Fora.tv is a web-based 'platform for intellectual debate'. There’s a useful video tour of the site here. It calls itself ‘the leading interactive viewing experience of the smartest, most entertaining video content in the world… The world of ideas and knowledge—all drawn from the live-event speeches, discussions, interviews and debates going on everywhere all the time at the world’s leading conferences, ideas festivals, think tanks and other major centers of thought and discourse’.

As far as I can tell, that basically means lectures, interviews and conferences made available online, complete with searchable transcripts. A search of the site for ‘immigration’ produces this list. One of the most recent videos is an interview with the Iranian author, Firoozeh Dumas, whose ‘Funny in Farsi’ told of her family’s experience of migration from Iran to the US. Her most recent book is ‘Laughing Without an Accent’. Her website is here.

Journeyman Pictures, the company profiled below, is as interesting for its ethos and business organisation as it is for its product. I thought it worth posting this edited excerpt from the company’s description of itself:

‘Independent TV producer Mark Stucke founded the company. After four impoverished years traipsing the world's most risky places, from the Gulf War to Sarajevo to Somalia, Mark Stucke realised that with a wealth of valuable copyright in his library he would be foolish to continue producing such dangerous material for the pay he was receiving for his work. It was at this stage that he set his mind to formulating a distribution system, which would bring greater returns to TV producers working in the neglected international actuality arena. As the company's experience grew we utilised our unique knowledge of one of the most difficult markets in the world to branch into distribution of the genre on a wide scale.

‘The free flow of information is the elixir of healthy democratic life. As journalists the company has spent ten years at the forefront of the international current affairs agenda… Our dedication is to the producers who believe such stories are worth making despite the time, danger and self inflicted poverty, which often comes with the territory. Our promise is to make their endeavours not only broadcast but to also create new revenue for their work into the future.

‘We market the films of many renowned independents and broadcasters. The key to actuality marketing is a sales culture centred on reactivity, topicality and the rapidly developing multi-media industry. It's what makes it a very different business from most other television marketing. Our sales team has a central journalistic ethic. We strive to offer a constant turnover of up-to-date and relevant documentaries and features. To us it means selling what relates and amplifies the day's interests.

‘Each week our films are broadcast to roughly 10 million people around the world. Many European actuality programmers rely on our supply. It's enabled us to become one of the largest actuality archives. But a large library all too often becomes a dead and inactive library, filled with films, which saw the light of day just once, but are now forgotten and buried, impossible to find. Not at Journeyman. A combination of the web's interactivity, a powerful publicity machine and a topical sales focus means films remain easy to discover, and continually on offer.

‘At the heart of sales is our newsletter, the Journeyman Weekly, faxed and e-mailed to feature buyers around the world. It includes a weekly rundown of Journeyman's offerings and topical features from the archive. The Journeyman Weekly is uploaded to our internet site with streaming video from the films.

‘But we at Journeyman believe a world in which the mainstream is swamped with popular material can help to bring focus on the minority. Multimedia developments offer diverse and different broadcast potential in a way never possible before. They offer new platforms to a niche previously too small to justify much airplay on terrestrial TV.

‘Perhaps it won't be too long before international news junkies tune into their own Journeyman TV station, a TV station where the client is the programmer. Where would you like to go tonight?’

Journeyman Pictures describe themselves as ‘London's leading independent distributor of topical news features, documentaries and footage. We're like a video encyclopedia of the world.’

I found them via this 20-minute documentary on YouTube, a clean, concise, accessible account of West African migration to the Canaries, from early 2007.

Their channel on YouTube has an extensive list of international news reports, with a large number relating to migration issues. Amongst them is this 30-minute documentary on the plight and politics of South Africa’s shack dwellers (mostly migrants from rural South Africa).

The site’s documentaries section offers a range of full-length docs, including ‘The Guards' Story’, which goes inside Australia’s most notorious immigrant detention centres, on pay-per-view (£1) or subscription.

Also available is ‘Hibo’s Song’, about female circumcision.

An interesting article from the Boston Globe, on Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war in Gaza, led me to the Al Jazeera website in search of material on migration issues.

As well as their website, the network maintains a YouTube channel, which is easy to navigate and clearly laid out. Al Jazeera’s videos are quite prominent in the general search of YouTube for immigration-related material, described yesterday. Their channel has a series of playlists, with one of these, 'Couscous and Cola' documenting the lives of a group of teenaged immigrants in Holland, and another, 'Crossroads Europe' taking an odyssey around Europe in search of stories of migration and integration. Each film is made by a different filmmaker.

Al Jazeera also has a regular slot called ‘First Person’. In this 2.5 minute clip, Omar Bar, an immigrant from Senegal in Paris, tells the story of his perilous journey by boat to the Canaries.

In 2006, an engineer at Lockheed Martin, Michael De Kort, tried to turn whistleblower about what he alleged were critical flaws in the defence contractor’s work. He contacted a legion of traditional media outlets, but none of them ran the story. So he turned to YouTube.

He lost his job, but broke the story, and it was quickly picked up by the mainstream news media. (View his video here.) This story popped up this week in the Drum Beat e-newsletter (which I’ve mentioned before), and it set me off looking for how YouTube, and other online media, are covering migration stories… If you’ve any other examples, please email them to migrationmatters [at] gmail.com.

A search for ‘immigration’ on YouTube produces a huge amount of material, mostly clips from US television programmes covering immigration issues there, and apparently with a bias towards anti-immigration and immigration-control views. (One more novel example, from 2006: a news cartoon from Cable News offering a ‘History of Illegal Immigration’.)

Searching under YouTube’s playlists provides a more structured response. Amongst those on the first page are playlists from UK Home Office and the San Diego Minuteman, notorious from their paramilitary border patrolling (“we are taking our country back!”), but the list is still immense.

Searching in YouTube’s channels is more productive, producing just 201 results. The first is 9500Liberty which appears to offer an intriguing use of this media.

As the filmmakers explain, ‘this project began as the world's first "Interactive Documentary" on YouTube, and developed into a virtual town hall about the politicization of the immigration issue in Prince William County, VA. During the first year of production, we often responded to viewer feedback, including requests for more coverage on certain story lines, contextual clarifications, and even on-site production… Because of the timeliness of the immigration issue and the urgency of the situation, we decided to create this real-time, interactive documentary page -- breaking with the usual documentary post-production method that delays public feedback for months and months. Some clips on this channel will become part of a feature length documentary.’ The most recent video on the site is a revealing interview with a former anti-immigrant activist.

Searching YouTube using ‘migrant’ produces another plethora of results, amongst them this video produced by the Armed Forces of Malta’s public information office on migrant landings on the island.

A playlist search turned up The Migrant Project, a collaboration of 40 based artists, based in Sydney, but with cultural and artistic ancestries from across the globe, centred on reclaiming Sydney as a city built on a history of migration.

Are soap operas a force for good? That’s the question that animated Miguel Sabido’s work in Mexican tv in the 1970s. His ‘Sabido Method’ involved using popular soap operas to disseminate important public health messages. That inspired the work of the Population Media Center, an organisation specialising in producing radio and tv serials for developing world audiences that attempt to change behaviour.

Their focus is on population growth and its consequences. The key issues they address include environmental preservation, HIV/Aids and reproductive health. Migration is an underlying, or tangential, issue in their work, given the direct, causal links between population growth, poverty and economic migration. But also, their serials occasionally confront aspects of migration directly, such as the West African ‘Cesiri Tono’ serial that highlighted issues of trafficking and exploitation of children. According to an evaluation of that serial’s impact, listeners in Mali were over five times as likely as non-listeners to have heard of the issue of exploitative child labour. In Burkina Faso, more than twice as many listeners as non-listeners reported having taken action against exploitative child labour.

There’s a New Yorker article on the Sabido Method here.

Population Media Center has a guide for journalists to plan and produce similar soap operas, available for free download here.

Population Media Impact is another organisation working in this area (since 1985).  They have a YouTube channel here.

Something to get you in the mood for the weekend: some infectious rap-cum-rock from K'naan, a Somali exile now living in Toronto, Canada. Also known as the Dusty Foot Philosopher, K'naan left Mogadishu with his mother in 1991, on the last commercial flight out of the country as the government of Mohamed Siad collapsed. K'naan means 'traveller' in the Somali language; they joined his father, already working as a cab driver in New York, and eventually relocated to Rexdale, Toronto, where there is a large Somali community.

K'naan learned English and dropped out of school to travel to open mic rap events. In 1999, he performed a spoken word piece before the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, criticising the UN's failures in Somalia. This led to work with the legendry Senegalese musician, Youssou N'Dour, and to more UN gigs. His first album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher, won various prizes, including the BBC Radio Three world music award, and his follow up, Troubadour, is due out next month. One critic has described him as having "a sound that fuses Bob Marley, conscious American hip hop, and brilliant protest poetry". His lyrics are rich with references to African and international events, as well as to issues of racial prejudice and stereotypes.

More links:

K'naan's myspace page (with free download of the track 'Somalia') here.

K'naan writing on black history, Somalia in particular, here.

Wikipedia entry here.

The Guardian website is hosting a slideshow of a new exhibition, Sense of Belonging, which explores refugees’ and asylum seekers’ views on the theme of belonging. The exhibition is organised by the Arts, Migration and Diaspora Regional Network in the East Midlands of the UK. The network’s aims are to enhance the lives of recent arrivals in the East Midlands; stimulate high-quality inter-disciplinary research and the production of art works; facilitate connection, communication and feed into public policy; and contribute to public awareness of the issues facing new arrivals.
There are further images from a previous exhibition, Global Refugees: Exile, Displacement and Belonging, here. Beyond Borders is a related organisation promoting the arts in that region (requires registration).

The Media Education Foundation is a documentary film production and distribution organisation that aims to inspire critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media. They have just released one of their feature documentaries online for free viewing, in response to what they say was the 'incredibly uncritical response by Western media to Israel’s massacre of Gaza'. The documentary, Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land was made in 2003, and 'traces the long standing pattern of media bias in the US'. More information on the film is available in a press pack downloadable here. A Wikipedia entry on the film includes details of some criticisms. A New York Times review found that, though the film is undermined by its overt pro-Palestinian bias, 'viewers will have no doubts that the region is seriously, murderously out of balance'. Democracy Now covered the film, and issues raised, here.

A group of young people in Britain, from all over the world, got together last year to put together a film festival dedicated to refugee and migration issues. They have just put out their call for submissions for 2009. As they say on their myspace site, ‘the festival was entirely developed by a group of young people. By giving a voice to young refugees, the festival addressed issues of representation of refugees and migrants in the film industry and was a space of celebration that contributed to a more tolerant society. The festival was been curated by a group of young people from New Generation and RefugeeYouth that come from different countries: Colombia, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Eritrea, Zambia, Congo, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Palestine, Kosovo, Algeria, Angola, Guinea, Mauritius, Bangladesh, Italy, Spain, France and England. They met fortnightly over four months to watch films and discuss the pictures from different angles and came up with an amazing programme that was presented at the British Film Institute on the South bank during the 20th to 22nd June 2008.

Part of the festival is a film challenge aimed at young people up to 25 years old: ‘We dare you to: 1. Make a film on the subject of immigration, refugee or displacement. 2. The format is free, you can make fiction, drama, comedy, thriller, documentary, animation, a trailer, an advertisement, or any kind of film you can imagine. 3. The film should be no longer than three minutes. 4. You should use original music and original images, this means music should be composed for the film and images should be made for the film. 5. The dead line for submissions is the 1st of May 2009.'

The Refuge in Films myspace site ‘friends’ also provides interesting pickings for other groups working in this area of media.

I've written before about the Communication Initiative Network, a website that brings together new ideas on the interplay between media and issues of social and economic development. One of their projects is Soul Beat Africa, which publishes an email newsletter. (You can subscribe here.) Migration is a common issue in their material, and a constant tangential issue, given the links between poverty and migration.

As an example, here is their latest newsletter:

1. Special Edition Kenya - Conflict Sensitive Journalism
This handbook is designed to be a practical everyday guide, which seeks to contribute to the theoretical refinement and practical realisation of conflict sensitive journalism for Kenyan media practitioners covering conflict...

2. The Broadcasting Independence Handbook: Lessons from the South African Experience
This handbook focuses on the transformation from state to independent broadcasting in South Africa, and the lessons that can be drawn from this transformation for the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The handbook is designed for SADC-wide civil society organisations, as well as independent and community media...

3. Tuvuge Rwatu (Speak Openly) - Uganda
This radio programme, which airs in the local language Lufumbira, is based on the English language model of Straight Talk. The serial programme aims to promote sexual and reproductive health issues for youth...

4. Media as Partners in Education for Sustainable Development
This training kit seeks to provide media professionals with basic information about key priority issues for sustainable development. It also provides practical exercises to inspire investigative reporting, and draws links to existing experience that may enrich the information resources of media professionals...

5. Using Radio for Budget Advocacy: Stories from Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Georgia, Indonesia, Kenya, and Uganda
This article describes civil society organisation’s efforts to use radio as part of larger budget advocacy and budget literacy efforts by civil society groups in Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Georgia, Indonesia, Kenya, and Uganda. The article states that radio has been effective in disseminating budget information, raising awareness on budget issues, and delivering specific advocacy messages to particular populations where lack of literacy and of television transmission are issues...

6. In Kidi Ya Chanza (When the Drumbeat Changes You Must Change Your Dance-Steps) - Nigeria
This is a radio drama series which is designed to assist smallholder farmers in northern Nigeria to adapt to climate change. It aims to provide information on new methods, alternatives, and options to encourage improved farmer (both male and female) adaptation to the effects of climate change...

7. Labour Community Radio Project - South Africa
The Labour Community Radio Project is an initiative of Worker's World Media Productions (WWMP), which has been running since 2002 in South Africa. The show has a labour focus, but also deals with issues ranging from housing, education, healthcare and work to political and economic matters...

8. Learning by Ear – Africa
This is a series of educational radio programmes developed by Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster, and journalists and authors from across sub-Saharan Africa. The entertainment-education based programmes look at issues related to 10 different educational themes, and are produced in Kiswahili, Hausa, Amharic, English, French, and Portuguese...

Two leviathans are about to collide on the world stage of science and politics — climate change and migration, write Janos Bogardi & Koko Warner in an article in ‘Nature’ the leading international science journal, ‘Here Comes the Flood’.

‘Their combination brings us to a tipping-point that could spawn a phenomenon of a scale and scope not experienced in human history. Beyond reducing the greenhouse gases that drive global warming, we are now faced with the task of finding ways to deal with the impact of climate change. Next in line, or perhaps even ahead of mitigation, adaptation is the new game in town….

‘Already, some countries cannot afford to wait for a new climate deal. Nations such as the Maldives now anticipate the loss of their sovereign territory. In November their President-elect, Mohammed Nasheed, announced the islanders' wish to buy a new homeland as sea level rise threatens to drown the archipelago, most of which lies only 1.5 metres above the surface of the Indian Ocean. Nasheed told the media, "I don't want Maldivians to end up as environmental refugees in some camp ... if the islands are sinking we must find high land some place close by. We should do that before we sink."’

And lastly, less about migration, but interesting use of media: US environmental group the Sierra Club has put this celebrity voxpop video together to lobby President-Elect Obama (though with just 11,000 or so views, it's hardly gone viral).

At Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, a new exhibition explores a historical story of migration. In ‘Monument to Another Man’s Fatherland’, two films by Dutch artists Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan trace the trail of the Celts to Berlin, where a victory monument commemorates an ancient battle. (There's a video introducing the exhibition on YouTube here.)

This monument, the Gigantomachia in the Berlin Museum, is the visual focus of the first film. The monument was originally sited near Bergama, Turkey, and moved from there at the end of the 19th century.

The artists originally planned to film the frieze on the monument depicting the battle, and wrote to the museum’s director explaining their project:

“We want to unravel the modern concept of ‘universal culture’ to trace how this concept relates to the current sweeping forces of globalisation. Today, it has become customary that people and objects are relocated, removed from their cultural, historical and political contexts, and distributed over the globe. Also as artists we experience this kind of transnationalism. In response to our ‘drifting studio practice’, we want to produce a film work, which reflects upon this contemporary condition of displacement from a historical perspective.”

But the director refused permission. Their project might ‘stir the debate about repatriation’, something the museum was ‘not interested in’, he replied.

Instead, the artists reconstructed the imagery from other reproductions.

For the second film in the exhibition, the artists collaborated with participants of an integration class in the Goethe-Institut in Istanbul.

Curator Tessa Giblin explains: ‘In this course, future migrants learn basic German vocabulary as well as culture in order to pass a proficiency integration exam, which enables them to get their papers for migrating to Germany, their new fatherland.

‘While on residency with Platform Garanti, van Brummelen & de Haan asked these prospective Germans to read out loud a description of the Gigantomachia frieze in German, the myth that travelled ahead of them. In front of a 16mm camera, and whilst grappling with difficult pronunciation and new terms (such as serpent’s leg, lion claw or fish tail) the language students describe each of the scenes of the gigantomachy frieze – a series of dry, descriptive sentences taken from various art historical descriptions of the gigantomachia - in their fledgling German.’

The exhibition continues till January 31. Entry is free. On January 31, there will be a day of screenings and dialogue with the artists, including a celebration of the launch of their artists' monograph 'Redrawing the Boundaries'.

More here.
 

According to GreenMuze.com: Environmental degradation around the world is creating a new category of people known as "environmental refugees," a United Nations Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) study reports.

Exact figures vary on how many environmental refugees may be displaced by environmental factors, although experts are predicting numbers may be from 50 million by 2010 to 150 million by 2050. British ecologist Norman Myers estimates there could be as many as 200 million people displaced by environmental factors by the end of the century.

A Canadian Broadcast Company News (CBC) report describes the Katrina disaster and Darfur as only dress rehearsals for the sorts of mass migrations of future environmental refugees. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 saw the displacement of more than 15 million individuals whether it was due to impacts to the economy, emergency evacuations, higher gas prices, or even drinking water, according to the American-based Hurricane Relief Fund. Nearly two years later, many individuals are still living in temporary housing.

Darfur & Climate Change
The ongoing and bloody conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan is considered to be an environmental-based conflict. The conflict started in 2003 between the African farmers and the Arabic herders, both struggling to access the same limited resources. The government is reported to be supporting Janjaweed tribes’ people who keep Sudanese farmers from accessing diminishing water supplies and from using the arable land. Restoring peace in the region will be extremely difficult until the area’s water and resource shortages are addressed.

Drought, Displacement and Disasters
Climate change will affect all aspects of human life. A Tufts University study shows the cost of inactivity around climate change could be an estimated $74 trillion dollars. However the study also found ‘… even these numbers fail to convey the multiple harms that lie in store for the world'. Around the world, the negative effects of climate change are increasing.

More than 70,000 farmers have been affected by the drought in Australia, considered to be the worst drought in more than 1000 years. Currently, a farmer commits suicide in Australia every 4 days, more than twice the national norm.Individuals living on low-lying islands around the world are starting to be forced from their homes due to rising ocean levels. New Zealand lets in an estimated 70 refugees each year from South Pacific Islands like Tuvalu and Tonga. Other recent environmental disasters have included the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and Hurricane Wilma in 2005, these disasters are considered to be a preview of what the future holds.

Internuncio, a British-based company doing media work on climate change, has produced a series of eight short films (c 5 mins each) on the impact of climate change on people in Bangladesh, 'Not Waving But Drowning', and has posted them on YouTube.

According to the filmmakers, 'The initial project bears witness to the disruption that sea level rise is having on the daily lives of low-lying island communities in the Bay of Bengal.

'Internuncio tells from the perspective of those affected, the personal stories of people already experiencing the social implications of climate change. Based on scientific and observed findings, Internuncio is currently producing documentary films and photo-reports which intend to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and social awareness. Putting a human face to the effects of climate change, our objective is to increase dialogue and understanding.

'Bangladesh, a low-lying country slightly larger than England in size, is renowned as the most densely populated country in the world. Home to 150 million people, Bangladesh is also one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change - particularly increases in sea level. About 80% of the country consists of floodplain with an elevation from less than one metre to three metres above sea level.

'Desperately trying to hang on to homes, possessions and livelihoods these people have not heard of the term ‘climate change’. Unaware of the causes behind the changes in their environment and unaware of the predicted consequences, the impact of what we understand as climate change is already changing lives. A movement of people has already begun.'

There is further writing on the work here. 

We mentioned this here before Christmas, but never followed up: here is an interview with Chuk Iwuji, lead actor in the current production of 'The Playboy of the Western World' at the Abbey. Chuk is Nigerian, and currently a leading young actor on the British stage. In this rewrite of 'Playboy', by Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle, he plays a Nigerian who arrives in Ireland, more or less as an asylum seeker.

Refugees of the Blue Planet is a remarkable film that connects the unseemingly related geographic regions of Western Canada, the Maldives, and Brazil in a beautifully shot and slick one hour work, writes the blog Art Threat...

'The central message of this Canadian documentary is: corporate greed is not only consuming the very earth we live on, but leaving a path of poverty and misery in a scorched wake while “the North” continues in the blissful ignorance of privilege. There is a twist however, and it is this angle that the film takes that makes it such an informative and fascinating document of economic globalization and the modern side-effects. According to the UN environmental refugees now outnumber political refugees at a staggering 25 million. And as the film points out in a very subtle nod to optimism, it is an affliction that affects not only the very poor, but the wealthy as well, leading at least one interviewed expert to have hope for change.

'From rising sea levels to hurricanes to monoculture “green deserts” to sour gas leaks in Alberta, the extreme corporate malfeasance, cajoled by the myopic and self-interested hand of governments like King Klein’s are exposed. And what is left are broken communities, decimated homes, jobless and dejected souls angry and despondent with nowhere to direct their frustrations. Enter Refugees of the Blue Planet: the film provides a platform, an outlet which serves as a conduit between those who may be sitting in the audience unmoved by recent environmental disasters like hurricanes and floods, to channel the stories of the survivors, of refugees seeking many things from justice to a place to sleep at night. The characters we meet are scattered postcards from the neoliberal project, an experiment gone terribly, viciously, wrong. The connections between environmental crisis and unchecked corporate rapaciousness have never been clearer than as they are in this work. The film’s technical troubles - redundant NFB voice of god narration, the art-destroying voice-over in lieu of subtitles, emotionally manipulative music - are not enough to detract from this intense portrait of the perils of neoliberal globalization.'

Meanwhile, Art Threat is a group blog that's right up our street: 'We write about political art of all genres, discuss policy as it pertains to culture, and showcase artists whose work inspires social change,' they say.

An extraordinary story of migration in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago: the story of how a community of Hmong (pronounced 'Mong') refugees from Laos were resettled in 1975 on a former prison colony on the northeast coast of South America.

'Since arriving more than 30 years ago, the Hmong, who account for only about 1.5 percent of French Guiana’s 210,000 people, have thrived. Once penniless, the refugees and their families produce up to 80 percent of the fruit and vegetables sold in this overseas French department, which must import other food at a high cost from mainland France or Brazil.'

Wikipedia's entry on the Hong is here.  

'El Mexorcist' is a San Francisco-based performance artist and commentator on National Public Radio in the US, and his latest show, 'El Mexorcist 4: America's Most Wanted Inner Demon' is currently touring the States. He described his show for the Tuscon Citizen newspaper: 'It's a work in progress. In a sense it's like the end of a series of spoken-word monologues that deal essentially with the Bush era: What it meant to be a Mexican, to be a Latino in the Bush era in the U.S.; How the war on terror affected us, affected our notions of community, identity...

'It's the end of the series because the Age of Obama is about to begin and we're walking into a new zone with a new kind of optimism, cautious optimism. But this is going to affect the kind of content of art and literature being produced in this country. This is going to be a transitional piece, like I'm saying goodbye to the war on terror and the Bush era and hopefully welcoming, in the name of the arts community, the Age of Obama.'

'Q. You call yourself "The Mexorcist." What is it you're "mexorcising?"

'A. It's like a word game on the whole kind of "mexiphobia" that emerged in the last three or four years. When the border become the, quote unquote, most sensitive zone of our national security, and the potential entry point for international terrorists, the U.S.-Mexico border became the second front on the war on terror. And migrants from the south became an extension of Arab terrorists, so there was (building) racism and one of the focal points was Arizona. So I created these performance personae to kind of exorcise those fears and hopefully call for a better understanding of our relationship with our southern neighbor, with Mexico.'

El Mexorcist is Guillermo Gómez-Pena. He describes his work in an article for the Journal of Visual Culture here.

Regular readers will know Migration Matters occasionally strays into the areas of humanitarian and development issues, particularly in Africa. These become inextricable from issues of migration at a certain point, when war, crisis and poverty provoke large-scale population movements, and when the intervention of aid agencies can itself provoke further displacement.

On this subject, I interviewed Dr Steve Collins, a pioneer in the field of emergency famine relief, for the Irish Independent's 'True Life' slot yesterday. Collins is the subject of a documentary by Frontier Films, ‘One in Six’, to be shown on RTE One at 10.55pm on Sunday.

The core insight in Collins's work is the imperative to place people back at the heart of policy: aid interventions have to be shaped in accordance with the wishes and strengths of local populations. His own life story gives great insight into the both the perils and successes of famine relief.

The article doesn't seem to be available online, but here is the original version.

True Life: Steve Collins, doctor and aid worker, director of Valid International and Valid Nutrition. As told to Colin Murphy
 
I went to Africa in the summer of 1985, on my holidays from medical school. I travelled through Uganda (where there was a coup), Congo on a bicycle, Chad (where a civil war had just ended), and ended up on the border of Sudan, in Darfur, where a full-scale famine had broken out. I realised you couldn’t be a tourist in a famine, and so I turned up at a refugee camp, and volunteered.
 
Simon, an aid worker, needed somebody to survey the villages in the surrounding desert, and I said I’d do it, on foot. The first day, I walked 15 miles across the desert to the nearest village. They had received an over-distribution of grain, and made beer with it. Every house I visited gave me some. After about three hours, I passed out. I woke up when it was just getting dark, and started walking home across the desert. I was getting into real trouble when my boss happened to drive past. “Christ,” he said, “you’re going to have to get a horse.”
 
I did, and would ride out into the desert, visiting communities, for two weeks at a time. I eventually went back to England to finish my medical degree, and then went to Jamaica to do my hospital internship. Luckily, the hospital was next door to a top-flight nutrition research institute. In Sudan, I had realised that nutrition was the basis of everything. If you don’t have the right nutrition in the first two years of life, the brain doesn’t develop properly, and you can’t learn.
 
In 1992, famine broke out in Somalia, and I volunteered with Concern, and was put in charge of an adult feeding centre. It turned out that this was the first adult feeding centre since the Second World War, and nobody knew why so many adults were dying. I changed the diets in the centre, using some research material I had from Jamaica, and managed to cut the death rate by three quarters.  

The adult we were treating were incredibly thin – 20% thinner than the people liberated from Belsen concentration camp. Afterwards, I managed to publish a paper in the top scientific journal, ‘Nature’. So everybody thought I was an expert, and I got sent everywhere to set up other centres.
 
A few years later, I was in Liberia during the war, with Oxfam, to open a centre. I asked people was there cholera in the area, and they said no, because there wasn’t, at that time. With limited resources you can’t do everything; I decided the priority was to feed people, rather than worry about water and sanitation.
 
I had asked the wrong question. I should have asked, “What do people normally die of?” There was a subtle difference, and it was fatal.
 
We set up up a feeding centre, and it attracted more people to the village. But the new people didn’t know the area, and didn’t know from where to take their water. Cholera broke out. Then, suddenly, a fresh outbreak of fighting forced us to leave for a few days. When we got back, the cholera had killed 18 people.
 
That brought home to me the danger of bringing people together in feeding centres. There had to be a better way, I thought. I knew that this would come from engaging with people better, looking at their strengths, rather than trying to impose solutions on them. I wanted to try fighting starvation by giving people food to bring back to their communities, instead of forcing them to come together in centres, and I set up a research organisation, Valid International.
 
In 2000, I went to Ethiopia. Their government had forbidden aid agencies from setting up therapeutic feeding centres, because they’d had them for years and realised they didn’t address the underlying problems. That gave us an ethical opportunity to set up community-based treatment programmes, which we called Community-Based Therapeutic Care.
 
By the end of 2001, working with Concern, we had treated about 300 cases by giving people ready-to-use food to be administered in the community. The mortality rate was just 4%, five times better than the normal mortality rates in developing-country hospitals.
 
We developed the research over the next few years, working with Concern and with money from Irish Aid, and eventually we had collected data on over 23,000 cases: the mortality rate was still under 5%. We took this to the United Nations and the World Health Organisation, and they endorsed it. Now, all governments in Africa are moving towards this community-based model. We also started another charity, Valid Nutrition, to set up local food production companies in Africa.

I’m 47, and I’m tired. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, and I’ve been affected, and saddened, by all the death I’ve seen. I got married last year to Claire [Martin], and we have a hill farm near Glengariff, in West Cork. It’s miles off the road. You can’t see our house from anywhere. I met Claire when she was working with Concern, and we worked together in Darfur in 2004. We run the farm together, and she also runs an organisation from home, providing administrative support to ethical organisations.

I now spend about half my time on the road with Valid, and half at home. I’m breeding a small herd of Dexter cattle. They’re very tame, very small, and produce good milk and will raise a calf a year. There’s a lot of people who want to get out of the rat race, and have a little bit of land, and could keep a couple of these miniature cows. I’m going to try to breed them up for that market.

Being able to retreat back to the hills stops me from going mad – it gives me the balance that I need, so I can continue doing the work that I do. But I have a vision for how the world can address malnutrition once and for all, and that keeps me going.

The enterprising migration-watch website, Fortress Europe, has just posted a new report, 'Border Sahara', from migrant detention centres in the Libyan desert. The report opens with this testimony:

'"With us, in the truck, there was a four years old child, with his mother. We were crammed like animals inside the lorry, with no air and no space to move. I wondered how a child could be put in these conditions. Inside the container it was very hot. The travel took 21 hours, from 4 pm to 1 pm the following day. They didn’t give us anything to eat. People urinated one in front of the others. When the drivers stopped to eat, we put the child near to the narrow windows of the container. His name was Adam. Finally we arrived in Kufrah. When I got out I stole some bread which was hung outside the container. We had not eaten since the previous day. We were 110 persons. Including Adam, four years old, and his mother."

'Menghistu is not the only one who have been locked inside a container and deported. In Libya is quite normal. Containers are used to sort migrants arrested on their way to Europe, to the different detention camps.'

The political point of correspondent Gabriele Del Grande's report lies in the following observations:

'Since 2003, Italy and the European Union are cooperating with Libya to fight migration. Now, the question is: why does everybody pretend they do not know what African migrants are suffering there?'

There is an excerpt from an Italian documentary on Libya's treatment of migrants here.

A somewhat more progressive piece of journalism - though not without raising its own ethical questions - is this 'hidden camera' news report by ABC News. Looking for anti-Latino prejudice, they sent a bunch of actors in to a diner. One plays a racist waiter, others play Latinos who get abused by him when they go to order. The camera's there to catch out other customers who chime in, and celebrate those who stand up to the racism.

A behind-the-scenes look at the series, which is called 'What Would You Do?', is here. Another episode looks at gay 'pda' - public displays of affection. 'More and more, every time you turn on the tv, gay couples are kissing' says the voiceover... You've been warned.

'The only thing about us and the troubles outside our borders are America's heroes.... They protect us from harm, defend our freedoms.' So say the trailers for the latest show on American cable tv, 'Homeland Security USA', on ABC. The first episode of this fly-on-the-wall documentary series screened earlier tonight.

If its politics aren't already clear enough, one trailer shows a brief clip of an officer talking to camera, looking sad and disgusted, and saying, "smugglers using their children as cover just to bring their drugs in..." Another voiceover says, "My God, they have human skulls in here."

To judge by opening night reviews, there was little of that kind of substance, and nothing at all to do with 'terrorism'. Though there was a young man having a bong confiscated, and a young woman carrying 'belly dancing equipment'.

The ABC.com site has a 'sneek peak' of the show, and promises online on-demand screening. There are some more clips here, and trailers on youtube here (no clips from the first episode as yet). Variety's review is here. There's a Huffington Post preview here.

One suspects the series may never get around to covering this aspect of American immigration control (from the New Yorker).

Happy New Year.