"YOUNG PEOPLE from immigrant and minority backgrounds are being asked to put their views of Ireland to creative use by designing original postcards", writes Ruadhan MacCormaic in the Irish Times.

This is part of an An Post project, 'C Both Sides', documenting how young people see Ireland today. There is a different theme each month, and August's theme is migration. Everybody is invited to design their own postcard and send it in to An Post, for inclusion in an exhibition being planned for next year.

An Post has full details on a dedicated website, www.anpostcbothsides.ie, and a gallery of submissions so far.

An Post says: "This August An Post C Both Sides encourages those who have either moved from or into Ireland in the recent past. This social record will highlight the individual experiences and expressions of a whole new age of people in Ireland.

"Ireland has long been a country with high emigration levels. Until very recently, many of our rural areas saw a continuous migration abroad. With Irish bars across the globe, we have always had a reputation for moving around. With all of this distance, a vital role was played by the letters, postcards and parcels that Irish immigrants sent home in the past.  Ireland’s new communities now use these services to keep in touch with their own homelands, so although much has changed in our society, the simple act of posting a letter home, by those living far away from family and friends, is still vital to many."

What is an immigrant? And what does integration mean? Until 1991 in South Africa, “the official definition of an immigrant was that he or she had to be able to assimilate into the white population”. This is according to a new article on South Africa, 'Policy in the Face of Xenophobia', on Migration Information Source.

“By definition, therefore, Africans were not considered immigrants. Rather, they came to South Africa as temporary contract migrants under bilateral agreements between the apartheid government and neighbors”, writes Jonathan Crush of the Southern African Migration Project.

Migration Matters will return to this theme next week, as we follow the progress of theatre director Kunle Animashaun’s project to stage Athol Fugard’s apartheid-era play, ‘Sizwe Bansi is Dead’ (as reported last week, see below).

In the meantime, for those looking for a deeper understanding of the background to May’s anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, Jonathan Crush warns that this was “the tip of the iceberg”.

“A nationally representative survey of South African attitudes that SAMP conducted in 2006 showed very high levels of intolerance across the entire population. The study showed that South Africans are still among the most hostile to outsiders in the world.

“Xenophobia is a deep and pervasive phenomenon that the government has not yet fully acknowledged, much less addressed, beyond isolated efforts. The preamble to the 2002 Immigration Act maintained that xenophobia needed to be contested. However, the act laid out no specific measures, as noted earlier, and there is no evidence that the act itself has made any difference to South African attitudes.”

Migration is not only from poor to rich countries, but also occurs between developing countries ("South-South"� migration) and within countries, as people move from the villages to the city in search of work.

The Guardian’s Katine project is focussing on the life of a village in Uganda over three years, tracking the efforts of a NGO to help boost development there. Saturday’s article tracked one villager's move to the capital, Kampala, and looked at the role of remittences in development.

The Guardian’s website has an elaborate section on Katine, including a "virtual village", intended to provide an evolving interactive experience of Katine, with ultra-short films documenting aspects of village life.

Some recent news headlines on migration issues, in case you missed them... (with thanks to the Irish Refugee Council's media update).

Review of visa system after family left in camp for 3 years
The husband and three children of a Somali refugee in Ireland were left in a refugee camp in Ethiopia for three years because nobody in the Department of Justice informed them they had been granted family reunification visas.
This was "more than a systems failure", argued the Irish Times in an editorial.

GAA issues racism apology
Officials issued "a strongly worded apology" to a young juvenile footballer who was racially abused in an underage club game.

Proposals for controls on UK and Ireland travel
Reform of the Common Travel Area will likely make it more diffcult for people from outside the UK and Ireland to travel between them, as well as requiring photo ID for citizens travelling.

See also: British and Irish governments in illegal immigrant crackdown

Blue Card work permit scheme could attract skilled immigrants
Over 3,000 "highly skilled" immigrants and their families will be given permanent residency in Ireland in an effort to keep them in the labour force, and the Government is considering adopting the EU's Blue Card scheme.

Tomorrow (Saturday) sees an intriguing, small workshop on social exclusion and integration being held in Dublin. Camino Del Orula Productions, a theatre company, is hosting the workshop in order to explore some of the themes relating to its forthcoming production, 'Sizwe Bansi is Dead', a play by Athol Fugard set in Apartheid South Africa.

The company's founder, Kunle Animashaun, explains:

"As a professional theatre company in Ireland with the main focus of fostering integration, I hope this dialogic opportunity for people from different backgrounds will be Camino De Orula's contribution to the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, and also afford us the opportunity of a perceptive and insightful contemporary interpretation of 'Sizwe Bansi is Dead'."

Animashaun last year directed 'Wedlock of the Gods' by Nigerian playwright Zulu Sofola. 'Sizwe Bansi is Dead' will play at the Project Arts Centre from 12-23 August (and Migration Matters will report on it again in the interim).
 
The workshop is at 2pm, Saturday 26th July, at Dublin City Council Arts Office, The Lab, Foley Street (near Conolly Station), Dublin 1. According to Kunle, there may be a place or two left. Contact olakunleanimashaun[at]hotmail.com. Migration Matters will report back on it next week.

Kevin Myers has returned to his theme of aid to Africa in two columns for the Irish Independent this week (last week's controversy was reported in Migration Matters, see below). On Tuesday, he elaborated on his arguments on overpopulation in Africa:

"This is the greatest moral quandary facing the world. We cannot allow the starving children of Ethiopia to die. Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050."

The following day, he countered last week's allegation of incitement to hatred by the Immigrant Council of Ireland, and addressed a series of questions put to  him by Metro Eireann (both these are FOMACS partners). In the course of this, he made the following comment:

"ONE of these orthodoxies (of the "new authoritarian 'liberalism'") is that Africa's woes are the legacy of "colonialism". But Ethiopia (formerly Abyssinia, and far older than any European state) was never colonised.
However, it was conquered by the Italians in 1936, and liberated in 1941 by a British army led by General Sir Allan Cunningham: a Dubliner, after whom a road in Addis Ababa is still named. This final titbit comes from one of a half-dozen Ethiopians who e-mailed me, supporting my attempts to broaden the discussion about Africa away from the grotesque pieties of simple victimhood."

Myers said he had received over 800 letters in response to his original column, some 90 per cent of which were in his support and "mostly from baffled, decent and worried people". The Independent's letters page has run correspondence both for and against Myers's arguments.

Most prominently, it ran a passionate rebuttal of Myers's original piece, by John O'Shea of Goal last Saturday. After Myers refocussed his arguments this week, however, John O'Shea wrote again, concluding:

"Last week, Mr Myers wrote an incendiary piece which stimulated much debate. This week, he has rightly shifted the emphasis of blame from the people of Africa to the corrupt leaders who are happy to watch their people die."

The Spanish government plans to offer unemployed immigrants advance payment of their benefits if they return to their countries of origin, and agree to stay there for at least three years, reports the Guardian.
"The Spanish labour ministry said 100,000 immigrants from 19 countries would be eligible to receive the payout but it expects only between 10% and 20% to agree to this trade-off. The government is expected to approve the plan in September."
The Spanish daily, El Pais, has a video report on its website. The measure will not be popular, according to immigrant groups surveyed by El Pais, who said it was "injust" and "would not motivate anybody".

A Spanish interpreter in the US has broken the interpreter's code of confidentiality to shed light on the abuses and inadequacies in interpretation in court for undocumented migrants.
Erik Camayd-Freixas, who is a professor at Florida University, said that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived, according to the report in the New York Times. The Times also has a video interview with him.

The number of citizens from the EU's newer member states who registered to work or to access public services in the Republic fell by 40 per cent in the first half of the year, reported the Irish Times last Thursday. The Times's figures showed that just over 40,000 people from these countries obtained a PPS number in the first six months of the year, compared to 66,500 over the same period last year.
This may have been explained by the report in the following day's paper that job losses in the construction sector were accelerating, as building activity contracted sharply: "The CSO's construction employment index, which measures the number of staff in private construction firms with five or more employees, fell 14.8 per cent to 92.6 in the year to May, the lowest reading in eight years."
Fás senior economist Brian McCormick commented that migration should "soften the blow of negative employment growth on unemployment", presumably both by an increase in emigration of Irish people, and a reduction in immigration.
There was more on the theme, with a somewhat dramatic tone, in Saturday's paper, where Ronan McGreevy reported that "Ireland's towns, once noisy with the sounds of construction, are ominously quiet, as people get to grips with a new reality and the prospect of emigration".
The same day, the Times reported comments by Minister of State for Integration Conor Lenihan that there had been a 100 per cent rise, from 16,000 to 32,000, in the number of immigrants signing on for dole in the last week to fortnight.
He said it was "incorrect" to say immigrant labour was "undercutting" Irish labour, and said the Irish economy would still have a strong demand for immigrant labour after the current downturn. He observed,
"The volume of people will now settle down, hopefully to a level that's more manageable."
The Central Statistics Office released data on the immigrant population from the Census 2006 at the end of June.

Some recent headlines...
Asylum seekers overwhelm immigration authorities (in Norway)
"The number of people applying for asylum in Norway has more than doubled so far this year, putting extraordinary pressure on the already over-burdened immigration agency UDI (Utlendingsdirektoratet)."
Failure to address the risks of unchecked immigration could spark riots, warn MPs (in the UK, according to the Daily Mail).
US Army deserter first to be deported from Canada
"A U. S. soldier who was deported yesterday after his refugee claim was dismissed nearly three years following his arrival in Canada may now face a number of consequences for army desertion."
EU Needs to Remain Accessible for Asylum Seekers, UN Refugee Chief Says
UNHCR Running Out of Money to Repatriate Southern Sudan Refugees
And there are ongoing disturbances in South Africa...
"Chaos erupted at Glenanda refugee camp south of Johannesburg (last week) when police clashed with an angry mob. Police used rubber bullets to disperse the group, who held four security guards hostage. The displaced people were angry about not being consulted on security measures at the camp and it soon turned into violence and police were called to calm the situation."

“Where Kevin Myers sees violent, layabout and lazy Africans, I see myself - except I got the chance of a better life through education”, wrote Bryan Mukandi in Wednesday's Irish Times.
Mukandi, an occasional columnist and blogger for the Times, was responding to Kevin Myers’s quickly-notorious article in the Irish Independent the previous week, which ran under the headline, 'Africa is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS'.
Myers described Africa as “almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world”, and Somalia, as  one example, as “another fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts”.
He asked:
“How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.”
His article was deliberately provocative, in Myers's style, but it was not surprising: in February last, he had asked:
“Is there a single sane African country north of the equator, whose children, as a matter of course, can expect to be raised to become literate, economically useful human beings, without being raped, or genitally mutilated, or sold into sex-slavery, or turned into Islamicist zealots, or bred to loathe their neighbours, or to fall prey to some other unnameable social affliction?”
Bryan Mukandi compared Myers’s words to those of a former classmate of his, who had once turned to him and said, “Bryan, you’re a good black. The people who work on our farm are bad blacks.”
He concluded:
“Personally, I would like to see the so-called "layabouts" given a chance. I would like them to have the same access to education that I had and to enjoy as safe and secure a childhood as I enjoyed. And if enough is invested in people living in challenging places like Somalia or Sudan, in time that investment should pay off. At some stage, it will hopefully be those same people who rebuild their countries and find lasting solutions to some of their conflicts. Rather than throwing a tantrum, Myers could have helped by suggesting ways to bring about those changes.”
In response to Myers’s article, the Immigrant Council this week lodged a complaint with the Garda Siochana. Denise Charlton said the council believed his article breached section two of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989. The Times quoted her as saying:
“We believe the published article does not just overstep the boundary of common decency - it triple jumps right past that - but it also crosses the legal boundaries."
The controversy will continue. Though one suspects that it will not compare with the outrage that greeted his 2005 Irish Times article that called single mothers "mothers of bastards", for which he subsequently apologised. (That article is no longer on the Irish Times website, but is available on Indymedia.) Vincent Browne thoroughly critiqued that episode at the time in Village.

Dubliners seeking refuge from the rain this Sunday could spend a couple of hours on a virtual tour of the one-time Butlins holiday camp on the east coast of Ireland, now known as Mosney, and home to hundreds of asylum seekers. Filmmakers Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley filmed in Mosney over three years, and produced a visually striking portrait of the camp, with some eloquent testimony from its residents. Mosney weren’t happy, and the film’s name was changed from that to ‘Seaview’ (trailer here). It’s on at the IFI at 1pm as part of their “Ireland on Sunday” series. (Incidentally, I didn’t hear it, but Bahroz Wakashi, from Mosney, who features in 'Seaview', was on Newstalk radio yesterday at noon.) Sara Burke interviewed the filmmakers in Village earlier this year. As one of the residents puts it in the film, “We wake up and eat, not sure what each day brings… It’s no life at all. We just live by the day… We are grateful for the food, for the accommodation, most for our children going to school… but people are wasting in the name of the asylum process.”

The Irish Times last Friday reported from Madrid on the latest casualties of the traffic in migrants across the Mediterranean. A “Zodiac” boat with 33 sub-Saharan Africans on board was intercepted off the coast of Almeria, southern Spain. Fourteen had died during the crossing, after their motor had broken down and they had drifted for five days. The details of the story were all too familiar, which perhaps explains why these incidents only rarely make the international media. (The Spanish media, however, reports them quite thoroughly. See El Pais.) 

Sunday’s Observer ran a useful overview of recent incidents, warning that this summer could see a record number of migrants killed at sea. According to the Red Cross, they reported, between 2,000 and 3,000 people die trying to reach Spain each year.  

"I was handcuffed, panicked and started to scream. I was forced down on the seats and my head pushed between my knees. It was very painful to my neck and back. They twisted my neck and threatened to break it. One of the female officers placed her hands over my nose and mouth. I couldn't breathe."
That’s the account of MM, 27, from Zimbabwe, who said she was assaulted by immigration officers as they tried to make her board a plane for Africa. She is just one of nearly 300 people who reported assaults by private deportation “escorts” in the UK to the authors of a new report, Outsourcing Abuse (the Independent, which broke the original story last year, summarises the report here). This comes the same week as reports that people awaiting deportation from the UK will have to agree to being electronically tagged, and pay a “large bail bond”, in order to avoid detention. And once deported, if they wish to return to the UK once their ban is over, they will have to repay the cost of the deportation (£11-13,000).

The Guardian website is hosting a small photo exhibition of migrant workers and their families in Cornwall, as part of the ‘I Packed This Myself’ exhibition (of travelling suitcases, no less) curated by Bridging Arts. There is a large eastern European community in Cornwall, many working in daffodil picking, but there is also a 3,000-strong Portuguese community.

The Guardian is advertising its Ethnic Media Summit, to be held in September. The summit will “examine the editorial, commercial and strategic challenges facing the media industry as it struggles to engage with ethnic minority groups in a digital world”, they say. 

The Abbey Theatre in Dublin has just announced that its "Nigerian-Irish" version of 'The Playboy of the Western World' will return for six weeks over Christmas. Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle collaborated to retell the classic Irish tale with a young Nigerian as the Playboy, arriving into a desolate bar in suburban Dublin instead of the village shebeen of JM Synge's 100-year-old original. (Your correspondent wrote about this for the Sunday Tribune last year.)

Migration Matters looks at how, where and when the media (in all its forms) covers migration issues. It is published each Tuesday and Friday, usually by midday.

Hosted by FOMACS, and based in Ireland, Migration Matters has an Irish angle on events, but an international reach. We're interested in anything involving migration and the media, from striking coverage of migration stories in the international media, to local media production amongst migrant communities. The media could be print, audio, film, theatre, visual art... In other words, anything.

If you know of any media that we should be reporting, but haven't, do let us know. Contact us with your thoughts or suggestions at migrationmatters[at]gmail.com.

Migration Matters is compiled by Colin Murphy. For articles by Colin Murphy, and more on migration issues, see the FOMACS print syndication project.

Migration Matters wants to hear from you. Send your tips on migration-related issues, especially to do with media in all its forms (from CNN to community theatre, with everything in between) to migrationmatters[at]gmail.com.