'I won't be mates with an Asian in Bradford, because people around me will take the mick out of me and him,' says a ginger-haired lad.

'I would like to mix with white people. Just, when I go to white areas, I don't feel safe,' says a young fellow of Asian extraction.

These are some of the voices in an intriguing reality tv-cum-educational tv project, titled 'Brit Camp', that's produced by Teachers tv (that's teachers.tv online) and showing on the Guardian's website. 'Can six young people finally discover more about what it means to be British and breakdown the prejudices that separate them?' the programme makers ask. Six teenagers from diverse social and ethnic backgrounds are brought together on a camping trip in the Lake District, to explore their commonalities and difference. The children work with historian Nick Barratt, an expert in social cohesion. Three 15 minute episodes have 'aired' so far: 'Am I British?', 'Building Bridges' and 'Divided Camps'.

Migreurop is a network of migrants' rights NGOs and lobby groups. Amongst their documents online is this map of detention centres for migrants in Europe, and in neighbouring countries. Note that there are numerous such centres in Ireland, according to their map: though there are no actual centres exclusively for the detention of migrants here, migrants are routinely imprisoned or held in police stations. This happens either prior to deportation, or due to failure to establish identity & residence status, or when migrants are refused "leave to land" at Dublin airport and are held in a police station overnight prior to being deported on the first available flight. This is what happened to John Achebe, a pastor from Nigeria, when he attempted to visit a friend in Ireland recently. Achebe was strip searched in front of other prisoners, detained in Cloverhill and subsequently released, following the intervention of the Nigerian ambassador. The incident prompted a series of letters to the Irish Times, amongst them this from the Irish Refugee Council (here). While researching this on the web, I came across this blog post from blogger Bernie Goldback who had a similar experience a few years ago.

The lives of 15 young asylum seekers - as seen through their own eyes - are captured in a unique book just launched in London.

'New Londoners: Reflections on Home' - a collaboration between two charities - features photos taken by the young people who were mentored by professional photographers.

18-year-old Chalak explains the significance of the camera for him: 'When I take the picture, I don't think about the background, where I came from, what happened to me. I just think about the photo. And that changed my life.'

You can hear Chalak and some of his co-contributors, and see some of their work, in this slideshow. BBC Radio 4's PM programme had a report on the project on Monday, with interviews with three of the young asylum seekers. Listen back here, and read about it on the programme's blog here. The charities behind the book are Photovoice, which provides photographic training, and Dost (which means "friend"), which supports vulnerable children, specialising in support for asylum-seeking and migrant children.

Photovoice's mission is to 'encourage the use of documentary photography by enabling those that have traditionally been the subject of such work to become its creator - to have control over how they are perceived by the rest of the world, while simultaneously learning a new skill which can enhance their lives'.  Check out their photo gallery for more of their work.

There's a more comprehensive slideshow of the book here, an article on it from the Guardian here, and the option to purchase it online here.
 

Twenty year old Marsha Swan arrived in Dublin from the American Midwest in 2001, to teach English at James's St CBS. There, she found she wasn't the only newcomer to Ireland. Many of her students were asylum seekers and other migrant children. Amongst the Irish children, many were from the impoverished Fatima Mansions area. 

'I was talking about my experiences teaching there and people just weren't really believing me,' Swan recalled. 'They'd say, 'You've got this very dark view of Irish society, but look at your society - you're so racist in America.' And I was like, 'I know, I know, but I moved here when I was 20 and this is my experience here. 

'So it's a fine line to walk, to be a foreigner going on about how badly you're doing this - it's the old thing about insulting somedbody's mother. But of all the people who should be doing better, it' should be the Irish.'

Swan has captured her experiences in a pair of novellas, The Punching Man, and Boys Are Elastic, Girls Are Fantastic, which are published in one volume by Hag's Head Press. (Swan was interviewed in yesterday's Sunday Times; I can't, alas, find the interview online.)

'There's a lot of immigrant literature in the States, but it's just something I really wanted to see done here,' she told the Sunday Times. 

And of her own identity, 'It's hard to explain - I don't see myself as Irish, I see myself as completely American, but I guess I've built this identity for myself internally, as an American in Dublin. And that kind of defines who I am. When I'm an American in America, it doesn't make much sense to me. But when I'm back in Dublin, I feel like it's home.'

Hag's Head Press is also of interest here: it is a small publishing venture that Swan runs herself, having being set up originally as a record label by her former husband. As they explain on their website:

'We are not a traditional publishing house and have instead based our business practices on independent record labels. Hag's Head is best described as a sort of a co-op: our authors cover 50% of the expenses... Ideally, we hope to combine the best elements of self-publishing and indie productions, giving artists the benefits of getting their hands dirty while still having professional guidance. We have minimal overheads and no funding (and therefore no external demands or restrictions), so our only goal is to bring out books and records that we believe in and to produce them to the highest standard.'

Here's a review of Swan's first novel, Dirty Sky.

One of the most extraordinary stories of migration ever is surely that of the Lost Boys of Sudan, children who were displaced or orphaned by the civil war in Southern Sudan and, over more than ten years, trekked across their war-torn country to refugee camps in Ethiopia or Kenya. More than three thousand of them were eventually resettled in the US. One of those was Valentino Achak Deng, and he told his story to Gerry Ryan on RTE's 2FM on Wednesday (you can listen back here).

Deng was in Dublin to address a conference on fighting hunger organised by Concern, and spoke about the work of his foundation, in his hometown of Marial Bai in Southern Sudan, where he is currently building the first secondary school. (There's a slideshow and video of his recent visit here.)

Not only is Deng's own story incredible, but the process by which he has come to international attention is also intriguing. Deng met with novelist and publisher Dave Eggers early in his time in the US, and the two became friends. Eggers said he would help Deng write his story, and this collaboration eventually became what Deng described as 'the soulful account of my life': a fictionalised 'autobiography', published as a novel by Eggers, titled 'What is the What'. The Eggers online vehicle, McSweeney's, has an account of the book here. Your correspondent's review, originally published in the Irish Times, is here. The book gives an immense insight into the plight of this group of refugees, and into the nature of refuge more generally. It also inspired Eggers's Voice of Witness project, which we've written about here before. Amongst those titles is Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, an oral history of the undocumented in the US.

How can, and should, journalists cover issues of migration and minorities in Europe? A conference in November aims to flesh this out. Pascal Verbeken, a Belgian author and journalist, investigated the history of migration within Belgium. He started a search for the poor Flemish emigrants that left their villages at the beginning of the past century when Flanders was one of the poorest regions in Europe, to live in the highly industrialised Wallonia, at that time one of the richest areas in the world. Mehmet Koksal is a Turkish journalist living in Brussels, which presumably gives him an edge in covering 'multicultural' society... Both of these will be leading a discussion on Minorities in Europe at the European Investigative Journalism Conference in Brussels in November.

Another of the conference's panel discussions deals with immigration, in the specific case of Islamism in Europe. Investigative journalist Patrick Pouw attended an orthodox Islamic school for almost a year, and wrote the book 'Salaam!' Janny Groen got friendly with radical young Muslim women and wrote 'Allah's Women Warriors'. This discussion is titled 'In Bath with Islam', and the question it addresses is whether going 'in bath with Islam' (which I take to mean becoming 'embedded') leads to successful reporting on radicalism.

The conference takes place in Brussels, on November 21st and 22nd 2008, and is hosted by the Dutch-Flemish Association for Investigative Journalists - Vereniging van Onderzoeksjournalisten (VVOJ).

New Generation has just issued a call for films for the 2009 Refuge in Films festival. The Guardian website has a short video from this summer's Refuge in Films festival, 'My Friend Nasir', featuring an interview with a young Iraqi man who was attacked by racists. ('My Friend Nasir' was made by Koutaiba al-Janabi, a British-based Iraqi filmmaker and photographer.)

The festival was developed by young refugees in London, and is dedicated to raising awareness about refugees and migrant issues. All films produced between January 2006 and April 2009, on the subjects of Immigration, Refuge and Displacement, by British and international filmmakers, are eligible. The festival will run during Refugee Week 2009 in mid-June and the deadline for submission is 30th April, 2009. There's more on Refuge in Films on their myspace page, which boasts an intriguing list of friends from both the filmmaking and migrant issues sectors...

He said, I can't stand it any more. It's doing me head in. This place used to be like a village.'

'What's wrong with it?', I said.

'It's full of foreigners.'

The Guardian has a novel posting on its website this week: a video of the British children's laureate, Michael Rosen, performing a poem, 'I Can't Stand It Any More', in which he takes a wry look at the immigration debate, as he walks around Walthamstow.

The Huffington Post has been making, as well as breaking, the news recently. The blog/website founded by Arianna Huffington has become one of the most influential news media in the US, particularly on the left of the spectrum, in the run up to the presidential election. (The Irish Times ran an interview with Mme Huffington last Saturday.)

We've noticed a number of stories on migration issues recently on the Post. Of interest to anybody concerned at proposals to require immigrants in Ireland to carry ID (under the new Immigration and Citizenship Bill, forthcoming), is the news that one in ten Latinos in the US have, in the past year, been stopped by police or other authorities and been asked about their immigration status.

And, notes Angela Kelley, 'vicious public denunciations of undocumented, brown-skinned immigrants -- once limited to hard-core white supremacists and a handful of border-state extremists -- are increasingly common among supposedly mainstream anti-immigration activists, media pundits, and politicians and are surely fueling the problems that Latinos are facing.'

(Angela Kelley is Director of the Immigration Policy Center. You can get alerts to her posts on the site here.)

Meanwhile, David Coates writes :

'One of the great hidden issues of this presidential campaign season has been immigration... early in 2009, immigration reform will be center-stage again.'

When this happens, he says, Americans will face the same ten choices as before - with Republicans and Democrats split in the middle of this list:

l. Forced repatriation of all undocumented workers
2. Increased raids by ICE inspectors, to trigger voluntary repatriation
3. A steady erosion of welfare rights for undocumented workers and their children
4. The building of longer and longer fences along the southern border
5. New documents for workers, and fines for employers who fail to police them
6. Expanded guest worker programs and more temporary work visas
7. Various routes to legal status for existing undocumented workers
8. A general amnesty for undocumented workers here for a specified period
9. The expansion of national quotas for legal immigrants
10. Reform and speeding up of legal routes for entry to the United States?

While immigration may have dropped off the mainstream radar in the US, Obama and McCain are still fighting over the issue, in public - but in Spanish. The Washington Post's daily campaign trail diary, by Ed O'Keefe, reports: 'The most recent message, "Otra Vez Con Lo Mismo," comes from the Obama campaign and attacks McCain for a message he started airing last week.

"McCain is up to the same distortions and lies on the immigration issue," the new ad states in Spanish. "He wants to hide the fact that he's the one who turned his back on us." The ad then plays a clip from a CNN debate where McCain is asked about the immigration reform legislation and whether he would vote for it now. "No, no I would not," he says.  Both the Obama and McCain campaigns have focused virtually all of their Spanish-language ad efforts in the "Latin quartet" of states, where Hispanic voter turnout could significantly tip the scales in favor of either candidate.'

You can watch the ad here, and there's a transcript of the ad on the Obama campaign site.

Olga lives in a kind of Ballymun-on-ice tower block on the edge of a horrifically polluted industrial zone, in Ukraine; there's no running water, kids are born with birth defects, and the state routinely only pays her 15 percent of her monthly wages. To supplement them, she's reduced to performing sexual acts on the web for the burgeoning German porn market. When she heads west to a friend in Vienna, she's hoping for a better life, but soon realises Austria is no promised land. She's treated as a subhuman by a series of casual employers before landing a job as a cleaner in an old folks' home, where she's victimised by a vindictive nurse.

That's how the Irish Independent reviewer describes one half of the story in Ulrich Seidl's new film, 'Import/Export'. In the parallel story, a young Austrian heads to Ukraine in search of his roots. You can watch a clip from the film here.

In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw summarises it as 'a dual story of two unhappy souls, washed across the central European continent by the irresistible currents of international capitalism'.

If that sounds like a sympathetic portrait, the film comes across, in reviews, as something far more ambivalent and darker.

'His film addresses the human costs and human pain that globalisation brings to its migrant workforce, but on this account the conventional liberal-humanist values of compassion, though detectable, are clearly secondary to something far darker: a cinema of cruelty like something by Artaud or De Sade,' writes Bradshaw. He concludes, 'this extraordinary film makes everything else around look comfy and pedestrian'. Philip French also has a positive review in the Observer.

The film is currently showing at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin, which is also showing a retrospective of Seidl's work. Calling it one of the year's must see films, Trevor Johnston writes:

'Seidl’s frequently been accused of misanthropy, yet it could equally be argued that his very lack of sentimentality marks a pointed refusal to soften his view of an unjust and unlovely world where the iniquities depicted here continue day by day.'

Ulrich Seidl's reputation is as a documentary maker, although he has said, 'I don't make any difference between feature films and documentaries. That's why the term “staged reality” was coined. That means the people in my film are non-actors, but sometimes don't act that way. And that irritates some people. They want to think and see in tidy categories.' There's a substantial essay on his work here.

Would be citizens of the United States have to pass a revised citizenship test from last Wednesday. CNN reports that the test 'omits the old "How many stars are there on our flag?" and "Name the amendments that guarantee or address voting rights." Taking their place are questions like: "There are four amendments to the Constitution about who can vote. Describe one of them," and "What is one responsibility that is only for United States citizens?"' The questions are supposedly more abstract and conceptual than before.

Migration Policy Institute has released a backgrounder on the test. Their conclusion is hesitant: 'It remains unclear whether U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was able to fully reconcile its desire to ask questions about complex U.S. civics concepts with the requirement that applicants need only speak, read and write English at the “ordinary usage” level.'

Having such a test is 'a no-brainer', argues the Washington Post.

'Some immigrant activist groups have the audacity to complain that the test is still given in English and that the concepts have become harder. Yet, that is the point.

'Passing the test is the crucial threshold. Good moral character, a favorable disposition to America, better knowledge of the U.S. government, and the ability to read, write and speak English are all signs that an immigrant is willing to become an American. How can someone be expected to meet those requirements without a test? If an immigrant really wants to be a U.S. citizen, he will find a way to learn English and study for the test. Motivation is a great teacher.

'Another way to think about the test is that naturalization candidates develop many of the characteristics needed to adapt in American society by being forced to study. A little exercising of the noggin goes a long way.

'Citizenship in America is a privilege, not a right. If immigrants want to become Americans, they need to know America.'

A full list of the questions is here. Note that they're not multiple choice; instead, many of them have a number of alternative correct answers.

Abdul Hussain spent three years in asylum seeker detention centres in Germany before moving to the UK, and then to Ireland, in 2001. He was refused asylum. Seven years on, his immigration status is still unresolved. What's he been doing in that time?

Boxing. Abdul is one of three young boxers whose stories are told in the new documentary film, Saviours, which gets a big screen release in Dublin from today. You can watch a trailer on the film's myspace page, watch a clip of Abdul's story on YouTube, read an interview with the director, Ross Whitaker, and read a review of it here.

Ross Whitaker says: "We wouldn’t really see it as a film about boxing per say at all. It was our chance to show a different side of Dublin; it’s another side of Dublin that you don’t normally see, another side of Ireland but not a necessarily depressing place at all. It is a really warm and energetic place where people are volunteering to help others to improve their lives.

Of Abdul's story, he says: "I suppose the hardest of the three stories to take would be Abdul in his situation. He is struggling with immigration problems and we filmed some pretty upsetting stuff. It’s very hard to stay behind the camera in those situations and not just put the camera down and give the guy a hug. What you are doing in these kind of things is you are trying to create a story that is more than just you behind the camera and that might move other people to feel or act differently in relation to problems that they don’t get to see otherwise."

A Polish man, lonely for his family at home, goes ballroom dancing in Dublin. There, he dances with an Irish woman, a woman who appears to be mute, and uses sign language, but her muteness has been developed simply to hide her crippling shyness. Slowly, at the weekly dances, something flowers between them - simple, unspoken, enriching.

This is the key moment in Dermot Bolger's new dance theatre show, 'Dodgems', playing at the Dublin Theatre Festival at present. (It runs till October 12th at the O'Reilly Theatre.) Bolger's company, Cois Céim, are at the forefront of dance theatre in Ireland. They make plays that bring dance, music and words together in often funny, very accessible and quite beautiful celebrations of contemporary life. 'Dodgems' is set in a fairground, at a bumper car rink, and this is the stage for a series of snapshots of contemporary Irish life, with particular focus on the new Irish and the challenges of integration. The piece isn't always successful - it's metaphors can be quite heavy handed - but key scenes are beautifully done. The funniest is when two Muslim men get into a taxi: "I'm as open minded as any taxi driver", says the Dublin driver, who then obsesses with the nuances of Islam's prohibition of pork. "Would you eat a chop?" he asks. "What if you were dying?" The patient exasperation of his two passengers is as amusing as his one-liners.

Here's a review from Irish Theatre Magazine, and here's a video clip of their previous show, Knots, which was stunning (Warning: theatre never looks good on video!). Michael Seaver describes another key scene in his review:

"Movement might have integrated the mixed group of dancers, but verbal language remained a barrier and a way of insulating themselves from the rest of society. The mean-spirited and untrusting dodgems owner (Mark O’Regan) hides behind his rhyming slang and parlari (a travelling showman’s dialect) as an innocent East European looks for work. “But that is my language too!” he says, making the connection with the gypsy language Romani, before storming off and calling the owner a Sri Lanker."