Here are summaries of some innovative media projects in Africa that I came across on the Communication Initiative Network (for more on the Network, see end of post):

'Khuluma Afrika!' (Speak Africa) is a community theatre production aimed at raising awareness about human trafficking and migration among the Mozambican community in South Africa. Created by Community Media for Development (CMFD)/ CMFD Productions and the Alertas da Vida youth group, Khuluma Afrika! combines drama, dance, music, discussion and the distribution of information materials. You can get a flavour of it in a short video presentation, and you can hear some of the Alertas da Vida group's infectious music here.

'Khuluma Afrika!' tells the story of two Mozambican sisters, drawn to South Africa by false promises of a better life. The two become victims of human trafficking. Separated, desperate and exploited, the two girls seek solace in letters to one another that express their hardships, hopes and dreams of home.

The story aims to raise awareness about counter trafficking, make people aware of the IOM hotline number, and aims to encourage people and whistleblowers to report trafficking and seek help. Performed in Portuguese, with some dialogue in Shangaan, English, and isiZulu, the main drama is accompanied by comedy skits that talk about life in the mines, being far from home and migration. Though the production focuses on trafficking and migration, it incorporates a variety of related issues such as women’s rights, gender and migration and HIV/AIDS.

'Through Our Eyes: Participatory Video in West Africa' is an article published in the journal Forced Migration Review (FMR). You can download a pdf here. The article explores the use of locally made, participatory video designed to raise awareness of, and to help prevent, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

Undertaken as part of an outreach project launched in 2005 by the American Refugee Committee (ARC) in collaboration with Communication for Change (C4C), this participatory media initiative was piloted in Guinea and Liberia in order to share compelling stories and vital information through video. (There's a video documenting this project here and more on the project here.)

ARC was motivated by the challenge to raise awareness of the health and psychosocial impacts of conflict-related sexual violence among the some 70,000 refugees and 314,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have returned since the end of Liberia's 14-year-long civil war. As reported here, it is estimated that 40% of all Liberian women have experienced SGBV including rape, gang rape, sexual, slavery and physical assault. In a survey conducted among Liberian refugee women in camps in Sierra Leone, 74% said they had suffered sexual abuse prior to displacement and 55% during displacement. Reported cases are usually dealt with by local leaders, and response services are seldom available.

The Communication Initiative Network is an online space for sharing the experiences of, and building bridges between, the people and organisations engaged in or supporting communication as a fundamental strategy for economic and social development and change. It produces a free weekly e-newsletter, The Drum Beat. We came across the media above by doing a search on the Network's website for the term 'migration' - these were amongst the first of hundreds of hits. You can refine your search according to 'communication tools' also, eg. 'Computing and Internet', 'Film and Video', 'Live Performance', etc.

The Paulaner German Film Festival starts on Friday week, and a number of films deal in different ways with the topic of migration.

'Trade' (Tuesday 9th, 6.30pm)

Following his earlier success with Summer Storm, director Marco Kreuzpaintner returns with his English-language debut Trade. This tough thriller about the vile trade of human trafficking won the Bernhard Wicki Peace Prize for German Cinema at the Munich Film Festival. Chillingly, the film is based on fact, as documented by journalist Peter Landesman in the New York Times.

When 13-year-old Adriana (Paulina Gaitan) is kidnapped by sex traffickers in Mexico City, her 17-year-old brother Jorge (Casar Ramos) sets off on a desperate mission to save her. Adriana’s only friend throughout her ordeal is Veronica (Alicja Bachleda), a young Polish woman captured by the same criminal gang. As he dodges incredible obstacles to track down the kidnappers, Jorge meets Texas cop Ray (Kevin Kline), who becomes an ally in the search.

Trade is a serious and thoughtful drama about the sex trade network, but it should be noted that the film includes some extreme imagery that audiences may find very disturbing.

Trade features Kevin Kline, amongst others. There's a trailer on the movie's website, here, and a video interview with the cast here (the quality is quite low).

On Sunday December 7, there's an immigration-themed double bill:

'Beautiful Bitch' (2.30pm)

The title may seem a bit flippant until you see the film, but this is a powerful and honest drama inspired by the real experiences of young people caught up in street crime. It tells of Bica (nicknamed ‘Bitch’), who lives on the mean streets of Bucharest. Lured by the promises of former policeman Cristu, she follows him to Düsseldorf to earn money for her young brother who has been taken into care by the child protection service. But the job in Germany turns out to be working for a gang of ruthless pickpockets. On one of her thieving missions, Bica meets Milka, daughter of a wealthy family. It is through her relationship with this equally troubled girl that Bica catches a glimpse of the supposedly ‘good life’ of privileged Western teenagers.

Blessed with two strong central performances, director Martin Theo Krieger’s film takes an honest look at young women who prove to have more in common than their very different social backgrounds would ever suggest.

'Machan' (6.40pm)

This feel-good immigration comedy-drama makes for an unexpected directorial debut by Full Monty producer Uberto Pasolini. He was fascinated by a news story about a self-styled Sri Lankan ‘National Handball Team’ which disappeared while playing a tournament in Germany, especially in light of the revelation that handball is entirely unknown on the South Asian island. It would have been too easy to give this creative immigration scam the Full Monty treatment. Instead, Pasolini commissioned local playwright Ruwanthie De Chickera to give the story an authentically Sri Lankan flavour.

Colombo slum dwellers Manoj (Gihan De Chickera) and Stanley (Dharmapriya Dias) dream of escaping to the West, but their hopes are dashed by yet another rejection of their visa applications. Then they discover an invitation to a handball tournament in Bavaria and submit a bogus application together with a motley collection of friends and colleagues. As the scam begins to take shape, the film develops from a Sinhalese social drama into a Western-style underdog fable complete with a rousing finale.

Also of interest is the festival's opening screening, 'Chiko' (Friday 5 December, 6.30pm).

One of Germany’s most respected auteurs, Fatih Akin shot to international fame documenting the Turkish-German experience in such modern classics as Head-On and The Edge of Heaven. He now assumes the role of producer for writer-turned-director Özgür Yildirim’s impressive Chiko, which Variety’s reviewer described as “a forceful Turkish-German Scarface set in Hamburg’s rough Dulsberg district.”

Street-smart Chiko (Denis Moschitto) and his quick-tempered friend Tibet (Volkan Özcan) yearn for money, power and respect. Chiko dreams of making it all the way to the top in the drugs trade and tries to prove himself to violent drug lord Brownie (Moritz Bleibtreu, having fun playing a psycho) by agreeing to sell a large amount of weed in a short time. Chiko’s new status threatens his friendship with Tibet, who sinks into a drug-fuelled anger and is bent on revenge.

Yildirim’s fascination with the day-to-day workings of the drug business gives the film a fierce veracity and makes it work as both a genre piece and social critique.

The notes above are from the programme. The festival runs from December 5 to 14. Full programme is here. Booking information is here. Directions to the IFI are here.

'Back to the Village' is a 26-minute documentary film on rural-urban migration in India, directed by Ric Wasserman. You can view a clip here. Wasserman is a freelance filmmaker who has specialised in films shot in the developing world. This one aims to document the impact of globalisation on India's rural population, as seen through the eyes of a villager.

We learned of his work via the Drum Beat email newsletter from the Communication Initiative Network ('where communication and media are central to social and economic development' is their tag line).

According to the synopsis of the film on the Network website: 'The film is the result of longitudinal anthropological style socio-economic studies of two South Indian villages. Its major theme centres on the cause and effect of rural-urban migration, taking the position that governments, pushed on by investment, in India and elsewhere, are building industrial centres, draining funding for the rural sector.

'The urban migration of the rural economically poor, as predicted by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Population Report of 2007, in Africa and Asia will cause the urban population to double between 2000 and 2030; and, as a result, the developing countries' urban centres will make up 81 percent of urban humanity. Small villages in South India are undergoing migration, as documented here, due to lack of investment. The film spotlights the growing urban middle class and the entrepreneurs from the textile industry, whose workers are urban immigrants from the countryside.
 

Since 2003 Italy and Europe have asked Libya to stop African migrants departing from its shores for Europe. What are the Libyan police really doing? What do thousands of African men and women suffer? And why does everybody pretend they do not know about it? These are the questions asked by a new Italian documentary giving voice to Ethiopian refugees in Rome, 'Like a Man on Earth' ('Come un uomo sulla terra'). You can view a five minute clip from the 60 minute film here. According to the synopsis, in English, the film tells the story of Dag, an Ethiopian law student, who leaves Addis Ababa provoked by political repression.

In the winter of 2005 he embarks on a tough land journey, crossing the desert between Sudan and Libya. On his arrival in Libya, he is soon caught in a web of violence and criminal activities run by in the rackets controlling the routes to the Mediterranean Sea. He ends up in the hands of the Libyan police, but eventually manages to get free and cross the Mediterranean to Italy.

The film is part of a project tilted 'The Archive of Refugees’ Memories' that has been developed from 2006 by the Asinitas Onlus centre for the education and care of refugees, in collaboration with ZaLab, a collective of film makers specialized in participatory video and social documentaries, and with the help of the Archivio Audioviso del Movimento Operaio e Democratico. The film was screened at the recent Sao Paolo International Film Festival.

The online campaign group Fortress Europe is calling for people to support the filmmakers' campaign for an international investigation into the detention conditions of migrants and refugees arrested in Libya on their way to Europe.  

'Londynczycy' (Londoners) is a new Polish soap opera, set in London. There are some scenes from it, in English, here, on the Guardian website. In one, mother Lucyna is confronted by a teacher about her son Stan's use of racist language against an African classmate; in the next, two characters discuss builder Darek's plans; and in the final scene 19-year-old Asia is snubbed when she tries to get a job in a pub.

There's a six-minute introduction to the series here, on YouTube, in Polish.

The series is produced by Twilight Films and launched in October on Poland's national broadcaster, TVP1. According to an article in the Guardian, it is 'perhaps the most hyped TV show in recent memory in Poland. Billboards featuring the legend "Wielka Brytania, wielke nadzieje" (Great Britain, Great Expectations) have been plastered all around the country, featuring four of the lead characters against the backdrop of the union flag. Polish radio stations in the UK and Poland have run wildly successful competitions offering listeners the chance to be extras'. There's some chat about the series on a Polish forum (in English) here.

Those looking for insight into the 'push factors' behind migration from poor to rich countries (and anyone with an interest in foreign correspondence and conflict reporting generally) could do worse than spending some time browsing amongst the winners of this year's Lorenzo Natali Journalism Prize, an EU award to promote journalism that looks at issues of development and humanitarian affairs. One of the winners in the Maghreb and Middle East section was this report on 'The difficult adaptation of African housekeepers'. (In the case of each of these links, download a pdf of the article from the target page.) Anne Marie Jazzar El Hage's report highlights the problems of abuse and exploitation of migrant workers in Lebanon, particularly domestic staff. There is no law regulating this work; cases of abuse are common, as are cases of late or no salary payment; or cases of women not being given time off or allowed leave the house. Suicide rates amongst Ethiopians in Lebanon are dramatically high. Amongst the other prize winners, a number document the situation inside countries where forced displacement and out-migration have been one of the consequences of devastating conflict. Angle Robson reports on the 'lost children' of Sierra Leone for the English-language edition of Le Monde Diplomatique (a paper whose archives are well worth a browse for reportage on migration issues). There are also articles on the situation of children and teenagers forcibly recruited by rebel groups in Colombia, and inside the war in Darfur.

Nobody seriously questions if the world's largest economies are in recession. But what do the economic changes mean for migrants, asks Kirin Kalia of the Migration Policy Institute. In the institute's latest e-newsletter, 'Migration Information Source', she pulls together some articles on the subject. In a report published today about immigrants/their children and European labor markets, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says immigrants are among the hardest hit in economic downturns.

OECD's recommendation: governments should continue investing in policies that boost immigrants' employment prospects to help their long-term integration.

This Reuters article about the OECD report also mentions a German Marshall Fund "Transatlantic Trends" study on immigration that finds 51 percent of Americans and 34 percent of continental Europeans believe immigrants take away jobs from native-born workers. More on that transatlantic study here.

Others articles on the Source include one on how the Hispanic vote went for Obama, but may not lead to quick action on immigration reform. Analysts attribute John McCain's poor showing among Hispanics to the fact that other Republican politicians were seen as promoting anti-immigrant sentiment, it argues. They also believe that the Republican Party's political stance cost the party Hispanic voters even in the 2006 congressional elections.

There's also a feature article on women migrants in detention in Mexico. Approximately 400,000 migrants transit through Mexico each year in order to reach the United States, it reports. As many solutions to the transit migration problem — including strong commitments from Central American countries — are neither politically nor economically viable in the short term, Mexico has opted for a policy that focuses on apprehension, detention, and expedited deportation.

For more about the Migration Information Source, see below.

It has an editorial staff of one and annual advertising revenues of less than $2,000. It charges its subscribers nothing and pays most contributors the same. Mapping the settlement of Latino poultry workers is its idea of a sexy piece.

But for a growing number of followers, it has become an important read.

Every moment has its magazine, and for the age of migration it is the Migration Information Source, a weekly (more or less) online journal followed worldwide by scholars, policy makers and the occasional migrant in distress.

So wrote Jason de Parle in the New York Times earlier this year, in a profile of “total migration geek” Kirin Kalia and the Migration Information Source newsletter and online resource she runs.

Ms. Kalia thrives on hybridity — devouring Indian-American novels and Dutch-Moroccan films — and finds no migration topic too obscure. To know the fate of Latvian mushroom pickers in Ireland is, for her, to glimpse the world in a grain of sand, he wrote.

With conflicts rising over immigration to the United States (for more on the subject in the NYT, go here), interest in the Source has surged. Readership has doubled in the past three years, Ms. Kalia said, to about 140,000 unique visits each month.

You can learn more about the Migration Information source here, sign up to the newsletter here, and subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Your correspondent has just produced a radio documentary on the subject of the African-American reaction to Barack Obama's election for Radio France Internationale's English-language service. You can listen to it here. The documentary went out on the programme Crossroads, which reports on African and African diaspora issues. Amongst a number of intriguing reports on the programme recently have been one on a meeting between groups of Kenya's semi-nomadic people, the Masai, European Gypsies and Sioux Indians in France; one on how the Mediterranean island of Malta is coping with being a key landing point for migrants who try to enter Europe by boat across the Mediterranean. They've also hosted a debate on the impact of the European Union immigration pact forged by the French presidency of the EU.

You can subscribe to RFI's useful RSS feed here (for those for whom that's one too many TLAs - three-letter acronymns - a RSS feed works with a 'reader', a programme that collects links to the stuff you like on the internet in one place. Migration Matters has feeds to a number of outlets producing material on migration, via Google Reader, and finds it an invaluable way of managing the media trawl).

M2M is a 'migrant to migrant' radio programme broadcast over the internet once a week from Amsterdam. Every Friday evening from 7 to 10pm, presenter Jo van der Speck, an artist and activist, sits down, over dinner, with immigrants in Amsterdam to share 'stories and experiences of migration from the confrontational to the intimate'. Their conversation is streamed and archived on the M2M website.

Van der Speck started M2M as a collaboration with the Amsterdam artists' studio he is involved with, the Blue House (there's an introduction in English here), and a radio project he had previously developed, Radio Ruisriet. He has been involved in immigration-related activism in the Netherlands, and has been a leading protester in the wake of the fire at the Schiphol detention centre, in which 11 immigrants, who had been locked in their cells, died, and which ultimately provoked the resignation of the Dutch Justice and Planning ministers. The third anniversary of the fire was on 26 October, and the M2M website has a series of photos from the commemoration. We previously told the story of one of those at Schiphol at the time of the fire, Babak, in our 'Close Encounters' publication, here.

There's an archive clip of van der Speck talking about the Blue House and their radio work here. The 'About' section of the M2M site describes their raison d'etre as follows:

M2M means from Migrant to Migrant.
M2M is a meeting point for migrants.
Like a camp fire.
Every migrant has a story, a message.
Every migrant is a messenger between there and here and here and there.
Every migrant is a medium...

All humans are migrants , whether they like it or not.
And all migrants are humans, whether you like it or not...

Migration is the medium of the future.

It seems appropriate to note the passing of Studs Terkel here. Studs Terkel was a Chicago-based historian, author and broadcaster, who died, aged 96, two weeks ago. He made his name - and a genre - with his books of oral history, telling the stories of ordinary Americans, from the Great Depression (and the mass migration that accompanied it, from Oklahoma to California), to World War II, to tales of ordinary working lives. He was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and chronicled his upbringing amongst America's immigrant/minority cultures in his memoir, 'Talking to Myself'. He was a self-professed Luddite, and called himself a 'guerrilla journalist with a tape recorder'.

Immigrants' stories featured amongst Terkel's oral histories, such as in his 2003 volume, 'Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times' in which he interviews an Iraqi immigrant. There's an interview with Terkel upon the publication of this volume here.

You can read or listen to a Democracy Now interview with Terkel from 2005 here, read the Chicago Tribune obituary here, There's a personal reflection by a self-professed 'regular guy' blogger here, who notes, 'As an immigrant, Studs Terkel’s books were instrumental in the formation of my view of America. More than just the America that is published and celebrated in the media and popular culture, Studs Terkel chronicled the lives and gave voice to the perspectives or regular, ordinary Americans.'

Terkel had a daily radio show for decades on Chicago's WFMT, and the station has compiled a 'best of' selection here.  

The Chicago History Museum, which owns his archive, summarises the convictions that informed Terkel's work as follows: 'First, that the common person had profound experiences in everyday life and could speak about them in a compelling and illuminating fashion if they were asked; and second, that the American people deserved to have a voice and share with their fellow citizens their different perspectives about social injustice, civic issues, intolerance, and personal struggles.'

Oh, the delights of the web. Yesterday's story on photographs of Yemeni immigrants led me to Melanie Friend's photographs of immigrant detention centres. Fascinating work - which was published last year. (I had mistakenly assumed it was current.) No matter - one of the key virtues of the net is as an archive, so, in case you missed it, here is a note on Friend's work...

Photographer Melanie Friend spent five years visiting immigrant detention centres in the UK, taking photos and making recordings, for her project, ‘Border Country’.

Over 25,000 people passed through the eight centres to which she had access during that time, and inevitably she became close to some of them.

‘I got very personally involved, you can't avoid it’ she told the Guardian. ‘I visited one person 14 times and was very upset when he was removed.’

She has kept in touch with some of the removed detainees, who have subsequently sent her emails detailing the danger that they have returned to. ‘I feel angry and saddened about how detainees are treated in the UK. I am horrified by the length of time some have been held. I heard some horrific tales of detainees being forcibly removed. As if they haven't been through enough trauma before they reach our shores,’ she said.

And on the centres themselves: ‘It is a locked away world. They look like ordinary places, but are also places of surveillance and demarcation, with lists of rules on the walls.’

You can view a slideshow from the exhibition here, buy the book here, and listen to some of the audio here on her website, here (follow the link for exhibitions).

On her website, she writes: ‘Dominant representations of asylum seekers and migrants focus on ‘our’ view of ‘them’ as ‘Other’. The interview extracts in Border Country’s soundtracks employ the asylum seekers’ and migrants’ perspectives as a mirror, reflecting both on the immigration systems itself and on our own culture.’

The relationship between a journalist/documentary artist and an asylum seeker can be a tricky one, and Friend discusses this. ‘Interviews developed slowly to build up trust. Each detainee and I met on at least two or three occasions and discussed the implications of possible future exhibition/ book/ web coverage. I was upfront about the fact that this was a slow long term project – and that be the time the show was exhibited, the individual would have likely been either deported, ‘removed’, or released. Such a project therefore could not help publicise his individual case for asylum. Despite this, we built strong bonds, and I tried to help in other ways. I was moved by the fact that, while in a very vulnerable position, the detainees who put themselves forward for interviews were eager to articulate their experiences and express their opinions for posterity.’

Ultimately, she decided not to include any portrait photographs in the exhibition ‘because portraits, particularly of such vulnerable individuals as asylum seekers, risk objectification and stereotyping… I felt that the project would be more focussed, more coherent and more challenging without the visual identification of the speakers on the soundtrack.’

The thumbnail here shows Abdul Ila, now retired to his home in Melah in Yemen, who was a merchant seaman who settled in Britian for thirty years, working in factories and forges. This is one of the portraits in 'Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh: Photographs of Yemen and British Yemenis', by photographer Tim Smith. The book tells the story of Yemeni immigrants who came to work in Britain's ports and industries, tracing their legacy in Britain and in their native Yemen. There's a slideshow of the pictures here, and Chris Arnot's story for the Guardian's here.

As Arnot writes, Smith's account reminds us that migration works both ways: photographs of Yemeni men who returned to Yemen occupy the bulk of the book.

'The landscapes are unmistakably eastern, but there are echoes of a western past here and there. A stallholder selling colourful cushions sports an old Liverpool shirt with the name Owen on the back. Mohammad Ali Atia holds up a picture of himself arriving in Middlesbrough in 1958. He returned to his native Melah in 1975 and is now a successful farmer of qat.

"When I first arrived in that area and started making inquiries," Smith says, "Atia was the only local resident who looked as though he'd been kitted out by Marks & Spencer casuals."

Most of the returnees have reverted to traditional Yemeni dress. A turbaned and skirted Ali Dubwan Quaad is pictured strolling across the barren, stony soil in the stark landscape of the Shameer region. He retired there after 28 years in the UK. His pension now supports an extended family of more than 30.'

Why the exotic title for the book? The frankincense and myrrh, writes Arnot, with their biblical allusion, are easy enough to explain: camel trains carried both aromatic exports east and west from the Yemen. The coal connection came into being many centuries later. [The Yemeni colonial port of ] Aden's strategic value to the British empire made it what Smith calls "a vast bunkering station, piled high with British coal, refuelling passenger liners and cargo ships alike".

Smith's work recalls that of Glenn Jordan, whose portraits of Somali Elders in Wales, and of Mothers and Daughters amongst immigrant communities, have been shown in FOMACS. Jordan is currently working with FOMACS on a series of portraits of the Sikh community in Ireland. Jordan calls his work 'humanist photography' - 'because we're all human beings, we're more alike than we're different,' he says. There's a short interview with Glenn Jordan here.

Your correspondent has been in New York for the week, reporting on the US election, and spent election night in the company of the good people of the House of Justice in Harlem, where the local African-American community gathered to watch the son of a Kenyan become President-elect of the United States. Here is a flavour of the night.

---

“Everybody here that voted for John McCain, raise your hand!” said Michael Hardy into the microphone. Nobody raised their hand.

On 145th Street in Upper Harlem, the crowd in the meeting room of the House of Justice (motto: “No Justice, No Peace”) was feeling good.

“It certainly looks like there’s gonna be a new day in the United States of America”, said Hardy, who is the organisation’s general counsel, and lawyer for the black civil rights campaigner, the Rev Al Sharpton. “Uhuh,” and “Yes it does,” the crowd said. It was ten pm, and Obama’s lead was looking unimpeachable.

Amongst the crowd was Jenkins Washington, who was born “in the clayhills o’ Georgia” seventy years ago. Back in Georgia, did he ever think he’d see the day when a black man would be President, I asked. “They used to hang black people back where I was,” he said.

“I was scared o’ white people. My brother and I used to walk down the road where they had signs up, ‘Coloureds this way’, “Whites this way’.”

“This is a wonderful time for America, cause the change is coming; it’s on the way,” he said.

Franklin remembered sitting around the fire with his grandparents, singing gospel, and he started to sing, standing out on 145th Street in Harlem. “There’s a bright sign somewhere, oh Lord, don’t you start until you find it, oh Lord,” he sang.

Suddenly, there was cheering inside. Michael Hardy was at the microphone again. Barely audible above the din, he called to the crowd, “I am…” “I am!” they chorused. “A history maker,” he called. “A history maker!” they replied. It was eleven pm, and the networks had just called it for Obama. A woman took the microphone, bent double with emotion. “Lord, we know we’re not perfect, but thank you, Lord,” she cried through tears.

The cheering was uncontrolled. “Oh my God!” a woman shouted, in a tone of incomprehension. People hollered. They ran out onto the street, shouting simply, “Obama!”

“We made it, we made it,” somebody was repeating into the microphone.
 
“I never thought in my lifetime that I would live to see this day. But Barack Obama is a president for everybody,” a woman said.

The room went quiet as John McCain appeared on the television screens. He spoke of “the special pride” that African-Americans must take in the election.

Back in Harlem, the dj played James Brown’s ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud’. “Barack Obama! Hands in the air right now!” he roared into the microphone. “We did it, black people.”

Then music went off and, on the tv, Barack Obama appeared on stage in Chicago.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Obama. “But tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, in this defining moment, change is coming to America.” In Harlem, close around the tv, they cheered, whooped, cried, and thanked Jesus.

Jenkins Franklin didn’t want to leave afterwards. As his family waited for him in the car, he turned to me. “I’m thinking of putting my gospel group back together,” he said.

--

By Colin Murphy for Migration Matters.

Barack Obama gained lopsided support from Hispanics in Tuesday's election, winning solidly among voters with whom President Bush had made inroads in 2004, reported AP.

'About two-thirds of Hispanics voted for Obama, decisively surpassing the 53 percent who voted for Democrat John Kerry in 2004, exit polls showed. That year Bush enjoyed a high-water mark of GOP support from Hispanics with 44 percent of the vote from the nation's fastest growing ethnic group.'

According to the pollsters Zogby: 'A high percentage - 47% - of Hispanic survey respondents are first-time voters. Thirty-six percent of these new voters indicate that they recently registered to vote for a combination of reasons: they have just become U.S. citizens, they want to express their opinions on the recent immigration debate, and they realize there are so many important issues at stake in the 2008 elections.'

So how did Obama court the Hispanic vote? According to this piece by Freddy Balsera, it may be because of Obama's uniquely postive campaigning message in its Spanish-language media ads:

'Three weeks before the November election, the Obama campaign's Hispanic media team bucked the trend of negative campaigning and took the bold move of making its entire paid Spanish language message completely positive. Gone were the criticisms of John McCain or the attacks on his policies. They were replaced instead with uplifting messages on how Obama would help Hispanic families achieve the American dream through lower taxes, access to health care and college assistance. A strategy of hope and promise versus defamation and fear mongering was how Obama closed the deal with Hispanic voters.

'To put things in perspective, this course was charted at a moment when McCain and the Republicans were painting Obama as responsible for everything wrong in the lives of Latinos: the defeat of the immigration bill, abortions among teenage girls and crime in the inner city.'

The key example of that positive message is Obama's final Spanish-language ad, in which Obama addresses the viewers directly, in Spanish, talking of el sueno Americano, the American dream.

However, the Obama campaign had previously taken the gloves off, earlier in the election, as this ad linking John McCain to Rush Limbaugh's views on immigration, and comentary on it from Fox news, show.

(Freddy Balsera helped develop Obama's Hispanic message and media campaign and also served as a Latino surrogate for the campaign.)

Reliable immigration watcher ImmigrationProf gives us a useful summary of the significance of yesterday's election.

'Election 2008 is history.  Barack Obama wins.  The effort at an October surprise with the "news" of his "illegal alien" aunt fails.  And some candidates with anti-immigrant platforms lost in races for the U.S. Congress.

A year ago, with the relatively recent demise of comprehensive immigration reform in the U.S. Congress, it looked like immigration might dominate the 2008 Presidential election.  However, with the Wall Street cataclysm hitting its peak weeks before the election, that is not how it worked out.

Immigration was a non-issue in the Obama-McCain presidential debates and was rarely mentioned on the campaign trail by the candidates or the voters.  It most definitely was not the issue that gripped Joe the Plumber on election day.

And candidates who tried to play the anti-immigration card failed to get much traction on the issue.

Goodbye to Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina who started her campaign this time with a television ad with local sheriffs enforcing immigration laws. Her storied political career may have come to an end.

Lou Barletta, the mayor of Hazleton, PA who was known for his support for a tough anti-immigrant ordinance, lost in his race for Congress in Pennsylvania.  This may have been the high point of his political career.

Latinos and newly naturalized citizens turned out in record numbers for the election.

'The Prof's earlier post on the 'Illiegal Aunt' story is here: 'CNN reports that "A member of Barack Obama's Kenyan family living in the United States is facing a possible immigration issue: the Associated Press reports that an aunt he speaks about in his memoirs is living in the United States illegally. The AP says she remain in government housing in Boston, even though an immigration judge denied her request for asylum four years ago. . . .  CNN has not been able to independently verify her immigration status." For the AP report that broke this story, click here. One McCain campaign official even has claimed that Senator Obama is not a U.S. citizen (and thus is ineligible for the Presidency).'

Bruce Morrison needs little introduction to Irish readers - or at least to Irish readers over a 'certain' age. Former Congressman for Connecticut, he was the author of the Immigration Act 1990 in America, which gave 48,000 Irish people, including thousands of illegals, the right to live and work in the US. He was interviewed at length by Eamon Dunphy on RTE Radio One last Saturday, November 1. (Here's the link: he discusses immigration in the second clip, from nine minutes on.)

According to Morrison:

'Historically, countries were formed around religion and ethnicity, etc., things that people didn't choose, but had, and defined them, and that defined others who did not have those characteristics as 'other'. [And that was] a source of conflict.

'America [is] an immigrant society... When the organising principle of a country is a value, like human rights and democracy, which is at the core of the US constitution, you've been given a great gift to look beyond all of the difference amongst people and to see people as able to be American, no matter what colour, what religion, what ethnicity. Anyone can be an American who signs up to these democratic principles.

To be able to organise a society around that is a great gift. It's a challenge to the rest of the world which wasn't organised around that from the start to be able to build societies where people look beyond these ethnic divisions to the humanity of people and the ability of people to join. Immigration is that joining process. And it's something you don't do for the immigrants, you do it for the joining society.

And you don't overdo it, you don't have immigration for the sake of immigration, you have immigration that strengthens society. It's a national-interest decision, it's not a private-interest decision. And it's something that should be permanent in nature so that people come and be part of, not come and be other.'

He referenced Germany's policy of issuing guest-worker visas to Turkish workers and said such programmes were 'a mistake'.

These programmes 'make people think these people will leave when their work is done. They make people think these people are only in the country eight hours a day... that they're not part of the community.

It's a big mistake and yet it's the European way with regard to so-called 'immigration'. As soon as Europe wakes up to the fact that the true way people come in from the outside is they come in and join the whole society and that's the way immigration works. You can't make immigration work by a bunch of government programmes.'

Morrison is now an immigration lawyer and lobbyist, and as he described himself, 'an immigration advocate anywhere they'll listen to me in the world'.

In the interview, he also reflects on growing up on Long Island, his entry into politics, on the US primary and presidential races, and on his involvement in the Northern Irish peace process. He told Bill Clinton, he says: 'If you spread the big tent and you bring the Republicans in, and you bring the Loyalists in too, you create the opportunity for politics, and if you exclude them you don't create the opportunity for politics, and in the absence of politics, you get violence.'

Here's that link again. And here's an article on Morrison's intervention in the debate on the Irish citizenship referendum in 2004.