, 2018 7:31 am

Out of Sight, Out of Our Minds

As the American detainee crisis deepens, Australia’s own immigration catastrophe points to a bleaker future

THE TINY PACIFIC ISLAND NATION of Nauru, all 8.1 square miles of it, used to be a pile of shit; that is, a pile of very valuable, phosphate-rich seabird guano. That explains why a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere was fought over and colonized by the Germans, then Australia and New Zealand (joint hall monitors of a League of Nations mandate), then the Japanese, and then the British.

When it achieved independence in 1968 it was better positioned for the future than most European colonies in the Pacific because the phosphate reserves were not yet depleted. More commonly the UK would grant independence immediately after the last phosphates were mined (as in Kiribati in 1979), and some cynics have suggested that such timing was not entirely coincidental. But Nauru appeared to do everything right. It set up a national Trust for its guano earnings and from 1968 to 1980 its roughly ten thousand citizens were the wealthiest people per capita on Earth.

Alas, the Trust fell to a series of zany investment schemes, including Air Nauru (repo men took its sole Boeing 737), luxury properties in Sydney and Melbourne (used mostly for Nauruan elites to treat themselves to luxury vacations), and, I shit you not, financing the 1993 West End flop Leonardo the Musical. By 2003 Nauru’s once-vaunted phosphate Trust had dwindled from well over $1 billion to $100 million. If that sounds like a lot of money, it isn’t for a nation with virtually no other substantial revenue stream. The guano was gone. Tourism was impossible (too remote, too underdeveloped). Manufacturing was nonexistent. Aside from a little fishing, there was no way to bring in money.

Nauru was once again rich in resources, only this time the minerals were the poor, the abused, the war-ravaged, and the persecuted.

And that is how in 2001 the Nauru Regional Processing Centre came into being, an economic life preserver tossed at a desperate nation by Australia. The Aussies, as it happened, were in need of a place to stash thousands of would-be immigrants and asylum seekers it very much did not want on Australian soil. Legally, if migrants could be intercepted at sea and prevented from setting foot in Australia proper, the government could maintain legal cover for denying them a slew of rights and privileges.

In exchange for detaining this most inconvenient population indefinitely, Nauru received a steady and valuable influx of Australian dollars. The island was once again rich in resources, only this time the minerals were the poor, the abused, the war-ravaged, and the persecuted of Indonesia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and other troubled spots throughout Asia.

Australia’s history with non-white immigration is, even from the view within the American glass house, deeply troubled. The “White Australia” policy was law of the land until 1973, and the harsh immigration policies imposed in 2001 (fueled partly by the right-wing populist ascendancy of the ghoulish Pauline Hanson, who is sort of Australia’s Donald Trump, both sharing a fondness for business failures and a voice like a pneumatic drill press), made it abundantly clear that the nation had decided not merely that there were too many immigrants but too many Asian immigrants. Tellingly, Australia labeled its tough new post-2000 policy of herding non-white immigrants into fenced camps the “Pacific Solution,” revealing a disturbingly fascist streak beneath the nation’s carefully crafted veneer of koalas and Natalie Imbruglia.

The nation’s vile treatment of its Aboriginal population, up to and including ripping Aboriginal children from their parents and sending them to live with white families, fills volumes and cannot be done justice here.

Nauru’s open-air detention center was not Australia’s only creative attempt to keep asylum seekers off its soil at all costs. One of its own territories, Christmas Island, was actually excised by the Howard government from the nation’s migration zone—so that detainees seeking asylum could not formally become refugees. A final holding pen was housed in Papua New Guinea—stop me if any of this rings bells—on an Australian military base.

Throughout their fifteen-plus year histories, the centers have proven themselves black holes into which immigrants are dropped and left to sit for years on end while their applications for asylum, which of course are never approved, are “processed.” If it seems like nothing bad could happen to a legally ambiguous population of non-people, disdained by much of the host nation’s public and government, while being held indefinitely in remote locations, I implore you not to take a sip of hot coffee before moving on.

The powerless, quasi-stateless, confined people in these facilities have been exploited at every turn, separated from whatever meager possessions they have by thieves and con men and subject to physical and sexual abuse while housed in open tents in hot, tropical conditions. One UK-based legal group called child abuse at the Nauru camp “institutionalized.” The camps are a humanitarian Chernobyl, a moral blight on the nation, and both a great expense and tremendous embarrassment to those Australians who care about such things as not being pointlessly cruel to the most helpless segment of humanity.


Continues: https://thebaffler.com/latest/out-of-si ... ds-burmila





'You will be responsible': a mother's warning is unheeded on Nauru

For months in the Australian-run detention centre she pleaded for her sons. The eldest, Fariborz Karami, killed himself last week

Image
26-year-old Fariborz Karami - the Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker had been held on Nauru for five years.


https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... d-on-nauru
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 26, 2018 5:37 am

Immigration turmoil equals crisis of capitalism

Image

“A nation WITHOUT BORDERS is not a nation at all.” So tweeted Donald Trump, and it’s one of the few things he’s said that’s actually true. The question is what is to replace the present system of capitalist nation-states? Will it be increased chauvinism and repression, or international working class solidarity and international socialist revolution? It is in this light that we have to understand the issue of the immigrant children being ripped from the arms of their parents and, in fact, the very issue of mass immigration itself.


Continues: https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/06/25 ... apitalism/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 26, 2018 8:43 pm

"TRIAL RUNS FOR FASCISM ARE IN FULL FLOW"

BY FINTAN O'TOOLE (IRISH TIMES)

Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.

Moral boundaries

But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.

It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.

To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.

‘Devious’ infants

And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.

This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable. So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow.


http://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2018/06/t ... -full.html
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