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.

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.  

"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."

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."

The New York Times reports an 11% decline in the past year in the numbers of immigrants in the US illegally. This is based on a report by the Center for Immigration Studies. From the report summary:
"Monthly data collected by the Census Bureau through May 2008 shows a significant decline in the number of less-educated, young Hispanic immigrants in the country. The evidence indicates that the illegal immigrant population may have declined by over one million in the last year. There are strong indications immigration enforcement is responsible for at least part of the decline. The economy also is likely playing a role."
The Center describes itself as being driven by "a pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted".
Its report, however, was not uncontroversial, and was rebutted forcefully by the Immigration Policy Center, which accused it of an absence of hard data, and faulty logic linking stepped-up enforecement measures with a decline in immigrant numbers. A summary of the debate is on the ImmigrationProf Blog.
Incidentally, worth bookmarking is the New York Times's page devoted to "Immigration and Refugees", where they collate all the paper's articles on those topics. The site features an interactive map of global migration, documenting where the world's 190 million migrants live (based on 2005 data).

Interestingly for Migration Matters, Cleave's new novel, The Other Hand, tells the story of a Nigerian asylum seeker, Little Bee. Cleave explains some of the background:

"There's our world, of getting our cars fixed and worrying about deadlines, and then there's the terrible world where refugees come from," says Cleave. "I was trying to get a circumstance where those two worlds would meet, and there are places in the world where holiday-makers are incredibly close to warzones. And Nigeria is one of those places. I was looking for a microcosm in which the developed world meets chaos.

"Cleave's novel is based heavily on research and interviews", writes Freyne. "He has very strong views on immigration and that makes this a political work. It has very strong words about Britain's attitude towards countries like Nigeria (on the 'safe' list of countries from which the UK won't accept refugees, despite a brutal oil war), and also for British detention centres. Ireland will soon have refugee detention centres of its own, according to the Department of Justice. Maybe we should think twice?"

And strong words on detention centres from Cleave:

"Detention centres in England match the text-book definition of concentration camps," says Cleave, who's visited one. "They concentrate people who were originally dispersed for ease of working out what to do with them. It was the British who first set up concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War. And that's what these facilities technically are.

"It's a big business. These places are run for profit by private companies. And asylum-seekers are in a sense a cash crop for these companies. Once you start doing this, then the profit motive for continuing to do it becomes huge. It's extremely expensive, and very cruel. And I think there are better ways of enforcing whatever immigration quotas a country decides to have.

"The Other Hand poses the question: what if this girl turned up on your doorstep and said: 'Can you help?' Once you develop a generic policy about what you're going to do with a group of asylum seekers, you end up treating them in a way that you wouldn't treat one asylum seeker. And that's where the denial is, because people allow the state to deal with it out of sight. It's not how we'd deal with it as individuals."

There's a short video introducing the book on Cleave's website. And the British Refugee Council has a list of other novels dealing with asylum and refugees.

'I went to my auntie's house and I had to live there until my dad came', he answered. 'It took a long time... I don't remember anyone from my country except my dad and mum. I learnt English really quickly; it took less than a month.'

'What do you remember about Kenya?' Potter asked Abdul's sisters, about the refugee camp they had stayed in.

'All our family except my mum's mum lived with us, and outside it was all sand. The school started at 8 o'clock and the first thing they did was check your nails - if they were too long you got hit with a metal stick', said Ruwayda.

The Kadirs, from Somalia, were amongst the twelve children who recently arrived in the UK, interviewed in the Observer on Sunday.

'Clanchy's book says something important about female refugees, who are often as much in flight from aspects of their old life as persecution. Male immigrants dominate the news, but there are many women like Antigona in western Europe, doing their best for their children and living in constant fear that their efforts won't be enough.

'In this instance, they weren't: the book ends with shocking finality when Antigona and her son are suddenly deported. Clanchy's distress is still palpable and the book is a tribute to their friendship. But it is also about the vulnerability of marginal women, for whom Antigona's fate is tragically emblematic.'

And Emine Saner interviewed Clancy for the Guardian: 'isn't there something exploitative about writing Antigona's story?' she asked.

'"I had to debate with myself whether it was a good thing to do," Clanchy says. "But I think she should be well known, I think she should be in a book. One of the things I can do is write. What is literature for? It must be about breaking down barriers, giving people a voice. Even though she's every bit as intelligent as me, she hasn't had everything that I have had that has turned me into a writer. So I can do that. I suppose the way it worked out was that I employed her, and I was able to employ her by writing a book about her." Clanchy says she will share royalties from the book with her subject.'

She concludes with the words of Antigona herself: 'There are a thousand women behind me in this country having shit lives. No one can understand their lives here. They are stuck, they cannot move forward. It takes one to break the ice.'

Animashaun is doing this through work with his theatre company, Camino de Orula, which presents Athol Fugard's 'Sizwe Bansi is Dead' at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin (running until August 23).

The play is set in apartheid South Africa in 1972, and tells the story of a township photographic studio. (Here's a New York Times review of a production earlier this year.)

The studio's owner, Styles, is a charismatic romantic, who says of his simple studio, and its clients: "This is a strong-room of dreams. The dreamers? My people. The simple people, who you never find mentioned in the history books, who never get statues erected to them, or monuments commemorating their great deeds. People who would be forgotten, and their dreams with them, if it wasn't for Styles."

As your correspondent wrote in an article for the Irish Independent, one of the areas in which its witness resonates most clearly is that of migration:

'For apartheid South Africa, read today's globalised economy: rich areas rely on poor areas to supply migrant labour, but only allow those migrants access under restricted and oppressive conditions, such as not being able to bring their families with them. Those who break the rules are liable to be deported.

'Fugard has one of his characters explain to the hapless Sizwe Bansi how he can get a permit to stay in the city. First, he must get a letter from a "white man" guaranteeing him a job. Then, he must take that to the Native Commissioner in his home area, and get a letter from that commissioner to the Native Commissioner in the city. Then, he brings all his letters to the senior officer at the Labour Bureau, who will put "the right stamp" in his pass book. And then he can apply for a residence permit ...'

(The image here is from Animashaun's production last year of 'The Wedlock of the Gods'.)

'We consider that this has made Poles living in the UK feel vulnerable and persecuted.... We maintain that Poles have felt humiliated by the coverage and are vulnerable to numerous acts of overt hostility and even violence which they have experienced from a vociferous minority of UK citizens.'

This article was published on the Daily Mail's website (and reprinted in the Guardian), following a complaint by the Federation to the Press Complaints Commission.

According to the Guardian, 'the federation complained about 50 Daily Mail headlines it said all displayed anti-Polish sentiment.

'However, the Daily Mail dismissed these claims. "If you take the balance of articles published by us the Polish migrant has not been identified as a hate figure and we have often and continuously drawn attention to the benefits Britain has and does derive from the skills that immigrants bring us," the Daily Mail spokesman said.

"We ran an in-depth series, The New Britons by Fiona Barton, which had a very balanced and fair assessment of the virtues of Polish immigrants," he added.

"The headline on a major feature by one of our top writers read: 'Poles apart – Hard-working, reliable, honest. Meet the Polish builders, plumbers, and decorators putting work-shy Britons to shame ...' ."'

A search of the Daily Mail website shows up one thing, at least: the newspaper is very interested in the Polish community. Some recent headlines include:

Joanna Sieracka had been involved in theatre in her native Poland since an early age. ‘My mum was always dreaming of being an actress, but she became a teacher’, she says. ‘So she decided to make me an actress.’ Three years ago, her father, a carpenter, moved to Ireland, and a year later his family followed. Shortly after Joanna Sieracka arrived in Ireland, a friend had to pull out of a play, and she asked Joanna to audition in her place. She got the part, and suddenly, her acting career was back on track.

“I thought it would be harder. But it’s the same – you learn the speeches and you say them.”

Joanna Sieracka has managed to combine her acting with her Leaving Cert and a job in a sandwich bar. Now, she is preparing to take a lead role in the new production by Calypso Theatre Company, Fairtytaleheart by Philip Ridley. The play tells of two youngsters meeting in a community centre, and using fairytale to escape the troubling realities of their daily lives. Calypso have reset it in an Ireland, with an Irish boy from a ‘New Age’ travelling background meeting a Polish girl.

The play is directed by Bairbre Ni Chaoimh, who runs Calypso. She has been dealing with the subject of immigration in her theatrical work at least since her 2001 production, ‘Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner’, which was Roddy Doyle’s version of the classic film: Doyle had a Nigerian asylum seeker as the dinner guest in a Dublin home. Shortly after that, Ni Chaoimh set up the Tower of Babel group to work with so-called 'separated children seeking asylum', young people who had come here alone, seeking refuge.

Tower of Babel aimed to provide them with leisure opportunities, using drama and music, and to help those with natural talent develop it. The group soon grew to include young people from all backgrounds and, as Bairbre Ni Chaoimh sees it, has followed the flow of their energies and ideas in the years since. There was an early emphasis on African drumming and singing, because that was where the members’ talents lay. Then there was a focus on circus skills and physical theatre, again following the interests of a fresh group of members. Currently, they are steeped in cinema: ‘Fairytaleheart’, which is just an hour long, will be followed by a selection of short films devised and made by Tower of Babel members.

‘Fairtaleheart’ runs at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin from next Monday, September 1, for a week. Tickets and information at (353 1) 881 9613.

Your correspondent has written a further article on it for the Irish Independent, forthcoming this Saturday: or check back here next Tuesday.

Journalist Julie Watson spent a week at the Mexican-US border gate in Tijuana, Mexico, watching people being deported.

'For those deported from the United States, the words are an unnecessary reminder', she writes. 'Nearly every hour of the day, guards unlock this gate that leads back into Mexico, clicking open the padlocks hung on each side, in each nation. Every time the gate slams shut, it wipes out a dream, divides a family, ends a life lived in the shadows of the law.'

She writes that U.S. deportations have jumped by more than 60 percent over the past five years.

'Many (of the deportees) stumbled over the Mexican official's question, "Where are you from?" after spending decades in the United States.'

'Among them are young people. There were more than 18,000 repatriations of children under 18 to Mexico this year, and in more than 10,000 cases they were alone, according to the Mexican government.'

This is strikingly vivid reporting. Here's one vivid detail from her lengthy piece (which she wrote for AP, and is published in the Washington Post):

"Where are you from?" the Mexican immigration official asks each one after calling off their names.

Paola Riveras' face is puffy and red from crying.

Three hours ago, the 16-year-old had jumped into the long line of Mexicans waiting to go to school, work or shop in California. When it was her turn to stop before the U.S. immigration agent, she panicked and kept walking.

He yelled "Stop!" three times. Finally, he stepped in front of her and told her to put her hands behind her head.

Riveras told him in Spanish that she had no visa and sobbed.

She says she only wanted to see her mom, who went illegally to Los Angeles when Riveras was 8 and left her with her father in Chimalhuacan, a slum outside Mexico City. When he died in December, her mother asked Riveras to come live with her. Now Riveras is not sure what she will do.

'Only one president was the son of two immigrant parents: Andrew Jackson. Five presidents ([Thomas] Jefferson, James Buchanan, Chester Arthur, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover) had just one immigrant parent each."   Of course, Barack Obama would be the sixth President with one immigrant (or at least noncitizen) parent.'

Meanwhile... 'energy, the economy and Iraq get top billing at the Democratic National Convention. Immigration won't get prime-time airplay – and that's fine with many advocates', writes Todd Gillman in the Dallas Morning News. As one delegate explains to him:

'"There's going to be a lot of meat cleavers that McCain can use on Obama," said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., who represents 300 miles of border. "He can drag that bloody rag of immigration around if he wants to. But we're not going to hand him the rag."'

A search of the convention website suggests that immigration has been namechecked, but not in any high profile way. Patricia Madrid, Attorey General in New Mexico, made these comments in a speech on Monday:

'We pledge to enact comprehensive immigration reform in a way that unites this country and doesn’t divide it, reform that solves the problem rather than playing on our worst instincts and fears... Our immigration system is broken. We need comprehensive immigration reform, not just piecemeal local efforts, and that’s the change Barack Obama and Democratic leadership will provide. We believe we must change not just our policies, but our politics as well.'

Finally, ImmigrationProf alerts me to this substantial post on how immigration is featuring at the Convention by blogger Roberto Lovato.

'Too many conservatives today abandon their free market principles... principled conservatism gives way to a sort of reactionary populism. There is no inconsistency in advocating for free markets and open immigration', he says.

Riley has written a book on the topic, 'Let Them In: The Case For Open Borders', echoing Philippe Legrain's 'Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them' (see below on Legrain). There's footage of him addressing the Cato Institute here.

Samura is renowned for his film of the war in Sierra Leone, and since then has specialised in a kind of immersion documentary in which he 'lives' with the subjects of his film. For his film 'Living with Refugees'... 'he set out to become, for all intents and purposes, a refugee. He traveled to Chad to live with a family in a refugee camp for one month. He lived under exactly the same conditions, eating what they ate, drinking what they drank. Sorious built close intimate relationships with the people in this situation sharing their hopes and fears. This film provides a unique insight into what life is really like for a refugee.'

'In 2005, 2006, and 2007 some Republicans tried it out, hoping that illegal immigration would turn out base voters angry about illegal immigration and win over culturally conservative swing voters in much the same way that crime, welfare, affirmative action, and gay marriage have in the past. Despite the fact that the issue just didn't seem to work in these three election cycles, many operatives and candidates believe that the storm of opposition to last year's comprehensive immigration bill presages a bigger reaction from voters this cycle.

Meanwhile, Democrats are beginning to understand that if you are for a common sense solution, and you lean into the issue, you can appeal both to swing voters and the growing Latino population, the largest immigrant voting population. Still, some Democrats are spooked by the issue and still not convinced.

Hence this project. Immigration08.com will track key races in which immigration may prove to be a critical, even decisive issue. We will evaluate quantitatively how this issue plays out in the Presidential, key Congressional, and close gubernatorial campaigns and on Election Day. We will track the ads being broadcast, the press coverage of immigration issues, and commentary on the elections. Key constituencies and voter blocs will be targeted with pre- and post-November 4th polling to get underneath what is happening and how immigration impacted close elections.

Our prediction? We believe we will learn, as we did in the last three cycles, that illegal immigration works well for Democrats who lean into it, rather than for Republicans who demagogue it. But the facts will be the facts, and the chips will fall where they fall.'

Amongst other material on the site is an analysis of the candidates' positions on immigration reform.

More recently, Refugee Week has launched an online Information Centre, which has a series of snappy, elegant 'pop it in your pocket' booklets available for download, such as 'Mobiles, Money and Mayhem: The facts and fibs about asylum' (example: 'Asylum seekers just come her to cream off our welfare system').

Culture buffs will appreciate their list of art works dealing with refugee-related issues under the headings of Films, Literature and Music (there's a huge amount of works listed, in further subdivisions - in film, for example, there's Documentaries, Feature Films, and Refugee Actors and Directors).

Lastly, there's a selection of links to other sources of information on refugee issues online in their resources section.

Fianna Fail's Thomas Byrne objected, suggesting that 'politics in this country has reached a new low when a member of Fine Gael suggests a voluntary repatriation scheme', and saying Varadkar's suggestion was 'in the dishonourable tradition of the British National Party, the American South and other organisations which I do not care to mention'.

The spat made the Nine O'Clock News on RTE. It followed close on controversy over recent comments by Fine Gael's Brian Hayes suggesting that, if immigrant children were holding up classes through lack of English language skills, then those children should be 'segregated' from native speakers. Brenda Power wrote a well-argued, if provocative, defense of his comments in the Sunday Times, which included the observation that 'we are meant to be pursuing a policy of interculturalism, which requires immigrants to respect our ways and culture when they come to live here, rather than multiculturalism, which seeks to place native and immigrant cultures on precisely the same footing'.

Leo Varadkar's comments in full were as follows:

'Up to 16% of those on the live register are foreign nationals. That is how it should be as 16% of the labour market comprises foreign nationals. All of those people have worked, paid their taxes and are entitled to benefits. Would there be a case for making an offer to foreign nationals on the live register to receive up to six months of benefits if they agree to repatriate to their country of origin and forego benefits? Would it not make sense economically to give them that option? It would not be forced on them but would just be an option.

'As a new policy tool that allows migrants to move more freely back and forth between their origin and destination countries, circular migration increases the likelihood that global mobility gains will be shared by both – and gives migrants more options to advance their working lives. Despite the growing interest, a new Migration Policy Institute report finds that the concept of circular migration is not well understood and that the experience of circular programs around the world remains thin.'

Frontex has counted 5,203 migrants having arrived in the Canary Islands in 2008 (including those intercepted at sea and brought to the Canary Islands). The number of those it has intercepted at sea and returned or diverted to Senegal/Mauritania is over two thirds of this, 3,767. Meanwhile, 111 traffickers have been arrested in the course of Frontex operations

'The Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program offers workers repeat employment with the same farmer if they and their employers comply with the program's terms, which include labor protections (pay rates, shelter and food, health care) monitored by the immigrants' home countries and the obligation to present a sealed employer's evaluation to the home government upon return. These immigrants in turn have invested in land and businesses in their home countries.

'The Spanish Contingente de Trabajadores Extranjeros uses both carrots and sticks to encourage circular migration. It requires migrants to register with the Spanish consulate in their home country to ensure return, and those who do return are able to participate in the program without undergoing the selection process. After four years of successful participation, the migrant obtains easier access to permanent work authorization, and can then choose circularity.'

'When a disaster hits, saving lives comes before anything else, even when those lives don’t have the right immigration papers. That is why the Department of Homeland Security called off its agents when Hurricane Gustav bore down on New Orleans' they write.

But it wasn't so simple. Undocumented workers arriving at a Red Cross shelter for evacuation received assurances that the Red Cross, which is impartial, wouldn't ask about their immigration status or report them to authorities. But they weren't reassured - they sought assurances that they would be safe from immigration agents while in the shelter. Those assurances weren't forthcoming, and the people organised their own evacuations.

The Times concludes: 'The federal government and the Red Cross still lack what should be an ironclad public policy: that during all phases of a disaster, from evacuation to shelter to return, victims without papers need never be afraid of accepting life-saving help.'

The Red Cross's principle of impartiality is explained here.

What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about immigration and undocumented immigrants?

That we're all Mexican. That's one of the most surprising and pleasant things about this book - there are immigrants from all over. For some reason, most people think all undocumented immigrants come here because they want to! They think, "Oh, it can't possibly be that bad in their country!" As if we cross one of the deadliest deserts, risk drowning, being raped, kidnapped, getting, lost, getting sold, etc., just because we want to see what it's like in the United States.

That's not a quote from George Orwell; it is a statement of the EU Presidency, and it is contained in a new report by Statewatch, a organisation that monitors EU policy and politics (download the report, press release and eight-page conclusions here). According to Statewatch, 'The EU is currently developing a new five year strategy for justice and home affairs and security policy for 2009-2014. The proposals set out by the shadowy ‘Future Group’ include a range of extremely controversial measures including techniques and technologies of surveillance and enhanced cooperation with the United States.'

The Statewatch report, 'The Shape of Things to Come (60 pages) 'examines the proposals of the Future Group and their relation to existing and planned EU policies. It shows how European governments and EU policy-makers are pursuing unfettered powers to access and gather masses of personal data on the everyday life of everyone – on the grounds that we can all be safe and secure from perceived “threats”.'

But how, asks Tony Bunyan, Statewatch Director, “are we to be safe from the state itself, from its uses and abuses of the data they hold on us?

This has clear implications for immigration policy, and Statewatch is a keen observer of the details of immigration and asylum policy across Europe (which it tracks in one of its dedicated observatories). Statewatch previously published the report 'Border Wars and Asylum Crimes'

A quick internet survey suggests that the only place this has been picked up in Ireland is by Digital Rights Ireland. In the UK, the Mirror and the Telegraph have stories on it.

'Immigration did not emerge as a significant reason for voting No in the spontaneous responses, but the pollsters said it was clear from the data and focus group research that No voters viewed immigration considerably less positively than Yes voters.'

More substantial was the Amárach Consulting report on attitudes to integration in Ireland. (There's a very accessible slide show presenting the data on Amarach's site.) The Irish Times front page report summarised that the survey 'found generally positive attitudes towards recent immigration, with 54 per cent saying it had on balance been good for Ireland. Some 33 per cent felt immigration had been bad for the country and 13 per cent believed it had made little difference.

'When asked about future policy, however, given the economic outlook, 66 per cent felt immigration policy should be made more restrictive. Seven per cent said it should be made less restrictive and 27 per cent felt the policy should be left as it is.'

I've also just come across July's Eurobarometer survey on discrimination in the EU (you can download the Irish results here). The Boston Irish blog has a useful summary:

'The EU report shows that Ireland scores high on toleration for ethnic diversity, toleration for different sexual orientations, and toleration for religious diversity. It says nothing about toleration for alcohol, where I'd hope we'd score highly too (sorry, I could not resist).

'Compared to the European average, Irish people were more likely to be happy to live next door to someone of a different ethnicity, religion, or someone who is homosexual.'

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."

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."

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.

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.

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?

"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.

'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 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...

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).

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.

'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.

'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.
 

'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'.

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.

'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).'

'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.)

---

“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.

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.

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.’

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.'

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.
 

'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.

'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 genesis of the book is explained in the foreword:

'It started in 2003, when we traveled together to Valentino’s hometown of Marial Bai. It was the first time Valentino had been back home since he fled, as a young boy, almost seventeen years earlier. The town had survived many attacks by militias and the ­Government of Sudan both before Valentino fled, and in the years of war that ­remained. When we arrived in Marial Bai, there had been a year or so of ceasefire in place, and the town was beginning to recover.

'During our time in the region, we sat down with three women who had been abducted by murahaleen raiders during the war, and had been brought to the North, where they were made to be slaves, serving as household servants and concubines. Save the Children and other agencies had recently helped rescue these women—and thousands like them—and had begun returning all such abductees (women, men, children) to their homes in Marial Bai and throughout South Sudan.

'For the women we interviewed, the return was extremely difficult. The women spoke little or no Dinka—the language of Marial Bai and much of the South—because they had been abducted at a very young age and were made to speak Arabic. They knew little of the beliefs, lifestyle, or customs of the South. And most significantly, two of the three women we spoke to had left children in the North, with the men who had enslaved and impregnated them.(1) When they spoke of their struggles since coming back, they wept, and thus the interviews were fraught and relatively brief.

'After we spoke to these women, we were determined that their voices should be heard... So while we worked on telling Valentino’s story—in what became What Is the What—we also made plans for a book of oral histories of the lives of Sudanese women during the war.'

Some further material, previously highlighted in posts below:

Valentino Achak Deng was in Dublin in October 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.)

Dave Eggers's online vehicle, McSweeney's, has an account of 'What is the What' here. Your correspondent's review, originally published in the Irish Times, is here.

Anthony Haughey writes with the following overview of the work:

'How to be a Model Citizen is the culmination of a three-year partnership between the artist, Anthony Haughey and the Global Migration Research Network - a group of diverse individuals who came to live in Ireland (north and south) during the recent economic boom. Migrant groups arriving in Ireland have been circumscribed by an established set of competing terminologies such as migrant workers, asylum seekers, refugees, or non-nationals. Saskia Sassen has alternatively more positively described these people as ‘informal citizens’, immersed within the host country with their networks of family, friends and associates [this notion is elaborated on in an article here].

'Exploring often contentious issues relating to citizenship and contested spaces, the group has worked with the artist over the last three-years in Malta, North Africa, and Ireland (north and south). Together they have produced many dialogical art and media projects: installations, exhibitions, video works, television programmes and intercultural public discussions.

'Setting up a temporary space within the Atrium of the Civic Offices, the Global Migration Research Network will invite visitors to test their knowledge of citizenship by posing a series of questions in relation to democratic institutions and civic society in Ireland. The group will simultaneously research these questions online in relation to the process of becoming a citizen in Ireland and elsewhere. Key video works from earlier collaborations will also be shown. The group's findings on this occasion will be included in a book to be published in March 2009, designed in collaboration with Detail Design, Dublin.

'How to be a Model Citizen is supported by a Projects: New Work Award from The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, with additional support from the Centre for Research in Art Technologies and Design at the University of Ulster.'

Anthony Haughey is an artist and Lecturer in Photography in the School of Media, DIT (which is FOMACS's host institution). There's a detailed biog of the artist here, and some information on a previous project that may be of interest, an 'investigation into the slowly unfolding aftermath of conflict in Ireland, Bosnia and Kosovo', titled 'Disputed Territory', here.

As Haughey notes, Minister for Immigration Conor Lenihan recently announced plans for citizenship tests: see an report on this from the Guardian here.

Also worth noting is the use of photos by the Source (for more on the Source, see last week's post), for the insight it gives into the evolution of photojournalism and publishing in the Web 2.0 era. Editor Kirin Kalia writes, 'We discovered the power of Flickr over the summer when searching for a photo to run with our two-part series on the Tibetan diaspora. I was thrilled when Ana Stefanovic, a professional photographer based in London, gave permission to use her vibrant image of Tibetan schoolchildren in India. Check out more of Ana's stunning work here.

'The strongest images for this issue came from Flickr: the Congolese woman in a shelter in South Africa, the migrants in Dubai waiting to send money home, and the elderly gentleman walking alone, framed by shimmering yellow leaves.'

The list in full:

1. "Buyer's Remorse" on Immigration Policy
2. The Recession-Proof Race for Highly Skilled Migrants
3. Remittance Patterns in Flux
4. Immigration Ultimately Not an Issue in the 2008 Election
5. Xenophobia Rising
6. Return Migration: Changing Directions?
7. Demography and Migration Flows: Do Shrinking Populations Mean More Migrants?
8. Building Border Fences
9. Warming up to Circular Migration?
10. Struggles of Iraqi Refugees Continue
 

There is a series of articles on their website, including this account of a visit to Yarl's Wood detention centre by Gillian Slovo (the South African writer). She writes:

'The right to seek asylum was born out of a world shamed by the genocide of the Holocaust. And yet asylum has now become a political football, with the government so determined to prove its muscle that it is prepared to lock up children. Yarl's Wood's inmates have committed no crime: although detention is supposed to be their last stop before removal, many appeal and are then let out pending further adjudication.'

There are also a number of videos, including this video of actress Juliet Stevenson reading the story of Tessa, who was sent to Yarl's Wood with her 1-year-old twins. (Juliet Stevenson recently performed 'Motherland', a play telling the stories of detained women and children in verbatim, in the Houses of Parliament. We'll return to this later in the week.)

Also on the New Statesman campaign site are a series of first-person testimonies from detained children. Here's the start of Bethlehem's story:

'Yesterday was one of the worst days if my life. I woke up in the morning like I usually do to go to school... Suddenly we heard this banging on our door... My mum got up and went to see who it was. I was still in the bedroom at that time and frightened. I was shaking like never before. Once my mum had opened the door about 6-8 officers came in and they handed my mum a letter... That letter was in fact a warrant to say that they had come to search our house. They told us that we had to pack our stuff and go with them because the Home Office had organised to get us both on a plane to go back to Ethiopia on the 1st of October.'

According to the New Statesman, every year, around 2,000 children pass through the UK’s immigration detention centres. They are there because their parents have applied for asylum in the UK. Detention is physically and emotionally damaging for children, as the detainees' testimonies so painfully demonstrate. In many cases, children have lived for most of their lives in Britain, and consider this country their home. Many subsequently receive refugee status, but children who have been detained remain deeply traumatised by their experiences.

The magazine cites a response to their campaign from Britain's Border and Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, as follows:

'We are absolutely clear that UK Border Agency’s treatment of children must be as sensitive as possible. That's why we've transformed our children’s policy, and even legislated to impose a duty on UKBA to keep children safe from harm. We would only ever detain children so they can stay together with their parents, which is where they are safest - we never want to split up families. And we are actively testing alternatives to detention which we'll roll out when we know they work and offer the best possible protection.'

(There's an article by Liam Byrne on the issue here.)

The magazine is running a petition, which has so far attracted over 3,000 signatories. The latest article in the campaign is here, which includes at the bottom a short list of suggested actions readers can take.

'How is it possible for a woman who has arrived in this country in a very brutalised state to produce medical evidence of that rape - at Heathrow? She doesn't speak the language, she's in a state of trauma, she doesn't know where her husband is, she may have left children behind.'

The words are those of leading British actress Juliet Stevenson, from an interview in the Daily Telegraph earlier this year. Stevenson is supporting the New Statesman campaign to end the system of detaining children for immigration reasons (see yesterday's post). In the course of reviewing the campaign, I came across her project from early 2008, 'Motherland'. This was a verbatim theatre production, where Stevenson and others performed the testimonies of people detained for immigration reasons. It played at London's Young Vic theatre for just a couple of performances, and was later staged in the Houses of Parliament. There's a collection of articles on 'Motherland' here, which is the news archive of the organisation Women for Refugee Women. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page for 'Motherland'; the page is a useful general archive of articles on women and asylum in the UK.) Also, Anthony Barnett, the founder of Open Democracy, has written about it in the Guardian and on OpenDemocracy's 'Our Kingdom' site.

There's been a strong, recent trend of documenting and exploring the asylum-seeking experience in verbatim theatre in the UK. One exponent is Sonja Linden, who has written about her work here. Though a few British verbatim productions have toured to Ireland, I'm not aware of any significant verbatim-based production here, whether dealing with asylum or another subject. Might there be an opening? Or perhaps the tribunals and their reenactments have exhausted our appetite for 'verbatim' drama.

Iwuji is Nigerian. He spent his first ten years in Lagos, then moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, when his parents took work with the UN. He was sent to boarding school in England, then went to Yale University in the US. Having trained as an actor, he was working as a jobbing Shakespearian actor when his brother phoned him from London, and said, 'It might be a good time to come back, because this black guy is playing Henry VI - the first black English king'. That was a landmark moment in British drama. The 'black guy' was David Oyelowo, and the production was the RSC’s 'Henry VI' trilogy in 2000, directed by Michael Boyd, which sowed the seed for the staging of the full Histories Cycle, six years later - in which Iwuji starred, himself taking the role of Henry VI.

In 'Playboy', Iwuji plays a Nigerian who arrives in Ireland having fled home, believing that he has killed his father; he is represented in the play as an asylum seeker.

I asked Iwuji about his background and sense of identity.

'When asked, ‘where are you from?’, I always say, ‘Nigeria’. I’m proud of that heritage, but my pride in it comes more from my Mum and Dad, who are my heroes, as opposed to from feeling Nigerian.

'I’m quite a rolling stone – I genuinely feel like I could live anywhere. I don’t miss it, just like I don’t really miss any other country I’ve lived in. I wish I felt more connected to Nigeria than I do. But it’s the closest thing to home of any of the other countries – home, where your roots come from. The village represents where home should be. Everywhere else feels like, ‘this is just where I’m living’. But I always feel slightly like I’m visiting (when in Nigeria). There’s nowhere I’ve been where I feel, 'this is where I want to be for the rest of my life'.

'Nigeria represents tradition, ideas, my extended family. So somewhere along my journey in life, it has to be (a goal) to really connect with that.'

I asked what it was like to play a Nigerian on stage.

'It's like any role – I see it as (just) another character. It could be Greek', he said.

'It makes me smile when I recognise Nigerian-isms in it, like certain phrases like ‘this fine woman’. So I probably have more access to it.

'Do I believe that should be a criteria for casting? No! I’ve played a British king, for Christ’s sake. It’s a bonus that I am Nigerian, so I can connect to that. But you have to come at it like a character, and if things bling out, like 'this fine woman' or 'no more boi boi', that’s a bonus.'

The language questions cuts both ways. He feels like 'a fish out of water, in a weird way', he says, because of the Hiberno-English accent of the play.

'There are phrases in there which are just words to me, but actually they’re phrases – like 'great girl', as in, 'she’s a great girl'.

As noted last week, there's a feature article by your correspondent on the original production of this Playboy here, and the Abbey Theatre's site is here. Bisi Adigun's African-Irish theatre company, Arambe, is here, and some of Roddy Doyle's work for Metro Eireann, Ireland's multicultural newspaper, for whom he writes short stories, is here.

'The ranks of the migrant musicians have swelled in recent years, but whereas most migrant brickies came here seeking employment and prosperity, and may now be thinking of returning home, it was generally less tangible benefits that attracted the musicians', he suggested. 'Perhaps the Irish acceptance of artists as an integral part of our society, and the respect offered to creative musicians has been a factor.'

This coming Sunday, in well-know jazz venue, JJs on Aungier St in Dublin, Dublin resident Italian multi-instrumentalist Franceso Turrisi's Pensierini e Canzoni explores the song forms of his native country with Danish bassist Claus Karsgaard and Portuguese drummer Joao Lobo, Larkin wrote.

Others singled out by him included: Argentinean guitarist Ariel Hernandez, who collaborates with accordionist Dermot Dunne (listen to a track from their latest album, 'Lunfardia', on myspace, here).

Australian trumpeter Paul Williamson (listen here).

English alto saxophonist Nick Roth, who plays with the Fuzzy Logic Ensemble (on youtube here).

'Pianist Phil Ware (on youtube here), with a successful album by his trio, In Our Own Time, flying the flag for Irish jazz as far afield as Japan and India, is now such an integral part of the Irish scene that it is easy to forget he only arrived from England in the late '90s.

'Similarly, Irish audiences, accustomed to high quality Cuban music from Conor Guilfoyle, may have missed the fact that the drummer's groups have become more international in flavour – with native Cuban musicians, singer Evelio Galan and percussionist Frailan Moran (lots of music and video here).

'Guitarist Sami Moukaddem, of Lebanese origin, is easily Ireland's longest standing migrant musician.'

Larkin concludes: 'Far from taking gigs from Irish musicians, our migrant musical community has enriched and stimulated the local scene, and long may they continue to find open minds and open ears here.'

There's a further article by Larkin on the multicultural nature of Irish jazz here.

'The problems facing asylum seekers in this Reception Centre are complex and beyond the scope of a well intentioned art project. However, by collaboratively and critically entering a dialogical process over a long period of time (four years) it was possible to learn, share knowledge, ideas and actions building strong allegiances and shared goals with the community in Mosney. The majority of the individuals who participated had a strong desire to actively negotiate and lobby for human rights in relation to unjust governmental policies in relation to the asylum process and migrant rights.

'Grant Kester has recognized the problems that artists have to deal with when working with marginalized groups such as asylum seekers and refugees. He is critical of ‘well intentioned’ artists [as in this article] who often inadvertently become an instrumentalising agent for the state. He argues for discursive strategies when working in collaborative contexts, he suggests that, ‘the antinomy between empathy and negation can be at least partially resolved by recourse to a discursive aesthetic which conceives of the artist primarily as a collaborator in dialogue rather than an expressive agent.’ He argues strongly for an ‘emancipatory political vision’ to ameliorate the philanthropic and often misguided tendency of socially concerned artists.

'In June 2006 I was invited by Belfast Exposed Gallery to produce an installation for the exhibition and public seminar series, Migrations. This offered an interesting opportunity to test the potential of a political (art) intervention with residents living in the Mosney Reception Centre to draw attention to the issues facing this marginalized and hidden community. The method we adopted was to revive and reinstate an historical and nostalgic connection between the site as a former holiday camp and its former visitors - the Irish public. In Northern Ireland, there is also a strong historical link between Mosney and working-class families. It was a regular holiday destination for thousands of families from N. Ireland and the Republic until the site was acquired by the Department of Justice in 2000 to house asylum seekers.

'I was aware of this collective memory and carefully selected an original John Hinde postcard depicting Mosney’s boating lake during its tenure as a holiday camp [see some other examples of John Hinde postcarts here]. The postcard acted as an aide memoir to trigger a point of recognition and connection with the viewer. It was also chosen for its metaphorical reading. By subverting the context of this postcard, it became an allegory for migration. During my research into postcard conventions, I observed that on the reverse of pictorial postcards at the top edge there is usually a short text which anchors the image into a geographical, historical, and cultural context. By subverting this convention, I was able to generate a revised history of the site for the reader.

'Together with my co-participants, we distributed the postcards to the residents in Mosney and invited the participants to write a personal message to the Irish Minister of Justice (responsible for decisions in relation to asylum applications). The response was impressive. The postcards were written, stamped, and mailed to the gallery in Belfast. An empty gallery wall in early July soon filled up with personal messages including criticisms, appeals and angry complaints. To reach the gallery, the postcards crossed an international boundary from south to north. This point was not lost on the residents of Mosney, further emphasising the stasis of asylum seekers, unable to travel outside of the Republic of Ireland.

'Because of the overwhelming response from Mosney’s asylum seekers and considerable interest from gallery visitors, the duration of the exhibition was extended. This was to encourage visitors to attend a series of public seminars organised to address issues raised by the Migrations exhibition. At the end of the exhibition, all the postcards were gathered together and sent to the Minister of Justice in Dublin for a response. Unfortunately, despite repeated efforts, a response never came. This may have been due to unfortunate timing as it coincided with a general election in Ireland. It seems that the voting public also did not agree with the Minister of Justice’s draconian policies as he was unceremoniously dumped from office!

'This political art intervention and act of resistance within a state controlled ‘detention centre’ is an example of how an artist can mediate within a collaborative frame. The dialogical exchange begins within the camp between the artist, co-participants, and the residents. By clearly articulating the historicity of the site and by subverting the John Hinde postcard we were able to generate a dialogical aesthetic. Although the interaction between the viewer and the residents of Mosney was virtual by necessity, it did nonetheless constitute a critical dialogical exchange between the site – gallery audience – and the Irish Department of Justice and Immigration. This final step of the process established a direct political voice from the residents to the Irish government. The anonymity of the residents was protected and a safe space was created to voice personal frustrations relating to human rights and asylum claims.'

Mosney has been the site of another substantial artistic intervention: a documentary film, originally entitled 'Mosney', but changed to 'Seaview' after protests from the owners. See the trailer here, and an article on the film here. There's an article on the John Hinde Butlins photographs here.

'Data on the nativity of the US population was first collected in the 1850 decennial census. That year, there were 2.2 million foreign born in the United States, 9.7 percent of the total population.

Between 1860 and 1920, the foreign born as a percentage of the total population fluctuated between 13 and 15 percent, peaking at 14.8 percent in 1890 mainly due to European immigration. By 1930, the share had dropped to 11.6 percent (14.2 million individuals).

The share of foreign born in the US population continued to decline between the 1930s and 1970s, reaching a record low of 4.7 percent in 1970 (9.6 million individuals). However, since 1970, the percentage has risen rapidly, mainly due to large-scale immigration from Latin America and Asia.

In 1980, according to the US Census Bureau, the foreign born represented 6.2 percent (14.1 million individuals) of the total US population. By 1990, their share had risen to 7.9 percent (19.8 million individuals) and, by the 2000 census, they made up 11.1 percent (31.1 million individuals) of the total US population.

As of 2007, they comprised 12.6 percent (38.1 million) of the total US population.'

For more on the Migration Information Source, see previous posts.

'The bigger point is this. As even MigrationWatch is forced to concede, there is not a fixed number of jobs in the economy. Immigrants don't just take jobs, they also create them, as they spend their wages and fill roles in complementary lines of work. If Britain threw out its Polish workers there wouldn't suddenly be more jobs for British people – just as throwing women out of work wouldn't provide more jobs for men.

'Whichever way you look at it, immigrants are not taking British people's jobs. On the contrary, they are helping to provide vital public services and keep small businesses going. Not for the first time, MigrationWatch's xenophobic prejudice is causing it to twist the truth.'

'At night, from the courtyard of the prison, you can hear the sound of the sea. They are the waves of the Mediterranean, a hundred meters from the fence of the detention centre. We are in Misratah, 210 km east of Tripoli, in Libya. And the prisoners they are all Eritrean asylum seekers arrested off Lampedusa or in the suburbs of Tripoli. Victims of the collateral effects of the Italo-Libyan agreement against immigration. They are more than 600 people, from 20 to 30 years old, including 58 women and several children and babies. The majority was arrested two years ago, but none of them has been tried by a court. They sleep in rooms with no windows, 4 meters per 5, up to 20 people in each one, on the ground. At least they are allowed to stay in the courtyard, under the watchful eyes of police. Their fault? Having tried to reach Europe in order to look for asylum.'

Del Grande compiles the Fortress Europe blog, which acts as something of a clearing house for hard information on deaths amongst migrants trying to get into Europe, and on conditions in detention centres in transit countries. There is a selection of activist/journalistic video and audio on the site here.

In November, Affleck visited Africa to shoot footage in the strife-torn North Kivu province of Democratic Republic of Congo, where tens of thousands have fled their homes since fighting resumed in August. He also visited Uganda, where some 30,000 people have sought refuge and are receiving help from UNHCR. UNHCR hopes the Gimme Shelter campaign will help raise $23 million in 2009 to pay for clean water supplies and emergency humanitarian assistance kits in the region.

The main film, 'Gimme Shelter', was directed by Affleck and filmed by John Toll, both Academy Award winners, and set to Paolo Nutini's cover of the Rolling Stones song Gimme Shelter, which Jagger and the group donated to the campaign.

For the series of short films on youtube, go here.

For UNHCR's campaign site, go here.

For a news release summarising the story, go here.

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.

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.

'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.  

'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.

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.

'"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.

'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.

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. 

More here.
 

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.

‘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).

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (Ł1) or subscription.

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

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.

The scheme is run by Create, which calls itself the 'national development agency for the collaborative arts', and emerged out of CAFE (Creative Activity for Everyone) in 2003. ('Collaborative arts' refers, loosely, to the idea of professional artists working with community groups.) Some interesting media on the Create site: they have just launched Create Exchange, an audio resource for the collaborative arts sector. And the site links to this YouTube video by Fearghus O Conchuir.

The video features Fearghus dancing with Chinese dancer Xiao Ke, near Dancehouse, Foley St, Dublin, as part of his Bodies and Buildings Project. Fearghus is fascinated by the changing landscape and demographic of Dublin, and documents his work in his blog, here.

Create publishes a beautifully designed, occasional newsletter. Back issues can be downloaded in pdf from their home page. The September 2007 issue featured an interview with Dragan Klaic on interculturalism and the building of inclusive cultural space. I'll post an excerpt from this next.

‘Cultural diversity is not a panacea, and contains a high risk of ‘here’ and ‘there', of absorbing notions of difference and perpetuating them. With intensive use its meaning has become ‘polluted’, through use by the cultural industries, and as a lever for support for ‘cultural exceptions’. ‘Cultural diversity is a bit passive’, according to Klai

His familiarity, both with many geographic areas of Europe and with its cultural institutions is impressive. I speak to him in Budapest, and he works in Amsterdam; he speaks seven languages, and although he recognises the strength of English as a useful shared language, he criticises both the European Commission, and the EU member states, for doing very little to promote multi-lingualism which he sees as essential in order to build Europe as an ‘inclusive cultural space’.

The term which he prefers in the pursuit of inclusivity, and which he finds ‘much more engaging and proactive than ‘cultural diversity' is 'intercultural competence'. This, he says is, ‘an attitude, a mentality and a skill, which enables me to interact with people who are a bit different but (with whom) I have a lot in common: our humanity, which we can recognise and share, and a skill, which enables me to act with others with curiosity and respect and with the feeling that I will be enriched.’  

Klaic is antagonistic and challenges the search for ‘identity’ which characterised much of European academic and popular dialogue in the late 20th century and early 21st century, as he sees it as being neither constructive or productive, since when one starts with identity one is immediately trying to alienate:  

'The question ‘who I am’ is boring: the question ‘who I might become’ is interesting, so I try to avoid all the identity searches which are self-limiting and curtailing and try to draw a line between ‘me, us, we’ – and ‘others’. When we start with identity it (leads to) stasis and limitation, and it does not recognise social and cultural change.’

What a relief that is to the Irish-Identity Conference weary; we can be what we feel, or aspire to in Ireland now, and share that aspiration with a genuine European like Dragan Klaic. What a liberation. For Klaic maintains firmly that ‘we have more in common than what separates us’. While culture can be a barrier, it is not insurmountable, and intercultural competence helps us.

While at a personal level – always the starting point – this involves effort and skills (presumably linguistic ability might be one of these), intercultural competence in a cultural or arts organisation can be ‘orientation, strategy, policy and philosophy. Ideally it will be part of institutional development at several levels.’ While all individuals need to work on their own competencies, it also needs to be a feature at ‘leadership and board levels, and with staff, associated artists and so with the public.’ ‘In the theatre, to achieve intercultural understanding in the auditorium, it needs first to be on and behind the stage.’

Unsurprisingly, he asserts that he is definitely not talking about the tokenism of a multi-ethnic work-force, but of an inclusive developmental philosophy in cultural organisations, and he cites many good examples of interculturalism – in museums, festivals and theatre: a performance by two dancers ‘Pichet Klunchun and Myself’ which premiered in Bangkok, then toured Europe, (including Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2006 as part of the International Dance Festival) ‘provoked and delighted’; the exhibition in Amsterdam of photographs taken by children on their return to Morocco for holidays, illustrating their ‘double existence’ through ‘what strikes their gaze as different when they go there’; and an exhibition of emblematic objects chosen by the multi-ethnic residents of a city, through which they recreate cultural continuity as ‘new' residents.’

More: There are bios of Dragan Klaic here and here. For more on Create, see last post.

 

Guantanamo Libia. The new Italian border police

The iron door is closed. From the small loophole I see the faces of two African guys and one Egyptian. I can't stand the acrid smell coming from the holding cells. I ask them to move. Now I can see the whole room, three meters per eight. There are some thirty people inside. Piled one over the other. There are no beds, people sleep on the ground on some dirty foam mattresses. Behind, on the walls, somebody has written Guantanamo. But we are not in the U.S. base. We are in Zlitan, in Libya. And the detainees they are not suspected terrorists, but immigrants arrested south of Lampedusa

VIDEO

Matar Hammam Lif

Devant la difficulté de franchir la mer clandestinement, les jeunes tunisiens découvrent... l'aéroport de Hammmam-Lif. De Slim Ben Chiekh. (Documentary in French on young Tunisians seeking routes to Europe.)

Esperanza

Documental magnífico de Rosa Mareike Wiemann sobre la vida de los menores marroquíes no acompańados en la enclave de Melilla. (Documentary in German & Spanish on unaccompanied minors from Morocco in the Spanish enclave of Melilla.)

PHOTO GALLERY

Libya: inside the immigrants detention centres

There's also an online game, Against All Odds which claims to 'let you experience what it's like to be a refugee', and a Google Earth collaboration, which 'takes you on a virtual reality tour with the UN refugee agency of some of the world's major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims'.

As they describe this: 'The first use of this geospatial tool focuses on refugees and displaced people located in remote areas of Chad, Iraq, Colombia and Sudan's volatile Darfur region. Sit in front of your computer and, with a few clicks, see, hear and develop an emotional understanding of what it is like to be a refugee. Highlighted are not only the physical area of the camp and surrounding country, but key parts of daily life such as education and health in photo, text and video format. Within seconds, Google Earth brings the daily life of a refugee camp into your home thousands of kilometres away.'

See below for a further discussion of the UNHCR site.

Ammado is a social network for non-profit organisations and their supporters and like-minded folk, established in Dublin by Peter Conlon, an award-winning IT entrepreneur. According to the UNHCR article, its target is to connect non-profit organisations and individuals who are dedicated to changing the world for the better, including for refugees. Excerpts follow:

‘Although Ammado offers many of the core social networking functions, the site also offers unique tools for charities and companies to manage their various social media. Its widget technology aims to help organisations to easily spread their message across the web while keeping a great degree of editorial control over the content. Conlon feels Ammado has the potential to change the hearts and minds of the public. "Ammado is a facilitator," he says. "In traditional media, journalists write the story and they have the editorial control. We are a channel that allows non-profits and people to publish their own story. Ammado is interactive, it carries on a conversation rather than broadcasting a message. People and organisations can connect directly, tell their story and ask for support. Also it combines different media tools such as print, images and video, to convey the message."

Manuel Jordao, UNHCR's Representative in Ireland, said: "Dynamic social networks on the internet are this generation's social revolution. The internet has changed the way we communicate with each other and the way we do business forever. Sites like Ammado are creating links between people with similar interests and commitments, helping to build the networks that can be a great catalyst for change.

Conlon and his business partner, Dr. Anna Kupka, launched the site's initial version in June 2007, which since then has rapidly developed and is now available in 10 languages with activities in over 100 countries.
Conlon says there are over 2,000 non-profit organisations from all over the world using Ammado to reach their objectives, increase public awareness and engage supporters and volunteers.

"We've spent the last year talking to hundreds of local and international non-profits worldwide to truly understand their needs and provide them with the technology they need to further their cause," he notes.
"Ultimately Ammado is about people being catalysts for change. Users can make a difference everyday by connecting to their favourite non-profits, supporting their campaigns in petitions, polls and communities or promoting non-profit profiles on other sites."

There’s an up-to-the-minute supply of news articles on their site, large number of blogs (for a list of blogs in their ‘immigration’ category, go here), a calendar of upcoming events, a directory (for purchase) of ethnic media and communities, a partnership with journalism schools, and awards information.

There is audio available on the site from ‘New America Now: Dispatches from the New Majority’, a news and culture audio magazine for and from California's ethnic communities, which also provides drop-in segments in five and nine minute modules for broadcast on public radio.

Amongst their recent articles are the following:

Fear and Hate Policies Along the Border: R.I.P.

Just as President Barack Obama has ordered a review of the cases at Guantanamo, it is high time that he take a look at the immigrants who have been convicted in sham trials and housed within the U.S. borders.

Immigration Detention Reform Moves to Front Burner

The recent death of an immigrant in a detention center, and a flurry of upcoming reports about conditions in detention center will likely make detention reform one of the first immigration issues the Obama administration will have to contend with.

From Ice Cream Cones to Elvis Presley – Uncovering America’s Arab Roots

Arabs and Arab culture have been part of American culture from the birth of this country. Journalist Jonathan Curiel traveled across the United States trying to find these hidden roots and wrote a book, “Al America: Travels through America's Arab and Islamic Roots,” about what he found.

Ethnic Media Answer Obama's Call for 'Remaking America'

In his inaugural speech, Pres. Barack Obama declared, "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America." NAM editors asked ethnic media journalists around the country about their views of Obama’s speech and his call to “remake America.”

Other recent documentaries of interest on Crossroads are a report on how France is the breeding ground for powerful new musical collaborations between European and African artists and a report on a new multimedia museum in Liverpool tracing the history of the slave trade, which is described as follows: 'On 23 August 2007, Liverpool opened a multimedia museum in its dockland area that retraces the history of the slave trade between Africa and the Americas. What has been the legacy of this practice that lasted from the 15th to the 19th centuries? What mark did it leave on the Mother Continent and the African diaspora? Through testimonies, terrifying recreations of the Middle Passage and a study of the music it engendered, the museum presents a challenging and important vision of what has been recognised as a crime against humanity.'

The International Slavery Museum site is here. Some details on current exhibitions are here. (Though it's a multimedia museum, their website appears to be rather static.)

According to an article on AlterNet, 'more than 200 Latino immigrants were chained, dressed in prison stripes and forced to march down a public street from a county jail to a detainment camp in a desert industrial zone outside Phoenix.

Along the way they were filmed by television news crews and guarded by at least 50 Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) deputies, wearing body armor and combat fatigues, armed with shotguns and automatic rifles. At least two canine units were present; a Sheriff’s Department helicopter hovered overhead.

The massive show of force was pure stagecraft for a blatant and dehumanizing publicity stunt orchestrated by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The MCSO gave no indication that any of the immigrant prisoners were particularly violent or presented a grave danger to the public.

According to a MCSO press release, 220 immigrants were transferred to a “Tent City” surrounded by electrified fencing. “This is a population of criminals more adept perhaps at escape,” Arpaio stated in the press release. “But this is a fence they won’t want to scale because they risk receiving a shock – literally.”'

Arpaio's reality show is currently airing on Fox Reality. A blurb for the first three episodes reads as follows:

Episode 1: Wanted fugitives are asked to model clothing for a fashion show as part of an elaborate sting operation. This culminates with a surprise arrest of the confused “models” by undercover deputy sheriffs.

Episode 2: Wanted fugitives are lured to a fake movie set and asked to participate as extras in a pretend film. Upon completing their scene, the director yells “cut”, and our fugitives are arrested for real by undercover deputies.

Episode 3:Wanted fugitives are led to believe they have won the VIP treatment at a new spa called “J. L. Spas”. After completing yoga and various relaxation services, a group of deputy sheriffs arrests them in the middle of a facial.

Read more on AlterNet and in the Huffington Post. Watch a report on an Arpaio 'sweep' here and a CNN report on the new reality show here.

AlterNet is an online news magazine and community that 'creates original journalism and amplifies the best of hundreds of other independent media sources. AlterNet's aim is to inspire action and advocacy on the environment, human rights and civil liberties, social justice, media, health care issues, and more'. Read more about it here.

Thanks to Riyaz for notifying us of this story, at migrationmatters[at]gmail.com.

‘Seven Jewish Children’ is a new play by one of the most esteemed of British playwrights, Caryl Churchill. It is ten minutes long, and was written in one week, in response to the war in Gaza. The debut run at the Royal Court in London was in aid of the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. Now, Churchill is making the play available for free on the Royal Court’s website, with the proviso that anyone, anywhere, can perform it, without having to secure or pay for performance rights, providing that it is free to attend and a collection is held for Gaza.

Churchill explained to the Guardian, a couple of weeks ago: "I wrote it last week; by this week I was arranging it with the Royal Court; it's now being cast; rehearsals are next week; and we perform it on 6 February. It's only a small play, 10 minutes long, but it's a way of looking at what's happened and to raise money for the people who've suffered there."

Now, an innovative theatre collective in Dublin, Project Brand New, are calling on Irish theatre companies and fans to perform or read the play all across Ireland on the weekend of March 7-8, in support of Trócaire’s appeal for Gaza. (Email projectbrandnew@gmail.com for more info.) For more on Project Brand New, see here.

In an article on the idea, the Guardian's Lyn Gardner observed that theatre often feels like too much of an oil tanker to modernise quickly enough and be really responsive to 21st century life... With Google and 24-hour news available at the press of a button, we all have access to the here and now, but because of the lag time in play-making, it sometimes feels "dated, stuffy and disconnected".

Michael Billington gave the Royal Court production a four-star review, and concluded that 'the play solves nothing, but shows theatre's power to heighten consciousness and articulate moral outrage'.

Also on in London is a dance-theatre performance, 'Plonter', exploring the conflict in the Middle East, which 'uses loosely interlinked scenes to explore the wretched consequences when a Palestinian child is killed by Israeli forces on a practice manoeuvre'.

The organisation Create have just posted a series of interviews with Haughey, as podcasts, here. For more on Haughey's work, see two earlier articles in Migration Matters: 'Art from an asylum seekers' accommodation centre, Mosney', on 15/12/2008, and 'Artist intervention at Dublin City Council's Wood Quay offices', on 04/12/2008 (in the December archive). For more on Create, see 'Supporting artists working with new communities, and others' on 03/02/2008, below.

Another area of at least tangential interest might be 'peace journalism', which we've stumbled across through our regular source, the Communication Initiative Network. An article on the Network on Bosnia's Open Broadcast Network looks at the practice and success of peace journalism, in the context of the former Yugoslav republic, and may be of interest to some readers. To quote:

'Peace journalism is part of a major worldwide media reform movement growing out of the strong critique of dominant mainstream media practices. The well-documented elite domination, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and conflict escalation of the media are particular points of concern within the field...

'Peace journalism participants seek generally to change journalistic practices that too stringently control and limit access to the media and too narrowly define information that is worthy of broad dissemination. Hence the emerging field of peace journalism lies at the nexus of concerns about the rights to communicate and to receive information regardless of race, ethnicity, class, gender, or nationality.'

The Open Broadcast Network is an internationally-funded commercial tv operation in Bosnia. Its website is here.

There's an interesting archived article on the history of the OBN (dating from 1999) here.

Wikipedia's entry on peace journalism is here.  

And Arambe is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a celebratory concert of intercultural music, tomorrow night (Saturday 21) at the O'Reilly Theatre, from 7.30pm.

'The town of Thiaroye in Senegal is not the peaceful fishermen’s village it used to be. It is from here that people first organized illegal boat departures from the small African nation to Europe. Because what they say is true: all the fishermen do want to leave as fish supplies dwindle leaving their families hungry. 30 year old Modou is one of these fishermen who have attempted to leave his home shores twice, each time risking his life on treacherous vessels, and like all the others, he knows that as soon as he has enough money he’ll try his luck again. Just like the next generation of young people who look on with the same dreams. Globalization and de-colonistaion have changed the lives of millions on both sides of the fence yet few independent films have been able to reveal personal stories like Modou’s to illustrate its emotional and cultural consequences. A hidden gem of this year’s collection, Barcelona or Die is both elementary and vital with humanity at its core.'

The film was strikingly shot in slow, carefully framed scenes, with great footage of Thiaroye in particular, and moving, very articulate testimony from the protagonist, Modou. Hopefully, there'll be another chance to see it in Ireland.

Some resources: 

A very bare website for the film here. 

A clip on YouTube here.

Last year's Sheffield Doc/Fest, here. 

An entry in the Africa-themed blog, Under the Baobab Tree, here.  

The critic Michael Billington (who gave it a harsh review) described it as follows: 'Bean's framing device is a group of asylum seekers putting on a devised play about four waves of immigration. And what becomes clear is that each new set of arrivals is absorbed into English life, and then resents its successors. So the Protestant Huguenots are uneasy with the Irish Catholics, who, in turn, are hostile to the Jews, who feel displaced by the Bangladeshis.'

The play has divided the critics. The Stage found it 'hilarious, irreverent, caricatural and crude'. The Jewish Chronicle wrote that its power lay 'in its refreshingly un-PC politics'. The Daily Telegraph critic, Charles Spencer, said it was as brave as any play ever staged at the National: he has both a review and, innovatively, a video review, here. In the Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh thought it a 'gross, cartoon history of English reaction to four centuries of refugees arriving in London’s East End'.

The play has provoked a series of articles on the Guardian’s theatre blog, on the one hand arguing that it is racist and offensive; on the other, that it ridicules racial stereotypes.

In an interview in the Guardian, the playwright described how he once sat on a playwriting panel where he was told he should avoid writing about ethnic minorities, because "you don't have their experience". It's an idea he finds infuriating. "England is an immigrant culture. We're all immigrants. If you can't write about young Bangladeshis - they are English, they were born here - then what you're saying is that a living writer can't write about England."

And the playwright himself writes of the play,

‘I spent some sleepless nights in the four years I lived in Bethnal Green. An immigrant to London myself, a Yorkshireman, I found the borough abrasive at best and violent at worst, with undisguised racism and tribalism on all sides.

Bethnal Green’s narrative is immigration. This play begins with the French Huguenots, refugees from religious persecution by Catholic France. Not allowed in the City walls, they established their trades in E2 and in three generations were English.
How to describe the Irish that followed – refugees or economic migrants? Persecuted and starving, many Irish found a home and work in Bethnal Green and quickly became cockneys.

The Jews followed, refugees definitely, driven out by the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Russia. They transformed the borough totally, and with pressure from the extant Anglo-Jewry found a way to be both Jewish and English.

The Sylheti (Bangladeshi) population followed their menfolk, the Indian lascars who served in the British Merchant Navy during the war. They have not been established for three generations and their project is unfinished, but the current issue of their process of integration, or lack of it, resonates with the experience of the French, the Irish and the Jews.

England People Very Nice is a play about immigration, integration, terrorism, housing, racism, religion, power, hatred and love – in fact, all the staples for a comedy with songs.’

There’s an attractive video trailer for the play on the theatre’s website, here.

As the Independent recalled, the popular chant from Elland Road Kop in the late 1960s – "The river Aire is chilly and deep, Olu-wa-le; Never trust the Leeds police, Olu-wa-a-le" – doesn't actually feature in The Hounding of David Oluwale, Oladipo Agboluaje's adaptation of Kester Aspden's harrowing book. But it was sung to constables on the terraces at the time of the Scotland Yard investigation into the systematic hounding of the eponymous Nigerian immigrant. A stone's throw from West Yorkshire Playhouse stands Millgarth Police Station, where arrest sheets describe his nationality simply as "wog", and where Oluwale was locked up, beaten up and cruelly sent up.

The Guardian noted that this remains the only case in which British policemen have been tried for killing a man of African descent, and it was brought back to the public's attention in a book by Kester Aspden, which last year won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger award for non-fiction... Dawn Walton's production has many shocking episodes to relate, and it navigates the usual pitfalls of documentary theatre - preachiness, piety, visual poverty - with stylish aplomb.

The author of the book, Kester Aspden explains some of his research in this interview: 'My first motivation was that this was a strange and compelling human story about a man who came here as a stowaway. I had romantic ideas about that – in fact it was a hard and arduous trip. That led me to research the experience of other stowaways who came over at that time, and also the experience of West Africans in England. There's a lot about the Windrush generation coming to Britain from the Caribbean, but I knew nothing about the experience of Nigerians. I was lucky to meet a man who knew David Oluwale and who had stowed away himself. Gayb Adams came from Lagos the year before David and then settled in Leeds. So I got a first hand account of what it was like at that time.'

There’s a YouTube video, featuring audience responses, here.

At time of writing, the latest entry documents the emergence of the Kakuma News Reflector, KANERE, a new refugee newsletter devoted to independent reporting on human rights and encampment in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya. 'In exercising a refugee free press, we speak in respect of human rights and the rule of law in order to create a more open society in refugee camps and to develop a forum for fair public debate on refugee affairs', they say.

The blog aims to inform and build a network of intellectuals (such as teachers, journalists, lawyers, jurists, and human rights thinkers), academic institutes, and various public interest groups in order to address the task of drawing political and social attention to the cause of the human rights of the victims of forced migration. One of its essential features is its constant attention to the requirements of gender justice with regard to the victims of forced displacement. We'll return to Refugee Watch Online later for a further look at the media being disseminated through the site.

When we are introduced to the refugees they put away their sad faces. They smile. They are friendly and open. There’s a shortage of rice, but we are fed handsomely.

Theh Reh fled the military regime in Burma in 1992. He lives with his grandmother, Hency, his parents, his sisters and their children, four generations of the family packed into a small house made of bamboo and straw. The illusion is maintained that the Baan Mai Naisoi refugee camp is a temporary arrangement – no permanent structures are allowed.

'My father was a village head in Burma,' he says. 'We had constant trouble with the army, but it was a difficult decision to leave. Everything is hard. We were farmers before. We grew rice and corn and other crops, but here we have no space to grow anything. We can’t teach our children how to be farmers.'

The Irish Times ran an editorial to accompany the article, which described the background to this refugee crisis:

They have fled from horrifyingly oppressive conditions in Burma to the relative safety of a border camp. But once there they have very little to do, are not allowed work and cannot farm or grow their own food. It is boring, but far better than being continually harassed by the Burmese army in their home villages. Only educational programmes and the possibility that some of them will be selected for international resettlement give them grounds for hope. Last month 78 members of the Muslim minority Rohingya community in a camp on the Bangladesh-Burma border were selected to come to Ireland under a United Nations programme.

According to the print edition, McKay's article was to be accompanied online by audio and a slideshow, but all I can find is a tiny slideshow embedded into the online version of the article.

McKay travelled with Irish charity Trócaire to highlight their annual Lenten fundraising campaign. Trócaire's Lenten campaign is here, and the charity has individual stories of refugees and displacement here (again, there is an embedded slideshow on the page, but it is very small).

Thanks to Roisin for the alert. Please send your alerts to migrationmatters [at] gmail.com.

The show is based on movement in and out of Ireland since the monks of the 5th century. There are songs, old and new, recalling major movements such as the soldiers of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the famine exodus, and the later strong emigration. Tunes also commemorate those who went to Montserrat and Barbados in the 1600s; there is an unaccompanied version of Van Diemen’s Land is for the first Australian exiles, and Far Away in Australia for later travellers. Altogether, there are 25 pieces, all directly relating to emigration and modern travel. The Cunningham sean-nós dancers from Carna do their magic on stage at various stages during the show and stories of particular emigrants add to the atmosphere. The DVD and accompanying CD were released in October 2008 and the show is in its second round of concerts. It has been a major success at every venue so far, with standing ovations showing audiences’ appreciation for the variety and sheer entertainment of the night. More info on the show itself and pics are on www.seankeane.com.

Many of the new songs were written by Kieran Wade. They are beautiful songs which, though new, have the structure and resonance of traditional material. On stage are Anth Kaley on keyboards, Sean Regan on fiddle, mandola and vocals, Pat Coyne on guitars, Rick Epping on mouth organs, Jew's harp and concertina and Sean Keane on vocals, flute, whistles and uilleann pipe, as well as the Cunningham Dancers.

Now, America’s Voice, the US immigration reform ‘platform’, has launched a campaign to counter Arpaio’s tactics.

'Should "America's Toughest Sheriff" get a free pass on his controversial tactics? Should he round up immigrants at traffic stops and force them to sleep in separate "Tent Cities" in the desert? We think he should get investigated by the Department of Justice', they say.

'With over 2,700 lawsuits against him, a history of virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Latino tactics, and 40,000 felony warrants outstanding in his jurisdiction, Arpaio has fostered a climate in which real criminals roam free while hard-working immigrants live in fear. America's Voice is calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to begin a federal investigation into his tactics, giving Sheriff Arpaio the attention he really deserves.'

There’s a smart, simple video and a petition (‘Sheriff Joe Must Go’) available here. And America’s Voice has a list of highlights of the Sheriff’s record for download here.

Episode one aired last Friday, and is – hooray! – available in its entirety (25 mins) online. It follows Galway bus inspector Mike Waldron, whose multicultral exerience amounts to having once eaten a kebab, and being sick for three days, to Turkey with his colleague and friend Kenny Ipek, where they finally get to settle their long-standing rivalry over who is the better driver, in the traffic of Istanbul. From an initial viewing, it looks lively, intimate, humorous and very well shot.

One intriguing project Drum Beat reports on is Fired Up Media, a network of videographers, editors, and journalists ‘reporting from the front lines of the youth climate movement and disseminating through the Fired Up Virtual Newsroom’. Here’s how they explain what they’re doing:

The media landscape is evolving and shifting rapidly to favor those who are nimble, multi-spectrum, and global. However, most media entities are massive conglomerates, often controlled primarily by a small group of investors or an individual. Fired Up Media is designed to evolve with this changing landscape, but first you need a map. This page contains a link map to a number of prominent environmental, climate, and youth media organizations. Fired Up Media’s work sits at the intersection of these organizations and efforts, serving to pull together independent, youth, and public service media efforts and those aimed at educating the world on the issue of global warming. The Fired Up team sees this focus as a lens, rather than a filter, that takes in the entire global media landscape.

There is some audio from the film on this blog and a report (in French) on YouTube, which features a discussion between the director and students. 

Burke's article on the film accompanies a striking report of his investigation in northern France. He writes from Norrent-Fontes:

The three tents are clustered in a ditch, beside a field, in the middle of nowhere. Anthony sits by the fire and strums his makeshift krar, a traditional Eritrean lute. It is 10am and the frost is still on the rutted brown fields that stretch to the flat horizon all around.

A tractor bumps past, a crow flaps across the grey sky, the traffic on the A26 Paris-Calais motorway 500 yards behind a small wood is barely audible. It is an unlikely place for a refugee transit camp, the last stop before the UK. The nearest town is two miles away: the grubby two cafes and post office of Norrent-Fontes.

But the ditch is a temporary home for 26 young Eritreans and Ethiopians trying to get to Britain by hiding in the lorries that stop in the layby every night. And their situation is far from unique. An investigation by the Observer has revealed scores of such makeshift settlements containing an estimated 1,500 people, including women and children, scattered across a huge swath of northern France.

According to Karen Akoka, the co-author of a recent major report on the unprecedented new network of camps, the fault lies with the progressive closure of facilities for immigrants in towns such as Calais, a French government drive to disperse and harass asylum-seekers who cross its territory, and new security measures implemented by the UK that have made it harder to physically penetrate the ports – forcing immigrants to try new ways to cross the Channel. Each week a new camp is established. The true number of them is unknown. "There are many that no one notices," says Akoka. French officials rebut the accusations, saying their policies are "humane, fair and generous" and denying any harassment or deliberate dispersal.

The second, ‘Lovely Andrea’, is by Hito Steyerl. This film ‘follows Steyerl as she returns to Japan, where she briefly worked in the 1980s as a bondage model under the assumed name Andrea, to search for a photograph of herself. Steyerl interleaves the narrative with film clips that include superheroes Spider-Man and Woman with cultural and political references to bondage, including samurai practices, popular music videos and images of Guantanamo inmates. ‘Lovely Andrea’ is played out like a psychological thriller in which Steyerl is both detective and missing subject.’ Steyerl works as filmmaker, video artist and author in the area of essayist documentary film and post-colonial criticism. Migration is one of her core themes. Her work is located on the interface between film and fine arts.

The films are showing at Pallas Contemporary Projects, at 111, Lr Grangegorman Rd in Dublin, from March 20 to April 19 from 12-6pm daily. Hito Steyerl will be in the gallery on April 6 at 7pm to talk about her work.

Some more on Pallas: Pallas Contemporary Projects is a not-for-profit, publicly funded gallery space, which focuses on developing exchanges between Irish and international artists with a strong conceptual approach working in different media. Pallas has established a reputation as a leading exponent of an alternative art methodology and D.I.Y. work ethic resulting in imaginative and challenging projects. Pallas Contemporary Projects focuses on the exchange of Irish and international artists with a strong conceptual approach working in different media.




           

Plastered over the roadside is a scruffy poster display, covered in parts by crudely typed flyers for workers' protests and general strikes. What looks from afar to be a mass of identical images reveals itself on closer inspection to be hundreds of separate portraits, all arranged block-like, row upon row. A woman in striking blue eyeliner and perfectly drawn lips clasps hands with a man in a sports jacket. An elderly lady with a mass of white hair poses with her baseball cap-wearing partner. One man rests his head on the shoulder next to him; another holds a toddler in his arms. Their subjects are of all ages and all colours, but the posters have one feature in common: in the centre of each is a passport or driving licence or blue-and-white identity card showing that one of the people posing is officially recognised by the Republique Française. The other is there illegally, as a sans-papiers or undocumented worker. Individually the pictures are charming but forgettable. Together, they are powerful, and demand to be noticed. And that, of course, is exactly the point.

The man who has chosen to record these people's lives is Fabien Breuvart, a 46-year-old photographer who feels he has a responsibility to support the sans-papiers in any way he can. Every lunchtime from the beginning of May to mid-July he locked the doors of his little shop and took his tripod down the rue Charlot to the Bourse du Travail, a labour exchange that has been occupied for four months by around 1,300 sans-papiers: men, women and children. There, in front of the dilapidated entrance, he took photos of the workers alongside documented members of the public who had come to show solidarity. So far there are 509 pictures, but there will soon be more - all of them aiming to show that, as their creator says, "the only difference between these two people is a piece of paper".

Breuvart believes an absence of political leadership means that solidarity with the sans-papiers comes most frequently from concerned individuals. He notes with pleasure that many of the people who come to be photographed don't even bother to look at themselves once the picture has been developed. "They came as though they were voting," he says. "To them the picture wasn't important; it was the act itself."

The full contents list is:
Editorial
Source Assessment in COI Research - James O'Sullivan, RDC
Case C-465/07 Meki Elgafaji and Noor Elgafaji v. Staatssecretaris van Justitie, European Court of Justice, 17 February, 2009 - Statement by UNHCR
Medical evidence in the asylum process - recent developments - David Leonard, BL
The Preliminary ruling procedure in the field of immigration and asylum law - Jonathan Tomkin
Vincentian Refugee Centre - Sr Breege Keenan
Consanguineous marriage and attitudes to disability in some Arabic cultures - Patrick Dowling, RDC
Recent Developments in Refugee and Immigration Law - John Stanley, BL
Relocation, Relocation – The impact of internal relocation on women asylum seekers - Claire Bennett, Asylum Aid (The original report by Claire Bennett can be downloaded here.)
Research on errors of recall by asylum seekers - Edited by Paul Daly, RDC
Book Review - Handbook on Immigration and Asylum in Ireland 2007 - Paul Daly, RDC

(The Handbook is available from the ESRI, here, and contains a directory of research institutes and programmes working in the area of migration in Ireland. According to the review, much of the information in the book can be found nowhere else, and it is simply invaluable to everyone working in the asylum and immigration areas.)

The current and back issues of the Researcher can also be accessed in various forms here.

1. The story of St Patrick I: how a shepherd in Wales (perhaps) came to be the defining figure of early Christian Ireland (maybe). (From Wikipedia)

2. The story of St Patrick II: how Patrick was trafficked to Ireland, in his own words... ‘I, Patrick, a sinner, the rudest and least of all the faithful, and most contemptible to very many, had for my father Calpornius, a deacon, the son of Potitus, a priest, who lived in Bannaven Taberniae, for he had a small country-house close by, where I was taken captive when I was nearly sixteen years of age. I knew not the true God, and I was brought captive to Ireland with many thousand men, as we deserved; for we had forsaken God, and had not kept His commandments, and were disobedient to our priests, who admonished us for our salvation. And the Lord brought down upon us the anger of His Spirit, and scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where now my littleness may be seen amongst strangers.’
(From The Confession of St Patrick, on Project Gutenberg)

3. The story of St Patrick III: how the children see it, as in the ‘Give Up Yer Aul Sins’ animation series.

4. The story of the Irish diaspora I: where they settled in the US. A beautifully simple piece of online interactive media from the New York Times, consisting of a map and timeline of where immigrants settled in the US. See also a thorough account on Wikipedia.

5. The story of the Irish diaspora II: The greening of the Obama White House. Politico.com has the story of Barack Obama’s Irish roots, with a short video of Obama’s speech to the Society of Irish Women’s St Patrick’s Day dinner. ‘There is a reason why Americans identify so strongly with St Patrick,’ he said. ‘It is the story of believing in things unseen, and making that belief a reality.’ He reminded his audience that he has ‘an old Celtic name’ - Baragh – and said he ‘hopefully can earn the honour of an apostrophe in O’Bama’. Also on that page is a video of the Corrigan Brothers' pastiche, 'There's no one as Irish as Barack Obama'. The latest on Brian Cowan's visit to the White House, from today's Irish Times, is here.

6. The story of the Irish diaspora III: St Patrick is also the patron saint of the volcanic isle of Montserrat: here is a story of the islanders and their own troubled history of migration.

7. The documenting of the Irish diaspora I: Irish editor/publisher/political activist Niall O'Dowd has just launched a new website, Irish Central, aiming to be a clearing house for all things to do with the Irish diaspora online - both serious and light-hearted, as this article, on the top ten worst ever Irish accents on film, suggests. O'Dowd is the publisher of the Irish Voice, and a leader of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform. (See the print interview with him here and with Marian Finucane here - scroll to March 22.)

8. The documenting of the Irish diaspora II: The Irish Diaspora List is an email list on the subjects of the Irish diaspora, Irish identity and culture, the burgeoning academic field of ‘Irish studies’, and migration issues more generally. It is run out of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit at the University of Bradford, and is a scholarly list, without open access. I find its discussion often of interest and occasionally very pertinent to Migration Matters (though it is very much focussed on the Irish experience of migration, and mostly therefore on Irish emigration). To join the list, email a request to the details on the site.

9. The celebration of Paddy's Day I: In the Guardian, Irish author Mary Kenny suggests that Britain needs an equivalent to St Paddy’s Day, ‘probably the most successful example ever of "global branding" of a saint's day’. ‘While the British visibly and collectively squirm at the suggestion that there should be new definitions of "Britishness" or some ritual, or national day to mark "Britishness", the Irish identity as branded by St Patrick is easy, natural, exuberant - sometimes too much so, with fashionable concerns now about binge drinking - and inclusive. Paddy's day in Dublin can accommodate gay tableaux and Chinese dragons as gracefully as it can the traditional allusions to the holy Ireland of St Pat. A definition of success is when something can be "all things to all men": and you can take your Paddy's day any way you choose. But it will always have an element of the green - of Irishness - at its core.’ Details of RTE's coverage of this year's celebrations is here, but their online presence is very disappointing (bizarrely so, considering the potential international audience). Alternatively, try YouTube for a selection of clips from previous parades, etc.

10. The celebration of Paddy's Day II: Such inclusivity, however, is not a universal feature of St Patrick’s Day celebrations, as Ian Williams previously wrote in the Guardian.

11. The celebration of Paddy's Day III: why they celebrate it in Spanish Harlem.

12. The celebration of Paddy's Day IV: in her President's greeting, Mary McAleese describes Patrick as an immigrant to Ireland whose life was one of outrageous hardship and outstanding endurance. You can read her full greeting at the Irish Emigrant, a long-running and very popular email/online magazine.

Email migrationmatters[at]gmail.com with any other St Patricks' Day or Irish diaspora leads. Meanwhile, Migration Matters is off to the parade. Lá Fhéile Pádraig.

'Yet if you should find yourself at a loose end in London over the next few weeks, you could certainly spend a stimulating hour or two visiting the PM Gallery in Ealing.

'The gallery is currently hosting the premiere of a new exhibition featuring the work of artists Bernard Canavan, Daniel Carmody, John Duffin, Dermot Holland and curator Brian Whelan, depicting the London-Irish experience in the 1950s and 1960s.

'My first surprise was to see The Quiet Men billed as “the first major contemporary London-Irish art exhibition” to explore this subject. As Whelan explains: “Irish music, literature, poetry and dance are celebrated all over the world. However, when asked to name an artist, many will have difficulty as very few have been celebrated outside Ireland. Perhaps because a people that experienced famine, war, economic hardship and mass immigration carried only their portable culture with them in their heads, hearts and suitcases.'

From the press release (which contains good short biogs of each artist): Each featured artist is an immigrant, or child of immigrants, from Ireland. This immigrant status informs the work, which observes the margins of society and is full of stories, humour and tragedy. The church and pub appear, as do the launderette, bus and train. The theme of the journey is often present in the songs, toasts, poems and prayers of the immigrant and the artists do not stray far from the vehicles that brought them to the city and might take them away again.

The PM Gallery is here. There is more on some of the artists here: Brian Whelan, John Duffin, Bernard Canavan and the late Daniel Carmody. The exhibition runs till April 18. A last excerpt from Frank Miller's article, especially appropriate for the week that's in it:

'There is no romance, it must be said, in Whelan’s tribute to those who helped build Britain. 'Paddy in the Smoke' shows a fairly evil-looking St Patrick with angels clutching on to coffins, it is not immediately clear whether the holy man is sucking the bodies in or spewing them out. In fact, Whelan explains, the bodies are sitting on unfinished slabs of motorway.

In what he describes as a sort of “spaghetti junction” moment, the artist says it occurred to him “there is no memorial to those, say, who built the Hammersmith flyover”, to those in that time, like his own father and uncles, whose hard lives and hard work also spelt a prematurely early death.'

For 18 years, Irish and Irish American queers have been challenging the narrow definition of Irishness set forth by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a conservative, Catholic, all-male organization that runs many St. Patrick's Day Parades across the country. As a right wing organization, the AOH prohibits all LGBT people and anyone that is pro-choice from OPENLY taking part in their events.

And from a short report on Indymedia:

'While our fight began in New York’s Irish and church institutions, we have learned that the City, the NYPD and the courts are all willing to trample the delicate, diverse fabric of the Irish community. So our struggle is not just with the parade organizers, but with the NYPD, the FDNY and other public servants who use the parade to express sentiments of hate and superiority that are disallowed anywhere else. And we struggle against messages of religious and military war-mongering in support of America’s conquests.

After 9/11, police and firefighters became the focus of the parade – celebrated and cheered even as they screamed “die, faggots!” at Irish LGBT people on the sidelines. While Irish immigrants of conscience were working to make links with Arab and Muslim immigrants who were coming under attack citywide, our parade was filled with US military contingents – bringing guns to our streets, hyping the war.

This year, the parade is filled with politics too. While we stand here – watching tens of thousands of NYPD officers march in a parade with an explicit message of hate – African-American communities and other New Yorkers are gathering in Times Square to hold the NYPD to account for the murder of Sean Bell. Like us, they are standing up to fight the NYPD’s wilful discrimination, its indifference to communities, its strong-arming of our streets, and its failure to take responsibility for creating a culture of violence. Meanwhile, back at the St. Patrick’s parade, our elected officials are falling over themselves to insist on firefighters' “rightful place” near the head of this bigoted display.'

Irish Queers is an organisation that grew out of the Irish Lesbian & Gay Organisation in New York in the late 1990s. More on the 'for journalists' section here.)

The exhibition will also go on tour. Full details are:
Dublin Civic Offices, Dublin: 30 March - 9 April
Siamsa Tire, Tralee, Co. Kerry:  20 April – 2 May
Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Co Mayo:  2 – 13 June
Galway City Museum, Galway, Co Galway:  22 June – 4 July
The Market House Gallery, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath:  15 July – 1 August
 

Racial discrimination is harmful to individuals and is also harmful to the development of society. Social exclusion and racial conflict lead to disharmony and parallel societies. We are all responsible for guarding against a repeat of the horrors rooted in racism – from slavery to the Holocaust, from apartheid to ethnic cleansing.

No country or region is entirely free of racism and countries around the world are working together to fight against this social ill. My Office is currently actively engaged in the preparations for a United Nations Conference against Racism which will be held in Geneva in late April 2009.

The Conference will look at the concrete actions that have been taken since the World Conference on Racism which was held in Durban in 2001 and will also review what remains to be done to fight racism globally and regionally.

The recent St Patrick’s Day celebrations reminded us of all those Irish emigrants who have made their home in numerous different countries around the world.  I believe that this is an opportune time to reflect on the immigrants that have come to Ireland to work, to study, to make their home among Irish communities around the country.

According to the latest official statistics, in the last quarter of 2008, there were an estimated 476,100 non-Irish nationals aged 15 years and over in the State.

Ireland has welcomed these immigrants and it is encouraging to see that research  by  way  of  public  opinion  polls  both nationally and internationally, show that Irish people are adapting well to the increased diversity in the country and have a high level of day to day contact with our newcomer population and a relatively low incidence of racially
motivated attacks.

However, one racially motivated attack is one too many and we must continue our efforts to stamp out any discrimination experienced by migrants in our country.

Ireland has a robust equality infrastructure in place which consists of legal prohibitions on discrimination on nine specified grounds – one of which is race.  Complaint mechanisms are in place for persons who suffer discrimination and two specialised bodies - the Equality Authority and the Equality Tribunal - were established on a statutory basis in 1999.

In 2008, over 1,000 people brought claims to the Equality Tribunal, of which some 85% involved alleged discrimination at work. Almost half of the work related cases were brought on the grounds of race indicating a greater awareness on the part of migrants of equality rights and the mechanisms in place to deal with complaints of discrimination.

We must go beyond simply raising awareness and reinforce the importance of changing behaviours, policies and practices within organisations. In celebrating March 21, I would urge organisations to adopt, as a priority, a whole organisation approach to managing diversity.

My Office is investing in schemes to ensure that the type of social tensions between immigrants and local population that some other European countries have experienced will not emerge in Ireland.

This is especially important now during a time of economic downturn when such tensions have a tendency to surface. Recent job losses have affected both the host and the immigrant communities and, like many other countries, we are facing a difficult economic climate ahead.

More than ever before, we will need to work closely together and adopt innovative and strategic approaches.

In order for integration to be truly effective, there must be a ground-up approach which takes place at a local level. Integration policies and practices must be pursued at a local level, in the home, in the workplaces
and schools.

Towards that end, my Office is encouraging local authorities and community organisations to become more involved in the integration process. My policies and funding priorities are based around mobilising migrants to participate in cultural and sporting aspects of Irish society.

I  am  therefore  providing  funding to local authorities, sporting organisations and faith based bodies around the country in order to
facilitate integration at a local level and I approved funding in the order of €1.4m in 2008 in this regard.

In summary, I urge everyone to mark this International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination by rededicating ourselves to the equality of human beings and to continue to work together towards the development of a cohesive and integrated Ireland.

Wikipedia's account of the Sharpeville massacre is here, and an original report from Time magazine is here. South Africa's impressive Apartheid Museum is here.  

‘Border Country’ offers insight into the experiences of immigration detainees, particularly through the use of the voice as an emotional force acting as a counterpoint to the formal images of the institutions.’ (Melanie Friend's work has been covered here before. For convenience, I have copied excerpts from that previous report, from November 12 last, below.)

The conversation is in the series ‘Negotiated Identities, Histories and Public Cultures’, which explores questions of participatory media, public memory, cultural identity, heritage and difference. (Download the brochure here.)

‘The presentations unpack the ways in which constructions of place, space and cultural heritage are shaped by both individual and collective memories that are multilayered and contested; how cross-cultural translation is underpinned by asymmetrical relations of power; how public spaces mobilise the potential for both communal empowerment, simultaneous with technologies of control and regulation; and the role that the cultural and creative industries play in conserving or re-imagining past, present and future understandings of cultural identity and belonging.’

The Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice offers 'a distinctive interdisciplinary postgraduate and research environment situated at the interface between cultural studies and social documentary practice, emphasising the innovative use of lens and screen-based practice (film, photography and multimedia), allied to ethnographic methods in social research'. This series is curated by Rashmi Sawhney of the CTMP.

More on 'Border Countries':

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.’

As they record, ‘to date, we have received 73 cameras — 38 from migrants and 35 from Minutemen — with nearly 2,000 pictures in total. The pictures show the human face of immigration, and they challenge us to question our stereotypes and to see through new and personal lenses.'

There is a series of short videos on the project's website, illustrating the project.

They explain the project as follows: 'To recruit migrant photographers, we visited migrant shelters and other humanitarian organizations on the Mexican side of the border. In the busiest areas, these shelters housed dozens of migrants every night, providing them dinner, a place to sleep, and sometimes clothes and medicine for the journey. We met the migrants in groups and told them about the project. Since many had never used cameras before, we also became impromptu photography teachers—pointing out the flash and film wheel and teaching them how to aim through the viewfinder. In addition, we showed them what U.S. mailboxes looked like so they would know how to return the cameras to us. Most migrants seemed eager to participate. Many expressed a profound desire to show American citizens what they had to endure to arrive in the United States.

We distributed cameras to Minutemen volunteers at observation sites in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California. During observations, volunteers camp out from sunset to sunrise, silently staring into the pitch-black darkness of the desert. When they spot migrants and smugglers, they avoid direct confrontation and instead call the Border Patrol. Our time with the Minutemen gave us a view of the so-called “vigilantes” that was much more nuanced than the caricatures painted by the media. We realized that volunteers are by and large concerned Americans, trying to do their part to make the United States a safer place and to protect American jobs. Many are retired veterans or have backgrounds in law enforcement. They have continued their lives of public service by volunteering to do what they believe the U.S. government should be doing—regaining control of the U.S. border with Mexico.

Migrants and Minutemen have very different backgrounds, yet they share one profound belief: both sides would agree that they are documenting a situation that should not be happening. U.S. border policy is broken and needs to be fixed.’

The project is organised by the Center for Digital Story Telling in the US and the Museu da Pessoa (Museum of the Person) in Brazil. The Museu da Pessoa, ‘Latin America’s largest oral-history center’, was recently the subject of a feature in a Wall Street Journal. Read about it, and view online exhibits from the museum, here.

This excerpt gives a useful overview of the development of the museum and of the medium of oral history.
‘"Brazil is an oral culture, partly because of our African and indigenous roots," Ms. Worcman [the director of the museum] says. "You meet people who might not have had much formal education, but they have a natural gift for telling a story."
Oral history gained traction during the Great Depression, when the Roosevelt administration's Federal Writers Project collected stories of people like a Vermont stonecutter and a Florida swamp-dweller. Today, places like the Museum of the Person are helping to reinvigorate the genre with the aid of digital technology.’

Incidentally, FOMACS was recently recognised on the website of the International Day for Sharing Life Stories, here.

We'll continue this theme of oral history in further reports.

More generally, the Digital Storytelling project focuses on the making and telling of stories by migrants, asylum seekers and refugees in Ireland. ‘Through a collaborative and interactive process of creating a digital story, utilizing audiovisual media, participants individually and collectively reflect on their experiences of migration, engage in dialogue with others about stories that are often left untold, and develop a new and critical understanding of these life stories… Digital stories can be used as a means to communicate with family members across distances; analyse social issues; develop educational outreach; advocate for policy changes; build social networks and artistically express oneself in a way that underscores the vibrant and heterogeneous ways of living migration.’ The project is inspired by the work of the Center for Digital Storytelling, at Berkeley, California.

Ismail Farouk is an artist and urban geographer in Johannesburg who’s trying to change that. His trolleyworks.org project is a multi-disciplinary art project with a hard social purpose – improving the lot of trolley-pushers in Jozi. Frouk’s own website is here, and his elegantly simple trolleyworks site is here. There’s video of a trolley pushers’ protest here.

He and his team have designed a prototype of a cheap, more manouverable trolley – there is a video on the site – and are hoping to roll it out in what is an intriguing fusion of art, science and social purpose.

From the Programme's website: 'Migration and displacement affect societies around the world. Nowhere are their impacts more evident than in Africa, where movements of people as a result of war, poverty, and persecution are central to the region’s economics and politics. While migration is transforming Africa, the continent lacks the capacity to understand and manage these movements. The Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand is designed to address this need.'

The toolkit, available here, consists of a series of short films, a teacher’s manual, a Trafficking & Smuggling Exercise, a toolkit evaluation form. Each of the films tells the story of an individual migrant, and they are strikingly shot and very personal. Réan is an Iranian refugee, Adelina is a Kosovar refugee, Doré is a young migrant, Tino is a ‘post WWII migrant worker’ and Alfredo and Veronica are ‘highly-skilled migrant workers’.

At the launch, Conor Lenihan said: “We must always remember that migrants and asylum seekers are people just like us, who have families and friends, concerns and worries, and hopes and aspirations of their own. It is important that young people are reminded of the dangers of not embracing and valuing diversity, inclusiveness and difference. Ireland must be mindful of history to ensure that racism, intolerance and bigotry are eradicated. Tragic events such as the Holocaust must not be allowed to occur again. It is vital that we all learn and constantly reinforce the fact that everybody has human rights - such rights are not dependent on race, nationality or religion.”

The Minister’s press release noted that the number of applications for asylum in Ireland has fallen from a high of 11,598 in 2002 to 3,866 in 2008, and that 524 asylum applications had been received in the first two months of 2009, a 16% decrease on the equivalent figure for the first two months of 2008.

The toolkit is being launched across Europe and is a joint venture of the International Organisation for Migration and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR.

FOMACS is collaborating with the Center, and their director, Joe Lambert, visited FOMACS last October to give a workshop (see here for more) during which he introduced the work of the Silence Speaks Project, an international digital storytelling initiative that provides survivors and witnesses of violence and other forms of trauma with a safe, supportive environment in which to tell their stories through a participatory media production process. Media trainers from the Center will return to FOMACS in May 2009 to run a train-the-trainer, one-week workshop.

The Center defines their remit as follows: ‘We assist youth and adults around the world in using media tools to share, record, and value stories from their lives, in ways that promote artistic expression, health and well being, and justice. While the term "digital storytelling" has been used to describe a wide variety of new media practices, what best describes our approach is its emphasis on first-person narrative, meaningful workshop processes, and participatory production methods.’

Questions of migration, identity and home occur frequently in people’s stories, as in this story, ‘Home… in past tense’, by Bix Gabriel, from Hyderabad, India. Gabriel writes, ‘‘Home… in past tense’ is ultimately for me. It reminds me that the city I left and have always loved can never be the same, when I return there. It will always be something outside of me and part of me... present and past.’

The Center has been promoting Digital Storytelling internationally since 1994, as this map shows.

This breaks down as follows: around half (14) of the stations aimed at minority ethnic communities are aimed at one or more communities with a south Asian heritage. Other services are aimed at Afro-Caribbean communities (6), African communities (2), have a strong Irish focus (2), target the Jewish community (1) or minority ethnic communities generally (2).

An intriguing statistic: stations serving minority ethnic communities received 34% of their income from advertising, whilst stations serving general audiences in urban areas took on average only 11% of their income from advertising.
On average, these stations had 77 volunteers, volunteering for an average of three hours per week. The stations averaged 89 hours of output per week, with 35% of that speech.

The report is the annual report on community radio by Ofcom, the federal communications regulation agency in England. You can download it here.

Peter Davies, Ofcom's director of radio policy, said community radio was a "real success story". "It delivers rich and varied content to listeners and provides additional benefits through community involvement and training. In just over three years, 130 stations have sprung up across the length and breadth of the UK ... We are delighted that interest from those wishing to run such stations for their own communities remains high."

There’s a story on the report, and the sector, from the Guardian, here. There's a list of all minority ethnic stations in the annex to the report.

There is an excellent general briefing on migration from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and to Europe on the Migration Information Source, here.

From that article: 'According to different estimates, between 65,000 and 120,000 sub-Saharan Africans enter the Maghreb (Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya) yearly, of which 70 to 80 percent are believed to migrate through Libya and 20 to 30 percent through Algeria and Morocco. Several tens of thousands (not hundreds of thousands, as media coverage might suggest) of sub-Saharan Africans try to cross the Mediterranean each year.

'Although commonly portrayed as "destitute" or "desperate," migrants are often relatively well educated and from moderate socio-economic backgrounds. They move because of a general lack of opportunities, fear of persecution and violence, or a combination of both.'

The BBC had this interview with an unnamed man from Eritrea who had successfully made a similar journey previously.

'There are problems in Europe, but there is a bit of freedom. I can go normally in the street,' he said. 'In Africa, I cannot go from country to country. If I want to go from city to city, I need a permit. Here in Europe, I can go anywhere I like. Here I am free.'

There is a series of photos of the situation on the Italian island of Lampedusa here.

The International Organisation of Migration's press briefings on the issue are here.

There is a documentary from Italian television (in French and English with Italian subtitles) here.

The leading source of activist information on this subject is Fortress Europe. There is a superb recent account of an investigation into conditions for migrants in detention in Libya here. Fortress Europe's 2007 report on Libya can be downloaded here.

Migreurop has a good briefing on the relationship between Libya and the EU with relation to the management of migration here.

Lastly, I'll be presenting a short piece on the subject on RTE Radio One's World Report at some time between eight and nine am on Saturday. It'll be archived online subsequently.

'Prospect' brings the viewer on a metaphoric journey across the turbulent seas off the coast of Malta. The vantage point of the camera places the viewer in the position of sub-Saharan migrants. The accompanying soundtrack and previously unseen footage records first-hand accounts of perilous journeys from Sudan and Somalia to Europe, journeys that can take over three years.

In 'Progress ll', a video work made in collaboration with Susanne Bosch, the camera moves continually around a dinner table, at which a group of recent migrants to Ireland are telling stories. The constant movement creates a spatio-temporal frame referencing the transient position of the participants as guests in the host country. The individual dialogues explore the in-between space and transcultural connections between ‘home’ and the host country.

Migration Matters previously covered Haughey's work - see the report, 'Artist intervention at Dublin City Council', on 04/12/08, in the December archive. As noted then, Anthony Haughey is an artist and Lecturer in Photography in the School of Media, DIT (which is FOMACS's host institution). There's a detailed biog of the artist here. Further information on Haughey, from the press release: He has exhibited widely in Europe and the US and his work is in public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Council, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and many private collections. His forthcoming exhibitions include the Prehistory of the Crisis ll at Project Arts Centre and Belfast Exposed Gallery and his installation Class of 73 at Les Rencontres d’Arles 09.

The Tailor of Inverness is a story of journeys, of how a boy who grew up on a farm in Galicia (Eastern Poland, now Western Ukraine) came to be a tailor in Inverness. His life spanned most of the 20th century. His story is not straightforward. He was taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939 and forced to work east of the Urals, then freed in an amnesty after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He then joined the thousands of Poles who travelled to Tehran, then Egypt, to be integrated into the British Army, fighting in North Africa and Italy. He was then resettled in Britain in 1948, joining his brother in Glasgow. This is the story he told.

But there is another story, and perhaps a third and fourth one, for in order to survive, he had to adopt different identities. Like all immigrants, the tailor had to adapt and he did that very successfully, integrating himself into the fabric of Highland life. And fabric was perhaps the most important medium through which he achieved this. He made a variety of clothes for thousands of people, including himself, constructing the outward trappings which play a part in defining who we are. Fabric. Fabrication.

Crossing the borders from Poland to Russia to Iran to Egypt to Italy to Germany to Scotland, the fable reflects on the Second World War but is personal, intimate and rooted in two cultures: Galicia and the Scottish Highlands. The play uses the central metaphor of the tailor and his fabric. Layers of ghostly clothes are projected on to with a series of still and moving images from the tailor's past and present-day Ukraine. The performance combines storytelling, songs, poetry and physicality with a rich soundscape of live fiddle music and effects.

The play won a Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year. There are reviews here and here.

They explain: 'The outcome of this project aims to challenge Nigerian stereotypes in Dublin. By doing so, we hope to create portraits which inverse the stereotypical view of a minority group in the city centre. In all the national conversations about immigration in Dublin, it is easy to forget the individual person living in this reality. The project's aim is to go beyond this generalisation and reflect the individual personalities of this Nigerian group.

'The specific work we are doing with them entailed workshops, where we got to know the group, spending time with them, finding out what it is that they do. We've been talking about representation and also object representation, we were hoping to incorporate either photography, written word and/or audio in the final piece for the exhibition. One of the things which struck us throughout our time of getting to know them, was how proud they are of their culture and what they do, so we really want to keep a traditional aspect to the work, but by challenging this stereotype we want to juxtapose the traditional aspect with more personal stories of perhaps their life here in Dublin.'

The performance art piece that results will be on view as part of the exhibition 'From Context to Exhibition' in the Lab, on Foley St in Dublin, from 23rd April for a week.

'Today's news is not the first time the conventional wisdom regarding the prospects of immigration reform has been turned on its head. Before the 2008 elections, the inside-the-Beltway belief was that Latinos would not play a critical role during the election and that immigration was not a mobilizing issue. This myth was shattered when Latinos and other immigrants turned out in record numbers, voted to punish Republicans for their hostility and opposition to immigration reform, and turned at least four states from red to blue.

'Since the election, we have asserted that President Obama would keep his campaign promise to tackle immigration reform during his first year in office. But critics and skeptics have argued that addressing immigration reform later this year would be impossible because of the down economy. Again, this conventional wisdom misses the mark - not to mention the economic benefits of reform for the average American.

'We all know the public voted for change. Two-thirds of voters approve of the aggressive approach being taken by the Obama White House to the myriad of reform challenges facing the country. In addition, the majority of Americans agree that earned citizenship, combined with smart policies that significantly reduce illegal immigration, is the American way to solve this complex challenge. They understand that our immigration system is broken, and overwhelmingly support practical efforts to fix it. 

'Moreover, the version of immigration reform that is likely to be debated this year will focus primarily on cracking down on bad actor employers who violate immigration, labor, and tax laws, combined with the legalization of workers and families already contributing and living here in the United States. This approach will lift wages for American and immigrant workers alike, enhance tax fairness and boost revenues, and create a level playing field for honest employers. This approach is about rebuilding America together.

'President Obama is rising to the occasion and demonstrating leadership on this issue that vexes the American public. It will be up to Congress to follow his lead and make it happen. We stand ready to work with all of our elected leaders to enact this long overdue reform this year. The time is most certainly now.'

This information comes from the database on irregular migration, an impressive new online resource providing detailed figures for irregular migration across Europe (though there are no figures for Ireland as yet). The Database website states: 'Irregular migration is a top priority in the European Union. Due to security and financial concerns, an increasing amount of resources are devoted to preventing people from entering without authorization, and to enforcing the return of Non-EU citizens who are not (or no longer) authorized to stay. At the same time, NGOs point to serious humanitarian side effects of this restrictive policy approach. Despite the political relevance of the phenomenon, assessments of the size of the irregular migrant population are often vague and of unclear origin. This website aims at increasing transparency in this sensitive field.'

The Database is part of the EU-funded Clandestino project, 'Undocumented Migration: Counting the Uncountable. Data and Trends Across Europe'. The project aims to bring together NGOs, local authorities, policy makers, researchers, journalists and other professionals to compare approaches on similar issues and exchange opinions on possible policy alternatives concerning some Northern European countries that share common features as regards irregular migration.

See below for more on Anthony Haughey ('Further media on Irish artist documenting migration', 10/04/2009 and 'Video response to 'Fortress Europe'', 08/04/09 and 'Artist intervention at Dublin City Council', on 04/12/08, in the December archive).

This information comes from the Create collaborative arts news digest, published by Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts. The collaborative arts digest provides a summary of collaborative arts projects that have been taking place nationwide over the last number of years and previews upcoming projects. It aims to act as a source of information, dissemination and discussion about collaborative art practice.

'New Guests of the Irish Nation' by Bryan Fanning, Co-Director of the Migration and Citizenship Research Initiative and author on migration and racism in Ireland.

'Migrants in local politics - Experiences in the US and Ireland', by Cormac O’Donnell of Dublin City Council. Cormac O'Donnell is the Strategic Policy Manager at Dublin City Council’s Integration Office. He leads the Migrant Voters campaign in Dublin.

'Polish Voices – Vote in the Local Elections campaign' by Emilia Marchelewska of Forum Polonia. 'Polish Voices...' is an information campaign aimed at encouraging Poles to register and vote in the local elections.

'20th Anniversary of the Collapse of Communism in Poland and Eastern Europe' by Jacqueline Hayden of the Political Science Dept at Trinity College Dublin. As a young journalist at the beginning of her career, Jacqueline Hayden went to Poland in 1980, where she met the underground opposition activists, KOR-u, labelled ‘dissidents’ at the time. She was also introduced to Lech Wałęsa when he still worked as an ordinary electrician in the Gdańsk shipyards.

The roundtable is at Polish House, 20, Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2. Contact Info@forumpolonia.org for more.

Some background from Forum Polonia:

Various sources estimate that the number of Poles working and living in Ireland exceeds 150,000, making it the second largest minority after the UK community. Many Polish people will remain in Ireland for the next few years, and some of them have already decided to live permanently in their new home. The Polish community is a vibrant part of Irish society and has a huge input into the development of the country. Poles work, they pay taxes, they set up businesses, and they create jobs.

This year the Polish community will have the opportunity to participate in local elections. They have the chance to vote, and even more importantly to stand for election, which many of them have already decided to do.

The aim of our conference is to understand what the benefits of being active in local elections are for migrant communities, particularly for the Polish community. We would like to introduce to the wider community people who have decided to stand as candidates at local level, as well as Polish activists within political parties. By doing this we would like to demonstrate to the public that the Polish community understands its role in Irish life, and that it would like to participate more actively and take its share of responsibility for the future of its new homeland.
Our hope is that on April 26th, we will host representatives, candidates and activists from different parties, Polish organizations, as well as people actively involved in the Polish community in Ireland.

Forum Polonia is a cooperative platform that brings together representatives of various Polish community organisations, the media, and individuals involved in projects relating to the Polish minority and its links to Irish society as a whole. The Forum operates through information exchanges, mutual supports, social integration, and promoting and developing the interests of the Polish community in the Republic of Ireland.

‘Film-making has made our family into nomads and refugees… My father, in order to make films, lives abroad and moves from one place to another.’

In 2001, when Hana made The Joy of Madness, two kidnap attempts were made on her in Kabul. And she is always on her guard in Iran: ‘Whenever I leave home, I don't know what will happen to me. Incidents are quite common. I might be arrested by a policeman because my scarf is not quite right. Or, if I walk with my brother, they might come and ask who we are. There might be a knock at the door and I might be arrested - because of my thoughts and the films I have made.’

Hana was interviewed on the occasion of the release of her film about Afghanistan, ‘Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame’, set against the background of the Taliban’s destruction of the giant statues of Buddha.

‘Many people think that if there are statues of Buddha, this represents peace… There was the contrast between what they represented and what was going on in daily life. I wanted to say that the level of atrocity could make even a statue, which has no feeling or humanity, fall apart from the shame of it.’

‘When I talked to the people, they all complained that everybody throughout the world was very worried about the destruction of a statue - but not so concerned with thousands of people being killed."

There is a Q&A with Hana Makhmalbaf here, and a trailer for the film here. There is a family 'film house' website here, with extensive interviews, stills, etc, from the whole family's filmography.

The stories ran in the East Valley Tribune, and won reporters Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin a Pulitzer for local reporting. They're published online here, and are accompanied by an impressive array of interactive multimedia items.

There is a rather grim twist to this story, from a media perspective. Reporter Ryan Gabrielson (pictured) was laid off in recent months due to financial difficulties at the Tribune. The Tribune itself is clearly struggling: it went from being a daily paid-subscription newspaper to a free-circulation tabloid, published four days per week. More recently, it announced it will cease its Saturday edition, publishing three days each week, and also will resume paid circulation.

Meanwhile, Gabrielson has gone on to set up a new online paper, The Arizona Guardian, focussing on the state legislature, with other reporters laid off. Going against the trend, this is a subscription news site.

On a lighter note, Arpaio was a guest of US comic Steve Colbert, who has a faux-right wing talk show, on Monday.   

The editor of the Tribune has an article on the background to their investigation on their website. Here are some extensive excerpts:

'Six months ago, the Tribune began an investigative project to answer three basic questions about Arpaio’s illegal immigration enforcement effort: How does it work? What is it costing the taxpayers? And what is the effect on other aspects of his agency — and public safety in general — if his focus has become so heavily on illegal immigration?

'This five-part series marks the first time anyone has examined Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office operations in such depth. Sheriff’s officials were uncharacteristically responsive to public records requests, saying, at first, they were happy to show off the enforcement effort. Arpaio and his top deputies made enforcement files, budget numbers and numerous other records available to the Tribune. That hasn’t always been the case with the agency, and one story in this series discusses some ways the agency tried to block county auditors and the reporters.

'Moreover, several top-ranking officers candidly discussed their policies and their concerns about the toll that is being taken on their operations as the cash-strapped agency tries to serve an area bigger than New Jersey and take on illegal immigration enforcement, too.

'Tribune writers Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin began by reviewing MCSO case files from 2006, when Arpaio’s operation began, through 2007. Using thousands of pages of unredacted records provided by the sheriff’s office, they built a database of criminal immigration arrests that includes in-depth information on the immigrants and well as the enforcement effort. The database is unique; not even the sheriff’s office has compiled such a systematic examination of the human smuggling enforcement operation.

'Using other records obtained from MCSO, the state, the county, the federal government and cities that MCSO contracts with, the reporters were able to explore staffing levels and personnel assignments, budget and payroll information, response times, arrest rates and the status of MCSO operations throughout the county. They examined interagency e-mails and other correspondence, state and federal grant documents and the rules governing the so-called 287(g) authority that Immigration and Customs Enforcement extends to local agencies that agree to follow strict guidelines prohibiting racial profiling, among other things.

'Beyond the facts and figures in public records, human sources were also vital to this project. Gabrielson and Giblin conducted nearly 100 interviews with deputies, federal agents, lawmakers, county and town officials, crime victims, local police chiefs and immigration experts. A number of people spoke about their concerns that law enforcement services in their communities have fallen off since the illegal immigration effort began.

'The sheriff’s office also allowed the reporters and a photographer to ride along with immigration patrols near Wickenburg and with deputies on an urban “immigration sweep” in Phoenix.

'The searchable database of criminal immigration cases is available online at eastvalleytribune.com/page/reasonable_doubt. We’ve also posted many of the county, state and federal documents used in this series as well as interactive graphics and maps and several videos, including Joe Arpaio talking at length about his immigration operations.'

Over the past year and a half, Glenn Jordan and Satwinder Singh have been travelling across Ireland, photographing and documenting the life stories of members of the Sikh community. This research project represents the first systematic exploration of the Sikh presence on the island of Ireland – providing both a profile of the present and a social and cultural history of Sikh immigration. More generally, it is a portrayal of the lived experience and narratives of people who are often perceived as ‘Other’ in mainstream Euro-American society – especially since 9/11.

The key themes addressed in the project involve issues of culture, experience and identity. ‘Being a Sikh’ is not a homogeneous experience: thus the study accounts for the various symbolic manifestations and sub-sects of Sikhism, highlighting generational and gender-based differences of experience among the Sikh community in Ireland.

Glenn Jordan is Reader in Cultural Studies, Cardiff Centre for Creative and Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan, and Director of the Butetown History and Arts Centre in Cardiff, a community-based archive, gallery and educational space. He is an experienced ethnographer with a longstanding background of documentary photographic work with immigrant communities. He has published widely on race, identity, visual culture and immigrants and minorities in Wales.

Glen Jordan has been an active partner with FOMACS since its inception. Some of his previous projects are here and here. There is a selection of his Sikh portraits here.

Satwinder Singh is an active member in the Irish Sikh Council and the Gurdwara in Dublin. He is an MPhil student in the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice, DIT. His research engages with the Dublin Gurdwara as a political, social, communal and spiritual site.

This event forms part of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice public lecture series: ‘Negotiated Identities, Histories and Public Cultures’.

The lecture is at 6pm at the Alliance, 1 Kildare Street, Dublin 2. Please RSVP to Maeve Burke at FOMACS: maeve.burke.fomacs@dit.ie.

I was interested in revolutions, " says Glen Jordan, with a chuckle. "The revolution was happening in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, so that was where I wanted to go."

Instead, he went to Cardiff, Wales.

That's a long story. He tells it.

There is a radicalised youth in California, his father descended from East Texan slaves, his mother descended from Cherokee Indians.

Aged nine, he starts a lone protest against the daily pledge of allegiance. In high school, he leads a school boycott that succeeds in getting black history and literature on the syllabus. There is a liberal arts degree, black power activism, anti-Vietnam war activism, and a mentoring with a leading black anthropologist. Then there is illness, nearly causing him to drop out of his studies. So he doesn't get to go to Angola, despite his Portuguese classes.

He goes to Cardiff, to do research on the Butetown docklands community, multiethnic long before anyone had conceived of the term.

He's an anthropologist. They go places, ask questions, and then go home and write about them. If they're good, they get jobs in nice places like Harvard and Princeton. But Jordan doesn't go home. And he doesn't really write about the people. "Mostly I facilitate them writing about themselves."

He helps set up the Butetown History and Arts Centre (www. bhac. org), and settles down to a life mixing academia with community activism. He turns down a job in Princeton. "I wouldn't want to work at any place where I couldn't do exhibitions, where I couldn't build a community archive." Then he gets into photography. He shoots big, beautiful portraits and hangs them at eye level in public spaces "so you as a viewer encounter it directly. . . You walk among the images."

You can walk amongst his images at the moment, on the ground floor of the Civic Offices on Wood Quay in Dublin.

These are some of a series of portraits of mothers and daughters, Asians, Africans, Polish, Greeks, Iranians, Irishf but Welsh also.

At the opening of an exhibition in Dublin, Jordan was approached by some Irish Sikhs. "I know nothing about Sikhs, " he says, but that didn't bother them. His next project is photographing them. "I'm interested in people who wear Sikh turbans and Nike jumpers. How they negotiate culture in complex ways."

Jordan calls it "humanist photography. Because we're all human beings, we're more alike than we're different. I'm interested in helping to enable people, " says the white-bearded, gravely voiced old-timer. Princeton doesn't know what they're missing.

On Easter Monday, there were a series of festival events at the Park, with a particularly lively market day in a fully recreated street from the time, complete with bars, drunks, food stalls, policeman, printer's shop, etc. It was both illuminating and entertaining.

The Park is also home to the Centre for Migration Studies, affiliated with Queen's University Belfast. There is an ongoing exhibition on two centuries of Irish emigration, and various festival-type events upcoming.

It took us two hours to drive from Dublin (going north on the M1 all the way to Newry, then west via Armagh).

By coincidence, Fintan O'Toole cited this ('superb', he said) in a review last Saturday of 'The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001', by Liam Harte.

Some excerpts:

'The figures given by Brian Lambkin and Patrick Fitzgerald in their recent and superb overview, Migration in Irish History, 1607-2007 suggest that over three million Irish-born people have emigrated to Britain since 1600. Over the course of the 20th century alone, 1.6 million Irish left for Britain, more than twice as many as went to North America... Yet, compared to the Irish in America, the Irish in Britain have an oddly low profile.

'This is a rare book, a real act of discovery that overturns inherited perceptions and opens up a rich terrain of Irish experience... Harte’s selection from 63 narratives published between 1725 and 1993 amounts, as he acknowledges in his introduction, to a corpus of writing that is collectively “fragmentary, eclectic, amorphous, uneven and obscure”. Yet if that sounds like an apology, it is in fact a brave declaration of intent. Harte does include the better-known autobiographies, like the great Irish-language writings of Micí Mac Gabhann (The Hard Road to the Klondike) and Donall MacAmhlaigh (The Diary of an Exile), and the much-read accounts of WB Yeats, Patrick MacGill, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Casey, Louis MacNeice and John B Keane. But the real excitement of the book is its archaeological uncovering of the fragmentary and the obscure, of names and stories that, if they were ever remembered, have long been forgotten.

'There are also significant gaps. Harte could not find any surviving narratives by Irish Protestant labourers in 19th-century Scotland, and the women who worked so prominently as nurses and domestic servants are largely absent from the record. (Though Harte did find one fascinating account by a Tyrone-born woman, Mary Loughran, who wrote under the pseudonym Maureen Hamish.)

'Yet these absences draw attention to the remarkable range of Harte’s research. His sources include St Crispin: A Magazine for the Leather Trades , whose issue for May 1869 yields the autobiography of a London-Irish shoemaker, John O’Neill. The story of the tailor JE is drawn from an 1857 edition of the Glasgow didactic magazine The Commonwealth . One grippingly unsentimental account of post-famine emigration, by Owen Peter Mangan from Co Cavan, is previously unpublished, and comes from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

'As any Irish emigrant knows, the carefully maintained religious and social distinctions of the Irish mean little in Britain, and it is fascinating to discover that this has been so since the 18th century. Irish otherness was often inescapable, even for émigré Protestants. Laetitia Pilkington, who grew up privileged and Protestant in early 18th-century Dublin, is assailed by the London toughs who have come to haul her off to debtors’ prison as “you Irish Papist bitch”. The mid-19th century tailor JE, a sober-minded Antrim man, finds himself among his colleagues in the north of England, “the butt of their ridicule and scorn”. The hand-loom weaver William Hammond, another sober Ulsterman, is reminded of his origins by his Glasgow co-workers: “some of the baser sort”, he writes with sublime understatement, “made me understand that it was not an advantage to have been born in Ireland”.

'... Harte undermines the whole notion of “the Irish in Britain” as a single entity and restores the complicating factors of class, gender, religion and geography. Above all, he restores in his wonderful book the individuality of each one of the millions of painful, hopeful journeys across the Irish Sea.'

This is a new concept, designed by Mermaid to mark Africa Day in Ireland and to celebrate African culture and society and the diversity of the continent. As is true of animation worldwide, animation in Africa does not only exist in the realm of children’s entertainment, but also acts as a document of local narrative and myth, political criticism and social commentary.

The work to be presented stems from a variety of African countries: Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Zimbabwe, the DRC, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, Ghana and South Africa. Animation, as such an accessible medium, is very suitable for introducing young children to Africa.

The daytime screenings will be suitable for children and offered to school groups. With funding from Irish Aid, Mermaid will be able to offer the screenings free of charge to the public.

The programme of animations for children presents a collection of works that are both entertaining and educational in their scope. The content differs greatly from European animations, presenting images that reflect the identities of African children and the environment, in which they live. The animations draw from the imagery and symbolism of the respective countries, as well as their own myths and fables. With African animation at the cusp of a new and exciting period, it deserves the attention of a wider audience.

The schedule is as follows:

10am & 11.30: Primary level screenings

2pm: Secondary level screening with introduction by Curator

8pm: Arthouse screening with introduction by Curator, Paula Callus (SOAS)

The Seanad (the second, or upper, chamber in Ireland's houses of parliament, the Oireachtas) gets paltry coverage in the Irish media, so I thought it of potential interest to report this speech at length here. The full speech is available here. The statement in reply by Fine Gael senator Eugene O'Regan, and further statements in the debate, are here.

Curran prefaced his remarks with some general comments on the subjects of immigration and integration:

'The most striking aspect of inward migration to Ireland has been the speed with which it has taken place, largely since 1 May, 2004, following the expansion of the European Union. There are currently about 550,000 non-Irish nationals living in Ireland.

'Another striking feature is the fact that the census for 2006 recorded that 29% of immigrants, about 140,000 people, came essentially from the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, most of them in the previous two years.

'Since the census was taken, more have people have arrived as evidenced by the number of PPS numbers issued by the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

'It is important to stress that these people are using rights under the EU Treaties in the same way that Irish people have used the same rights to seek employment in other EU countries.

'In the context of this debate, I think it is important to stress that there is no suggestion that those people who have come here are in any way more involved in criminality than anybody else. One way of seeking to prevent people in this category from becoming involved in anti social behaviour is to encourage them to become involved with their local communities.

'My Office has made funding available to major sporting bodies, the GAA, FAI and Basketball Ireland to assist them in promoting increased participation by non nationals in their games. My Office also made funding available to local authorities to assist them in their efforts.

An example of the way in which local authorities used this funding was to promote voter registration among migrants in order to further improve the participation of migrants in the forthcoming local and European elections.

My Office, together with the Iris O'Brien Foundation, is providing financial support for the extension of the Fáilte Isteach project, started in Summerhill, Co Meath, by Mary Nally of Third Age... I am happy to support this project, bringing together as it does older people and migrants, enabling both to learn from each other about different cultures, languages and traditions...

'I want to say very clearly that it is important that we avoid repeating the mistakes made by others in this area. In the current economic climate, there may be those tempted to scapegoat migrant workers as in some way contributing to our decline in employment. This would be wrong.

'The people who have come here to work and live have made and continue to make a valuable contribution. They pay their taxes here, many have established families here and they are enduring the same economic challenges as everybody else...

One of the areas of concern has been that of road safety. Since March, 2006, the Road Safety Authority has been running an ongoing foreign language road safety campaign. The campaign focuses on legal and road safety advice when driving in Ireland. Areas covered are licence, tax and insurance, the National Car Test, speed limits, penalties for breach of speed limits, seatbelt regulations and drink driving laws. A leaflet and poster entitled Road Safety and the Law have been produced and have been translated into 8 foreign languages- Russian, Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, French, Portuguese, Arabic and Chinese. The leaflets and posters are distributed through the minority ethnic press, ethnic shops, advice centres, ports and airports as well as An Garda Síochána and local authorities. The new Rules of the Road have so far been produced in Russian, Polish and Mandarin Chinese.

In addition, Garda road safety awareness programmes are conducted in schools, 3rd level colleges, workplaces and other facilities, with the aim of educating road users, including persons from minority ethnic backgrounds of the obligations of all road users.

Staff of the Garda Racial and Intercultural Office, established in 2000, have responsibility for coordinating, monitoring and advising on all aspects of policing in the area of ethnic and cultural diversity. The remit of the Office was recently expanded to cover other areas of diversity and it has begun a consultation process with other diverse communities such as the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and various organizations representing people with disabilities.

There are currently over 600 trained Ethnic Liaison Officers nationally. These Gardaí liaise with ethnic minority communities, the Traveller Community and inform and assure them of Garda services and protection.

The Garda Pulse system has been adapted to include a modus operandi for recording incidents of racism. All such incidents are captured on the system and are monitored by the Racial and Intercultural Office on a weekly basis.

In addition, there are regular meetings with members of ethnic minority communities as part of the Garda Síochána’s commitment under the National Action Plan against Racism.

Turning to the prisons, all foreign nationals are facilitated in contacting consular representatives and are entitled to receive a visit from their consul at any reasonable time. Cloverhill Remand Prison, which holds the highest proportion of foreign nationals in our system, translates prisoner induction/information leaflets into a number of languages – at present Arabic, Russian, Romanian, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, French and Latvian. Other institutions with a high proportion of foreign national prisoners follow a similar practice. Any special dietary requirements of prisoners are catered for in all institutions. A module on Intercultural Awareness and Racism is now part of prison officer training.

In the Courts, the Courts Service has produced a wide range of leaflets in various languages available both in hard copy and on its website. The leaflets are available in Irish, English, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian and Mandarin Chinese. These leaflets cover a range of procedures including Bail, Family Law and the Small Claims Procedure.'

Curran also spoke extensively on the issues of people smuggling and human trafficking, and on the state of current legislation in these regards.

In an introduction, Diana Denghor, director of the centre, describes their approach to oral testimony:

The Oral Testimony is a new format in community radio, adapted from a social research tool set up by Panos London. It is an inverted interview because it is guided by the interviewee and not the interviewer. It stems from the principle that to know what is really going on in a community, you have to listen patiently to the people at grassroots level, instead of asking only the leaders of that community as is usually the case. These leaders tend to hide problems in their efforts to present a nice face of their community to outside eyes and ears. The consequence is the vast majority of community members who effectively shape social trends, never get a chance to say their views, perceptions, experiences, priorities, values. Thus, a lot of projects have failed and a lot of community conflicts have remained unsolved because the attempted solutions have ignored the silent majority, or did not have the right approach in identifying the pitfalls ahead.

Because it goes deeper, the Oral Testimony is much longer and much more structured than a classic interview or traditional researchers questionnaires. In the classic interview, the questions are based on what we believe listeners want to know, or facts we want to establish for a project. In the Oral Testimony, the resource person is called the narrator. He or she is encouraged to tell things through his or her experiences, values, priorities. This is what informs behaviour more than hard facts. The idea is, for instance in cases of conflict in a community, when the adverse side hears the deep motivations of the narrator, his or her fears, aspirations, beliefs, it can foster understanding. The recorded interview can last several hours. For community radio it is adapted to the documentary format by selecting the dominant topic.

The global organisation is a partnership of eight independent institutes in different countries/regions (West Africa being one of those). Panos London is currently showcasing an online video on asylum seekers in Britain, ‘Still human, still here’. (There is a collection of the photographs involved, as stills, here.)

From their site: ‘The shocking, hidden lives of refused asylum seekers are revealed in a new film by Panos Pictures. Abbie Trayler-Smith has photographed men and women who have fled torture and persecution. They had hoped to find sanctuary in the UK but instead are enduring a new kind of torment - destitution. All of the individuals featured in the exhibition have been refused asylum and are living in extreme poverty rather than return to their home countries, in most cases out of fear of what might await them upon their return. With just a handful of possessions they move from place to place, sleeping in phone boxes, on night buses or park benches'

The video was produced for Panos London by Panos Pictures, an independent photo agency who document issues and geographical areas which are under-reported, misrepresented or ignored.

Amongst the projects of particular interest on the site of Panos Pictures are this series of photographs of the Raika, a nomadic people in Rajasthan, India, and these pictures by George Georgiou of the Balkans in the aftermath of the Kosovo war. A collection of the agency's pictures on the subject of Migrants is here.

The image used in the thumbnail here is from the 'Still human, still here' collection, and is of a snow covered phone box in Highgate, North London. '28 year old Hamid from Iran used to shelter in phone boxes in this area in the years he spent living on the streets. "When you're sleeping outside one night feels like one year because it's so cold. I never managed to sleep for more than an hour or two and when it's raining it's hard to sleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time." Hamid is one of an estimated 300,000 rejected asylum seekers living in the UK.'

The report warns many failed asylum seekers are living in a "twilight zone", with no housing or financial support, and no right to work. Many failed asylum seekers are living on less than "a dollar a day", the global yardstick for extreme poverty, it claims. Recent research by the London School of Economics estimated there are 500,000 failed asylum seekers in the UK.

Christine Majid, from the refugee charity Pafras, who commissioned the Underground Lives report, says the number of destitute asylum seekers the charity dealt with tripled in the past two years and called destitution a "deliberate" policy to force asylum seekers out of the country.

She said: "In the 21st century the fact that the government is trying to starve people out of the country, it is absolutely inhumane and it just isn't working. These people would rather starve on the street here than return to their own countries."

A series of governmental policy decisions including preventing asylum seekers from working in 2002, cutting legal aid in 2004 and an overhaul of the system in 2007 has lead to an "untenable strain" on local charities, she added.

The report found that, on average, failed asylum seekers were surviving on Ł7.65 per week, but the majority lived on less than Ł5. Two thirds had experienced torture in their countries. Following the refusal of their asylum claims, 72% have spent time sleeping outside; of these, 38% have experienced physical attacks. More than a third of the women sleeping rough had experienced sexual assault, including rape.'

There is a short overview on the interrelation of migration and development, and selection of key links here
(various sub-headings give more substantial information and references, such as on international migration flows and trends).

Connect World runs a media funding scheme to promote coverage of development issues, the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund (funded by Irish Aid). Their site showcases funded projects in their ‘standard’ funding round (covering print, radio and multimedia), and in the ‘tv seed’ round (providing seed funding for tv documentaries). Some samples:

Fiona Whitty’s pilot on the migratory connections between Ireland and Nigeria, ‘Pathways of Movement’

Patrick Butler’s project to film in a rehabilitation centre for trafficked children in Benin.

My own story from Morocco and Melilla on people trying to enter Europe from north Africa.

Louise Williams’s award-shortlisted radio documentary from Senegal on the same subject.

There is also this short video documentary on FGM and the story of Pamela Izevbekhai, shortlisted in the multimedia awards run by Connect World for media students.

Connect World also produces an excellent fortnightly e-bulletin on development stories and issues in the media. Sign up here.

The next funding round is the tv seed, deadline September 30.

Here is Inga’s story. In summary: she is 38 years old. She is Abkhazian and her husband is Georgian. There are four children in the family. Fifteen years have passed since the family went into exile; they lived in Ochamchire district in Abkhazia before the war. Inga talks about the difficulties and hardship experienced during the period of armed conflict, how hard it was even to get bread to eat and the problems of equipping a new place. She speaks of the sadness of losing her home and leaving behind her elderly parents, whom she sees very seldom…

Inga’s story was originally recorded in Russian, but is presented here in English. (I’m not clear on whether they have used an actor, or she is reading a translation of her original script.) Her story is accompanied online by a map of her journey. There are a further 28 Georgian stories here. A book comprising a selection of these stories of displaced people from Georgia can be downloaded here.

IDP Voices is a collaboration between the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and Panos London's Oral Testimony Programme. (There is more on Panos in this week's other reports.)

Last Sunday saw an article in the Sunday Times on contention between three Nigerian candidates in the Mulhuddart area of Dublin, Fine Gael’s Adeola Ogunsina, Independent Ignatius (Iggy) Okafor, and Fianna Fail’s Idowu Sulyman Olafimihan. I haven’t been able to find this online – the Sunday Times doesn’t appear to archive its Irish edition comprehensively – but if anyone comes across it, please let me know. The Sunday Tribune wrote an earlier article on the rivalry last November and Metro Eireann has covered it also.

A recent article in the Sunday Independent gave voice to some of the anxieties around immigration now that the economy has hit a crisis. Journalist John Whelan (recently made redundant) documented some of the 'urban myths' and anti-immigrant prejudice and fears that are being generated by the downturn, in an article that was generally sympathetic. He wrote:

'Signing on last week the queue was getting longer and more restless. The talk was mounting of "those foreigners ripping off the country", "who do they think they are", "getting the dole sent to their bank account and they not even in the country", "getting the children's allowance as well and the kids not even here"...

'It all brings to mind the fantastic stories that were peddled when our black brethren started to arrive in droves on the back of the boom a few years ago... My own personal favourite was the one from the taxi driver who told me that as he collected a couple of black women on Main St it started to rain as they tried to get their children's buggies into the boot. Struggling in the shower they said to hell with it, left them on the pavement outside Shaws and declared they would get two new ones from the Health Board. Curious and concerned as to the possible veracity of the story I pressed the taxi driver, a sound man known to me, who explained that it hadn't actually happened to himself but to another colleague who told him. Duirt bean liom, go nduirt bean lei. [This is an Irish expression, meaning, 'A woman said to me, that a woman had told her...']

He conlcuded: 'A far cry from all that when in 2004, Nigerian Rotimi Adebari was elected to Portlaoise Town Council and in June 2007 became the country's first ever black mayor. Rotimi and Portlaoise beat Obama and the White House to it. The story was printed and broadcast in a positive light all over the world... Rotimi recently was a prime mover in establishing a new organisation in town called SUIL - Supporting Unemployed in Laois. Interesting to see how he fares in the local elections on June 5.'

Integrating Ireland has launched a voter registration drive and a website, ivote.ie, offering key information and forms in a variety of languages.

They write: 'The website aims to provide you with information and materials to support immigrant organizations and immigrant voters around the country to have access to and share basic information and materials on registering to vote and the voting process, as well as highlighting events and activities taking place in the run up to the elections. It’s being updated every day, with more FAQs in more languages, the next being Romanian and a variety of new videos in other languages are also to be added on the weekend, in English, French, Urdu, Portuguese, Filipino and Russian.'

Tomorrow, Thursday May 14, they are holding a voter registration clinic in the Integrating Ireland offices, from 2-6 pm. There will be a community Garda present so that anyone who has not registered can come along and have their form stamped and submitted there and then.

Integrating Ireland and Dublin City Council have also produced posters in a variety of languages, which can be found here.

Some key dates and information:

Local and European elections will take place on Friday June 5th 2009

Deadline to Register to Vote is Monday 18th May 2009

The voters’ register was published on February 1st and was made available from February 15th. You can check it here.

The number of people fleeing fighting in Pakistan's Swat valley has increased steadily since May 2 to nearly 1 million as of today, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The latest figures from UNHCR: 987,140 people registered from the current influx, with only about 80,000 in camps. These people are in addition to 550,000 who have fled fighting since August 2008. UNHCR head Antonio Guterres is warning of a humanitarian disaster (more from UNHCR here).

Dawn, an English-language Pakistani media company, has photos of displaced children and vulnerable religious minorities in its media gallery.

Pakistani photojournalist Sajjad Ali Qureshi has uploaded numerous photos of a refugee camp near Mardan.

In times of crisis, the diaspora are often a source of financial support. A study of the philanthropy habits of Pakistanis in the United States showed they have a strong preference for giving directly to individuals in need.

Also, Reuters AlertNet is a useful source for reports on humanitarian crises.

‘Living in Direct Provision: 9 Stories’ was made in the context of a six-month participatory media workshop run by FOMACS, in partnership with Integrating Ireland and Refugee Information Services.

The nine storytellers participated in a collaborative process that integrated storytelling, group and individual reflection, creative writing, photography and the use of multi-media technologies, in order to make a 3-5 minute story about their own experiences as asylum seekers and refugees.

I saw these at an earlier, informal showing in FOMACS and they are very powerful.

The stories are the product of the FOMACS Digital Storytelling Project.

In order to secure a seat at the screening, please RSVP to Maeve Burke at FOMACS: T: +353 (1) 402 3006  E: maeve.burke.fomacs@dit.ie

The show is the result of a collaboration between John Scott of IMDT and the Centre for the Care of Survivors of Torture in Dublin, which provides care to asylum seekers, refugees and others who have suffered torture.

Here is an earlier article on the BBC site, which coincided with a feature on Radio 4's 'Dance Saves Lives' series (no longer archived online).

The four-day event will feature a photographic exhibition, a series of public talks by Holocaust historians Ruta Puisyte and Robert Gerwarth and survivor Tomi Reichental, and screenings of the Surviving History documentary which follows Shivaun’s journey to Vilnius as she interacts with the narrators. This documentary premieres at the Cannes Short Film Corner this month.

Shivaun Woolfson is of Jewish-Lithuanian descent. She said: ‘To hear these experiences has been so meaningful for me, as the fate of these individuals is what would have awaited my own family had they not escaped to Ireland during the Czarist pogroms in the early 1900s. It is particularly timely to present these stories as Vilnius takes on the coveted role of European Capital of Culture for 2009 against a backdrop of increased anti-Semitic activity.’
 
The exhibition is a collaboration between UK-based Living Imprint, Holocaust Education Trust of Ireland and UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, is free to the public. It will be officially opened by the Lithuanian ambassador to Ireland, H.E. Ms Izolda Bričkovskienė on Wednesday, 27 May.

The full programme is here. Pre-registration for the evening events is required and can be done online here or by calling Valerie Norton on +353 1 716 4690.

Perhaps surprisingly, Caldwell's argument gets a positive airing in two leading publications of the mainstream British left, the Observer newspaper and Prospect Magazine. Prospect publishes an excerpt in its May issue and David Goodheart (who is editor of Prospect) reviews the book in the Observer.

In Goodheart's introduction:

Caldwell 'asks some unusually direct questions: can you have the same Europe with different people? Why did mass immigration happen when so few people actually wanted it? Immigrants want a better life but how many of them want a European life? Why is minority ethnic pride a virtue and European nationalism a sickness? Is political correctness just fear masquerading as tolerance?'

And he concludes: 'As you can tell from those questions, the book is a sustained attack on the well-meaning liberalism that is still the dominant note in official immigration debates. Yet although Caldwell, a conservative American, believes that European immigration has not been a success, at least for the host societies, he is not anti-immigrant and says that he is a great supporter of the American melting pot.'

Prospect's archive of articles (and blog entries) on immigration and race is here. The Guardian's is here. Both are rich pickings...

'Shahrazad will bring new, original and challenging stories from all over the world into Europe. These stories will be created, told and disseminated by poets, journalists, novelists, editors, cartoonists, translators and essayists who are persecuted and silenced in their own homelands.

'Human rights, free speech, diversity and solidarity are core values within the project. Shahrazad will become a unique tool for integration and for understanding between insiders and outsiders within communities, countries and even continents. It will also generate a great number of literary events and projects, dialogue and debate, within the six partner cities...

'Ultimately, the Shahrazad project aims to provide Europe with new, more open and sustainable narratives about itself. By opening up to human and artistic impulses from ‘outside’, Europe can regain and revitalise some of its capital values: freedom, democracy and solidarity.'

For more, and some sample digital stories, see here.

The competition was won by Font, an Iranian indie rock band, who were once jailed for playing a gig in their native Tehran. Watch them playing their winning version of Cliff Richard's Congratulations here. Readers in the UK can review each night's programme on the BBC iPlayer, access to which is blocked in Ireland (and presumably other countries).

However, you can catch up on it by working through the Newsnight blog. Monday's blog entry, with the intro report on the contest is here. You can then follow the contest through the week. Thursday's entry has a round up of all the contestants, here.

According to the MRCI, the changes would make it almost impossible for non-EEA migrants who are made redundant to get another job, regardless of how long they have lived or worked here. Many people and their families will be forced to leave Ireland or will have no other choice but to stay and work informally. For more information on the campaign to postpone the changes, see here.

If you miss the Prime Time report, you can watch it on RTE's new online player, here (this only works in Ireland).

Migration Matters ran a series of reports on the issue of Environmental Refugees in January this year. 

Maphoso spoke to me for an article for the FOMACS print syndication project, which was published on Sunday in the Sunday Tribune. (An international version will shortly be available in the June issue of Le Monde Diplomatique.)

The Irish Times also had an article on immigrant participation in the elections this weekend. Ruadhán Mac Cormaic's article focussed on the parties' strategies for involving immigrants.

Metro Eireann has a good archive of articles on various immigrant candidates.

• The vast majority of second-level schools have newcomer students. In contrast, four in ten primary schools have no newcomers while there are a number of primary schools with quite high concentrations of newcomers.

• Newcomers are more likely to attend urban schools and those already catering for more disadvantaged student groups. This reflects the interaction between residential patterns, availability of school places and school admission policies.

• Newcomer students are seen by teachers as motivated and hard-working, placing a high value on education.

• Most newcomers do not have English as a first language. Language needs, if not addressed, are seen to hinder the academic development and social integration of newcomer students. Language needs among newcomer parents make it difficult to involve parents in their child’s education since few schools have access to translation services.

• Schools most commonly withdraw students from class for additional language support. However, newcomers spend most of their time being taught by mainstream classroom or subject teachers, few of whom have received training on teaching English as an additional language.

• Many schools have built up a team of committed and enthusiastic language support teachers. However, principals and teachers would like to see more training for teachers, guidance on best practice and access to teaching materials suitable for older students learning English.

• Two-thirds of second-level schools and half of primary schools have put formal measures in place to support the social integration of newcomer students. Relations between newcomer and Irish students are seen as broadly positive. However, there is some evidence of segregation in friendship patterns and incidences of bullying based on nationality or ethnicity.

• A positive school climate (that is, good relations among teachers, parents and students) enhances the academic and social development of newcomer students.

The report can be downloaded here.

Launching the report, integration minister John Curran noted that 'the majority of principals - and especially those from DEIS (Department of Education & Science) schools - report that academic achievement levels among newcomer students are at least as good as those among Irish students'.

He concluded by saying that newcomer students were 'a very positive addition to our schools, presenting an opportunity to enhance outcomes for all students and an opportunity for society as a whole. While there are challenges to be addressed, this report shows that with a positive school climate, it is possible to meet these challenges.'

As Ruadhan Mac Cormaic in the Irish Times reports, 'former mayor of Portlaoise Rotimi Adebari was one of just three immigrant candidates to secure local authority seats at the weekend.

(In fact, there was a fourth immigrant candidate elected: Anna Rooney, originally from Russia, took a seat on Clones Town Council for Fianna Fail. Rooney was one of those featured in the recent FOMACS print syndication articles for the Sunday Tribune and Le Monde Diplomatique. Her election was declared after the deadlines for Mondays' newspapers.)

The Irish Times continued: 'Mr Adebari was joined by Dutch former aid worker Jan Rotte, who retained his seat for the Labour Party in Lismore, Co Waterford, and Kristina Jankaitiene, a Lithuanian school teacher who took a seat for the Green Party in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan.

'Taiwo Matthew, an Independent from Nigeria, lost the seat he won in Ennis, Co Clare, in 2004.'

Various other candidates came close to seats, notably Elena Secas, from Moldova, for Labour, in Limerick East. In Mulhuddart, three rival Nigerian candidates appear to have split any immigrant or Nigerian community vote, polling 15.4% in total but each failing to get elected, as the Times reports.

The Irish Independent also reported on this issue, however that paper incorrectly reported that Katarzyna Gaborec, originally from Poland, had been elected for Fianna Fail to Mullingar Town Council. That article is here.

There's an interview with Malarek here and a profile here.

Victor Malarek is the author of “The Natashas” and “‘The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It”.  Other speakers include co-author of the ICI’s recent research report, “Globalisation, Sex Trafficking and Prostitution”, Patricia Kelleher; Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission Policy Advisor, Rebecca Dudley; IHRC Commissioner Rosemary Byrne and ICI Senior Solicitor Hilkka Becker. For further information or to book a place at the seminar, please contact ICI Anti-Trafficking Coordinator Nusha Yonkova at nusha@immigrantcouncil.ie or call 01 674 0202.

In the film, Sadiq, like so many refugees in Ireland, grapples with the fact that he must wait two years for his family’s visas to be processed, while his Grandmother has to remain in Darfur as she does not qualify under Irish law as a family member. All this while also being the star player in a football game against his team’s brutal arch rivals, the Bashers...

Online viewers can vote for their favourite shortlisted film here. There's also a short documentary on the making of 'Team Spirit' here and more on the FOMACS animation project, run by Siobhan, here.

Upstate Local’s first community-based initiative through their Louth International Theatre Project, ‘Journey from Babel’, was mounted from May 21-23, 2009, in Drogheda in the old Weavers’ Factory. This site-specific piece was written by a company of community members comprising eight nationalities who are currently living in Drogheda. ‘Journey from Babel’ was developed over a period of nine months in workshop rehearsals through the facilitation and, ultimately, direction of company founders Declan Gorman and Declan Mallon.

‘Journey from Babel’ led its audience members on a trip through time and space, addressing themes of migration from multiple perspectives. Audiences were issued a boarding pass with their programmes, and received a summary stamp as they hesitantly crept up a narrow stairway into an uncertain experience. Contemporary Ireland served as the anchor for the majority of the storylines, whether as origin point or final destination. Yet the play’s stories ranged from WWI-era Austria to the roaring 1920s in New York to 18th century Ireland. A hilarious and ribald Drogheda tea lady (Nicola Devine) shares performance space with lesbian newcomers to town from London and Quebec (Cara Brock and Shannon O’Donovan), while a French pilot (Sylain Pastor) threads his way through the crowd contemplating the philosophical reasons for flying at all, whether in the air or imagination.

The plight of a pregnant new immigrant to Ireland named Anna, who is about to give birth in the airport, is considered (Maria Copley), as a childless woman named Marguerite (Jenny Thompson) is made redundant after 30 years of work and wonders why she has never been able to go anywhere at all, finally settling for at least leaving her husband behind. Multiple generations of women writing to lovers away at war are presented through the story of a German woman named Alicia, who experiences loss and rebirth as a new immigrant to the US (Doris Genner), while the global traffic of sex workers is briefly and boldly explored through the competing perspectives of an Irish woman in London, Rose (Bianca Browne), and a Hungarian woman in Ireland, Florka (Alexandra Pap).

The whole show finally ends up on New York City’s Broadway, with the Drogheda tea lady, Alicia, and Anna sharing the stage space in hauntingly different roles before the cast appears for a candlelit vigil in honour of all those who have migrated to a new life for many different reasons.

This dizzying collection of narrative threads and intersecting geopolitical issues would tire any theatregoer, especially one who has stood for the better part of an hour and a half, winding their way through a maze of rooms. ‘Journey from Babel’ engages with a litany of push-button issues, most extensively the recent furore over pregnant immigrant women coming to give birth in Ireland, which resulted in the 2004 citizenship referendum.

At Anna’s first appearance, a scene in immigration control in which she is asked to hand over her visa is enacted over and over again without sympathy. By the time the audience is present at her delivery in the hospital, her pleas for an epidural turn into a plea for a free epidural, then social welfare, then a buggy, then designer shoes for her baby and so on. The scene ultimately dissolves into a pillow fight between the staff over whether this scene ever really happened, and whether the recession is the fault of the bankers or this woman and her baby. Meanwhile, Anna’s cries for help for her distressed baby are drowned out by the row.

When Anna reappears with her baby buggy, it is to sing ‘Pirate Jenny’, from Brecht’s ‘The Threepenny Opera’, on Broadway. She belts out the haunting song about a female worker who dreams of being rescued by pirates who will kill her unjust employers. As the actor cradles her baby and sings to the audience, “And they pile up the bodies/ And I'll say: 'That'll learn you/ That'll learn you,'” it is unclear whether the piece is revising stereotypes of aggressive and violent women of colour, or using the Brechtian context and the song’s history as a US civil rights anthem via Nina Simone.

This tension is the strongest feature of Upstate Local’s work here with ‘Journey from Babel’, and this section, as well as the stand-out performance from Nichola Devine as a well-meaning tea lady, who is continually frustrated by her straight talk being taken as racism when, “sure isn’t me daughter dating a black fellow, and he’s a lovely lad,” save the piece from pedanticism with their humour and striking theatricality.

The successes and shortcomings of ‘Journey from Babel’ dramatise anew the problems that community-based performance presents for theatre criticism. The performances here are uneven, the transitions often tedious in a small space with many audience members, and the piece frequently feels strained by its epic scope.

Yet, the staging of the piece manages to be site-specific in more than name only, utilising the unique architecture of the Weavers’ factory to not only create a world, but multiple worlds in the same rooms. And, most significantly, this piece is brave enough to push the audience literally into the same space with many issues that have received far too short a shrift in Irish performance spaces in the wake of the Celtic Tiger. It is also a piece that evolved through nine months of continuous contact between a group of community members with diverse opinions and points of origins, many of whom had never set foot on a stage before.

Upstate Local’s work with ‘Journey from Babel’ makes a strong case for more flexible models of theatre criticism in Ireland that can accommodate appreciation and support for this kind of work. ‘Journey from Babel’ ultimately demonstrates an impressive willingness to use a theatrical process to interrogate the questions most commentators agree Irish arts should be asking, as well as take risks aesthetically and theatrically.

Charlotte McIvor

Charlotte McIvor is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley where she teaches courses in acting and writing. Her dissertation explores contemporary Irish performance that engages issues of race, immigration, and cultural belonging. She recently worked with the City Fusion Project as part of the St Patrick’s Festival in Dublin. A further article by McIvor, analysing actress Ruth Negga’s performance in Neil Jordan’s 2005 film, 'Breakfast on Pluto', is here.

'Journey from Babel' ran from May 21-23, 2009, at the Old Weaver’s Factory, Drogheda, and was presented by Upstate Local: Louth International Theatre Project.


 

Eamonn Walsh, Catholic auxiliary bishop of Dublin and chairperson of the Irish Bishops Immigrant Council, launched it on Monday  at the long-running Vincentian Refugee Centre in Phibsboro, Dublin. There will be a Belfast launch on Friday at 4pm at Edgehill Methodist Theological College.

Amongst the points Eamon Walsh made were that “Any reference to people seeking asylum as irregular or, worse still, illegal migrants cannot be permitted or tolerated” and that recent changes to the work permit regime raised “major concerns”.

The full text of his speech follows.

A few days ago I noticed the “Wet Paint” sign on the door of Maynooth Church – it was in three languages – English, Irish and Polish! Just one of the signs, and not all limited to print on paper, of the new times in which we live and of the new people with whom we live. This has also found its way into Irish humour where I saw the ‘w’ of a sign on a Telecom van changed to a ‘v’: “Vorking for Telecom”.

While the composition of the Irish population was beginning to change in 1999 when the first edition of ‘What the Bible says about the Stranger’ was published, few of us could have foreseen the changes which have taken place in the past decade. Changes which have resulted in our living in a country where over 160 languages are spoken by people coming from countries as distant from us, and from one another, as Croatia is from China and Estonia from Ecuador.

But the pattern of change in the past ten years has not been along a straight line. At first it was people seeking asylum, people searching for a place of refuge, who made up the majority of newcomers to the country. In a relatively short time, their number was overtaken and far surpassed by people who came here to fill the growing jobs market. And now for a variety of reasons, some of which are very evident and others much less so, we witness a downward trend in figures of incomers to this country.

If reflection from a Christian faith perspective on living in a multiethnic, intercultural society was a need in the late nineties, it is an even more urgent challenge as we come to the end of the first decade of a new century. At a time when migration to this country – in all its forms – is no longer in its initial phase, when we in Ireland now have significant experience of inward as opposed to outward migration, what is the vision which is now needed to guide our living together? We know only too well that, “Without a vision, the people perish” (Prov 29.18).

As people who live in a common space, how can we share life in a way that contributes to the building up of a community? A space in which each one is valued, not according to external criteria like ethnic origin, language or religious or cultural background but, first and foremost, as a person created in the likeness of God, with the inherent dignity which that confers.
 
Matching the vision and ideals of individuals with action is a challenge for all regardless of creed or none. This challenges us to ask are we learning from the dear lessons of the past or are we repeating them in another context? The context for us here is in how we “welcome the stranger”.
 
While a vital aspect of welcome for the stranger is expressed in the interpersonal sphere, this welcome must be promoted and safeguarded too in the social, public arena. This is the arena of Government policies, procedures and practice. In all that relates to the right to seek asylum, it is essential that as a country we honour our international commitments by translating these into domestic legislation while, at the same time, putting in place effective mechanisms to ensure implementation.

Any reference to people seeking asylum as irregular or, worse still, illegal migrants cannot be permitted or tolerated. Similarly, legislation in relation to in-migration, whether it be for work, study, to join one’s family or whatever, must be in line with the relevant international conventions and other agreements to which Ireland is a signatory. In Ireland - as, indeed, everywhere - immigration policies must be located in a rights framework and be humane, transparent, sustainable and non-discriminatory. And while legislation alone, even when comprehensively implemented, is never sufficient, it is, nonetheless, an essential part of the foundation on which an intercultural society is built.

While Government policies and practice are on the one hand, a reflection - partial, at least - of societal values, on the other, they create and shape values. In forming public opinion through underscoring attitudes and actions that are acceptable - and, by implication, those that are unacceptable - legislation has a key function. This, for example, is why recent changes to the work permit regime raise major concerns.

I wish to highlight the requirement that a vacancy must be advertised for two months and no local or European Union applicant found before a work permit application from a non EU candidate can be considered. The condition applies equally to new applicants and to work permit holders already resident here who lose their jobs. Many people and their families who have made Ireland their home will be forced to leave or will have no other choice but to stay and work informally with the potential for exploitation that can accompany such working circumstances. This measure should be reconsidered urgently and not await a possible autumn review.

It is the call to Christian life – indeed, to human life – that ‘What the Bible says about the Stranger’ addresses from a wide variety of perspectives. Its breaking open of the Scriptures gives us a window into the mind and heart of God, made explicit in so many ways by the words and actions of Jesus. Discussion questions invite us to grapple with the difficult issues, not just intellectually but, more particularly, in a search for life-changing responses. The prayers included in each section, and a new feature of this edition, remind us that welcoming the stranger is, in essence, a task we share with God who is the One who first welcomes each of us and so enables us to welcome one another.

Addressing the deep-down questions is too profound a task for our heads alone. That is why the wide-ranging and very practical suggestions for dramatization offered in this publication are invaluable. They offer possibilities for participation, beyond language, age or acting ability, which allow for the involvement of everyone.

At a time of serious cutbacks for several agencies which worked to ensure that the human rights of all who live in Ireland were respected and upheld, not least in relation to racism, the mission of faith communities and of the Christian churches, in particular, is more crucial than ever and more urgent. At this time, in the face of the challenges which we face both globally and nationally, I am delighted to launch this publication. May it be widely distributed and, especially, widely used, and may “Wet Paint”, and every sign in our society, whatever its medium, be in a language that recognises, values and welcomes the Stranger.

And to end… an old Jewish tale told of the Rabbi and his students. The rabbi asked ‘How can you determine the hour of dawn – when the night ends and the day begins?’ One of the students suggested ‘when, from a distance, you can distinguish between a dog and a sheep’. ‘No’, was the answer of the Rabbi. ‘Is it when you can distinguish between a fig tree and a grapevine?’ asked the second student. ‘No’, the Rabbi said. ‘Please tell us the answer,’ pleaded the third. ‘It is’, replied the wise teacher, ‘when you look into the face of a stranger and have enough light within you to recognise that person as a sister or brother. Up until then, it is night, and darkness is still within you.’

The Guth Gafa festival takes place every year (this is the third) in Gortahork, Co Donegal.

Drawn from real life conversations, 'Asylum Dialogues' explores the everyday encounters between asylum seekers and British people. According to the company's patron, Juliet Stevenson, "We regularly hear about the terrible hostility that asylum seekers and refugees face. But we rarely hear the stories of British people who are standing shoulder to shoulder with those seeking sanctuary in the UK. Asylum Dialogues tells these inspirational stories and shows how small gestures of welcome can make a big difference."    

There is some video of the play here. Note that the company performs the play, as with their earlier 'Asylum Monologues', as a reading, with volunteer actors, with scripts in hand.

There is a selection of reviews of the company's other work (all similarly political) here. Tour details are here.

Playwright Sonja Linden has a thoughtful piece on how she became a writer, and one motivated by such stories, on Open Democracy, here. She writes:

'What sustains oppressive regimes such as Hitler's Germany, is not just the machinery of terror that holds them in place, but the disempowerment of an entire people through ignorance and poverty. It is this that allows a lumpenproleriat to build and bulwark such regimes. Access to information and humane living conditions alone set people free, enabling them to disengage from oppressive ideologies. In a society as ‘liberal' as ours in the UK, if we are to maintain more than lip-service to a just and cohesive society, this is still what is needed.'

The City of Sanctuary movement aims to build a culture of hospitality for people seeking sanctuary in the UK. 
 
The theatre company iceandfire explores human rights stories through performance. Asylum Dialogues is performed by members of their national outreach network, Actors for Human Rights, made up of over 300 professional actors dedicated to drawing public attention to a range of contemporary human rights concerns. The actors and musicians involved volunteer their performance skills and public profile to encourage public acceptance of human rights laws and principles and to give voice to people whose basic human rights have been violated.    
 

According to a recent article in the Sowetan, Wax began his humanitarian work in Hillbrow and Yeoville in Joahannesburg, areas of the city that are largely black and are now notable for their large numbers of African immigrants. He is now involved in anti-trafficking awareness work with the International Organization for Migration, which publishes 'Global Eye on Human Trafficking', available here. (Or you can download an issue directly here.)

Wax says: 'I did a lot of work in counter-trafficking on a personal level working in places like Hillbrow, were I had contact with women who were victims of commercial sexual exploitation.

'My new album is 'African Dream', and that is what it’s all about. The fact that you could see a child on TV and this child is desperate and hungry. Yes the child does need food, but it doesn’t end there, that child has a brain that could produce a business idea like Facebook, that could build a plane, that child could be anything because a child has that ability.'

Wax's own website, with ample downloads and videos, is here. The 'bio' section contains an account of a fascinating life story.

(Incidentally, in the course of researching this item, I came across the advocacy blog, 'The Human Trafficking Project', which may also be of interest.)

World facing new displacement crisis, says UN refugee chief - Emma Batha, AlertNet
FACTBOX: Latest U.N. figures for refugees and displaced
Viewpoint from UNHCR chief Antonio Guterres
Countries to mark World Refugee Day with a dizzying array of events - UNCHR
UN refugee chief cites pressing needs as those uprooted tops 42 million - UNHCR
Insecurity prevents more refugee returns - UNHCR

'Humanitarian Heads-Up' is a very useful weekly bulletin provided by Reuters AlertNet as a service to journalists covering humanitarian crises and related issues. You can subscribe to it here.

AlertNet is a 'humanitarian news network' established by Reuters as a philanthropic activity. Read about it here. It provides a suite of online services aimed at journalists. Amongst these are this YouTube video giving an introduction to crisis reporting, and an e-learning site with a range of online self-training packages. These include one on 'Reporting on refugees and displacement' - getting the facts right and explaining the stories behind the numbers'

There is more on the background to AlertNet here. According to AlertNet, the site 'attracts upwards of ten million users a year, has a network of 400 contributing humanitarian organizations and its weekly email digest is received by more than 26,000 readers'.

And on the background:

'During the Rwanda crisis of 1994, the Reuters Foundation became interested in media reports of poor coordination between emergency relief charities on the ground. It surveyed charities on what could be done to remedy this. The conclusion was that there was a need for a service that would:
* Deliver operation-critical information to relief charities worldwide
* Encourage relief charities to swap information with one another
* Raise awareness of humanitarian emergencies among the general public.

A search for 'asylum' on the site produces this list of stories, amongst them the story of a Sudanese asylum seeker who was murdered after being deported from the UK.

According to NowPublic, the site 'mobilizes an army of reporters to cover the events that define our world. In twelve short months, the company has become one of the fastest growing news organizations with thousands of reporters in over 140 countries... By harnessing the wisdom of crowds and tapping into the news creating potential of the hundreds of millions of Internet users, bloggers and photography enthusiasts, NowPublic is changing the way news is made and distributed.'

NowPublic was recently acknowledged as one of the top 20 Web 2.0 sites in Canada. According to the commendation: 'NowPublic is a crowdsourced media outlet. Sign up for an account and the site promises “You’re seconds away from publishing your news, your way.” If you’ve heard the term “citizen journalism” it’s because of companies like NowPublic. “This is a superbly thought-out and executed approach to crowdsourced news,” O’Connor Clarke said. “There are a lot of players in this space, but the way NowPublic have put things together, the way the site operates and their success in securing major partnerships with traditional media companies are all well worthy of recognition. NowPublic is a superb example of how 2.0 thinking can bridge the old and new media worlds to create something wholly new.” Other judges also raised the competition flag. Shuttleworth said there is “too much competition in this space” and Moffitt felt that “given its success already and its international scale, NowPublic could be creating an interesting form of new journalism, but it could also raise the hackles of well-moneyed competitors — but they have the head start.”'

The newsletter is essentially a selection of links to new material on the Statewatch site. An excerpt follows.

1. EU: Major report on the: Criminalisation and victimisation of migrants in Europe (255 pages, pdf) directed by Salvatore Palidda.

2. EU: European Commission: Tracking method for monitoring the implementation of the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum (COM 266 2009):

3. EU: Council discussions: "State of play": Proposal for a Council Framework Decision on combating the sexual abuse, sexual exploitation of children and child-pornography, repealing Framework Decision 2004/68/JHA - State of play and: Proposal for a Council Framework Decision on preventing and combating trafficking in human beings, and protecting victims, repealing Framework Decision 2002/629/JHA - State of play (EU doc no: 9892/09):

4. UK: The BNP's success reflects the new racism of our political culture (IRR News Service, link):

5. UK-N IRELAND: Guilty until proven innocent (Between the Lines, Paul Donovan's blog, link):

"The arrests of 12 Pakistani students in April on suspicion of terrorism hit the news headlines. Two weeks later there was less fanfare as all were released without charge. The pattern of arresting people under anti-terror legislation and then releasing without charge is familiar to Irish people who experienced the tactic during the conflict in the North."

...

20. Council of Europe: The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) releases its Annual activity report for 2008. It highlights the main trends with regard to the presence of racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance across Europe.

22. UK: How MI5 blackmails British Muslims: 'Work for us or we will say you are a terrorist' (Independent, link):

________________________________________________
Statewatch: Monitoring the state and civil liberties in Europe
PO Box 1516, London, N16 0EW. UK
tel: +44(0)20-8802-1882; fax: +44(0)20-8880-1727
http://www.statewatch.org

Others will speak of the need for accuracy, for a basic knowledge of what is involved in asylum-seeking, for avoiding stereotyping and the repetition of ill-informed and prejudiced comment, for treating asylum-seekers and refugees with courtesy and respect, so I won’t dwell on them.

I want to speak in more general terms – what are we trying to achieve when we write about this subject and, indeed, I would hope, any subject?

We are fortunate in that we live in a democracy, where our state institutions and our media, while flawed, do permit us freedom of expression within the constraints of the law and the limitations of the media’s thrust for circulation and profits.

Democracy can only thrive where there is an informed citizenry, where the institutions that are meant to serve us act in a transparent manner and are accountable, and where the members of the society can learn about sections of it they may never engage with in their own daily lives, as part of building a harmonious and tolerant society.

Writing about the issue of asylum and refugees is part of that. I use the word “issue” deliberately, because the key issue here, in my opinion, is process.

The media love a “human interest” story, and of course it is important to humanise what we write and ensure that the impact of public policy on real individuals is understood. But there are real dangers in covering the issue of asylum purely from a “human interest” point of view.

First, it tends to focus attention on the photogenic and articulate asylum-seeker, preferably with a couple of pretty children tagging alone - and I am not singling out any one individual here. There are several examples.

This individual then becomes the symbol of that particular category of refugee. Many refugees are not photogenic or articulate, and are no less deserving of protection for that.

Secondly, it reduces the issue to the individual story. The story might be heart-rending or heart-warming (the talented footballer who is the life and soul of the local GAA or football team), but the person concerned does not necessarily meet the criteria for protection under international refugee law. If the individual is refused asylum, this can cause confusion about the purpose of the asylum system.

Thirdly, and this needs to be said, we do not necessarily know whether the story is true. Checking the story of a person claiming to be a refugee is the task of the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, who have at their disposal staff with at least some training and access to international data, which is more than most journalists have. They still sometimes get it wrong.

Why should journalists, who normally (though there are many, very well-informed exceptions) have less resources available to them to check such stories, be sure the story is true?

The other side of this is the leaking by State agencies of stories aimed at discrediting the individual asylum-seeker to selected journalists, so that the person becomes the centre of a propaganda war.

Fourthly, if evidence does emerge that refutes the story, not only is the individual asylum-seeker discredited, but, by association, so are all asylum-seekers in that category or from that country and the argument for providing protection to those fleeing persecution is itself damaged.

None of this means we should not talk to refugees and tell their stories. Of course we should. But that is not, and cannot be, the whole story. We must give context. We must find out ourselves as much as possible about the countries they come from. We must know – and explain – what the criteria are for obtaining asylum. And we must not be afraid of saying when asylum is not warranted.

Not every asylum-seeker is fleeing persecution. We need only recall the total collapse in applications for asylum from Poland and the Baltic states following their accession to the EU. There was no sudden change in the character of their political regimes at home.

Telling the stories of individual asylum-seekers can only ever be part of the picture and, I would argue, a subordinate part. Our focus must be on the bigger picture – explaining why there are refugees, and what are our obligations to them, and examining how those who act in our name are meeting those obligations.

That brings me back to the issue of process. We, as tax-payers, are entitled to be sure that our money is well-spent and that our asylum process is one of which we can be proud.

Assessing claims for asylum is a difficult and complex task, involving both great sensitivity and extensive knowledge. It is of the utmost importance; people’s lives are at stake, and a wrong decision could send people to their death. We must do everything humanly possible to ensure this does not happen, while also ensuring that our system of protection goes to those who need it.

Thus the process of assessment must be transparent and accountable. We pay for it, and our reputation in the world depends on it.

Yet there is a culture of secrecy surrounding it. The institutions dealing with asylum applications, ORAC and the RAT, are not subject to Freedom of Information legislation and do not fall under the remit of the Ombudsman or the Information Commissioner.

The RAT fought tooth and nail against making its decisions available even to the legal representatives of those appearing before it, making a limited concession only on the eve of a Supreme Court case it was certain to lose, and where an embarrassing split in its members would have been revealed. Under the proposed Immigration and Residence Bill, disclosing previous judgments to an academic researcher, a journalist, or even to another lawyer will be a serious offence.

The issue of transparency and accountability in the system is a crucial one, and a fruitful one for journalists to explore, without losing sight of the human stories of those caught up in that system.

I came into journalism relatively late. In early 2000, I found myself in Angola in Southern Africa, as an aid worker with an Irish NGO, where the main focus of our work was the people displaced by the Angolan civil conflict. When I came home, in 2002, and started writing, one of the aspects of Irish life that had changed most notably while I was away, and which I found most interesting, was demographics, and I gradually started to cover this as a journalist, initially with Village Magazine and, more recently, freelance.

I’ve covered various insidious aspects of the asylum system, such as the iniquities of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, the situation of unaccompanied minors, the disappearance of children from HSE hostels, and the direct provision system. I’ve also covered the exploitation of migrant workers and the denial of full rights to immigrant married couples. It can be tempting, covering these areas – particularly when meeting people whose lives have been terribly damaged through their suspension in the limbo of the Irish system – to be overwhelmingly negative about that system.

More recently, however, I spent some time on the canvass with immigrant participants in the local elections. Just three were elected but, more importantly, 40 or so put their heads above the parapets and announced that they believed their communities were worth representing, and that they could and should participate in Irish politics. And wearing another hat, I spend a lot of time at the theatre, and there I’ve seen further evidence of cultural integration and enrichment.

Despite the injustices and some desperately sad stories, I think the Irish experience of immigration and demographic change in the last ten to 15 years has been very positive, for both sides. I think the Irish state, and the people as whole, n the media have done pretty well. I think it’s important to acknowledge that. It could be a lot worse. It’s a lot worse elsewhere. Acknowledging the positive is an important part of fighting to make sure it doesn’t get worse here.

Reporting on asylum and immigration issues has its own challenges and its own rewards. It is a great privilege to be invited into people’s homes, and to have them tell their life stories. Because there are many amongst immigrant communities who lack a voice in Irish society, or feel excluded from public discourse, and because there are many injustices being suffered by people, there is the potential to do journalism that actually impacts upon people’s lives in a tangible, positive way. On the other hand, issues that are often tricky for journalists – making contacts, getting access, gaining confidence, verifying information – can be even more so when dealing with people with whom you don’t share a first language, or cultural norms, as may be the case...

On a sheer practical level, this area of reporting can be slow, and difficult to fit into the hectic schedule and overbearing expectations of a news desk. Add to that the challenge of dealing with a chronically secretive and unaccountable bureaucratic-judicial system.

But on the whole, I don’t think this area of reporting is fundamentally any different from any other area where you’re dealing with issues of legal and emotional sensitivity. Treat everybody with respect, but don’t be credulous towards anybody. Make your own contacts. Don’t rely on mediators, though they can be invaluable. Be wary of received language. Avoid jargon, and clichés. Allow people to speak for themselves. Be precise. Seek detail. Strive for balance. Be clear about the difference between on and off the record. Interrogate. Don’t sentimentalise. Lastly, don’t reduce people to ‘victims’.

Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle recently rewrote ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, to feature a young man arriving in Dublin from Nigeria in the central role. He walks into a pub in West Dublin, and starts rumours flying. One of the locals refers to him as a “refugee”, but another corrects him – clearly, if this man has just arrived, he must be an “asylum seeker”.

There is a crucial, legal distinction between the terms refugee and asylum seeker, and the joke Bisi and Roddy were making was that Ireland had become so au fait with these terms that any auld fella in a pub would know the difference. That’s perhaps a good thing. It perhaps reflects a growing awareness of these issues amongst the media, and a more accurate treatment of them.

But there is a deeper resonance of the term ‘asylum seeker’, and it’s an example of how language works to shape people’s perceptions of reality, not just describe them.

When I worked in humanitarian aid in Angola, the word we habitually used to describe the people we were trying to help was ‘beneficiaries’. ‘How many beneficiaries does your project have?’ somebody might ask. We thought it was a neutral, factually accurate way to describe those people, like the number of ‘passengers’ on a train. But it wasn’t. It is a deeply ideological term, which suggests that the native population of a poor country inherently benefits from the interventions of the charity of a rich country.

‘Asylum seeker’ is something similar. In legal terms, it is a way of describing the place one has within the system. But the deeper meaning of the term is reflected in the way these people are treated in the system: their nature is defined by the fact that they are ‘seeking’ something – they are cast as mendicants, dependent on the largesse of the system and the state that has the power to award asylum or refuse it.

This is reflected in a real sense in the recently revealed circular from the Department of Justice to accommodation centres for asylum seekers, prohibiting political activity or canvassing in the centres – implying that asylum seekers need protection from politics, when in fact what some, at least, want, is more participation in politics.

It’s difficult to know what to do about this precise linguistic issue as a journalist. If I’m reporting on a hunger strike by a man from Iraq, say, who has been refused asylum, do I start my report by referring to ‘an Iraqi asylum seeker’, or to ‘a hunger striker from Iraq, who has sought asylum here’, or to ‘a member of the Iraqi opposition who was refused asylum in Ireland’?

Words matter. And the words that matter most in an article are the words you start with. Is there a way of reporting on his actions, and his predicament, without casting him as the helpless seeker of our sympathy? Because, though there may be some truth in that portrayal, it is never the full truth.

So, how can your use of language, as a journalist, both avoid perpetuating the alienation and marginalisation of people in the asylum system, and present the story vividly and coherently to the public?

More generally, when investigating or reporting on perceived injustices or abuses within the system, how can you do so in ways that do not sentimentalise the people involved, that recognise their agency as well as their problems? Or in other words: when is somebody a survivor, or even simply an individual, and not simply a victim?

Treading that fine line is perhaps the key challenge in reporting on asylum issues, and I have been privileged to be guided around it by various people who have come to live here.

I am honoured to have been asked to formally launch this leaflet containing guidelines for reporting on refugees. The reasons will be obvious to everyone here. The first is that issues connected with the reporting on refugees will continue to arise, and may well arise even more sharply in a world increasingly characterized by financial meltdown, democratic deficits, and real threats to the life and limb of individuals and ethnic groups in an ever-increasing range of countries and regions.
The second is because this is a leaflet offering guidance not only for, but by journalists themselves. It embodies, therefore, reflections based on the practical experience of those at the coal-face, and is not simply a wish-list compiled by people with the best of intentions in the hope that everyone will sit up and pay attention. It is therefore both detailed and practical.
The third is because it comes with the imprimatur of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNCHR deals with the poorest of the poor, those whose grip on a viable existence is the most fragile, and those who are most deserving of our help. Even if there is little we can do to help, they deserve, at an absolute minimum, our understanding and our sympathy.
From the point of view of best professional practice, which is what my Office is about, there are also three points I’d like to make.
The first is that precision, always important in journalism, is absolutely vital where critically important distinctions need to be made, to help prevent the creation of stereotypes, and as part of the public education function of professional journalism.
The second is that guides and codes, even the best of them, are at the end of the day just that – guides and codes. They can assist, but can never be a substitute for, the exercise by all journalists of a deep sense of personal responsibility, of their allegiance to truth and fair dealing, and of their vocation to public service.
The third is that the responsibility for responding adequately to the kind of problems with which the UNHCR is dealing, and to which this guide relates, does not rest on the shoulders of journalists alone. You don’t have to shoot the messenger if you can pretend that you didn’t hear what he had to say, or that he is the only person saying it. So the message has to come not only from journalists but from community and political leadership, and from individuals and social institutions at every level.
We do not have to be flag-wavers: but journalism, in the face of this constant and enormous human tragedy, should take special care to be neither complacent nor complicit, but to be critical and constructive. Our fellow human beings deserve no less.

Some content of note:

Migration Nation: Statement on Integration Strategy and Diversity Management, from May 2008. This document is a Ministerial statement on the future direction of integration policy in Ireland. This Statement recognises that a key challenge facing Government and Irish society is the imperative to integrate people of different cultures, ethnicity, language and religion so that they become the new Irish citizens of the 21st century.

Key statistics on immigration

An archive of Press Releases

Funding: Details of the (small) amount of funding disbursed by the Office in support of integration projects countrywide.

Managing Diversity: A section containing comprehensive information on government policy and the international context.

Useful Information for Migrants

On the home page, John Curran, the Minister of State responsible, writes:

'The Irish people have vast personal experience of the challenges and opportunities that emigration and integration present as traditionally we were a country of emigration ourselves. Therefore, as a result of our own history, we understand emigration and the problems that emigrants can face. Uprooting your life, finding work, accessing services and building friendships in a new country can be a major challenge, even without the added complexities of cultural or language differences.

'In the 1990s, we saw a new, transformed Ireland emerge as a result of the economic success of the Celtic Tiger years. We became a destination-of-choice and over the past decade or so, many migrants have come here to live, work and study.

'By examining the official figures, we can clearly see the extent and indeed speed of this change - in 2002, approximately 5.7% of Ireland’s population of just under 4 million were immigrants while the 2006 Census figures show that over 10% of our population are newcomers and this represents an astonishing increase of 87% over the four year period. It is no overstatement to say that this has been a phenomenal demographic and social change for a small country to absorb over a relatively short timeframe.

'The 2006 Census figures show that we have over 420,000 migrants here who have come from 188 different countries and these people have a wide diversity of cultural and religious backgrounds. The level of migration we have experienced has brought both benefits and challenges but it is generally agreed that the benefits to Ireland have been substantial. Over the coming years, I expect that inward migration will continue to contribute to our labour force growth but that the level of immigration will not be as high as in recent years.'

According to the introduction on the site, the portal contains 'links to information on the Irish education system, links to resources available for intercultural education, and links to organisations and institutions (in Ireland and abroad) conducting educational research on migration. It will be of interest to all sectors of education from pre-school to higher education and will provide information for policy makers, parents, teachers, researchers and others interested in migrants and their education in Ireland.'

As a close reading of the above suggests, this is very simply a collection of links to bodies and information sources relevant to newcomers to the Irish education system.

According to the website, this information is also available on the website of the Department of Education & Science. After some navigating of that site, I found a section on 'Newcomers to Ireland'. This is distinct from the information in 'portal' on integration.ie, and has an eclectic but potentially useful collection of documents and official statements relating to migrants and interculturalism in the classroom.

Amongst the features of interest on the site are the following:

Good practices: a selection of examples of good integration practice from all across Europe, submitted by those involved. (The criteria for selection and details of how to do so are here.) 

An information sheet on Ireland, which appears to be a comprehensive selection of links and documents on key aspects of integration policy.

The PROMINSTAT database is a comprehensive inventory of statistical datasets on migration, integration and discrimination in Europe and currently contains descriptions of more than 1,200 statistical datasets.

A facility to contribute and share information on integration.

An extensive selection of information on national, European and private funding opportunities.

A discussion forum that has clearly not yet gained any traction, but nonetheless provides a potentially useful facility.

'Even before the onset of the recession, thousands of media jobs had been lost across Britain. The internet, digital television, falling advertising revenues and the commercial pressures of the 24/7 news cycle have all had an impact. While there continues to be great examples of courageous journalism, a growing number of news outlets are increasingly putting emphasis on entertainment, on rapidly-delivered and recycled news rather than the investigation and discovery of what the public wants and needs to know.

'We have decided to announce the formation of a Foundation for Investigative Reporting to look at what practical steps can be taken, both to experiment with new means of funding essential investigations and to inspire a new generation of reporters. The Foundation will act as an incubator for new ways of conducting journalism and for new ideas of how to finance this kind of reporting.
 
'As of today, we are creating a new rolling fund that will aim to help provide the initial cash required for the kind of risky, challenging reporting and film-making for which there is a crying demand, but few sponsors. This not-for-profit venture will not compete directly with established media, but will instead provide the seeds from which the big stories can grow.'

The full text of the letter is available here.

A report in the Media Guardian is here. It notes:

'Fundraising has yet to begin, but the Telegraph group has offered to make a contribution to start-up costs, and Google is to provide technical support and advice for free. Grey is talking to other media groups and is hoping to attract the interest of philanthropists or draw subscriptions from donors. A relatively modest budget of £500,000 could "transform things". The fund will, he hopes, give harried journalists the time to pursue the leads they are often forced to neglect. "Unless you have the resources or integrity to be able to spend a lot of money on something and still be prepared not to run anything, there's not going to be much integrity in your own investigation."'

Under the heading, 'The Crisis', the Foundation outlines the current depressed state of the media business:

'Even as the practice of investigative journalism – the pro-active search for facts and explanations in the public interest – is squeezed and endangered by ever-greater commercial pressure, global trends make world events themselves ever more complex. The ‘story’ itself has got beyond what any individual investigator – be they a newspaper or media organisation or official agency – can investigate with their own resources. In the regulation of the corporate sphere, investigation is increasingly privatised under the guise of ‘self-regulation’ or ‘due diligence’.'

And they note the following 'depressing trends':

- 60 local papers in Britain have closed in the last 12 months, and over 4,000 jobs in the UK media went from July 2008 to January 2009, including the jobs of at least 1,000 journalists.

- The average Fleet Street journalist now fills three times as much editorial space as he or she did in 1985.

- According to research commissioned for Nick Davies’ book 'Flat Earth News', only 12% of stories in Britain’s quality newspapers show evidence that they have been thoroughly checked.

- 54% of stories in Britain’s quality newspapers are wholly or mainly constructed from PR material.

The implications of these trends for reporting on the issue of immigration are clear: except in the scaremongering tabloids, migrant-related stories do not 'sell' papers. As Carol Coulter commented at the recent launch of new guidelines for reporters on refugee issues (see below), the media too often treats asylum stories simply as human interest ones, neglecting the stories and issues that do not have an immediate human interest angle and failing to subject the institutions of state and the justice system to adequate analysis. We wish the Foundation for Investigative Reporting well in its work.

Johannesburg has become home to thousands of foreign Africans. Some are refugees, fleeing persecution and seeking asylum, others are looking for work and a better life. Many find that life is not what they expected and face discrimination from government services, harassment by police and degrading treatment from people, whether in the taxis, schools, shops or streets.

The organisation responsible for MAX, CMFD (Community Media for Development) Productions works with communities, non-profit radio stations and media organisations to strengthen the use of media and communication for development.

'As immigration policy gains more notice in the media during the election season, its importance surpasses mere politics. A country built on immigration, the United States is in the midst of deciding the fates of millions of people who call America their home regardless of legal status. Many of the stories found here come from members of The Media Consortium, a network of smart, passionate journalists who are committed to changing and improving the political debate here in our country.'

Also namechecked is Immigration Impact, the blog of the Immigration Policy Center.

'Standing for Election: the New Faces of Irish Politics' is a print and radio project by this writer, Colin Murphy, on the unprecedented participation in the recent local elections by immigrants. The outputs of this so far are a podcast for Le Monde Diplomatique and articles for the same publication and for the Sunday Tribune. A radio documentary is in process. 

The FOMACS Radio project page is here. Click on 'Projects' in the menu bar across the top of this page for details on the other FOMACS media projects.

Thanks to Sarah for the link. Please send links and suggestions to migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org.

If the answer to any of the above is 'Yes', then please write to us at migrationmatters@fomacs.org. Send us anything from an interesting link to an archive of information. We cover all media - print, online, film, radio, theatre, community-produced, and more - as long as the work being done is of interest.

Where the work is already well documented online, we'll link to it with a short introduction. Where it hasn't been documented, we'll publish a more comprehensive report, within the constraints of this site.

Spread the word. Friends and colleagues can sign up for these weekly updates automatically here. You can also subscribe to a RSS feed from Migration Matters and from other FOMACS projects at the same page.

Thank you for reading.

Colin Murphy, editor.

'M2M (Migrant to Migrant) has received reliable information that several EU countries have planned a special charter flight from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol to Africa, carrying tens of undocumented migrants back to Africa. Reliable church sources in Germany and Belgium ask for additional information and M2M calls for concerted action to protest against this form of "human trafficking".

'We have informed the detained migrants in two of Hollands detention centres: Schiphol Oost and Alphen aan den Rijn. Mamadou from Chad is already 14 months in detention and fears deportation. He has successfully resisted deportation on several occasions and is a leader of many collective actions in the last year. We talked with Mamadou and others through the fence, during the last commemoration of the Schiphol Fire.'

That interview can be listened to here.

The circular concludes:

'Please circulate this information widely in Europe and Africa. Let us know of any addictional information on this deportation flight you may have. Let's come together and organize support for the ongoing resistance inside these prisons. M2M proposes actions of protest and solidarity on the 14th of July: Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood. Visit the prisons, make phone calls, picket lines at Airports, Embassies and Institutions of Repression anywhere.

The mailing list can be accessed here or via email to m2m-eng@listcultures.org. For more, see the earlier Migration Matters report on M2M, on 17/11/2008, in the November archive.

An excerpt from that article, by Anne Flaherty:

"Capturing a moment in time," is how the 39-year-old from south Armagh describes his work. He asks his subjects - all pensioners in their 70s or 80s - to remember long-buried memories from childhood, of taking the boat to England and the difficulties of adapting to life in their new environment. The majority left Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s to escape harsh economic circumstances. But every narrative of exile is different.

"When I first start I find they have a little 10-minute biography in their heads as to what they think I would like to know," he says. "But then the real life story comes out. If there is anything too personal I check if they want to include it and they generally say 'Yes, it's part of the story'."

The oral archive is a pilot project funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs, and encouraged by David Cooney, the Irish ambassador, who will be the next secretary general of the Department of Foreign Affairs and who is also the child of Irish emigrants to London.

Cumiskey, who worked with the traditional Irish music archive in Dublin before moving to London five years ago, aims to conduct up to 200 interviews in the first year.

Next year, Cumiskey hopes to expand the project around Britain and to put together a touring exhibition to publicise the project. Ultimately he hopes that the material will be in a national archive in the UK and Ireland, and available on the web.

 

'More than 70,000 Muslims who were forced from their homes by rebel Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka's war-torn north in the 1990s, are now contemplating a return home. While the older generation are keen to go, some of the younger displaced who grew up in the displacement camps would rather stay in their adopted home. Sri Lanka’s relief and rehabilitation minister says many houses in the north which once belonged to the Muslims have been completely destroyed and some of the returnees will find it difficult to locate their ancestral lands.

Meanwhile, the majority of aid agencies still don't have free access to army-run camps for the 300,000 Tamils who fled fighting this year. The government has grown increasingly suspicious of aid agencies because their work has focused on Tamil areas in the north, reports the British Times newspaper. It is weeding out veteran aid workers it sees as pro-Tiger with a visa regime under which no-one can stay more than three years. And it has imposed a 0.9 percent tax on all funding for aid groups. Although the tax was introduced in 2006, it was not enforced and most agencies did not comply, hoping to persuade the government to change it. Now it is insisting they should pay the tax, backdated to 2005. 
 
When fighting escalated last year between government troops and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels, the government ordered all aid agencies to leave the area saying it could not guarantee their safety. The only one allowed to remain was the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which continued to deliver aid and evacuate the wounded from the conflict zone.
 
President Mahinda Rajapaksa has said any political solutions to the problems that helped fan the conflict must wait until after the presidential elections, which could happen any time between November this year and 2011. Rajapaksa had strong backing for his tough military approach from hard-line members of his ruling coalition. But he will have a tougher time getting them on board with a political solution if it involves significant concessions to the country's Tamil and other minorities, political analysts say.

AlertNet Sri Lanka crisis briefing
The ICRC in Sri Lanka
U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Sri Lanka
Victims of Tamil Tiger war hit by Sri Lanka tax on aid workers - Times
Sri Lanka's 'forgotten' city poor need help too - blog
Sri Lanka's forgotten displaced Muslims - BBC

For more on AlertNet, see last month's report, below, from 18/06/09, Refugee Day links from Reuters AlertNet.

In a statement, spokesperson Kurt Nikolaisen said: 'there are elements of our society that continue to promote anger by the scapegoating and targeting immigrants including migrant workers, refugees, asylum seekers or even students, we need to work to expose these myths and challenge racist ideas'. The statement continued: 'Love Music Hate Racism Ireland is not just an organization. It’s a movement. We need people from all walks of life to get involved. We want everyone to play a part in LMHR no matter how big or how small. We want to hear what you have to say, and address issues you find important. Issues that your community, neighbors, friends and family find important where you live. We aim to have a network of support for each and every person involved in LMHR across the county and we encourage people to make suggestions, put on their own events and start their own groups with help from this network'.

The launch event will run in three rooms at the venue, incorporating live music, comedy, graffiti art, photography, DJs, and short film screenings. (See report below for more on this.) Further information from Kurt Nikolaisen on 085 8244468 or email to lmhrireland@gmail.com. Follow Love Music Hate Racism on MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook.

In 2006 artist Jesse Jones was commissioned by the Fire Station Artists’ 2 Studios in partnership with Dublin Docklands Development Authority to produce 12 ANGRY FILMS, an outdoor season of films tracing the history of labour and social justice issues in cinema. The end result of this commission was a site-specific public art event in the form of a temporary drive-in cinema. This was located in the disused industrial setting of Pigeon House in Dublin’s docklands, over a weekend in November 2006. The objective of this project was to create a collective social space, where films both by and about workers and activists could be shown, generating debate and reflection on globalisation and the changing nature of industrial labour.

The Fire Station Artists’ Studios and Jesse Jones chose to work with an elective community as opposed to a prescribed group. Viewing community in its broadest sense as any gathering of individuals who come together in support of a concept, a general call for participants was put out through union, community and activist networks. Participants were not limited to a particular geographical area, or social class. Rather this “community of being” came about through those with an interest in film, workers rights and/or social activism as well as an ability to commit to a series of evening workshops. This resultant elective community consisted of a diverse group of individuals ranging in ages 19 to 50 years plus, over half of whom were non-native Irish.

Each group was given three rules for the making of their film: firstly that it would not be in English, secondly that it would be three minutes long and finally that it would be set in a car.

The film 'Sol Ziemi' was one of those made as part of the collaborative workshops. It translated a scene from 'Salt of the Earth' into Polish, and was staged between two Polish immigrant workers in contemporary Dublin.

There is a short overview of the project here.

We joined Aziza Brahim in Seville on Saturday, where a march in support of self determination for the Saharawi people was held, after which Aziza Brahim headlined an outdoor concert. There is widespread popular support for the Saharawi cause in Spain, arising in part from Spain's colonial history in the country, and from the ongoing and successful programme of bringing Saharawi children from the refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria, to Spain to stay with families for the summer. (The camps are incredibly inhospitable, and amongst the benefits to the children are improved nutrition and a less oppressive climate.) Brahim performed a fusion of traditional Saharan music, desert blues and rock, to a wildly enthusiastic crowd, many of whom were Saharawi immigrants, or families hosting children. We then accompanied her and her group to their hometown, Leon, and on to Bilbao, where Brahim was to perform a further gig last night. 

We plan to join her in London for a performance at the Royal Festival Hall in the London African Musical Festival on September 12, and on a homecoming visit to the camps in Algeria in October. More on this project later; in the meantime, here are some further links on Aziza Brahim, etc: the Amazon download for her stunning short album, Mi Canto; her MySpace page; her blog (in Spanish); more on Saharan blues; from the New Internationalist on Western Sahara.

Morocco's position on the Western Sahara issue is here (from their Washington DC embassy).

PHILIPPINES: About 387,000 people have been displaced by fighting between government forces and Muslim rebels which has escalated in the oil and gas-rich marshlands on the southern island of Mindanao in the last two months, pushing back peace talks stalled since August 2008. This footage posted on the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism's blog gives an insight into the the plight of the refugees. Bomb attacks in Mindanao, which led to a travel ban for U.N. and other diplomatic staff, forced the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) to suspend food distribution a week ago. But that was lifted on Monday, allowing WFP to resume the distribution of food to the displaced.

'The period since the 1990s has seen immigration into Ireland of a scale and speed unprecedented in comparative context. After decades of net emigration from Ireland, the strong economic growth of the last decade and resulting rapid immigration of non-Irish nationals from a wide range of countries has transformed Ireland into a country of net immigration. In recent years the inflow of migrants has become more diverse, with many nationalities represented, and return Irish migration declining from 50 per cent of the inflow in 1996 to less than 25 per cent in 2006. In little over a decade Irish society has become more diverse in terms of nationality, language, ethnicity and religious affiliation as the population share of non-national immigrants increased from 3 per cent in 1993 to 6 per cent in 2002 to 10 per cent in 2006.'

This summary can be downloaded here. The full quarterly report is here. The original research report is here. Ruadhan MacCormaic's article on that report, from the Irish Times, is here.

The annual Netroots Nation Convention, entering its fourth year now, is a unique gathering of progressive bloggers, activists, issue campaigns, and candidates. This year, America's Voice will send 8 immigration bloggers to Pittsburgh, PA to attend the convention, with the help of the Netroots Nation planning committee. America’s Voice is committed to supporting a vibrant and independent pro-migrant blogosphere and we believe it is critical for bloggers who write about immigration to be well-represented at Netroots Nation. So, do you know someone working at the intersection of new media and immigration, who blogs on the issue, and who needs some help getting to Netroots Nation?

Netroots Nation 2009 will include panels led by national and international experts; identity, issue and regional caucuses; prominent political, issue and policy-oriented speakers; a progressive film screening series; and the most concentrated gathering of progressive bloggers to date.

America's Voice is the newly-founded communications hub working for just, common-sense immigration reform.

The group reported yesterday, and their comprehensive (and often savage) report is the lead across all today’s media. On an initial scan, recommendations in the area of immigration and integration services have not been singled out for coverage in the media. Accordingly, Migration Matters thought it useful to provide a synopsis, as follows. Most of the relevant cuts are within the Department of Justice, Equality & Law Reform (divided into cuts that fall within the ‘Equality’ remit of the Department and those to Immigration Services). There are also cuts within the Department of Education & Science. They are presented here without comment.

Department of Justice

In the area of Equality

Measure: Abolish the Office of the Minister for Integration.
Saving: €1.5m.
Justification: Its functions were previously carried out within the Department of Justice, Equality & Law Reform, and hence can return to it. Each Government Department should report annually on how they have contributed to the promotion of cultural integration.

Measure: The non-pay element of the allocation to the Office for the Minister for Integration should be reduced by 10% (immediately, prior to it being abolished).                                                            

Saving: €0.8m (including savings from similar reductions to the allocations to the Equality Authority and the Equality Tribunal).

Staff cuts: 30 people (including cuts in other areas of this Programme of the Department of Justice - broadly, the ‘Equality’ area).

In the area of Immigration Services

This area has a current budget of €143m and 740 staff, most of it to do with the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS) which was established in 2005 in order to provide a ‘one stop shop’ in relation to asylum, immigration, citizenship and visas.

Measure: Cut staff by 240
Saving: €10m.
Justification: The numbers of staff in INIS has grown since 2006 from 580 to over 750. The extra staff were sanctioned on a temporary basis to address various issues that arose  such as applications for renewal of leave to remain from non-national parents of Irish born children following revised arrangements in December 2006. In the current climate of reducing immigration as well as asylum applications, an initial reduction to the 2006 level of core staff (i.e. 580) should be delivered in the short term, with a follow-up management review to investigate how quickly staffing levels can be got down to between 450 and 500 staff.
Note: This will involve the consolidation of all immigration-related actions, including the implementation of policy on work permits, within INIS. However, the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment should retain its role in shaping policy in this area.

Measure: A reduction of 10% in the non-pay allocation to INIS. Saving: €2m.

Measure: Transfer responsibility of immigration control at entry point to INIS.

Saving: €1m.
Justification: At present, members of An Garda Síochána are responsible for conducting passport control checks at Dublin Airport. This is an inappropriate use of Garda operational resources and and should be outsourced. In the first instance, responsibility of immigration control at Dublin Airport, and later, the major points of entry into the State, should be transferred to INIS.
 

Department of Education & Science

Measure: Reduction in the number of English language support teachers by 1,000.
Saving: €7m in 2010, rising to €21m in a full year.
Justification: There are currently almost 2,200 language support teachers providing services to non-English speaking children, which is due to reduce to about 1,500 from September 2009. This should befurther reduced in 2010 because of the decreasing levels of immigration, the increasing trend of immigrants leaving the country due to the current economic difficulties, and the length of time that most existing immigrants have now been in the country. This proposed reduction would return the number of language support teachers to long term trend requirements based on estimated immigration and labour market parameters.

More information:
The two volumes of An Bord Sip Nua’s report (scroll down)
RTE’s coverage
The Irish Times’s coverage
Migration Matters on the new Integration website: see the report on 26/06/2009 in the June archive

How much, if anything, would be saved by the Exchequer were the Direct Provision system to be axed, and asylum seekers allowed work, for example? There would potentially be greater costs in rent supplement and social welfare payments to families no longer catered for in ‘hostels’, but savings from those who would find work rather than rely on the dole.

How much would be saved were processing times in the Department of Justice, Equality & Law Reform to be reduced so that those seeking asylum moved through the system quicker? (In other words, would greater savings overall result from maintaining current staffing levels?)

Might cutting language support services have a detrimental economic effect in the long term, lowering the educational outcomes of non-native English speakers? Or has An Bord Snip got it about right? (For non-Irish readers, the nickname given to this group is both an Irish-language pun and a historical reference. Wikipedia explains all.)

What do you think? How would you cut services in the area of immigration and integration? Or how would you improve them, but in the context of the imperative to make savings?

Let us know. Here at Migration Matters, we’d be interested to hear from readers with any observations on these, or other issues arising from the report - particularly as this is an area not likely to get in-depth focus in the mainstream media.

American dream, Brazilian reality: a report from Governador Valadares in Brazil

No regrets, as home beckons after the boom: Unemployment among immigrants in Spain could reach 30 per cent by the end of the year

Colder climate for those facing home truths: Many migrants’ morning routine now consists of scouring the internet and papers for jobs

Ruadhán has agreed to do a Q&A with Migration Matters. Any readers who wish to participate should email questions to me at migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org (replacing the [at] with @, to deter spammers).

The profile is by MPI Senior Policy Analyst Will Somerville, Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah of the Royal Commonwealth Society, and Maria Latorre of the Institute for Public Policy Research. For a detailed look at the British economy and immigration, see Immigration in the United Kingdom: The Recession and Beyond by Will Somerville and Madeleine Sumption for the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission.

You can also discover the top destinations of British and other European migrants by visiting the MPI Data Hub's World Migration Map.

 

Migration at a glance: global figures

• Number of migrants: 190.6 million or 3 per cent of population (UN 2005 figure).

• Women as percentage of migrants: 49.6 per cent

• Refugees: 13.5 million or 7.1 per cent of the total migrants

• South-South migration is nearly as large as South-North migration.

More than 47 per cent of migrants from developing countries are believed to be living in other developing countries.

• Top 10 destination countries: United States, Russia, Germany, Ukraine, France, Saudi Arabia, Canada, India, United Kingdom, Spain.

But as a share of population, top immigration countries include Qatar (78.3%), United Arab Emirates (71.4%), Kuwait (62.1%), Singapore (42.6%), Bahrain (40.7%) and Israel.

• Top 10 emigration countries: Mexico, Russia, India, China, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Turkey, United Kingdom, Germany, Kazakhstan.

• Top 10 migration corridors: Mexico-United States, Russia-Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia, Bangladesh-India, Turkey-Germany, Kazakhstan-Russia, India-United Arab Emirates, Russia-Kazakhstan, Philippines-United States, Afghanistan-Iran.

• Top 10 remittance recipients in 2007: India ($27.0 bn), China ($25.7 bn), Mexico ($25.0 bn), Philippines ($17.0 bn), France ($12.5 bn), Spain ($8.9 bn), Belgium ($7.2 bn), United Kingdom ($7.0 bn), Germany ($7.0 bn), Romania ($6.8 bn).

• Top 10 remittance recipients in 2006 (as percentage of GDP): Tajikistan (36.2%), Moldova (36.2%), Tonga (32.3%), Kyrgyz Republic (27.4%), Honduras (25.6%), Lesotho (24.5%), Guyana (24.3%), Lebanon (22.8%), Haiti (21.6%), Jordan (20.3%).

It further discusses security considerations that might impact citizen media and freedom of information. Finally, it describes possible medium-term directions for future development and donor investments. The report is available here.

Working group report on the idea of a migration museum:

The Migration Museum Working Group was formed in late 2006 to discuss what more could be done to represent migration issues within the UK museum and heritage sector. It consists of people who share an interest in these issues and a passion for seeing migration more appropriately represented in cultural life in the UK.

Over more than two millennia migration has continuously shaped and reshaped the people of the British Isles. Migration is an important part of our history and of contemporary society. But while we have major museums on most other aspects of our national life, devoted to everything from war and science to transport and the media, there is no major museum of migration. It was in this context that the Migration Museum Working Group was formed in late 2006. The group's aim was to outline the case for a major Museum of Migration in the UK.

Supporting research report by Mary Stevens on the representation of migration in the UK heritage sector:

The history of migration to and from the British Isles is as old as the islands themselves. However, the common understanding of this history as passed down through the education system as well as by museums, archives and other heritage sites, has often glossed over or ignored this crucial aspect of our island story. This paper makes the case for representation of migration in the heritage sector.

Migration is a fact of life. Increasingly, every community reflects more of the diversity of humankind. At many points in the Bible this reality is celebrated in the promise of a banquet to which all the peoples of the world are invited.

There are some further resources of relevance on CTBI's Black History Month section.

By community archives we mean any collection of material that documents one or many aspects of a community’s heritage, collected in, by and for that community and looked after by its members. This material helps tell the story of groups of people who have often been excluded from mainstream archives, which have tended to focus on official documents and the lives of elites. In our project we will investigate the role community archives play in supporting a sense of rootedness and identity amongst members of a community, as well as what they do to raise awareness of these neglected stories in the wider public. Ultimately, we are interested in the social impact of community archives on their creators and on their publics.

Until now there has been very little concrete evidence demonstrating the potential benefits of community archives. Research that has been done has mostly focused on the social impact of museums. We aim to fill this gap by providing detailed evidence of the ways in which community archives and histories impact on the lives of those they touch.

To do this we will be working very closely over several months with the community archives that have agreed to take part in our research. Mary will be participating actively in and contributing to the work of the archives, documenting her experiences in order to build up a detailed picture of the organisation and the effect of its work that is much more than just a snapshot.

We hope that the community archives chosen will see the project as a collaborative venture with concrete benefits for themselves. Moreover, in contributing to the research we anticipate that in a small way they will be helping to secure the long-term future of the sector, by providing evidence of the value of community archives to today’s diverse society.

For readers abroad, Liveline, an afternoon public phone-in show on the main radio station, is one of the most influential media spots in Ireland; under Joe Duffy and his predecessor, Marian Finucane, it has achieved an iconic status in Irish culture and has on many occasions created news through careful steering of public discussion of controversial issues. There's an overview of its history on Wikipedia.

Why did you start writing about migration? 

The Irish Times ran a fellowship a few years ago which gave a journalist the chance to select a project and pursue it for up to four months, filing weekly reports for the paper on a topic that was of "transnational significance" but of particular relevance to Ireland. I chose migration because it embraced so much, and I thought it could be sustained as a single theme over quite a long time. It was also a major domestic issue, and one the media had been slow to get to grips with.  

What challenges/obstacles did you face in writing about the area?

It’s a constant challenge to strike a balance between the local and the global. Migration is a big domestic story, and generally that’s why news media here have shown such interest, but it’s also one that’s being played out on the fringes of a larger drama, and cannot be fully understood without reference to the broader context.

The paper [the Irish Times] clearly recognises its importance (not to mention its potential for new types of stories), so I’ve always felt I’ve been pushing an open door in securing space. But with such an appetite for local, Irish-specific copy, the challenge has been to keep pushing the brief further and wider.  

There’s also the perennial problem of finding a balance between the diary-driven news stories and in-depth feature work. In some ways the two work symbiotically (coverage of a “diary” event might lead to a deeper treatment, which in turn informs and improves coverage of the story as it develops), but with 14 news pages or an hour-long bulletin to fill every day, news media can unwittingly overdo the coverage of events/ reports/ arguments that are of no serious value in the long run. The trick is to satisfy the demands of the news cycle in as much as possible while looking for every chance to delve deeper into a story that is, after all, more about the process than the event.

Has the Irish media done a good job covering this story?

There’s such variety and divergence in the industry that a phrase like “the media” has lost much of its analytical meaning. It depends very much on what you read, watch or listen to. In some places the coverage can be sophisticated and well informed, in others crude and sloppy. But there’s also internal variety within media organisations, and each one of us has our strengths and weaknesses. You might read a thoughtful and thorough piece on trafficking or separated children by a certain journalist in a paper that routinely mixes up terms like asylum seekers or refugees, or shows little interest in migration generally, for example. A lack of specialisation means the nuance of a topic can often be lost, or that coverage can be vulnerable to the different agendas that are in play in the sector, whether those of NGOs, politicians or government departments. We haven’t been helped by the fact that politicians tend to say very little about immigration in public.

Overall, I think media were slow to react. Newspapers and broadcast media can be flexible and fast-moving in some ways, but, by necessity, they’re also institutionally quite rigid. As a story, migration doesn’t adhere to the same patterns that apply to, say, health or education. It’s amorphous, it cuts across established specialisms, it’s a process more than an event, and there are few ready-made networks in place between the journalists and the immigrants they’re writing about. It takes time to find contacts and gain their trust, to master asylum law or to get a handle on trends, for example, and in most newsrooms time is generally in short supply. But the situation has clearly been improving in recent years. The job I’m in at the paper was, I think, a statement that this was a major issue of the day, but also an attempt to overcome some of these problems.

What was the most significant story you've covered?

We’ve had some running news stories – the controversy over the wearing of the hijab in State schools, inspection reports on asylum seeker accommodation centres, changes to immigration law, trafficking cases, reports of ongoing problems at immigration control at Dublin airport, and so on – though I think the most interesting material has looked at the lived experience of shifting trends. Some examples would be my trips to Gort in Co Galway and to then to Anápolis in central Brazil, looking first at the effects of remittances on the Brazilian town, and then, more recently, at the pressures the economic downturn was putting those who left for Ireland. Looking at the experience of other major immigrant-receiving countries (Canada, Denmark, Germany and Spain) was instructive as well, while some of our in-depth pieces – on the growth of African Pentecostalism or the life of Ireland’s first black mayor, Rotimi Adebari [see also here], for example – were useful ways of tracking the huge changes of the past 15 years.

How is the story changing? Is it becoming less important within the media - is it getting more difficult to get space in the newspaper?

I haven’t found it more difficult to find space, but there’s clearly an appetite for news and analysis of how the economic crisis is having an impact on immigrants and migration flows generally, so the focus has shifted naturally. Across the media, there’s less coverage of immigration-related material these days than there would have been last year, but that’s in large part due to the fact that economics has been the story of the past year, and everything else has been squeezed. It would be fairly natural for coverage to move into a new phase anyway – journalists can no longer get away with relying on stories that do little more than marvel at how Ireland has changed as a result of immigration – and perhaps it’s time for more sophisticated analysis of current and future challenges.

'From gay rights to global warming, the jury-selected collection represents the work of a diverse group of independent filmmakers, many of whom are under 21. The films are equally diverse in style and content, with documentaries, music videos, animations, experimental work and everything else in between. What all the films have in common is that they spark debate and action in 12 minutes or less.'

The website collects all previous films by subject: see here for those on immigration. The winner in the Immigration section this year was 'Immersion', a narrative docudrama, which can be viewed here. Read about the film here.

Amongst those I interviewed, one Angolan in the town of Kuito told how his father, a Portuguese settler, had left overnight in 1975, leaving his son (born to an Angolan woman, not the settler's wife, in one of the bairros) behind. They have never had contact since.

With independence, the country descended into civil war, from which it emerged briefly in 1992, to hold elections, which prompted a renewed and more ferocious war, and again, briefly, in 1994, and finally (and so far successfully) in 2002.

The most striking account of the country at war is Pedro Rosa Mendes's 'Bay of Tigers', an idiosyncratic account of this Portuguese journalist's journey across the country in the late 1990s. (I previously reviewed this, here; also available here.)

The war provoked huge population movements. The conflict moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers around the country, often leaving them abandoned in areas far from their homes when they were injured. Large numbers of Angolans sought refuge in Zambia in particular, largely associated with the UNITA movement. And hundreds of thousands were internally displaced. Some of these people resettled in peri-urban areas, particularly around the capital, Luanda (as documented by Development Workshop), which is now a hugely overburdened city whose bairros are apparently increasingly dangerous.

Others moved periodically, fleeing their villages as one army raided and returning when they could. In one village in Bié province, local elders told me how they had sometimes spent up to ten months living in the bush, seeking to avoid the bombardment and attacks of one or either armed forces, losing many of their community to sickness (such as malaria) or violence en route. And many sought refuge in temporary camps that arose around the inland towns such as Kuito and Huambo. In some of these sites that I visited, former camps have been formally converted into bairros, and the residents had replaced earlier hastily-built huts, often with roofs of plastic sheeting donated by aid agencies, with more sturdy and spacious (but still very poor) houses of adobe bricks and corrugated-iron roofs. In others, the camps were gone, the people returned to their places of origin (or absorbed into the towns), and markets had sprung up on the sites.

I worked in Angola in 2000-2001, and a large part of my motivation for returning, and filming, was to witness and document the free movement of people on the roads. During the war, most inland towns were effectively islands, with land travel between them both dangerous and logistically complex, due to appalling roads and lack of transport. Travelling across the country on private buses and taxis (both minibuses and jeeps - motorbike taxis are also very common, though hair-raising), I witnessed a population exhilaratingly on the move.

Though the country hugely lacks formal opportunities, Angolans are highly entrepreneurial and trade is thriving. On one journey, the women travelling in the taxi I was in (an overcrowded Hiace, which broke down half way to our destination) started discussing their trade: one had been to Dubai last year, taking advantage of the new direct flight from Luanda, to buy goods for resale in Angola, but said that Namibia was actually more cost effective. The main problem was cash: you could only bring $5000 into Dubai she said, and "$5000 is nothing for doing business". These are people who by Western standards could only be described as poor in opportunity and resources, with very limited access to such goods as formal education, employment opportunities, credit or home ownership, yet they by a constant routine of travelling and trading, bringing products to areas to which franchises and larger-scale traders have not yet penetrated, they leverage their limited resources to make small profits on very high turnovers.

But there was a yet more surprising aspect to the migrations that characterise Angola today. The town of Kuito in central Angola was long a proxy for the Angolan war itself: hugely war-damaged, ringed by vast camps of displaced people, and with a population who lived for the best part of a decade effectively besieged (there were two formal sieges of Kuito by UNITA during the 1990s, both successfully resisted, both at huge cost in lives, damage and trauma). Now, it is rapidly being rebuilt, and foremost amongst those both rebuilding, contributing and taking advantage of new opportunities are a great diversity of migrants.

There is huge Chinese investment in Angola - controversial, as in other countries in Africa, for the extent to which Chinese construction firms rely on their own, imported, labour, and for allegedly poor conditions for those workers (according to some sources, Chinese prison labour is common, with prisoners serving out their sentences in construction in Angola. In one private business in Kuito, I met an Angolan entrepreneur who had gone into partnership with a Chinese firm to run a small cement brick factory producing 2,600 bricks a day: the firm brought with it a staff of 12 labourers from China, apparently on five-year contracts. There were camps of Chinese, sometimes guarded by the military, dotted throughout the areas I passed through. It is commonly said that they do not mix greatly with the locals, though in Kuito there was tangible evidence that they do: as one young woman said to me, excitedly, "they've made [Angolan-Chinese] twins!" There are also Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans running shops and small businesses locally. (See these articles on BBC and New York Times for more on Angola-China links.)

The informal businesses of currency exchange (dollars for kwanza) and resale of mobile phone credit in Kuito are dominated by Congolese, amongst them some who are the Congo-born children of Angolan refugees or expats. These are reluctant to talk as (presumably) they are 'sans-papiers'; they complained of harassment by the local police.

Various people told me of 'Arab' businessmen and traders: I met young men from Khartoum who had rented a prominent shop space from a local and were importing various electro-domestic and household goods for retail.

There has been renewed migration from Portugal to Angola, with many of those who left in the 1970s, and/or their children, returning, and new immigrants seeking business opportunities, and this has been accompanied by extensive immigration from Brazil, whose government is reportedly notably sympathetic to Angola's.

Another group to return in numbers are the Cubans: Cuba was a notable supporter of the new Angolan state (run by the socialist MPLA) in its early years, which were characterised both by the war with the South Africa-backed-UNITA (Cuban military support was vital in the State's success in the 1988 battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest land battle in Africa since World War II), and with the attempted extension of the State, in which Cuban teachers and medics were notable. There are again large numbers of Cubans working in third level education and as doctors throughout the country. Other counties contributing such 'solidarity' workers include the Czech Republic and North Korea. International non-governmental organisations, amongst them the Irish charities Concern and Trócaire, retain a presence in the country, though it is greatly diminished since the end of the war, and less reliant on expatriate staff.

From my point of view, work now begins on the difficult task of selecting and editing footage, and seeking further funding to facilitate this. The eventual output will be a short documentary; however, ideally, an interim step would be to release short selections of footage online, either via a YouTube channel or a dedicated website, or even perhaps Facebook. The aim of this would be make the material more readily available, both to any interested in Angola (about which there is a great shortage of English-language media) and in particular to those who participated in the filming and their community. Internet rollout in Angola is proceeding apace, and all of the towns I was in have cyber cafés (though connections are erratic and bandwidth is even slower than that of Ireland).

Though traditionally Angolans have been guarded in their discussion of the war and politics, there is a new openness in the country following the successful elections of last year, which themselves followed four years of stable peace. I found people everywhere very willing to talk on camera about themselves and their country, and when I needed to film in public places (such as on buses), as soon as I described the nature of the project, people embraced it. Though there are huge problems (neglect of poor communities, corruption, incompetent administration and heavy-handed state centralisation are amongst them), there is a tangible sense in the inland towns that the country is staking a claim for recognition as a modernising nation, and they largely welcomed this outsider come to document that. I will post further updates as the project progresses.

The project is in part a collaboration with the South African photographer Guy Tillim, who has photographed Kuito extensively. There is a selection of his work here. The thumbnail above is taken from his series of portraits of displaced people in Kunhinga, outside Kuito town, in 2001.

As always, correspondence is welcome to migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org.

Colin Murphy

In an introduction, David Lynch explains the rationale behind the project as being, simply, 'a chance to meet these people'. 'It's so fascinating to look and listen to people,' he says.

As an example, here's their interview with Jim Carter in New Mexico.

This project isn't about migration in the sense in which it's commonly covered here, though invariably some of the stories told in it deal with migration across the US. I stumbled upon it while researching the camera I used on location in Angola recently (see last week's report for more), the Sony PD 150, which was used by David Lynch to make the feature, 'Inland Empire'. (He discusses the making of the film here.) However, in its emphasis on the integrity and inherent drama of 'ordinary' people's own stories, and in its smart use of online video and distribution, I felt it echoed some aspects of our own work at FOMACS and might be illuminating for readers.

Interview Project is also on Facebook.

Current TV was launched in 2005, and features a combination of user-generated content, driven to the TV network via its online sibling, Current.com, and in-house productions. All material is factual. Viewers/users can contribute both documentary segments (called 'pods') and ads (with the possibility of getting paid if their work airs on the network), and can organise and join groups to follow certain subjects online.

Though the diversity of media, programming strands, groups and ways of participating initially is at first a little confusing - with the venture having spawned its own lingo - there is clearly good content there, and the online platform is a dynamic and accessible one.

Current's News strand is here.

The news groups are here, with a short article on the groups here.

(I don't see a group devoted to migration/immigration issues - perhaps an opening there for America's Voice, or one of the US lobby groups, to tap the Current community.)

The network's in-house documentary strand is called Vanguard, and airs 30-minute programmes and shorter follow-up segments. There's a programme on migration from Mauritania to Europe here and a search list for material on migration here. And more on Vanguard here.

In Ireland, Current airs on Sky Channel 183.

Finally, the FAQ section will be invaluable to those, such as myself, outside of Current's target demographic (15-34) who therefore sometimes feel that these people are speaking a slightly different language. For example: 'Current pioneered the television industry's leading model of interactive viewer created content (VC2). Comprising roughly one-third of Current's on-air broadcast, this content is submitted via short-form, non-fiction video "pods". Viewer Created Ad Messages (VCAMs) are also open to viewers participation.'

O'Loughlin writes about the play's genesis here. There is some video of a schools workshop by the writer and actor here.

Mark Day has also made a documentary on the San Patricios: information here, and a YouTube clip here.

Venue details:
The Station House Theatre, Clifden, Galway, September 10th
Aras Inis Gluaire, Belmullet, Mayo, September 11th.
Backstage Theatre, Longford, September 12th.
Draoicht Arts Centre, Blanchardstown, October 16th.

Edit Kaldor is certainly someone who has lived a migrant's life: an émigré from Budapest to New York, now living and working between Amsterdam and Brussels. She brings 'Point Blank' to the Fringe. Here's some information on it

'The definitive spy-ware performance - a voyeur's paradise. Kaldor invites the 19-year-old Nada to present her large collection of photographs - for years she has been observing people, taking 'spy-photos' of them, capturing their private moments. The core of Nada's interest is to trace the various life-strategies that people follow. Driven by curiosity, she becomes witness to a wide range of - at times excessive - human behavior. Together with the audience she autopsies the images, implications and patterns that emerge. She aims to get a comprehensive overview and reach the ultimate conclusion: the vision of a life worth pursuing.

'Edit Kaldor was born in Budapest. At the age of 13 she immigrated with her mother to the United States, where she lived for ten years. After receiving her degree in English and Theater at Barnard College (New York) and University College (London), she worked for 6 years with Peter Halasz (Squat theater/Love theater, New York), collaborating on numerous theater performances and filmscripts. She then enrolled at DasArts (the postgraduate performing arts center in Amsterdam), where she started making her own theatre pieces, which soon received international acclaim. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam and Brussels and makes theater performances that tend to integrate the use of digital media, like Or Press Escape (2002), New Game (2004), Drama (2005), Point Blank (2007). In the past years she has been invited to perform her work in about 30 countries around the world.'

(Runs September 5-8 at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 6pm. Tickets here.)

'Down on Cow’s Lane you’ll see a battered Mercedes camper van sitting forlornly at the kerb. After you and 12 others cram into it, you’ll find two Polish migrant workers engaging in a faintly absurdist tragic-comedy. As you knock knees with them, the men, XX and AA, lurch from an existential debate about eating a can of dog-food to a boozy exchange of philosophies over a melancholy New Year’s drink. Based on Slawomir Mrozek’s famous 1974 play, this vivid play questions the motives of migration, from raw economic need to a much more nebulous yearning for freedom.' So they say.

That's at Cow's Lane from September 5 to 11, with two shows nightly at 17.30 and 19.30. Tickets here.

Curtis has made numerous influential documentary series for the BBC, specialising in the use of archive footage (Wikipedia has a list with links). More recently, he has been experimenting with online video and other innovations, specifically a collaboration with the pioneering British theatre company, Punchdrunk.

In the Sunday Times recently, Bryan Appleyard explained:

'Indulged by the BBC, Curtis nevertheless feels that many of his employer’s ideas — notably its obsession with “multi-platform”, involving the internet, mobiles, podcasts and so on — fail to correspond with reality. He’s a web sceptic, and the ideology of the internet is the subject of a future series. It occurred to him, though, that the BBC’s neophilia did suggest an entirely new way of making documentaries. Thanks to the iPlayer and other technologies, people can now watch programmes many times. Yet all Curtis’s training was based on one prime directive — keep it simple, they’ll only see it once. Now, why not let it be as complex as it needs to be?

'“I was marching round the BBC saying, ‘If we can watch films over again on iPlayer, then the form is going to change. We can start making more complicated, more involving films, of different lengths.’” So he suggested a series of experimental films, dispensing with most of the conventions of documentary-making. This being Curtis, they said yes, but then, when he delivered, they got jumpy and gave him his own website instead.'

The website doesn't appear to be fully functional at the moment. However, there are selections of Curtis's work on Google Videos (this link brings you to his recent five minute film, 'The Rise and Fall of the Television Journalist as Hero') and YouTube. There's a trailer for Curtis's latest film, 'It Felt Like a Kiss', with an article, on the Guardian site, here.

'It Felt Like a Kiss' involved a collaboration with Punchdrunk, and premiered as a theatre installation in Manchester earlier this summer. The Guardian's theatre critic, Michael Billington, reviews it here. (There are reports it may be transferring to London later this year.) I've written about Punchdrunk and the trend towards making theatre in unconventional spaces for my column in this coming Saturday's Irish Independent and will link to that here next week.  

The Sunday Times's Bryan Appleyard keeps a blog, 'Thought Experiments', here.

O'Toole writes:

'David Marcus’s passing reminds us of the extraordinary and disproportionately significant contribution to 20th-century Irish culture of the small Jewish community from which he sprang. That community, largely concentrated in Dublin, Cork and Belfast, was never much more than 4,000 strong. Much of it, moreover, had its origins in a single shtetl in Lithuania...

'The passing of David Marcus does remind us that the Jewish community in Ireland is in decline and that the riches it has created can no longer be taken for granted. And this in turn makes it appropriate to ask what the experience of this remarkable enrichment of Irish culture by a Diaspora community has to tell us for the future.

'Much of what it suggests is obvious but needs to be repeated. The first point is that paranoia about an indigenous culture being somehow adulterated or weakened by immigration has no relationship to reality. Like the Irish communities around the world, the Jewish community in Ireland significantly strengthened the indigenous culture, both directly through the work of its own members and indirectly through its influence on indigenous artists (both Joyce and Beckett, for example.) The second lesson is that crude notions of “assimilation” are wrong-headed for many reasons, one of them cultural. Why do immigrant communities make a disproportionately large cultural contribution? Because they are complicated. Simple assimilation seeks to flatten out complexities, to absorb all differences into an assumed norm (which is usually itself a fiction). This is the opposite of art, which lives in ambiguities and uncertainties and enriches the world by hovering between different realities. Immigrant communities need to be integrated (and the integration of Jews into Irish artistic, political, professional and intellectual life is a fine example to follow) but they should not be expected to cease to have another life of memories and meanings.'

Further resources:

O'Toole cites Dermot Keogh's Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Antisemitism and the Holocaust.

There is a website for the Irish-Jewish community here and a gallery of images of the Irish Jewish Museum here. The long-standing curator of the Jewish Museum, Raphael Siev, died last January. There are obituaries here and here.

On a related subject, O'Toole earlier this year wrote about a play by Conall Quinn that explored something of Ireland's Jewish history (albeit through a historical counter-factual), 'The Death of Harry Leon'. That article is here. I wrote about the play and its author here.

The reason it's of interest at all is largely due to two events this summer. The elections in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson were the first global stories to shape, and be shaped by, Twitter as a new medium. In both cases, Twitter broke stories. In the case of Iran, Twitter itself became a force in the development of that story, as it became a tool for mobilising dissent, as well as reporting it. In the case of Jackson's death, though Twitter obviously didn't affect it, it did set the tone for the initial coverage, which echoed that of the death of Lady Diana in its effusiveness and emotionalism. (For more on Twitter in Iran, see here, and for Twitter and Jackson's death, see here.)

So what is it? Twitter is basically a refinement of blogging - ie, the habit of writing short notes about your life and publishing them on the web. Essentially, it's designed for people who want to process greater quantities of trivial information, more quickly - though, as Iran proved, that information needn't be trivial. 

You can sign up for Twitter in about two minutes here. Wikipedia explains it here and there's an article about how it works, and where it comes from, here. Of interest to anyone also wrestling with the challenge of producing online video will be this short guide to Twitter produced by CommonCraft, specialists in making three-minute educational videos. (I was very impressed by the style and concision of this.)

So, to Migration Matters: what's happening on Twitter of interest to us? A quick search of Twitter for 'immigration' yields these results, showing that there's plenty of people tweeting about the subject. Immigrations is a particularly prolific tweeter.

A search for 'migration' in the 'Find People' section yields these results. MigrantHistory is the Twitter page for the NSW Migration Heritage Centre, in Australia. MigrationMuseum is the page for the Migration Museum in Adelaide.

Very curiously, this search seems to be pulling up entirely Australian tweeters. A search for 'migrant' leads me to Migrant Rights, the twitter page of this organisation in the Middle East.

In short, there's plenty of action on Twitter. That said, Migration Matters won't be tweeting just yet. We're busy enough getting to grips with the blogosphere. 

Some of the key points:

'If international economic conditions improve, large-scale Irish emigration could resume. There are some indications this may happen: emigration rates overall rose 25 percent between 2006 and 2008. However, net migration remains strongly positive.' 

'Sometimes, when a people are about to surrender a culture, outsiders come to its rescue. It was TS Eliot, a young man from St Louis, Missouri, who saved English poetry in the 1920s, abetted ably by other outsiders like Pound and Yeats. In the previous generation, the English novel had been reconfigured by an American named James and a Pole named Conrad – as it would be by Joyce in the next decades. All cultures which survive strongly do so because they are open to injections of new life from without.

'It would not, therefore, be altogether surprising if immigrant writers from Africa or Eastern Europe reopened a dialogue with Cúchulainn and Deirdre. They may well find inspiration and new meaning in these marginal figures, who exist still as buried memories of that landscape in which these newcomers are choosing to live...

'The Irish State was solidly established, but the cultural domain, in whose name the whole separatist agitation had been mounted, remained largely marginal, even tokenistic. The family, named as the basis of society in the 1937 Constitution, often functioned as an alternative to the social itself. By the last century’s end, despite the growth of the State, there had been a further shrinkage of the cultural “public sphere”. By then, most people owned cars in which they hurried through streets from one private experience to another. Gated communities emerged on the edge of towns, in which domestic dwellings got much bigger. It was often left to immigrants to become the most enthusiastic users of streets, parks, beaches, galleries – as if Old Ireland were retreating into privatised space. 

'To understand what a huge reversal this represented, one has only to think of Ulysses , in which “street people” , far from constituting a problem, are seen as vital to a full civic life. In the free circulation of persons through all of Dublin’s streets, a young poet can confront his own inner strangeness by taking a late-night bread-roll and coffee with a Jewish ad-canvasser. By the 1990s such meetings seemed less and less likely. Even though the streets of Ireland contained many migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, the literature produced in Tiger Ireland (with some honourable exceptions) seemed largely incurious about the Other. Instead of attempting a total portrait of a city or society, writers tended to focus on this or that sub-group...' Read the essay here.

Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD and author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (reviewed here).

'Pakistan has been encouraging more than 2.3 million people to return to homes in the Swat Valley and wider northwest region which they fled in April when the government launched an offensive to retake the area from Taliban control.

'Those who have returned - and officials estimate over 80 percent have now gone home - face unexploded ordnance, sporadic militant attacks and a lack of basic services . Hospitals and clinics were looted, vandalised or destroyed in the fighting, and many health staff have not yet returned.

'Government officials have dismissed concerns from aid workers that returnees are at risk while the army conducts its mopping up operations, and say people help the army hunt down remaining militants.Aid agencies have, by and large, applauded the government's response to this crisis.

'But some say the return process may have started too early, with huge numbers returning in a short space of time - more than 1.3 million people have returned since the beginning of July.

'Meanwhile a lot of the displaced have experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome and many women have stopped breastfeeding because of mental stress , says Maria-Luiza Galer, country director for Merlin. 

'Some families will remain displaced over the winter because of ongoing fighting near their homes, says Manuel Bessler, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The newsletter contains a list of contacts in the region for media seeking more information or a report.

Pakistanis rally to support the war-affected – AlertNet

Fresh clashes in Pakistan's Swat valley; dozens killed – Reuters

Amputees bear lifelong cost of Pakistan's conflict – Reuters

INTERVIEW-Having baby full of risks in Pakistani conflict zone - AlertNet

INTERVIEW-Over 80 pct of Pakistan's war-displaced return home– AlertNet

INTERVIEW-Some Pakistan war displaced must winter in camps-UN - AlertNet

A Clash of Principles? Humanitarian Action and the Search for Stability in Pakistan – Humanitarian Policy Group

The Swat Conflict: An Arc of Instability Spreading from Afghanistan to Central Asia and Xinjiang - The Jamestown Foundation // Global Terrorism Analysis

Reporter Hector Tobar wrote a sympathetic story about Mexican immigrants, and attracted an email calling him a 'crybaby' and citing statistics claiming that social services were being overwhelmed. He decided to check on the claims in the mail (which was being circulated as a chain mail). Here's an excerpt:

'What did I find? A stew made up for the most part of meaty exaggerations and spicy conjecture, mixed in with some giblets of truth. Two of the "stats" are the musings of a conservative op-ed writer. Another takes its information from a government "report" that is, in fact, a work of fiction...

'Here they are, from 1 to 10:

1. "40% of all workers in L.A. County are working for cash and not paying taxes. . . . This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card."

The source of this information seems to be a 2005 study by the Economic Roundtable on the informal economy in Los Angeles County. Its findings were reported in The Times and other papers.

But the chain-mail's author more than doubled the figures in that study, which estimated that 15% of the county workforce was outside the regulated economy in 2004. Illegal immigrants getting paid in cash, it said, probably made up about 9% of the workforce.

A later Economic Roundtable report, by the way, credited immigrants with keeping the local economy from shrinking in the 1990s.

2. "95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens . . . "

We traced this "fact" to a 2004 op-ed in The Times by Heather Mac Donald of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Mac Donald said "officers" told her about the warrants. She conceded that there were no such data in official reports but suggested the LAPD "top brass" was hiding the truth.

I called the LAPD's press office, which contacted the department's Fugitive Warrant Section. Officers confirmed that the statistics in item No. 2 and No. 3, which follows, don't exist.

3. "75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens."

We traced this figure to something circulating on the Internet under the name "the 2006 (First Quarter) INS/FBI Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants." The "report" contains similar figures for Phoenix, Albuquerque and other cities. But it isn't an actual government document. The INS ceased to exist in 2003, after the Department of Homeland Security was created...

4. "Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal, whose births were paid for by taxpayers."

Once again the "statistic" more than doubles the actual figures. According to a 2006 story in The Times, there were 41,240 Medi-Cal births to "undocumented women" in the county in 2004. They accounted for 27% of all births.'

It's a useful examination of how statistics can be distorted, misused and made up. Read the rest here.

Arts Audiences is a new Arts Council project being run by filmmaker and director of the Stranger Than Fiction documentary festival James Kelly. The project is looking at how the internet can be used by arts organisations to develop their audience ('Audience 2.0'...) and therefore is of potential interest to anybody producing creative media. More details here.

A post by James led me to this video, 'Social Media Revolution', on YouTube, which should be mandatory watching for anybody who isn't sure quite what Facebook is and why anybody bothers blogging. The video is a spin off of Erik Qualman's 'Socialnomics'.

More details on the figures cited, including sources, is here. The comments suggest that (as you might have guessed from the video) there is a level of slippage between the original data and the claims being made in the video. Take it as a piece of polemic rather than hard science. I think it's usefully provocative.

Arts Audience has some related, Irish-based information here. One impressive figure cited is that the Barbican arts centre in London generated £110,000 in ticket sales through a single mail shot to its email list (of 100,000 names) - a pound per email.

Searching for migrant-issues organisations utilising social media brought me to this article from the Toronto City News about LoonLounge, a Canadian initiative that describes itself as an immigration and settlement online community'.

('LoonLounge was created to improve the Canadian immigration process for the millions of people involved... By facilitating communication and centralizing member information, the purpose of LoonLounge is to empower Canadian residents, immigrants, and potential immigrants with the knowledge we need to build a stronger Canada together.')

There's clearly much more out there, though. Readers with their own experiences of using social media for either producing and distributing media, or for organising, are welcome to send on any links or information. Email me at migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org. As always, new readers can subscribe to Migration Matters here to receive the weekly email update.

Public Architecture practices and proselytises for 'pro bono architecture'. The firm 'puts the resources of architecture in the service of the public interest. We identify and solve practical problems of human interaction in the built environment and act as a catalyst for public discourse through education, advocacy and the design of public spaces and amenities,' they say.

'Can't sophisticated design serve social justice? It can, and it should. The distinction between progressive design and popular design is a class prejudice—and a red herring. Public Architecture brings the values of design—formal innovation, intellectual currency, critical appraisal of the status quo—to bear on real problems in our communities.'

Their Day Labor Station 'is a simple, flexible structure [to be erected at] informal day labor locations. It is a sustainably-designed project that utilizes green materials and strategies and exists primarily, if not completely, off-the-grid. It provides a sheltered space for the day laborers to wait for work as well as greater community amenities and resources. Our design is a responsive one, addressing the needs and desires of the day laborers themselves, as our clients. As such, the structure will be flexible enough to serve in various capacities, including as a meeting space or classroom.

'Despite day laborers' contributions to key economic sectors of our society, they receive little in return. Their role in the informal economy has forced them to occupy spaces meant for other uses, such as street corners, gas stations, and home improvement store parking lots. A relatively small number of officially sanctioned day labor centers have appeared in recent years, but the previously mentioned informal gathering sites remain the norm. These sites are far from being ideal; their presence in spaces designated for other uses means that they often lack even the most basic of amenities (shelter, water, toilet facilities, etc).

'Conscious of the controversy surrounding day laborers, our goal is not to cast an opinion about public policy. Instead, we seek to fulfill our professional responsibility: to give day laborers a more dignified environment and to advance the debate about day laborers and the spaces they inhabit.

'The Day Labor Station project was introduced as part of the Design for the Other 90% exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York... However, this project is intended to be more than just a museum piece; we are actively working to locate a day labor site, which can serve as a permanent home for the first full prototype. Ultimately, Day Labor Stations will be deployed across the country.'

There is a gallery of images here, a radio debate on day labourers from NPR here, and a list of affiliated firms and organisations here.

Liz Ogbu is the member of Public Architecture due to speak in Johannesburg. She has an essay on the Day Labor Station project here. She writes: 'In proposing the Day Labor Station, Public Architecture is identifying the day laborer, not a municipal entity or a nonprofit, as its client. As such, we acknowledge their individual and collective voices: their realities, their needs, and their desires. The social structure that forms the underpinnings of their lives is not viewed as an appendage that will adapt to whatever structure is built, but instead an armature on which the design is based. With this perspective and with further research, and creative exploration, Public Architecture seeks to produce an actual product that provides an institutional spatial visibility to the day laborers and engages the debate around their presence in a new light.'

The Oromo Liberation Front has been fighting for self-determination for the Oromo people against what they call "Abyssinian colonial rule" since the early 1970s. It has been designated a terrorist organization by the Ethiopian government. See Wikipedia and this and other reports on Refworld, which is UNHCR's online information database.

I spoke to Lepage during the week for my theatre column for the Irish Independent, which I will post here once published. In the meantime, he referenced a recent French production called 'Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées)' which played in New York in 2005. This was a six-hour theatre work by Ariane Mnouchkine's Paris-based Théâtre du Soleil that explored the phenomenon of asylum and refuge, and Lepage said it was extraordinary.

According to the New York Times, the show was 'based on letters, interviews and testimonials collected by Ms. Mnouchkine and assistants from several years of visits to refugee camps and detention centers in Sangatte, France; Sydney, Australia; Auckland, New Zealand; and Indonesia. It was developed, as are most of Ms. Mnouchkine's productions, slowly and painstakingly, with the cast of 36 drawing on their own experiences in improvisational workshops. (Ms. Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil collective is a thoroughly international organization, with 25 nationalities represented.)

'The arduous process involved in the show's creation imbues it with the kind of specificity and vividness you normally find only in documentary film...

'Ms. Mnouchkine and her remarkable assembly of artists evoke the struggles and suffering of their subjects with a simplicity and compassion that allows the production to transcend its few aesthetic miscalculations. Despite its broad scope, "Caravansérail" is a profoundly intimate theatrical work that brings us into uncomfortable communion with the everyday anguish of men and women fleeing oppression and violence at home, only to discover that the indifference of the wider world can be equally brutalizing.'

According to the Guardian, 'Le Dernier Caravansérail opens with a vast storm, an army of stage-hands agitating an immense billowing stage-cloth. We are, a slide informs us, on the Kyrgyzstan/ Kazakhstan border. A tiny boat, packed with people who have paid their dues to smugglers, is attempting to navigate the crossing. The wind threatens to whip them out of the boat. Some founder. One makes it to the other side, only to be shot by a smuggler. He hasn't paid.

'What follows draws on hundreds of taped conversations, the migrants' stories of family, fanatic oppression back home, dangers in the camps, on railway sidings and on the road. These tales are brief, laconic and often surreal. An amputee in Sangatte receives his metal crutch and plays "All the lonely people" on it like a flute. A beggar slumped beneath a telephone on a Moscow street picks through his old medals: "Chechnya ... Afghanistan ..." A young woman returns from a demonstration to a living room in Teheran. She screams when her father hugs her: her back has been whipped raw by the faithful. Talibans cluster salaciously around a house in Kabul where a couple are making love.

'These scenes are played by a company of actors who, like the stories, originate from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Russia. They play what dialogue there is in their own or each other's language, subtitled. The French philosopher Hélène Cixous accompanied Mnouchkine on her visits to the camps, and tried to write a play based on the stories. But that text felt too constructed and "aesthetic". In the end it was set aside, and the speeches and scenes were improvised.

'Le Dernier Caravansérail doesn't go in for economic or political overviews; instead, it confines itself to the real experiences of the actors and the inhabitants of refugee camps. The recorded voices of the original tellers punctuate the action, and what they say is striking. One woman, who was denied education in a fundamentalist theocracy, insists: "Both women and men must study. It's not right that only men study. In our religion, knowledge is a matter for all Muslims. In our religion, it's said that one must study and study as much as one can. We have to go on studying right to the edge of the grave." Such voices give the play the immediacy and intimacy of a radio documentary.'

There is another account of it here.

Rimini Protokoll have previously brought some intriguing shows to Dublin. 'Cargo Sofia' took place in the back of a truck as it rolled through Dublin's Docklands, and its Bulgarian drivers told of their lives on the road. 'Call Cutta in a Box' took place, essentially, on the phone, as the audience had individual conversations with employees of an Indian call centre. I wrote about that here.

The company will participate in a post-show discussion on October 7, and the Festival is hosting a panel discussion on documentary theatre in the Samuel Beckett Theatre on October 10 at 4.30pm.

The 130-page report provides data on migration, remittances, employment and poverty rates for immigrants and the native-born alike; and examines the policy changes some countries have enacted to suppress migrant inflows, encourage departures (including through recent “pay-to-go” plans) and protect labor markets for native-born workers.

The report also examines internal migration in China, and how the recession affected the 70 million rural migrant workers who returned to their hometowns for the 2009 Chinese New Year, in what amounts to the world’s largest annual movement of people.

The report can be download here. There's a related story on the BBC here.

The Voice of Witness project is a series of books of oral history from crisis zones, which was inspired by Dave Eggers's collaboration with Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng in 'What is the What'.

The Voice of Witness site leads me to this interview with the editor of the volume 'Out of Exile' in an attractive online cultural magazine, 'The Rumpus', and to this trailer for a HBO documentary on child migration, 'Which Way Home'.

Also on the site are links for Dave Eggers's latest book, a documentary account of the struggle of a Muslim family from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. There's an interview with Eggers on altmuslim.com here. There are reviews of the book, which sounds fascinating, here. From Salon:

'Zeitoun is a story about the Bush administration's two most egregious policy disasters — the War on Terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina — as they collide with each other and come crashing down on one family. Eggers tells the story entirely from the perspective of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun.. At first, as a reader, I felt some resistance to this tactic — could the Zeitouns possibly be as wholesome and all-American as Eggers depicts them? — but the sheer momentum, emotional force and imagistic power of the narrative finally sweep such objections away.'

The Law Reform Commission has included aspects of Irish immigration law in its Third Programme of Law Reform, for 2008-2014, which is available here. Under the heading, 'Legal Aspects of New and Emerging Members of Irish Society (Reunification Procedures and Citizenship)', the commission will 'specific issues arising from the new and emerging patterns of migration to Ireland. The project will focus in particular on the extent to which family reunification procedures and the related issue of citizenship are consistent with international law and best practice.'

This has been facilitated by ArtPolonia, a Polish-Irish cultural exchange centre in Dublin. ArtPolonia has just moved into a new venue, the new Centre for Creative Practices. For Culture Night, tonight, the centre will celebrate with an open day from 12pm to 11pm, with a programme of workshops and talks. There's more on culture night here.

Incidentally, the recent Polish production in the Dublin Fringe festival, 'Emigrants', was reviewed here. Meanwhile, I wrote a piece on Gerardo Naumann's play in the Fringe, 'A Useful Play', which used 'post-dramatic' techniques to explore the story of a Bolivian immigrant to Argentina, here.

It's an intriguing idea, which would seem to have some potential for a 'viral' impact, with members of the public uploading their own videos, but the campaign does not appear to have got much traction, with just a dozen videos on YouTube. 

The campaign also included these written contributions on refuge from established authors.

One component is the Home Project, a project led by curator Ian Russell and playwright Ursula Rani Sarma, to explore the concept of 'home' against the changing landscape of the past, present and future of the inner-city Clanbrassil Street area in Dublin.

The words for the project are taken from a series of creative writing workshops run by Sarma with 10-12 year olds. A postcard was designed and was distributed throughout Dublin, and in July, a selection of statements about 'home' were chosen and stenciled onto both footpaths of Clanbrassil Street. (See the photos on flickr here.) The children's statements were collated in a simple booklet, which can be downloaded here.

Amongst those contributing are Abdi Salem Taher Haji, who writes that 'home is the place where you live with your family', and quotes his father: 'I used to live in a small village in Somalia. I like living near my son's school. Home is one place because I only have one.'

Placing Voices - Voicing Places explores what heritage means to people today and how heritage has a central role to play in the integration of a multicultural Ireland. It is a collaboration between University College Dublin, CREATE and Dublin City Council, bringing together archaeologists, artists, policy analysts, local government officials and sociologists to work with the diverse communities of inner-city Dublin in articulating and exploring the many heritages that are part of their everyday lives. 

Another of its publications is a zine on the history of Clanbrassil Street, which can be downloaded here. The latest issue of Create's newsletter can be downloaded here. It features an interview with Tadhg O'Keefe on histories and Heritages beyond the surface.

One such is Africa Media Network, which describes itself as a 'networking community for people who are professionally involved in the African Media Industry'. You can sign up more or less immediately, and then contribute blog posts and start discussions. One discussion from earlier this year was on human trafficking, anticipating the impact of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

This network is hosted by Ning, a platform for creating your own special-interest social network. A quick search for social networks on Ning dealing with migration issues throws up Team Grassfire, a US network providing 'a place for conservatives to get informed, connected and engaged', and (for balance) freeDimensional, an international activists & arts community. Perhaps Migration Matters should be amongst them?

Another network of potential interest, though not using the social network form and somewhat clunky in its web design, is the AfricaNews network of African reporters. A search for contributions on migration issues produced this list.

Let us know about any interesting examples of social networks out there. Email migrationmatters[at]fomacs.org.

A search today for 'immigration' brought up these results, amongst them (for example), a written answer by Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern to a question on an unnamed individual's application for asylum. You can receive email alerts every time a particular person speaks, or a key word (eg. asylum) is said in the Oireachtas.

The site is still in beta (ie. trial), and does not feature the same range of features as the British equivalent, on which it is based, TheyWorkForYou. This allows much more comprehensive analysis of individual MPs' records. This site is run by mysociety.org, a British charitable organisation that 'builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives (and) teaches the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives'. More about their work here.

Their mission statement is worth quoting at length: 'We are living in an age of upheaval, institutional collapse, and historic unforeseen change. And journalism is not immune. The only “business” protected by the Constitution, the business of informing the public, has been eviscerated in recent years. The role that journalism plays in a functioning democracy—informing the public and holding the powerful accountable—is at serious risk. Major issues affecting the very fabric of this nation and the world go uninvestigated. As we struggle to find solutions to two wars, climate change, immigration, a recession, and myriad other global issues, a thriving media is more important than ever.

'CIR is working to ensure that high-quality, credible, unique journalism does not die, but flourishes. Our innovative new model relies on in-depth collaboration with other news organizations, journalists, public policy organizations and universities, and fully exploits new storytelling technologies, to provide citizens—local and global—with critical, actionable information that impacts their lives. Important to this model is our search for new revenue streams that can help sustain high-quality journalism in a digital age.'

A portfolio of CIR investigations is here. Amongst them is a story from June this year, 'Immigration Courts Make Do With Limited Resources Despite Mounting Caseloads'. This was a collaboration with truthdig.com, a 'progressive' current affairs web magazine. Truthdig's list of stories on immigration is here

Cited in the above article is another piece in The Nation on 'secret courts' exploiting immigrants. The Nation's list of stories tagged Migration & Immigration is here.

Renowned director Agnieszka Holland will take part in a Q&A on Saturday 24th, after a screening of 'Copying Beethoven' (trailer here), her most recent (2006) film. Holland received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film for her 1985 film, 'Angry Harvest', about a Jewish woman on the run in World War II. Her best-known work is 'Europa Europa' (1991), based on the biography of Solomon Perel, a Jewish teenager who fled Germany for Poland following Kristallnacht in 1938, but who subsequently found himself enrolled in the Hitler Youth. It became one of the most successful German films released in the US, and won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (according to Wikipedia). Holland collaborated with Krzysztof Kieślowski on the screenplay for his film, 'Three Colors: Blue'. Kieślowski's 'Decalogue X' (1988) will screen on Sunday 25th.

The programme is here and booking is here.

As they put it, they make 'riveting talks by remarkable people free to the world'. Currently on the home page is a talk by a remarkable writer, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie. Adichie draws on her own experience as part of the diaspora to speak of the hegemony of the Western worldview, the need to tell diverse stories and 'the danger of a single story'. Her talk is here.

TED held a conference in 2007 on the theme of 'Africa: The Next Chapter'. Those talks are here.

Of general interest, the site has a selection of short videos, 'Ted in three minutes', here and the top ten talks are here.

Earlier this year, director Donal Scannell and I joined Brahim and her Spanish group, Gulili Mankoo, on tour in Spain (during which we stopped off at the Roman ruins in Merida and captured this spontaneous performance - also posted below); more recently, we were in London for the African Music Festival (for which the Independent interviewed Brahim). Last week, we travelled with her to visit her family in the refugee camps, on her first visit home in three years.

Brahim’s mother was pregnant when she fled Laayoune in Western Sahara, with her family, in 1975, following the Moroccan invasion. (The BBC's overview of this conflict is here.) She was born in the refugee camps, and grew up there, before being sent to Cuba for secondary school, along with many of her peers. She refused the option of pursuing third level in Cuba, and returned home to the camps, where she started to perform, taking first prize in an annual singing competition. She moved to Spain to pursue a singing career; there was an early hiatus, during which she quit, but when she started singing again more recently, she quickly found a measure of recognition and success both in Spain and on the world music circuit.

Her digital release ‘Mi Canto’ topped the world music chart on emusic.com and she has rapidly acquired status as a cultural representative of the Saharawi people, alongside the renowned singer Mariem Hassan.

Scannell recorded Brahim’s September concert in London, and on Thursday last, it was given a public screening in one of the refugee camps, in a community hall. Though this screening was a largely spontaneous outcome of the ongoing process of making the documentary, it seemed to be one of some significance. Till now, Brahim had not had the opportunity to raise her profile, or to play her music, in the refugee camps. (Travel to the camps is complicated by cost – there are no direct flights – and by visa issues.) The public screening, which was coordinated by the Polisario Ministry of Culture, gave her the opportunity to firmly introduce her music to Polisario’s senior members and the Ministry of Culture itself, and to the Saharawi public.

The screening was publicised the previous night in the typical form in the camps – a loudspeaker announcement from a Ministry van. The screening took place in the morning, and the audience was almost entirely women. Those we spoke to spoke of being very proud of their compatriot, and of being excited to see Saharawi music being blended with foreign, modern influences, such as rock and blues. The official response was very enthusiastic, and they hope to replicate the screening in the many community halls throughout the camps, and hoped to broadcast it on Polisario radio and on the recently started tv station.

There is a skeleton market economy in the camps, which has arisen only in recent years, and there is no electricity supply: people use solar panels to charge car batteries, which they use to power lights and basic appliances such as a music player. Thus there is no formal market for distribution of music. What has arisen instead, though, is a bootleg, digital market: digital music is downloaded onto mobile phones, often from privately-run kiosks which also offer phone services, and people then pass these files from mobile to mobile via bluetooth.

Accordingly, Scannell made a low-res version of the Merida music video of Brahim and gave it to Brahim’s younger family members; as we left the camps, this was already seemingly hopping from phone to phone, and seemed to have the potential for going ‘viral’, providing perhaps as much potential exposure as the more formal distribution and publicity of screenings and broadcasts.

There is an annual film festival in the camps, and Scannell was encouraged to present his film on Brahim for inclusion next year. In the meantime, Brahim has been nominated for an international human rights prize. More on these to follow.

A number of Brahim’s songs are versions of poems in Hassania, her native language (a dialect of Arabic) by her grandmother, an acclaimed Saharawi poet, Ljadra Mint Mabruk. There is an article on her (in Spanish) here and a video of her reciting here. Brahim’s myspace page is here.

Scannell received Irish Aid ‘seed funding’ (via the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund) to develop the documentary. (The seed funding strand is unusual – and very useful – in tv production funding, as it provides small amounts up front to allow a producer get started on a project, with almost no strings attached.)

Incidentally, Scannell came to Brahim’s music through that of the Touareg group Tinariwen, leading figures in 'desert blues'.

This time next week I'll file a further report on the interplay between migration and media issues in the Saharawi camps. Normal Migration Matters service - regular, shorter reports, will resume thereafter. As always, new readers can sign up for the email newsletter version here.

Colin Murphy

‘Africa’s last colony’ was how one of the authorities on the Western Sahara in English, Toby Shelley, described the country, in his sharp and accessible book, 'Endgame in the Western Sahara'.

Having reported from the colony/country/disputed territory last year (in an article and a radio report), I had the opportunity to visit the territory of the Western Saharan government-in-exile, the Polisario Front earlier this month. Their ‘territory’ encompasses a series of refugee camps in Algeria, in the desert near the Algerian city of Tindouf.

‘Desert’ is in no way a euphemism: is unremittingly hot and utterly barren, compelling and very beautiful in its way, but land that feels viscerally hostile to human beings. Yet the Sahrawi people have lived there – not through choice – for 34 years and counting, and have built a functioning (though perhaps barely) polity there.

One of the ways they have managed to do so, it seemed to me, has been through using migration as a strategy for development and empowerment. The Sahrawis are a nomadic people by origin and nomadism is still practiced to some extent form the camps, with people leaving the camps for periods in the ‘free zone’ that is the area of Western Sahara occupied by the Polisario (east of the berm built by Morocco securing their occupation of the core territory). In the years since their exile, however, it might be fair to speak of a globalised nomadism.

The Sahrawis are a highly travelled people. Young people go abroad for secondary education, and often for third: Cuba and Algeria appear to be the leading destinations. During the week I was there, a van drove through the camps at night broadcasting public announcements via a loudspeaker: “Children going to study in Libya are to be assemble with their bags in the morning.”

Some Sahrawis travel to Mauritania, and from there can travel into the ‘occupied territory’ of Western Sahara – though this is officially disallowed by the Polisario. Others, like the singer Aziza Brahim, obtain Algerian passports (with the backing of the Polisario) and can travel internationally. There are large numbers of Sahrawis living in Spain, where many have obtained residency and citizenship through former colonial ties.

According to some sources, those who have gone to Cuba for their education - such as Aziza Brahim - have often found it difficult to reintegrate into life in the camps upon their return. Students who study closer to home maintain closer contact and have better access to the few formal opportunities in the camps, in administration and basic services. Those who go to Cuba often spend five years and more away from home without visiting, and typically form very tight bonds amongst themselves. In the past, some of these have subsequently not resettled into life in the camps, and have sought opportunities abroad. One group of young intellectual emigrés formed a group called the Generación de la Amistad Saharaui to promote their culture internationally (modelled on the pre-civil war Spanish Generación de la Amistad); more recently, some of these have been 'reincorporated' into the official Polisario international network and appointed as cultural ambassadors. They keep a blog here.

With regard to media, the camps are poorly served. There was no evident newspaper or magazine circulation; there is a Polisario radio station and a recently inaugurated and extremely basic tv station - the station is, however, a smart user of limited resources; we met one correspondent at the airport, who travelled on his own, filming his own reports and filing them each evening over the internet. Internet access was very sparse, though the proliferation of mobile phones suggests that, once data packages become more accessible, internet access will quickly become widespread, which is likely to provoke innovative usage of already existing online media and have interesting cultural effects. 

Internationally, Spain is the sole western country that pays extensive attention to Western Sahara. An online campaign, Todos Por El Sahara, has been supported by the actor Javier Bardem and singer Manu Chao have recently supported a campaign, Todos Con El Sahara. An indicator of the relative indifference to or ignorance of the story is the fact that the New York Times online lists just ten articles in ten years on the story. The most recent, last year, focussed on the controversial issue of criticism of the Polisario regime by former refugees in Algeria who fled to Western Sahara.

October 16 marked the anniversary of the International Court of Justice ruling in 1975 that Western Sahara had the right to self determination, as was noted in a letter to the Guardian. Less politically, this travel blog post on the Guardian leads me to Listen to Africa, the online record of a two year journey across Africa by bicycle, recording African sounds and voices, which crossed through Western Sahara earlier this year. Enjoy.

Also upcoming from ArtPolonia: Lutosphere experimental music concert, November 30, Liberty Hall Theatre. Poland’s most celebrated musicians present their daring and innovative interpretation of works by Witold Lutosławski, Poland’s most renowned composer of the 20th century.

An 'x-ART market' will take place in the Centre for Creative Practices from December 4 to 20, with arts, crafts, music and performance. Artists interested in presenting their works for sale at the market should email info@artpolonia.org by November 22.

I wrote about the show in the Irish Independent; it was also reviewed in the Irish Times. Brokentalkers' Facebook page is here. 'Silver Stars' has been invited to play at the Under the Radar festival in New York in January. I have little doubt that, once the American press gets word of it, it will become a sensation. In fact, the show is absolutely un-sensationalist; but the combination of its narratives of emigration to the US and self-empowerment with its sexual politics, Irish origins and sensitive deployment of cutting edge theatrical practice seems to me likely to be very well received in New York.

The festival is titled 'Rucksacks and Suitcases: Mutant Geographies' and the various events tackle the themes of travelling, exile, migration, tourism, pleasure traveling, journeys, and travels to the past and to the future, with writers from Cuba, Chile, Ireland, Argentina, Germany and Spain. Click here to download the programme. The festival runs from Thursday 5th to Saturday 7th. Other events are:

Thursday, 6.30 pm: Rucksacks and suitcases: opening talk

Friday, 10.30 am: A suitcase for an island: talk

Friday, 2.30 pm: Screening of the documentary, 'Even the Olives Are Bleeding' about the Irish in the Spanish Civil War

Saturday, 12 pm: Return and writing: literary brunch.

The Cervantes Institute is a Spanish government-funded institute to promote and spread the Spanish language and Spanish and Hispanic-American culture. Its head office is located in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, author of 'Don Quixote'.

1. A FRONTEX (EU borders agency) report on 'The impact of the global economic crisis on illegal migration to the EU'. The report seeks to draw conclusions based on the decrease in the numbers of undocumented migrants reaching the EU (or attempting to do so) and the economic crisis in the EU leading to fewer job opportunities.

2. 'Spooked! How not to prevent violent extremism' by the Institute of Race Relations in the UK. An excellent report and critique of the counter-terrorism Prevent programme from the IRR, according to Statewatch. To quote: 'There is strong evidence that a significant part of the Prevent programme involves the embedding of counter-terrorism police officers within the delivery of local services, the purpose of which seems to be to gather intelligence on Muslim communities, to identify areas, groups and individuals that are ‘at risk’ and to then facilitate interventions, such as the Channel programme, as well as more general police engagement with the Muslim community, to manage perceptions of grievances.'

"The atmosphere promoted by Prevent is one in which to make radical criticisms of the government is to risk losing funding and facing isolation as an ‘extremist’, while those organisations which support the government are rewarded. This in turn undermines the kind of radical discussions of political issues that would need to occur if young people are to be won over and support for illegitimate political violence diminished. The current emphasis of Prevent on depoliticising young people and restricting radical dissent is actually counter-productive because it strengthens the hands of those who say democracy is pointless.'

3. An online news report on Der Spiegel on the acquittal of the Cap Anamur crew in Italy. On 7 October 2009, a Sicilian court acquitted the former chair of the human rights organisation Cap Anamur, Elias Bierdel, his former captain, Stefan Schmidt, and the first officer of the ship, Wladimir Dschkewitsch. In 2004, the three had rescued 37 refugees off the Italian coast from distress at sea and helped them to land in Sicily. They were then accused of and prosecuted for assisting in illegal entry. They faced the possibility of four years imprisonment and a fine of 400.000 EUR. The organisation Cap Anamur and the German asylum rights organisation Pro Asyl had started an international campaign for justice to acquit the three and have reacted positively to the decision.

4.'The Privatization of Immigration Detention: Towards a Global View', a working paper by the Global Detention Project, a Geneva based institution that seeks to map the use of detention as a response to immigration. Readers may also have missed this quote from Silvio Berlusconi, featured on the homepage of the Global Detention Project: 'I think it is much easier to examine individual situations in the country of origin, otherwise they [irregular immigrants] come here and go to a camp which, I should not be saying this, is very similar to a concentration camp.'

Show Racism the Red Card is a campaign seeking to harness the profile of sport to educate against racism, and supporting programmes encouraging integration through and within sport. One current initiative is the Online Anti-racism Creative Competition, which seeks to engage schools and youth services through producing multi-media artwork and entering it online. There is an education pack with DVD, clips from which are also available online, and young people are asked to produce a piece of art - whether a painting, photo or written article - on the themes of the DVD. There is another short video here, an example of a video entry to the competition. There's also a downloads section on the site, and a Facebook page. More on this subject to follow.

The theatre director Peter Sheridan was in the audience and, shortly before the end, interrupted the performance to shout out 'Tolerance, tolerance' and left. There were other walkouts. Sheridan and another woman talked to Duffy on air, and argued that the play apparently had the effect of simply repeating (and thereby endorsing) the sentiments of the characters, rather than satirising them. 'When you're dealing with material this provocative and this incendiary you'd better be absolutely sure that you've got the balance right, and this show hasn't got the balance right,' said Sheridan. Utton came on air to defend the show.

Utton has been touring the show for over a decade, including playing three times in Berlin, and has received strong reviews, including in Edinburgh. Utton was interviewed at some length on Newstalk's 'Culture Shock' programme last night (which doesn't appear to be available to listen back), and came across as a sensitive and thoughtful writer-performer. There's a video clip of the play, which I haven't yet seen, here.

An interview with Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on 'straddling continents'.

An interview with Anita Diaman, author of 'Day After Night' which tells the fictional story of a group of young women who escaped Nazi Europe for Palestine, only to be detained in a British run camp for illegal immigrants.

A report on Mike Kim's book 'Escaping North Korea', the story of Kim's efforts to help North Korean refugees cross the border into China. Kim was also interviewed on BBC World Service's 'Outlook' programme. See also Kim's own site.

Dimitrios Pandermalis has been Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki since 1979 and is internationally known for his lectures on classical archaeology. From 1996 to 2000 he was a national member of the Greek parliament.

The new Museum of the Acropolis, designed by Bernard Tschumi, the renowned Swiss architect opened in June this year, and is located 300 yards south of the Acropolis hill, where the 134-year-old original museum still stands. The new glass-marble structure faces the Acropolis, providing a view of the Parthenon Temple and other key structures. The museum is mounted on roller bearings so the structure and contents will be protected from earthquake tremors. The project was a multicultural enterprise drawing on glass crews from Germany and the UK and concrete workers from Albania, India, Russia and Greece. The new museum echoes the ascent to the Acropolis with the top floor displaying the friezes of the Parthenon. Copies have been put in place of the parts of the friezes that are housed at the British Museum, the original artworks having been taken to London in 1801, by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin.

There's an interview with Pandermalis, along with extensive other information on Elgin, on the site Elginism, and video of a talk by Pandermalis on Fora.tv, 'the web's largest collection of unmediated video drawn from live events, lectures, and debates going on all the time at the world's top universities, think tanks and conferences'.

Booking contact details: (01) 4120939; office@irishmuseums.org; www.irishmuseums.org.

'Some days after the Perejil shipwreck, a little more information surfaced. There were 19 men and 17 women from west Africa on board, with four babies born during the journey, in Morocco, whose age was between one and three years. Out of 17 women, at least eight were pregnant. 16 were Nigerian, aged between 15 and 25. One of the young women was a 22-year-old Guinean (Guinea Bissau). The majority of the men were Nigerian, except for two Senegalese and a Guinean (Guinea Bissau). The dinghy was heading towards Cádiz. At three in the morning, the first call for help went out. Someone living in Spain received the call and warned the emergency service. When the rescue services arrived it was too late; the dinghy had capsized at sea. Eight corpses were recovered (a 25-year-old Nigerian man and seven young women, Nigerian as well, aged between 16 and 24, four of whom were pregnant). There were 11 survivors: seven young Nigerian men and four Nigerian women. Those missing at sea were 17. The survivors were taken back to Morocco, to Tangiers harbour, from where they were expelled the following day and accompanied back to the Algerian border, to Oujda, from where it was assumed that they had entered Morocco.'

I reported from Oujda on a similar story last year, and later, in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, on the north Moroccan coast, heard more accounts of the long and dangerous journeys made to get into Europe.

Also on the Fortress Europe website, which now houses a substantial multimedia archive:

The Northern Jungle. Reportage from Calais and London. A documentary by Vincent Nguyen and Jean-Sebastien Desbordes (in French), with the voices of Eritrean refugees, trucks drivers, smugglers and social workers met along the route.

A review of border deaths in the first six months of 2009

Sent back to Libya: Exclusive Photos from Paris Match of the return of 90 people, shipwrecked while crossing the Mediterranean, to Tripoli by the Italian coastguard patrol boat that rescued them.

'By working alongside established rural film venues,' they say, 'we hope to establish a broader platform to expose issues as well as challenge conceptions of the African continent and African cinema.'

The programme for the full festival, which is the biggest African film festival in the UK, is here.

Of particular interest is the film 'Come un uomo sulla terra' (Like a man on earth). According to the blurb: 'In 2005, a law student from Addis Ababa fled Ethiopia to escape violent political repression, setting off for Libya across the desert border. Once in Libya, he attempted to make his way to the Mediterranean, only to be caught by one of the numerous criminal gangs that control the route. After many ordeals he was betrayed by the gang to the Libyan police, and deported back to Ethiopia. Having eventually escaped to a refugee camp in Rome, this film is his attempt to bring together his own story with those of the many other refugees who have suffered in their attempts to escape brutality at home, stories of great suffering and great dignity. 'Come un uomo sulla terra' is a journey of pain and dignity, through which Dagmawi Yimer voices his memories of unthinkable human suffering to denounce a tragic political and humanitarian situation.

More on the film, including a clip, on its website, here.

Professor Alessandro Triulzi from the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, who worked as a producer and researcher on the film, gave a seminar on the research context of the film at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

The festival's Facebook page has more information on individual films and activities.

Migration Matters is an online report on how the media covers and documents migration issues. The newsletter contains a précis of the week's reports, and is published each Friday.

Migration Matters is a project of FOMACS, the Forum on Migration and Communications. It is edited by Colin Murphy.

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]fomacs.org.

Boatloads of asylum seekers headed for Australia made headlines nearly a decade ago. The response of the government then was to process them on island territories or persuade Pacific Island countries like Nauru to accept them while their claims were being processed (see the Australia country profile).

A new wave of asylum seekers in the past year, most of them from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, has set off a new public outcry. The issue recently reached a boiling point when the Oceanic Viking, an Australian customs ship that had rescued 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers in international waters, attempted to bring them to Indonesia for processing in mid-October.

In a standoff that lasted nearly a month, the Sri Lankans refused to come ashore in Indonesia, saying they wanted to be taken to Australia. Last Friday, 22 of the Sri Lankans agreed to enter an Australian-funded processing center in Indonesia after the Australian government essentially promised them their claims would be fast tracked. They could be resettled to Australia, but the government has made no guarantees (see the ABC News story)

Australia's opposition leader has attacked the government's offer, saying it will only encourage more human smugglers. The Australian government's attempts to reach a broader agreement with Indonesia on human smuggling had another setback Monday when Indonesia's president postponed his visit to Australia. In addition, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd admitted his staff were involved in the asylum-seeker deal, but he maintained he had no prior knowledge of it (see The Age).

According to provisional statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of asylum seekers in Australia increased 27 percent in the first half of 2009 (2,501 claims) compared to the same period in 2008. The 2009 level remains well below those Australia experienced in 2000 and 2001.

For more on how Australia and others, including the United States and the European Union, approach migrants who arrive by sea, see MPI's report The New Boat People.

The MPI's website is here and is on Facebook here.

'Wasafiri is a Kiswahili word and translates as “travelers.” Susheila Nasta [the editor] says the name was chosen “because many of those who created the literatures in which Wasafiri was interested have all been cultural travelers, either through migration, transportation or else in the more metaphorical sense of seeking an imagined cultural ‘home.’”

'The magazine’s journey reads like a short story you might find on one of its pages. In its early days, it was edited in various living rooms in London and Kent, while back issues were stored in an Islington pub... Today, Wasafiri is regarded as Britain’s premier magazine for international contemporary writing, and it continues to expand and break new ground within the international literary and publishing landscape.'

Wasafiri's home page describes itself as having 'continued to provide consistent coverage to Britain's diverse cultural heritage and publish a range of diasporic and migrant writing worldwide.' Wasafiri has 'consistently aimed to shift the contours of established literary canons and extend the borders of international contemporary writing, creating imaginative spaces and publishing some of the most promising new literary voices.'

Nasta tells the story of the magazine's birth and role here. She says: 'The best literary works – whatever the particular trajectories of the often mixed cultural traditions which inform them – are challenging precisely because they take us to the limits of what can be expressed, in forms which extend understanding and carry us to new vistas where hope and desire would like to reside. If we lose the ability to continue to cross frontiers, confront change, write the stories of the future, we may not only lose our way but also our humanity.'

The magazine has made a selection of the best writing over its 25 years available in a free download. Wasafiri is also on Facebook.

Also on during the festival is a play called ‘The Cappuccino Culture’, a multilingual piece of documentary theatre exploring Dublin’s cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. The festival is presented by THEATREclub, an emerging theatre company in Dublin, and an intriguing initiative called Exchange Dublin, a new artists' collective based on Exchange Street in Dublin's Temple Bar. What's intriguing about Exchange is that it's led by a group of teenagers and early twentysomethings, and was founded by Dylan Haskins, who's been organising arts and cultural events in Dublin since he was 16 or so. Read the interview with him by Jim Carroll of the Irish Times (on Carroll's blog) from earlier this year to get a glimpse of what's happening in the worlds of youth and 'DIY' culture in Dublin.

Through Two Seas, I came across Nomadsland, an online forum for video on social issues. As they explain:

'What is NomadsLand? It’s a new destination built by nomads - professionals who have spent much of their lives traversing the globe – gathering, recording and sharing in our collective human experience. We are video producers, filmmakers, activists, nonprofit staffers and social entrepreneurs who are joining forces to curate, create and distribute visual media that raises awareness and support of worthwhile international projects and important global issues. As our logo indicates, we are squarely focused on media that addresses issues affecting the "base of the pyramid."

'We believe that online video – or what we refer to as "micro-documentaries" – is how socially responsible organizations and companies will tell their story in the age of Web 3.0. A "micro-documentary" captures the essence of a project and the characters that propel it in a way that a blog or a Tweet simply cannot.

'At NomadsLand, we aim to boost the signal and reduce the noise of video found on the Internet. On these pages, we are curating the best social issue video available on the web while creating a community for filmmakers and organizations to partner on original productions.'

There's a section of videos on migration, and you can subscribe to email updates.

Closer to home, the EU Commission recently sponsored a competition as part of the Darklight digital film festival in Dublin for one-minute videos on the theme of 'Democracy and Dialogue'. The winner was this beautifully produced short, 'Noise to Get Heard', by Alan Early, on the subject of gay marriage. 

The 26 ultra-short monologues, all less than one minute long, are based on the true stories of individuals, and are performed by actors and writers.

Amongst the stories are George Seremba's account of escaping death in Milton Obote's Uganda, told by the actor himself, and stories of children being sent into exile alone, of people stuck in legal limbo in the asylum system, and of people triumphing over huge odds to make new lives in Ireland.

Sanctuary will travel to cinemas across Ireland in 2010, and has been produced in solidarity with Ice and Fire Theatre Company, UK

In addition to the digital stories on the DVD the booklet includes:
•    A summary of the goals of the MRCI ‘Bridging Visa Campaign’ Group
•    An explanation of the collaborative methodology underpinning digital storytelling
•    A short updated biography of the storytellers alongside their individual scripts
•    A brief description of the weekly workshop written by the facilitator and creative director, Darcy Alexandra
•    A synopsis of what happens to migrant workers when they become undocumented
•    Excerpts and recommendations from the MRCI publication ‘Life in the Shadows – An Exploration of Irregular Migration in Ireland’
•    A list of cross-references and links for further exploration.
 

The programme was launched last week by the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Seán Haughey who described it as an example of successful collaboration between universities and the business community, based on research in intercultural training was created through DCU’s leadership of a collaborative pan-European project entitled the European Intercultural Workplace (EIW). The programme addresses core diversity issues including food, religion, gender, body language and racism.

Channel Content describes itself as 'a learning and communications company that creates digital and social media to boost user access and engagement.' The company has a YouTube channel here.
 

More positive news comes from Aziza Brahim, a Western Saharan singer from the refugee camps in Algeria, on the other side of the berm that divides Western Sahara, featured here on a number of previous occasions. This week, she was nominated for (but didn't win) the Freedom to Create Prize, in London. The prize was won by the Iranian filmmaker, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who was interviewed by the Guardian here. The Sunday Times had a good overview of this year's nominees here.

'We are Sri Lankans, there were, kidnap, kill, gun shots and bombing. Because of that reason we lost our half family and we were Sri Lankan refugees and also we lost our properties and gutere. At that time we heard that Australia takes refugees in the country. So we got ready to go to Australia. We came to Malaysia. After two months we went to the forests. We got a hard life. For example: we got wet in the rain and drank muddy water. And also we live in middle of insects. And later we started our journey on the wooden boat. One day suddenly the engine stopped and the weather condition was bad. It shook a lot. And the engine was okay. While we were traveling to the Indonesian border we were arrested by the Indonesian Navy. We came to Indonesian habour of ‘Merak’. And we are waiting in the boat for one month asking Indonesian government to give us a solution. But still we didn’t get an answer. While we were arrested by the navy we asked the Australian Embazy so that lady said “you can go to the land” but we didn’t get down if we have done it we would have been in the ‘detention centre’ She was a big liyer... We had a hard life every where please gives us a solution.'

Sarkozy: 'La chute du mur de Berlin sonne aujourd’hui comme un appel à combattre les oppressions, à abattre les murs qui, à travers le monde, divisent encore des villes, des territoires, des peuples.' (The fall of the Berlin wall echoes today as a call to fight oppression, to knock down the wall that, across the world, still divide towns, territories and peoples.)

Zapatero: 'No podemos perder de vista que hay otros muros en el mundo que deben caer.' (We can't forget that there are other walls in the world which should fall.)

Migreurop: 'Since it was set up in 2002, the Migreurop network, a collection of more than forty organisations on both sides of the Mediterranean, has been denouncing the imprisonment of migrants, the militarisation of the European Union’s borders and its policies of control and repression of emigration. Understandably, therefore, we wish to see in official declarations calling for walls to be knocked down, like Nicolas Sarkozy’s ’Berlin appeal’, signs of a turning away from what is in effect a war being fought against migrants. For too long, this war has shaped European Union migration policies, and it has caused thousands of victims...' Continued here.

Other resources of interested on Migreurop's site include maps of detention centres and links to other sources. There doesn't appear to be any Irish involvement in the network.

Clare County Council: €35,000

Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council 62,500

Galway City Council: 45,000

Kerry County Council:  46,800

Kildare County Council: 40,000

Limerick County Council: 30,000

Mayo County Council: 30,000

Meath County Council: 45,000

South Dublin County Council: 110,000

Wicklow County Council: 15,000
 
According to the Minister, these grants will fund:
- the establishment of forums to enable local authorities to apprise themselves of immigrants' needs on an ongoing basis and to facilitate communication in both directions;

- the payment of small grants to local groups working on integration;

- integration strategy development;

- intercultural centres; and

- intercultural events.

The Minister previously approved a grant to Dublin City Council of €250,000 for integration measures. That was to cover activities including the expansion of the Tell Me More language programme; the Libraries Intercultural Programme; a digital  storytelling and multimedia project; an Ethnic Entrepreneurship Programme; an Anti Racism Discrimination Transport Campaign; a Dublin City Sports Integration initiative; integration dialogue
forums; developing monitoring mechanisms and indicators on integration at city level; and grants to local groups carrying out integration measures.

Some further details on that, including how to apply for grants, are here. I have sought further details from the Council but they have not been forthcoming.

Pope Benedict XVI’s address to the congress is here.

‘Why not consider the contemporary phenomenon of migration as a favourable condition for understanding among peoples, for building peace and for a development that concerns every nation?’ he asked. ‘Migration is an opportunity to emphasize the unity of the human family and the values of acceptance, hospitality and love of neighbour.’

Benedict publishes an annual message for World Day of Migrants and Refugees. The archive is here.

Next year’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees, on January 17, is dedicated to the theme of minors. There’s a video report on the Pope’s message (which was published in advance, in October) here and the full text here.

The Vatican has a Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. Within this there are resources on migrants, refugees, nomadic peoples, and others.

The Vatican website, however, is rather imposing and text-heavy.

The World Congress appears to have received little coverage other than in the Catholic press. A Google News listing is here.

I interviewed Collins for the Irish Independent last week: see here. For more on Mobile, see here. These performances are part of Traveller Focus Week 2009. There doesn’t appear to be a website for the week, but there is a small amount of information here, and Pavee Point should be able to provide more.

Tiny James is an actor and comedian. His website is here (it features some of James's stand up routine, which dwells on immigration and multicultural issues).

From Patrick Maphoso's activist independent politics on Dublin's northside to Anna Rooney's staunch support for the Government in Clones, this project aimed to chart the diversity of experience and opinion amongst an emerging group of politicians. Ultimately, the experience was a sobering one for many of those. "It will take a long time for people to get used to immigrants participating in the elections," said Maphoso, "but the first generation have to pave the way." In Letterkenny, Michael Abiola Phillips is also philosophical: "I won't be disappointed even if I don't get in this time around," he said. "It means I have to work harder."

According to Liam Harte's review in the Irish Times, Hegarty's 'informative and very accessible popular history of Irish immigration' ranges from pre-historic fossil records through to a dissection of the mythology of the Celts, followed by accounts of the successive arrivals of the Vikings, Anglo-Normans and Protestant New English, culminating in an account of more recent immigration.

'For an avowedly non-academic book, The Irish (and Other Foreigners) distils a great deal of scholarship into its 200-odd pages,' Harte writes. 'Shaming episodes of xenophobia are duly dealt with, from the anti-Semitic boycotts in Limerick in 1904 to then minister for Justice Patrick Cooney’s desire to exclude a tiny cohort of Chileans fleeing Pinochet’s regime 70 years later, on the grounds that their “absorption” could prove “extremely difficult” for Ireland’s monochrome society. Intriguing details punctuate each chapter, such as the fact that the genetic make-up of modern Icelanders is heavily influenced by the Gaels who accompanied the Viking colonisers; that there was one, lone Jew living in Tyrone in 1891; that 10 times as many people moved from America to Ireland in 1932 as went in the other direction; that Polish was the Republic’s unofficial second language in 2006; and that there were 400 “lost” immigrant children in the state in 2008.'

Hegarty made a YouTube trailer for the book, available here. He can be followed on Twitter here.

The reviewer, Liam Harte, is the author of The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001, reviewed here.

The Irish Times also published an excerpt from the book. A short extract follows, on the history of the Italian chipper.

'Irish visitors to Italy will no doubt have noticed that its national dish is not burger and chips. You do not swing onto Rome’s Via del Corso to be met by the smell of boiling oil. You do not sit down for dinner, and choose an antipasto of batter burger and onion rings. Which has always made it somewhat curious that the Italians in Ireland became renowned for their chippers, and that many of the names that were serving fish and chips half a century ago will still be serving snack boxes to peckish or drunken Irish this and every weekend.

'It began sometime in the 1880s, when an Italian, Giuseppe Cervi, stepped off an American-bound boat that had stopped in Cobh and kept walking until he reached Dublin. There, he worked as a labourer until he earned enough money to buy a coal-fired cooker and a hand-cart, from which he sold chips outside pubs.

'Soon after, he found a permanent spot on Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street), where his wife Palma would ask customers ‘Uno di questo, uno di quello?’, meaning ‘one of this and one of the other?’ In doing so, Palma helped to coin a Dublin phrase, ‘one and one’, which is still a common way of asking for fish and chips. The shop, meanwhile, had launched an industry.'

A joint initiative with Amnesty International UK, this is a rolling script submission service for human rights themed plays. Of course, it's not enough to have a well meaning subject. As they say: 'But how can human rights be transformed from formalised, aspirational ideals to real, breathing situations that form the basis for excellent theatre?'

They quote Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize acceptance speech: 'Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task.'

The FOMACS short film series, Sanctuary, currently showing at the IFI, has been produced in solidarity with Ice & Fire. Ice & Fire are also the company behind Asylum Monologues. 

The company is currently working on a play about journalists investigating human rights issues. Read their blog here.

Also of interest may be the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) Human Rights Film Award, which was launched last month.

The Office of the Minister for Integration had been threatened in the report of An Bord Snip Nua, headed by economist Colm McCarthy (for more, see here), but has been retained. This was welcomed by the Minister for Integration, John Curran, who said this was a 'recognition of the contribution being made to Irish society by migrants and of the need to continue to promote integration'.

Curran noted that he had assumed responsibility for Integration matters in addition to his other responsibilities, resulting in 'the saving of the normal costs associated with the appointment of a Minister of State, as staff previously employed in the separate Office of the Minister had been allocated to other offices'.

His office received €5.465 million in the budget, compared to a revised estimate of €5.165 million for 2009. The closing of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism had resulted in a saving of about €500,000 euro a year, he said, saying that the functions of the NCCRI had been subsumed into his office.

Some of the key expenditure of that office this year has been:

Local authorities: €950,000

Resettlement: €500,000

National sporting bodies: €470,000

Employment for People from Immigrant Communities project: €390,000

Immigrant Integration Fund administered by Pobal: €280,000

The Free Legal Advice Centres (FLAC) was quick off the mark in spotting this, and denouncing it as 'mean-minded, petty and divisive'.

According to their statement: 'The Government proposal would mean that no-one who had not been given a right to reside in the State could qualify for payments like Child Benefit, State Pensions and Carers Benefit. This would exclude people who had already spent years awaiting an asylum decision.

'There are already provisions under the Habitual Residence Condition to prevent so-called ‘welfare tourism’ and stop people getting benefits unless they have been here for some time and have established links here. (Download FLAC's paper on the habitual residence condition here.)
 
FLAC Senior Solicitor Michael Farrell said the measure would penalise children, persons of pension age and people caring for sick children.

'It will cause divisions in schools where asylum-seekers’ children who may have been here for a number of years will not be able to take part in school trips and will be marked out as different. It will set back efforts at integration.'

FLAC said the Government proposal followed a series of successful appeals taken by FLAC on behalf of asylum-seekers who had all spent years awaiting decisions on their asylum applications. In a total of nine such cases, the Chief Social Welfare Appeals Officer had rejected claims by the Department of Social and Family Affairs that no one in the asylum process could qualify for benefits.

Michael Farrell said the decision showed a cavalier attitude to the system the Government had established to hear social welfare appeals.

'When those tribunals showed genuine independence and made decisions the Government did not like, the Minister’s reaction was to change the law, not to listen to the valid points the Appeals Office was making.'

Watch out for more on this on the blog, Human Rights in Ireland.

FLAC has recently launched an online audio archive, featuring interviews with key people in its 40 year history, and describing the fight for access to justice in Ireland.

Radio 1812 is essentially a global radio marathon that coincides with International Migrants Day, with the aim of bringing stories from migrants to radio audiences across the world. In 2008, 175 radio stations from 48 countries took part. This year, FOMACS is amongst them.

FOMACS has contributed two radio documentaries to Radio 1812, Neighbours, by Abiba Ndeley, and Candidates, by Migration Matters editor Colin Murphy.

Neighbours offers a snapshot of Ndeley’s life growing up in Cameroon, leaving for Ireland, and starting a new life in Dublin. It explores the similarities and differences between her hometown, Limbe, and her adopted home in Dublin. In Dublin, she moved with her husband and four children into the inner-city Pearse Street Flats, and soon found herself a part of a tightly-knit community of neighbours.

Neighbours was made as part of a radio mentoring course, ‘Having your Voice Heard’, run by FOMACS, part-funded by EPIM (European Programme for Integration and Migration) under the ‘Migrants and the Media’ project, and led by broadcaster Roisín Boyd. The course consisted of 12 classes and mentoring, and explored a range of topics, such as the relationship between  ‘voice’ and ‘accent’ – issues of particular interest to migrants who wish to break into the Irish broadcasting sector. Six migrant women, including Ndeley, with experience of or interest in the media, took part.

Candidates has been covered recently on Migration Matters. It is a documentary about immigrant candidates in the 2009 local elections in Ireland, in two formats: a 20-minute version, available here and on Radio 1812, and an eight-minute version, produced with Ronan Kelly for RTE Radio One's The Curious Ear slot.

For a short audio introduction to Radio 1812, there is a compilation of last year's event here.

Radio 1812 is an initiative of the organisation December 18, which is an online resource centre on the human rights of migrant workers.

For more on the background to Radio 1812, see here, and the FAQ, here.

There's a guide to UN sites on migration here.

Sanctuary features some of Ireland's leading actors and writers, as well as some emerging voices, performing a series of short monologues based on the true stories of individuals who have sought asylum in Ireland. It was produced in solidarity with ice&fire theatre company, who originated the concept and play Asylum Monologues.

The film tells the story of Noemi Barredo, who was separated from her infant daughter, Gracelle, when she left the Philippines for work in Malaysia, in order to support her parents and extended family. Barredo subsequently arrived in Ireland to work in 2000.

According to the filmmakers, Promise and Unrest is an intimate portrayal of a migrant woman performing caregiving and long-distance motherhood, while assuming the responsibility of sole provider for her family back in the Philippines. Dublin may be a long way from Noemi’s hometown of Babatngon, yet she retains a sharp eye on the welfare of her family, attentive to a range of small businesses she has financed, and paying for the education of her daughter and son, medication for her terminally ill father and her sister’s nursing degree. The film observes the everyday intricacies of Noemi and Gracelle’s relationship, their subsequent reunion in Ireland and the beginnings of a domestic life together in the same country for the first time. Promise and Unrest unravels a familiar yet subtle migration story of maternal sacrifice, loss and love, yet to be seen in Irish cinema. It was filmed over a five-year period.

Alan Grossman is co-director of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice in DIT.

Áine O'Brien is director of FOMACS and co-director of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice.

Their most recent documentary feature was Here to Stay, an intimate portrait of Filipino nurse Fidel Taguinod and his political activism in Ireland.

Click here to see a short trailer of the film.

Abbi's Circle is a three-part animation series aimed at 10-13 year olds, telling the story of Abbi, a young Nigerian girl at school in Dublin, and her adventures with family and friends as they negotiate the nuances of being migrants in Ireland. Part one, The Memory Box, told a story of family reunification. Part two, Team Spirit, told a story of asylum. Part three, New Beginnings, tells a story of undocumented migration.

Each episode has been accompanied by a teacher's pack, and the Volume 3 New Beginnings Teaching Pack will be published in February 2010. Written by teachers Liz Morris and Niamh McGuirk, the pack covers issues related to undocumented migration, as well as religious and cultural diversity. As with previous packs, it focuses on the primary school curriculum, offering suggestions for use in SPHE, History, Geography, Visual Arts, Mathematics and more. It employs a combination of in-depth background information sections for teachers, together with a broad range of lesson ideas that are both child-friendly and age-appropriate.

The animation series and teaching packs have been reviewed in the latest (winter) issue of Film Ireland.

A summary of the goals of the Bridging Visa Campaign, run by the Migrant Rights Centre of Ireland (MRCI);
An explanation of the collaborative methodology underpinning digital storytelling;
A short updated biography of the storytellers alongside their individual scripts;
A brief description of the weekly workshop written by the facilitator and creative director, Darcy Alexandra;
A synopsis of what happens to migrant workers when they become undocumented;
Excerpts and recommendations from the MRCI publication Life in the Shadows – An Exploration of Irregular Migration in Ireland;
A list of cross-references and links for further exploration.

The digital stories are also available to view here. The package may be purchased here. The previous FOMACS digital stories series, Living in Direct Provision, is here.

These stories were the result of a collaboration between FOMACS and the MRCI. 

Reuters AlertNet is a key source for information and media on humanitarian crises. Haiti is currently the lead story on their home page, with a series of links, including an article on the logistical challenge facing aid agencies, and a list of what organisations are on the ground in Haiti, and how you can donate. There's also a 'live blog' featuring Twitter updates.

The online American TV & radio station, Democracy Now!, features various reports on Haiti, including a discussion on the legacy of US policy in Haiti and Naomi Klein on 'disaster capitalism' and the response to the earthquake.

As well as video and audio, Democracy Now! features transcripts of interviews, a useful feature for those who prefer to scan content.

The New York Times has a slide show from Haiti on its home page, and a photo feature comparing satellite photos of before and after the quake. The Times is also running a Twitter list, @nytimes/haiti-earthquake.

As I write, the latest update on this, ten seconds ago, is a link to this video uploaded to YouTube of a rapid response outdoors clinic. The video in itself is unremarkable, but the authenticity and immediacy is remarkable.

The Times has an interactive map and a photo feature taking a 'closer look at the destruction in Haiti', with a zoom feature providing extraordinary detail.

Another interactive feature is one allowing readers to send in photos of loved ones missing in Haiti.

Twitter is proving to be a key means of communicating from Haiti. Irish journalist Mark Little, who has recently left his job at RTE to start up an online media business, has been retweeting actively on Haiti.

One of those he has highlighted in Haitian journalist Carel Pedre.

To look at those sites, that’s not particularly surprising. Though Haiti is the lead story in the print edition of the Times, the paper's online coverage is thin and static, at least compared with other international media.  Bizarrely, Haiti doesn't feature on the Independent's home page at all, except as the third story mentioned in World News. The lead photo is of Samantha Mumba.

Irish Times columnist Elaine Byrne retweeted from Ann Curry, an American NBS news correspondent: Curry's Twitter feed records her deployment to Haiti on Wednesday and the story since then.

RTÉ’s Morning Ireland radio programme (the most listened to in the country) is also tweeting. This morning's programme is on their recently upgraded website, and features an extraordinary, gruelling eyewitness account by Yvonne Trimble.

Curiously, while Haiti is the lead story on the BBC's website and dominates the BBC News home page, RTÉ’s website leads with the standard slideshow of entertainment images. Haiti is the lead story on the RTE News site, but it features just a static print report and a poorly signposted link to Morning Ireland's coverage.

Concern Worldwide is one of the lead Irish charities in Haiti, based there for a number of years. They have a video on their website explaining their response. Their appeal for donations is here.

The Guardian's coverage is here and features this short, extremely grainy video footage showing the moment the quake struck. There's also a piece on Haiti's troubled history: 'a long descent to hell'.

Jon Henley writes: 'What has really left Haiti in such a state today, what makes the country a constant and heart-rending site of -recurring catastrophe, is its history. In Haiti, the last five centuries have combined to produce a people so poor, an infrastructure so nonexistent and a state so hopelessly ineffectual that whatever natural disaster chooses to strike next, its impact on the population will be magnified many, many times over. Every single factor that international experts look for when trying to measure a nation's vulnerability to natural disasters is, in Haiti, at the very top of the scale. Countries, when it comes to dealing with disaster, do not get worse.

'"Haiti has had slavery, revolution, debt, deforestation, corruption, exploitation and violence," says Alex von Tunzelmann, a historian and writer currently working on a book about the country and its near neighbours, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. "Now it has poverty, illiteracy, overcrowding, no infrastructure, environmental disaster and large areas without the rule of law. And that was before the earthquake. It sounds a terrible cliché, but it really is a perfect storm. This is a catastrophe beyond our worst imagination."'

There's more critical history on AlterNet, where Carl Lindskoog writes that Haiti's many years of underdevelopment and US-sponsored political turmoil made the Haitian government ill-prepared to respond to such a disaster.

The Guardian also discusses the new media coverage of Haiti in its weekly Viral Video Chart. This is a chart of the most widely disseminated online videos in the week - ie what's going viral, what videos are being recommended on Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc. Three of the videos listed deal with Haiti, and Mercedes Bunz has some astute comments on this viral media:

'The disaster of Haiti showed that social media has become an additional resource in spreading news; and it also made clear that it is often not easy to verify the material... it shows that a new role of journalists today is to fact check the rich material we have won through social media.'

The Guardian also has a piece on the use of social media by mainstream news organisations in reporting from Haiti. They suggest that CNN has the most extensive coverage of the quake, making rich use of social media.

'It's now almost two years since CNN decided officially that iReport – a section of its website where people can upload video material, with contact information – and social media should become a legitimate source for its newsgathering.

'In the Haiti crisis, CNN has published a selection of social media material, making clear what isn't verified. This user-generated content is set apart from vetted postings, which are labelled differently and used in the same way as any other verified source.

'Despite communications being down in Haiti, by yesterday evening 218 quake iReports from Haiti were sent to CNN, with 17 being vetted by CNN, and additional 212 reports of missing loved ones, with 13 of them being verified, CNN said. Two of their iReporters did live interviews.'

Miller-McCune, a US magazine devoted to making academic research more widely available has this article on the science of seismology and attempts to reach the 'Holy Grail' of 'the precise prediction of when earthquakes will occur'.

Migration Information Source links to the US Census Bureau, which has detailed 2008 data for the 535,000 foreign born in the US from Haiti; their Spotlight on Refugees and Asylees, with a feature on migrant hometown associations, which often assist in disaster relief, and the Haiti page on the World Migration Map.

News events like this pose a particular challenge for weekly and monthly magazines that have an online presence: do they divert resources to respond more quickly online, or remain relatively static online while focussing on their next print issue? The New Yorker's answer is contained in a short, elegant blog post, linking to a combination of blog posts and archive pieces. Their correspondent, Philip Gourevitch, has a short, modest proposal:

'As the public’s horror at the devastation in Haiti eclipses, for the moment, the popular outrage over the huge profits and huge bonuses being enjoyed by the big American banks that American taxpayers bailed out when they faced the abyss, here’s a thought: Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase should give a billion dollars apiece to Haiti relief and reconstruction efforts—and they should do it swiftly and without hesitation. They should do it today, before they start cutting bonus checks. It would do them good, and it would do good.'

The books that make up the genre - from Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe to Steyn's America Alone - tend to be polemical rather than grounded in fact. As David Goodhart says of Caldwell's book: 'He is not seeking to be balanced and reasonable. This is a declamatory, polemical work and no more so than in its treatment of Islam. In fact, the book is really two essays - one an insightful probing of Europe's confusion about postwar immigration; the other a rather cartoonish polemic about the potential Islamic takeover of Europe.'

Caldwell - by contrast to the studiedly hyperbolic Steyn - has some intellectual heft, so the demolition of the more 'cartoonish' elements in the New York Review of Books by Malise Ruthven is worth quoting at length:

'He flatly ignores evidence produced by numerous scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh, Tariq Modood, Philip Lewis, and Jytte Klausen that Muslim identities are shifting to meet changing circumstances, that a majority of younger British Muslims, for example, "share many aspects of popular youth culture with their non-Muslim peers," and that their problem is not so much with the majority culture as with "traditionally-minded parents who seek, usually unsuccessfully, to limit their access to it."

Caldwell pours scorn on writers who emphasize the diversity of the Islamic traditions in Europe. "For all its pleasing glibness," he says, "this harping on diversity is misguided." His reading of Islam takes an essentialist perspective of a primordial religion impervious to change, as if he were oblivious of the way that essentialist views of religion have long been under sustained intellectual attack. No one remotely familiar with the work of scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh (who ruminates on the diversities of "Islams" and "modernities") or the political scientist Jytte Klausen, whose brilliant work on European Muslims investigates emerging hermeneutics and epistemologies of faith, would dismiss them, as Caldwell does, as "glib." Al-Azmeh and his colleagues provide plenty of support to refute "the cliché," as al-Azmeh writes, "of a homogenous collectivity innocent of modernity, cantankerously or morosely obsessed with prayer, fasting, veiling, medieval social and penal arrangements,"(1) while Klausen has demonstrated convincingly that European Muslims are overwhelmingly hostile to extremism, support democratic processes, accept the duties of citizenship, and are evolving distinctively local styles of Muslim identities. (2)

Nor does Caldwell exhibit any familiarity with the rich literature describing the spread of Islam in peripheral cultures such as sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, where a religion originating in Arabia proved every bit as adept as Christianity in adjusting to local conditions. He has similarly failed to familiarize himself, even superficially, with the vast literature charting the encounter between Islam and modern Western society. In his review of Western attitudes toward Islam he prefers to celebrate the prejudices of writers such as Ernest Renan (in 1883) or Hilaire Belloc (in 1938) than to engage with significant Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal, Fazlur Rahman, Muhammed Arkoun, or Abdullahi an-Naim who might challenge his essentialist assumptions. Caldwell's "Islam" owes more to tabloid headlines than to responsible research. To borrow a phrase of Philip Lewis, it exemplifies the need for greater religious literacy in the post–September 11 era.

It was founded by David Hutchins, a filmmaker, producer and social entrepreneur specialising in news, documentaries and new media.

The idea behind the project lies in the power of the image to convey a message: 'Visual imagery, human characters, inspirational stories – these are the most potent ways of conveying an organisation’s mission. So many nonprofits and social enterprises possess incredible personal narratives, yet something is lost in the translation. A tweet or a blog posting simply do not do these stories justice'.

The emphasis is on improving the quality of online video produced by nonprofits and social enterprise organisations. To this end, they are 'advancing the idea of the “micro-documentary,” where professional storytellers help institutions tell their story with visual sophistication'.

The storytellers in question come from a global network of qualified, professional filmmakers who, say the Nomadsland team, are 'motivated by ideals first, money second'.

Another interesting project harnessing film's unique power as an advocacy tool is B'Tselem's video project. B'Tselem is 'The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories...It endeavors to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel'.

In January 2007 it launched a camera distribution project, whereby they 'provide Palestinians living in high-conflict areas with video cameras, with the goal of bringing the reality of their lives under occupation to the attention of the Israeli and international public, exposing and seeking redress for violations of human rights'.

In June 2009 the project won a British One World Media award, given annually to an outstanding media project or organization working on the ground in the developing world which has made a real impact on the lives of those living and working around them.

A selection of videos from the distribution project can be viewed here.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

He puts at 300 the number of large scale violent incidents against immigrants in Italy in the past two years. It is the fourth such incident in Calabria alone in recent years, according to Rachel Burleigh in Time. Six Africans died two years ago in fighting in the coastal town of Castel Volturno.

According to Corriere della Sera journalist Gian Antonio Stella, at the root of Italian xenophobia is a failure to interrogate its past: 'Britain has reflected on its colonial past, Germany has done the same with Nazism, but Italians still believe the myth of the Good Italian, soft colonialism and insist the racial laws of the 1930s were passed by fascists, not Italians'.

Italy's colonial experiences left it ill-equipped it to deal with immigration, according to some: 'Italy's colonial period was brief, violent and filled with military defeats', says Sylvia Poggioli on NPR.org. She goes on: 'Lucia Ghebreghiorges, an Italian of Ethiopian origin, says many Italians still see their former colonial subjects as enemies. "This is why they are unprepared for immigration. We are part of the future of this country, but they still see us as barbarians"'.

In an editorial published in the aftermath of the Rosarno violence entitled "Italians and Racism", L'Osservatore Romano (the Vatican's semi-official weekly newspaper) also made note of a failure to come to terms with a history of xenophobia.  'Italians are still incapable of shedding their racist past. In 2010 we are still at hatred. Whether silent, intoned in mocking chants or manifest in physical action...Apart from being disgusting, reports of episodes of racism take us to the silent, savage hatred of another colour of skin that we thought we was a thing of the past...For once, the press is not over-emphasising. Take a train, walk in the park or go to a football match. There is no room for doubt. We Italians, from the North down, have never shone for our openness'.

The UN added its voice in condemning the violence in Rosarno, and also pointed out that it is reflective of an endemic problem with migration in Italy. Said rapporateurs Jorge Bustamante and Githu Muigai, 'The violence is extremely worrying since it reveals serious and deep-rooted problems of racism against these migrant workers.'

Since May, Italy has been operating a system of 'push-backs' - sending boats full of Africans en route to Sicily to Libya before they can reach shore. Vittorio Longhi points out that, 'the UN high commissioner for refugees opposed a practice that openly violates the 1951 Geneva convention on the status of refugees'. He goes on: 'A large majority of those who try to enter Europe through Italy or Malta flee from conflicts and persecutions in central and eastern Africa, and push-backs leave no chance for protection claims'.

Italy's immigration issues are complicated by the widespread exploitation of both legal and illegal immigrants by organised crime gangs. The government argues that in order to weaken the crime gangs, immigration must be tightly controlled. Reports The Journal of Turkish Weekly on 13th January:

'[Interior Minsister] Roberto Maroni made clear the fight against illegal immigration would continue without let-up. He said the illegal entry into Italian territory represents the basis for the marginalisation and exploitation of foreigners and often becomes the reservoir for recruiting labourers by criminal organisations. Maroni said 42,000 immigrants were repatriated in the past two years. He added that since an agreement was reached with Libya, arrivals by boat on the Italian southern coast have dropped by 90 per cent. He added arrivals are down from more than 30,000 to just more than 3,000, mainly thanks to the government's new 'push-back' policy to Libya. Maroni also said the government plans to further intensify its fight against illegal labour in the agricultural sector as part of its plan to more effectively combat illegal immigration, black-market labour and every form of organised crime'.

Regardless of the reasoning behind the 'push-backs', government policy toward migrants seems calculated to make life as difficult for them as possible.
From individual.com:    

'Rather than policies to help these migrants fit in, there is a tough stance that many say makes it harder for them to settle and integrate into Italian society and may, perversely, actually create illegality.
"Now they only issue residence permit for the period of your work contract, so if you lose your job at the end of it, you are no one," Nelly Diop, a Senegalese intercultural mediator told IPS.
"It means you are only here as a worker, not as a human being. You have no prospects to be able to plan for the future. Then they make you wait so long to have your permit. I know a man who has been waiting two years and, of course, in the meantime he has been forced to take jobs on the black market because he still doesn't have his papers.
"You don't create an integrated society like this. There are no thoughts of integration but only of exclusion and the climate is getting worse. They want to make us invisible."'

In the town of Citadella in Northern Italy, reports NPR,

'Mayor Massimo Bitonci has sharply restricted immigrants' rights to live there. His ordinance sets a high threshold: a regular work contract, a minimum income of $5,000 per family member, and a required home size that is too expensive for most immigrants.
Bitonci says the town feels besieged.
"We're very frightened by what we see around us. We write the rules here, we want to safeguard our culture," he says. "Yes, we're raising the drawbridge, and we're on the battlements to defend ourselves from external attacks."'

A statement by  Andrea Ronchi, Italy's European Affairs minister, if true, indicates an odd refusal to acknowledge Italy's reality. News24.com reports  him as saying (it's not a formal statement so its veracity is not absolute):

'"In Italy, there is no racism. It does not exist. It is an accusation made by people who do not know Italy," he said on the sidelines of an informal meeting of European affairs ministers in La Granja, Spain.
"We will give them (those making the accusation) a free tour, at our expense, to show them what there is in Italy: solidarity and welcome. But it is true there is a violent phenomenon - illegal immigration," he told journalists.
"These accusations are the fruit of a left-wing culture no longer in step with citizens," he said.
"Italy is the most welcoming country in Europe, and anyone accusing us of racism is stupid."'

Vittorio Longhi, writing in the Guardian 10th January:
'More and more migrants in Italy are reaching the end of their tether, due to the hostility caused by a political and media criminalisation campaign against the clandestini. "We must be resolute against clandestine immigration," the interior minister, Roberto Maroni - a Northern League politician - keeps on repeating like a mantra.'

He puts at 300 the number of large scale violent incidents against immigrants in Italy in the past two years. It is the fourth such incident in Calabria alone in recent years, according to Rachel Burleigh in Time. Six Africans died two years ago in fighting in the coastal town of Castel Volturno.

According to Corriere della Sera journalist Gian Antonio Stella, at the root of Italian xenophobia is a failure to interrogate its past: 'Britain has reflected on its colonial past, Germany has done the same with Nazism, but Italians still believe the myth of the Good Italian, soft colonialism and insist the racial laws of the 1930s were passed by fascists, not Italians'. Italy's colonial experiences left it ill-equipped it to deal with immigration, according to some: 'Italy's colonial period was brief, violent and filled with military defeats', says Sylvia Poggioli on NPR. She goes on: 'Lucia Ghebreghiorges, an Italian of Ethiopian origin, says many Italians still see their former colonial subjects as enemies. "This is why they are unprepared for immigration. We are part of the future of this country, but they still see us as barbarians"'.

In an editorial published in the aftermath of the Rosarno violence entitled "Italians and Racism", L'Osservatore Romano (the Vatican's semi-official weekly newspaper) also made note of a failure to come to terms with a history of xenophobia.  'Italians are still incapable of shedding their racist past. In 2010 we are still at hatred. Whether silent, intoned in mocking chants or manifest in physical action...Apart from being disgusting, reports of episodes of racism take us to the silent, savage hatred of another colour of skin that we thought we was a thing of the past...For once, the press is not over-emphasising. Take a train, walk in the park or go to a football match. There is no room for doubt. We Italians, from the North down, have never shone for our openness'.

The UN added its voice in condemning the violence in Rosarno, and also pointed out that it is reflective of an endemic problem with migration in Italy. Said rapporateurs Jorge Bustamante and Githu Muigai, 'The violence is extremely worrying since it reveals serious and deep-rooted problems of racism against these migrant workers.'

Since May, Italy has been operating a system of 'push-backs' - sending boats full of Africans en route to Sicily to Libya before they can reach shore. Vittorio Longhi points out that, 'the UN high commissioner for refugees opposed a practice that openly violates the 1951 Geneva convention on the status of refugees'. He goes on: 'A large majority of those who try to enter Europe through Italy or Malta flee from conflicts and persecutions in central and eastern Africa, and push-backs leave no chance for protection claims'.

Italy's immigration issues are complicated by the widespread exploitation of both legal and illegal immigrants by organised crime gangs. The government argues that in order to weaken the crime gangs, immigration must be tightly controlled. Reports The Journal of Turkish Weekly:
'[Interior Minsister] Roberto Maroni made clear the fight against illegal immigration would continue without let-up. He said the illegal entry into Italian territory represents the basis for the marginalisation and exploitation of foreigners and often becomes the reservoir for recruiting labourers by criminal organisations. Maroni said 42,000 immigrants were repatriated in the past two years. He added that since an agreement was reached with Libya, arrivals by boat on the Italian southern coast have dropped by 90 per cent. He added arrivals are down from more than 30,000 to just more than 3,000, mainly thanks to the government's new 'push-back' policy to Libya. Maroni also said the government plans to further intensify its fight against illegal labour in the agricultural sector as part of its plan to more effectively combat illegal immigration, black-market labour and every form of organised crime'.

Regardless of the reasoning behind the 'push-backs', government policy toward migrants seems calculated to make life as difficult for them as possible.
From individual.com:
'Rather than policies to help these migrants fit in, there is a tough stance that many say makes it harder for them to settle and integrate into Italian society and may, perversely, actually create illegality.
"Now they only issue residence permit for the period of your work contract, so if you lose your job at the end of it, you are no one," Nelly Diop, a Senegalese intercultural mediator told IPS.
"It means you are only here as a worker, not as a human being. You have no prospects to be able to plan for the future. Then they make you wait so long to have your permit. I know a man who has been waiting two years and, of course, in the meantime he has been forced to take jobs on the black market because he still doesn't have his papers.
"You don't create an integrated society like this. There are no thoughts of integration but only of exclusion and the climate is getting worse. They want to make us invisible."'

In the town of Citadella in Northern Italy, reports NPR,
'Mayor Massimo Bitonci has sharply restricted immigrants' rights to live there. His ordinance sets a high threshold: a regular work contract, a minimum income of $5,000 per family member, and a required home size that is too expensive for most immigrants.
Bitonci says the town feels besieged.
"We're very frightened by what we see around us. We write the rules here, we want to safeguard our culture," he says. "Yes, we're raising the drawbridge, and we're on the battlements to defend ourselves from external attacks."'

A statement by  Andrea Ronchi, Italy's European Affairs minister, if true, indicates an odd refusal to acknowledge Italy's reality. News24.com reports him as saying (it's not a formal statement so its veracity is not absolute):
'"In Italy, there is no racism. It does not exist. It is an accusation made by people who do not know Italy," he said on the sidelines of an informal meeting of European affairs ministers in La Granja, Spain.
"We will give them (those making the accusation) a free tour, at our expense, to show them what there is in Italy: solidarity and welcome. But it is true there is a violent phenomenon - illegal immigration," he told journalists.
"These accusations are the fruit of a left-wing culture no longer in step with citizens," he said.
"Italy is the most welcoming country in Europe, and anyone accusing us of racism is stupid."'

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

At the time, Bird was merely reflecting the dominant tone of the coverage. The key stories and footage in the first days after the quake were either of looting, US military intervention, or dramatic crisis scenes, such as of operations in outdoor hospitals, or of rescues.

While each individual story may have been true, and as such merited reporting, the cumulative effect was greatly distorting: the looting achieved almost parity with the humanitarian and political stories; the US military appeared to have a far greater impact than the United Nations and combined non-governmental sector; the 'outdoor hospital' footage gave the impression that there was no organised medical aid, or intact medical service, available; and the footage of foreign rescue teams, and the United Nations statistics of numbers of those rescued, entirely neglected the extraordinary efforts of ordinary Haitians to rescue people, which clearly started before any organised rescue effort, and presumably saved many more people.

One particularly egregious example of a valid news story achieving a distorting prominence was that of supposed 'roadblocks' of bodies being mounted around Port-au-Prince. This story made headlines around the world, and fitted neatly with the prevailing tone of apocalyptic warnings of actual and looming violence. Curiously, though, there were no photos of such roadblocks that I saw.

Ironically, therefore, the story originated with a photographer, Time Magazine's Shaul Schwarz, who told other media outlets he had seen two such roadblocks on his travels in the capital. (He was interviewed by the BBC here.)

He had, however, no photographs, and no precise details. By the time the story reached the London Independent, it acquired a further veneer of authority when it was attributed to (nameless, but apparently numerous) 'eyewitnesses': 'According to eyewitnesses, some Haitians had even used corpses to set up roadblocks in the city as a protest to the delay.'

Readers are welcome to send in observations or links on Haiti and the media coverage. We'll return to this in coming weeks. Write to migrationmatters@gmail.com.

A good story on the radio station, Signal FM, that survived the quake and stayed on air, becoming a crucial source of information.

Jared Diamond on why the political, economic and ecological histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti unfolded so differently - based on his international bestseller, the very readable Collapse.

One of those killed was the self-described 'geographer, politician and writer', Georges Anglade, president of the Haitian branch of PEN, the global organisation that promotes freedom of expression and literature, and a prominent intellectual in Canada also. In an obituary in the Canadian Globe & Mail, John Ralston Saul wrote that Anglade's was in many ways was a classic Canadian story of exile and commitment.

'This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story.' David Brooks in the New York Times.

The Hampstead Theatre in London will hold a fundraising evening of theatre and reading, featuring 'immediate response' plays and poems by various writers.

ReliefWeb, the humanitarian information service, also run by OCHA, is a good source of hard information (maps, statistics, etc) on the humanitarian response.

The Haiti site of the UN humanitarian coordination agency, OCHA.

The IRIN news service run by UN OCHA.

The (pre-existing) UN mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH.

In the New York Times: two excellent articles, one about the relief efforts of Haitians themselves:

'At the University of Haiti, professors summoned students by text messages and deputized them to serve as trauma counselors for a shocked population. “The state is broken, the people are broken, but it is time to mobilize,” said Tirone Joël, 24, a psychology student. “We can sit back and wait for help from our friends abroad, or we can use our own talents and take charge of one little corner of this situation.”'

Another by Haitian novelist Évelyne Trouillot on solidarity in Haiti:

'No, I am not watching the news. I am too busy trying to find a way to keep my hope alive because the work in front of us is humongous. I am busy rejoicing in the laughter of the children in the camp near our house, smiling at the comical reactions of a passer-by after a recent aftershock. I am busy shedding tears at the news of a miraculous rescue of six students from the wreckage of a university building. I am busy collecting the fragments of life that reflect the enormous courage and resilience among us.

'I am busy loving life and my country.'

The New Yorker features an article by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat and an 'ask the author' Q&A with her

(The two Haitian writers above come together in this interview with Trouillot by Danticat, from 2005.)

I wrote a critical piece about the reporting of roadblocks of corpses in Haiti for Prospect (developing some of the thoughts outlined here last week). There's a more nuanced and sensitive story of one such roadblock in the LA Times.

The UN ReliefWeb site has a useful archive of key UN documents on the crisis response in Haiti.

CNN's iReports provide an opportunity for the network to 'crowd-source' news. They've used that forum for posting reports on missing persons, and for 'citizen journalism' from Haiti - though in the case of this diary of the work of a San Diego volunteer 'rescue team', I suspect that this is less citizen journalism and more freelance-journalism-for-free.

The immigration reform lobby America's Voice has an article on Obama's granting of Temporary Protected Status to Haitian immigrants in the US, which includes a useful roundup of some of the anti-Haitian commentary and 'xenophobic sentiment' commentary in the US media. The article concludes with a restatement of America's Voice's core belief, backed up by research: 'Recent polling shows that the majority of Americans want to see a pragmatic, common-sense solution that fixes our immigration crisis: comprehensive immigration reform. In fact, a series of polls conducted in November 2008, May 2009, and December 2009 show that the American people want Congress to tackle the issue, and are strongly in favor of a comprehensive proposal that puts undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship if they register, pay taxes, and meet other criteria. In other words, most Americans support a bipartisan solution that's in line with our nation's values.'

American National Public Radio also has a report on the temporary protection issue.

The brothers were inspired to set up the site by a meeting with a young Afghan refugee called Mansour in 2005. Mansour had lost contact with his family and friends aged 12. Say the Mikkelsens: 'No government organization was able to unearth any information on Mansour's family, and only after traveling back to Pakistan, bribing his way, did he learn that his entire family had been split up and scattered across the globe. An almost impossible mission of gathering information and traces began - without the slightest knowledge of the family's whereabouts'.

They eventually tracked down Mansour's brother, who was in Russia, and the experience inspired them to try and do the same thing for more refugees. Thus the establishment of Refunite.org - 'a global search engine based on self-sufficiency and anonymity'. There is no central registry to provide interlinked communication between refugees and their loved ones, and many refugees are afraid of contacting authorities. Refugees United aims to become just such a central registry, facilitating communication without the need for the intercession of a third-party.

Talking to Spiegel Online David Mikkelsen said,"We didn't want to be the kind of NGO (non-governmental organisation) that is a third party providing help to refugees. We wanted to give them the opportunity to take control of their situations and help themselves - and give NGOs another tool to help."

Obviously, a major obstacle in the path of the site's success is the fact that many refugees do not have ready access to the internet. To this end, reports Newsweek, Refugees United has undertaken a number of pilot programmes to place computer terminals in the midst of large refugee populations in Egypt and Brazil. They hope to encourage major computer companies to donate computers to the cause, according to ABC News, and are also working on a mobile platform to allow access to the site from mobile phones.

In the same Spiegel Online interview quoted above Christopher said: "It's really just another search engine. But the fact that it is specifically intended to help refugees find their families makes it a beacon. It is about helping the refugees and helping those people trying to help refugees."

www.refunite.org

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

Step dance originated in its modern form the African American fraternities and sororities aforementioned - with Howard University in Washington D.C. in particular being crucial in its development. Jacqui Malone, in Steppin on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance describes the form as featuring 'synchronised, precise, sharp and complex rhythmical body movements combined with singing, dancing and verbal play. It requires creativity, wit and a great deal of physical skill and co-ordination...the goal of each (step) team is to command the audience with stylistic elements derived primarily from African-based performance traditions'. She goes on, quoting Robert Abrahams: '(Stepping) is a uniquely African-American dance genre that was created in the United States but is..."animated by the style, spirit and social and aesthetic organisation of sub-Saharan Africa"'.

Elizabeth Fine, in Soulstepping: African American Step Shows, calls the dance form 'a ritual performance of group identity' and 'a vibrant arena for the display of African American verbal and nonverbal art'. For Fine, this 'nonverbal' element is important, and she draws on the work of Sally Ann Ness in Body, Movement and Culture to place stepping within an attempt to 'return bodily experience as a form of consciousness and understanding to a central place within the discipline of ethnographic inquiry' - something she says has been lacking from Euro-American thinking. Stepping can offer a real and definite reading of African American culture, says Fine, because 'Just as one may 'read' material and verbal culture: (quoting Ness) "even the simplest gesture can make visible a culture's most cherished and carefully shaped relationships"'.

As well as reflecting cultural traditions, stepping, according to Fine, is part of a broader tradition whereby rapid cultural change engenders a melding of contemporary and heritage elements to create new identity markers. 'With the homogenisation and cultural levelling of the 'global village' cultural identities become fluid and negotiable. In response to tensions caused by rapid cultural change, persons often construct identities through syncretic performances that combine traditions of the past with contemporary cultural expressions'. The 'rapid cultural change' experienced by black students attending predominantly white colleges and universities, combined with the ravages of global homogenisation, she says, go some way to explaining the emergence and subsequent popularity of stepping as a dance form.

Whatever the putative explanations for its development, stepping is a high octane and exhilarating experience - as this excerpt from Spike Lee's 1988 film Schooldaze, shows. To watch Soul steps in action click here. They perform in the Axis, Ballymun, at 8pm, Tuesday, 9th February.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

A report by the British Migration Policy Institute from September 2009 (available for download here) highlights the Europe-wide implications of global recession for migrants. On the subject of employment pre-recession they have this to say: 'Broadly, in Anglo-Saxon countries (the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland), in Japan and in the Middle Eastern oil-exporting countries, unemployment among migrants was low - often below natives; however, so were wages'. The report also makes the point that, 'Conventional wisdom suggests that immigrants are the last hired and first fired in the workplace. Available data confirm this notion — especially in the countries that have been worst hit by the recession. Immigrants disproportionately possess the demographic characteristics of workers who are most vulnerable during recessions. They tend to be less skilled and less formally educated, relatively young, and recent labor-market entrants. Many immigrants work in economic sectors like construction and lower-value-added manufacturing that have been the hardest hit by the downturn. It is not surprising, then, that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that unemployment rates for immigrants are rising faster than, and exceed, those of native-born workers in many developed nations' - all of which seems to confirm the Irish experience. 

The report also goes into the effects of the global recession on patterns of migration globally. It concludes that while the movement of economic migrants to the major immigrant receiving regions of the world has slowed, it also shows that 'counter to popular perception' immigrants are tending to stay in their adopted countries, rather than return home, despite the high rates of unemployment aforementioned.

The response of many governments to the recession has been to tighten requirements for admission to their countries, or to ramp up efforts to deport illegal migrants. 'Confronted with the most severe economic crisis in decades and rising unemployment, governments in locations across the globe embraced a range of policies to suppress the inflow of migrants, encourage their departure, and protect labor markets for native-born workers'.

While the report does not deal specifically with Ireland in this instance, this country does seem to be adhering to these global trends. The number of deportations from Ireland in 2009 - 236 - was almost double that of the previous year, when 129 people were deported.  An Irish Times piece from September 2009 states: 'Officials concede that the increased activity (in deportations) is largely down to the pressure being exerted on the immigration and asylum divisions – together one of the largest areas of expenditure in the Department of Justice – to make savings'.

Similarly, the number of asylum applications processed by the State has dropped - from 3,866 in 2008 to 2,689 in 2009. Back in 2002, the State processed 11,634 applications. Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern has credited the drop off in asylum applications to Ireland's changed economic circumstances, saying, 'Information available to us suggests that many asylum applicants are economic migrants. Therefore it is possible that economic conditions in Ireland may have been a factor in the reduction in asylum application numbers in 2009'.

Speaking to the Irish Times, Roisin Boyd of The Irish Refugee Council added another possible reason for the drop-off: '"The reasons that applications for asylum to Ireland appear to have dropped are numerous, including increased security making it harder for asylum seekers to access EU territory – leading to what has been described as 'Fortress Europe'"'.

The real reason for the drop off in asylum applications is probably a combination of many factors, but certainly the economy and increased security around the EU are playing a part. Although here the MPI report is looking at illegal migration, the issues around 'Fortress Europe' still pertain for those seeking asylum:

'It is hard to disentangle the impact of the recession on illegal migration from that of increased enforcement. Besides a significant reduction in labor demand in economic sectors that traditionally employ migrant workers, such as construction and manufacturing, many EU Member States also have reinforced their internal measures against employers of illegal migrants while stepping up their use of return programs, enforcing residence laws more strictly, and stiffening border controls.'

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

Sherkin Islanders, their friends, family and members of the Sherkin Diaspora were given pin-hole cameras to create solargraphs between the summer and winter solstice 2009. After that, they were sent back to artist Sheelagh Broderick to be developed.

According to solargraphy.com, solargraphy is 'a photographic method for recording the paths of the Sun. Solargraphy is the art of pinhole photography. Solarigraphics or solargraphs are pinhole photographs taken with a lensless pinhole camera with a long exposure. By doing so the invisible movements of the sun can be made visible in landscapes'. 

The project aimed to explore space and time through the process of solargraphy, and to try and forge deeper links between those still on the island and those who have left. The results are quite beautiful. Check them out here.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

A 2007 UNFPA statement, puts at between 120 and 140 million the number of women who have been subjected to the practice and says that 3 million girls are affected each year. A 2008 joint statement from Benita Ferrero-Waldner, EU Commissioner for External Relations and Neighbourhood Policy and Louis Michel, EU Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, states that the practice is prevalent in 28 African countries, a few Arab and Asian countries and among some African immigrants in Europe and the US. FGM has been criminalised in fourteen African countries. While most countries have legislation in place prohibiting FGM, actual enforcement this prohibition is difficult, they say, in particular in rural areas. The UNFPA statement says that '(FGM) violates the basic rights of women and girls and seriously compromises their health, posing risks during childbirth, and leaving lasting physical and psychological scars'.

The UN factsheet on FGM points out that the practice is not required by any religion, and is a tradition 'designed to preserve virginity, ensure marriageability, and contain sexuality'. In March 2008 the UN issued an interagency statement - including submissions from, amongst others, UNESCO and the UNHCR - expressing commitment to supporting governments, communities, women and girls to abandon the practice within a generation.

While the UK introduced legislation to combat FGM in 2003, Ireland still has no specific legislation against it. A National Action Plan on FGM was launched in 2008. The goals of the plan are, according to The National Women's Council of Ireland, 'to prevent the practice of FGM in Ireland, to provide high quality, appropriate healthcare and support for women and girls who have undergone FGM. It also endeavours to contribute to the worldwide campaign to end FGM'. Research carried out by Akidwa in 2008 put at 2,500 the number of women in Ireland who have suffered FGM.

An International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM has been held annually on 6th February since 2003. That a day marking opposition to the practice should be held annually was first suggested by The Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children. This year, for the first time, an event to mark the day will be held in Dublin. Organised by Ireland's National Plan of Action to Address Female Genital Mutilation Steering Committee - whose members include Amnesty International (Irish section), Barnardos, Cairde, the Refugee Information Service and many more (see here for a full list) - a free seminar will be held in the European Public Information Centre, Dublin 2 on February 4th, from 10am to 1.30pm. Beyond marking the day, the aim is to provide a forum for discussion on work in Ireland and overseas to combat FGM. Admission is free.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

The aim is to connect new migrants both to native-born Canadians and to other immigrants in the country. Users can join communities based on common ties - like country of origin and occupation - and common interests - there are skiing and drama interest groups, for example.

From his experience in his own work with immigrants, Cohen observed that "those with contacts and support in Canada are better equipped to establish themselves than those who try to make it on their own."  Hence the establishment of the Loon Lounge, a site he calls, according to the Globe and Mail, "Facebook with a purpose". It is "the missing link - a tool to help people make connections and build a support system to help ease their transition into life in Canada...By facilitating communication and centralizing member information, the purpose of LoonLounge is to empower Canadian residents, immigrants, and potential immigrants with the knowledge we need to build a stronger Canada together." 

As of November 2009 the site had 30,000 members who use the site to network, learn about Canada, search for jobs, post events, and to access resources about settlement and citizenship in the country.

It's an excellent initiative - as Cohen told the Toronto Star, “I know our government means well, but their efforts are, well, oafish. The government can’t afford to answer one-on-one questions, they can’t help an engineer in Norway find someone in Toronto who can answer his question or tell someone in Greece where to find Toronto’s Greek neighbourhood.” His comments could as well apply to the Irish case as the Canadian.

www.loonlounge.com

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

Swiss charity Terre des Hommes released a report, also on February 1st, into the phenomenon of unaccompanied minors disappearing in four countries in the EU (download here). They found that up to half of foreign minors arriving in particular reception centres in Switzerland, Belgium, France and Spain disappear within 48 hours of admission. They say: "The disappearance of children from institutions is not a marginal or rare phenomenon: it is a variable but significant percentage of a given population which can reach 50% depending on the institutions or countries concerned."

One of the most decisive factors in the disappearance of these children, they say, is the fact of their being placed into State care in the first place: "Most minors (mainly boys between 14 and 17 years of age) perceive their future prospects once it is decided that they be placed in an institution. What does being placed and protected mean to minors who have often been through extreme hardships, who have been forced to reach a degree of adult maturity, and of whom it is required that they comply with the rules and regulations of an institution normally designed for younger minors? There is also their certainty, even if they are told otherwise, that this placement is the anteroom of eviction back to their country of origin, despite the fact that their projects are usually very clear and that they want to work in the host country."

Disturbingly, the Terre des Hommes report observes that, "the principle of actively searching for a minor who has disappeared from an institution is very rarely implemented, in contrast to the immediate search which is initiated when a national child disappears. This attitude could very easily be interpreted as discrimination."

In Ireland, the Ombudsman for Children's Office (OCO) recently released the results of their Separated Children Project (1), which ran from January to October 2009, and which aimed " to better understand the lives and level of care afforded to separated children in Ireland by hearing directly from them." The project resulted in a guidebook compiled by the 35 separated children who participated and a storybook setting out their stories, as well as a project report. (All are available for download here). The OCO report echoes the findings of Terre des Hommes, saying: "[The] large number of missing children is alarming as is the apparent lack of further investigation into incidents. Minister Barry Andrews stated earlier this year that, 'We wish to treat all unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the same way as all children in the State are treated.' Yet, the majority of missing separated children are not listed on the missing persons website."

The stories gathered as part of the Separated Children's project are frequently harrowing, and bring into sharp relief the need for the State to make every effort to ensure separated children who arrive in Ireland are well cared for and looked out for, and every effort is made to find those who go missing. The editors introduce the collection by saying, "We all make our own stories. But our stories also make us.  In their home places, these extraordinary children were unconsciously shaping their own stories with their families when dramatic events tore apart their lives. At that moment their stories began to shape them. They shaped them in ways they never imagined or wanted. Now, on these pages, and through this project, they have become their own stories’ tellers...These stories are sacred. And here is their airing. They are sacred to the children who own them. They are sacred to the children’s home countries. And now, whether we acknowledge it or not, they are sacred to Ireland. To each one of us who reads them. These are Irish stories too."

An extract:
"We came to Dublin Airport. I didn’t know it was Dublin then.  I had never known of Dublin. I had never known of Ireland. We got on a bus and into the city centre somewhere maybe and then he just left us...It was really cold. It was in October last year and we didn’t have jackets on us and we had just, yeah, a small bag with our few clothes and small things inside. We went in this big building. They got an interpreter for us. We was afraid and confused. My younger brother was talking because I couldn’t talk in that time ever since those things were happened to me in the past, when they tried raping me. That pains, the pain never stop. I couldn’t talk in that time because I was breathing too fast. My chest was very painful.
They are strange to me and I feel strange to them. I have nothing more to say. I finished saying, I’m just sad. It’s just hard for me, it’s really hard for me, and sometimes I feel like doing something bad but it is no way to go on. "

(1) Note: the OCO uses the word 'separated' rather than 'unaccompanied' because, they say, "This term is preferable to ‘unaccompanied’ because it better defines the problems that such children face. Namely, that they are without the care and protection of their parents or legal guardian and as a consequence suffer socially and psychologically from this separation. While some separated children appear to be accompanied when they arrive, the accompanying adults are not necessarily able or suitable to assume responsibility for their care."

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

They conducted a ten week scan of the sites above over the summer of 2009, and contrasted their findings with a similar scan conducted in 2007. They justify the research by saying, "In just a few short years, we have witnessed a transformation in the most popular technologies and uses of the Internet. That change, in turn, is reshaping the media landscape and the public discourse...For those who seek commonsense immigration reform and the integration of immigrants into our national community, a robust and positive experience on the social web is crucial. Because Americans of all walks of life increasingly use these sites to learn about issues and build relationships, the information they encounter will shape their views and influence the broader public’s perceptions."

Summarising their findings, they say: "We found an almost complete turnaround from the results of our last Web 2.0 scan conducted approximately two years ago. We saw positive developments on Facebook and YouTube, and we found progressive-leaning mainstream blogs to be a friendlier environment for pro-immigration discourse than just two years ago."

In 2007, the group found anti-immigrant groups outnumbering pro- by approximately two to one on Facebook. In 2009, searching for the keywords "immigration, immigrant, dream Act, Comprehensive Reform, amnesty, undocumented, and illegals" and limiting their analysis to groups with more than 100 members, they found 92 immigrant related Facebook groups, of which 76 had a pro-immigrant message (note: it is unclear from the methodology section if they were just searching within US networks or globally - it seems likely, given the small numbers involved, it was only within the US. A quick search of Facebook for 'immigration+America', 'Common Interest' groups with the subtype 'Beliefs and Causes' threw up 146 groups in February 2010, which would suggest Opportunity Agenda used something like this methodology, though they do not specify). Of 15 fan pages scanned, 11 had a pro-immigrant message.

They point out that the most successful groups on Facebook (measured by number of members) were those related to advocating for the passage of the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Minors) Act. They speculate that, "An important reason for this was the ability of these groups to consistently update their content and have active members routinely post information and news related to the DREAM Act... Members often need to see the vibrancy of a group before they will participate. Once they do, these members’ networks see this activity and learn of the group. It is this cycle, we believe, that led to much of the success seen by these groups."

On Youtube, they found content that was supportive of immigrants and immigration slightly outnumbering content that was anti-immigration, although they do note that many of the comments under videos they categorised as 'pro-immigration' were "laden with offensive, anti-immigration rhetoric".

Looking at a list of the top 100 blogs on Technorati (globally rated), the researchers chose "the first 10 that consistently covered issues of political relevance...The Huffington Post, Think Progress, DailyKos, the Daily Dish, the CNN Political Ticker, Michelle Malkin, The Caucus of The New York Times, Gawker, Pajama Media, and TreeHugger." They say that, " only the progressive blogs we monitored (such as The Huffington Post, DailyKos, and Think Progress) discussed immigration topics on a consistent basis. More conservative blogs (Pajama Media and Michelle Malkin) blogged less than five times each on the topic of immigration throughout our 10-week scan and mainly in response to what was popular in immigration news at [that] moment." Despite this, their conclusions are upbeat: "Blogs continue to increase in popularity...In comparison to our scan two years ago, the progress that pro-immigrant voices have made in this space is striking."

On Twitter, they found that amongst those users who tweet frequently on immigration issues, pro-immigration voices are predominant.

Their final conclusion is optimistic, in particular with regard to the success of pro-immigrant voices in the social media sphere in the US, and their yoking of social media tools to their cause. They advise: "It is not enough for us to simply create content for these technologies. We must take advantage of the freedom inherent in these tools. The technology allows us to be precise about how we frame our argument....This is an opportunity to produce and present our content unfiltered. The findings of this report show a promising start, but we must not relinquish our current lead. The social web is wildly popular and we have no reason to believe that will change. We must use it to our advantage."

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

The Song of Nations band is "a truly multicultural line up" made up of Hungarian bassist Peter Erdei, Irish percussionist Eamonn Cagney, violinist Kathryn Doehner from Germany and Cuban percussionist Frailan Moran Mendive.

Tsumbu's latest album, Song of the Nations, was released to rave reviews last April (again from the Irish Times: "Tsumbu’s confident juxtaposition of clarinet and guitar, insistent percussion and declamatory vocals trace a path that’s all his own...the final, hidden track...hollers from the mountaintop: its tribal rhythms and transcendent male harmonies declare Tsumbu’s intention to carve a niche nobody else has even dreamt of.")

Tsumbu arrived in Cork from the Congo in 2004, and has played with a number of different groups since then, including the Dublin based Detached group, the Niwel Tsumbu Duo, Sumu and the Clear Sky Ensemble, and has toured extensively, featuring on the bill at such diverse events as the Electric Picnic, the Festival of World Cultures and the Cork Jazz Festival.

He has studied both African music and jazz, and those influences fuse in his work. As Rootsworld puts it, "rich Lingala roots merge with jazz, classical and popular music in an acoustic tour de force of rhythm, melody and tight, terse vocals."

Niwel Tsumbu and Song of the Nations play St John's Arts Centre, Kerry, on 11th February. For more tour details see here.

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

Wisner goes on: "If The Education of a British-Protected Child doesn’t tell us much that is new about Achebe’s life, it does tell us a lot about his views on other matters." As The New York Times puts it, "In this book he tangles further, and profitably, with the obsessions that have defined his career: colonialism, identity, family, the uses and abuses of language."

Particularly interesting is a reprint of Achebe's essay 'Africa's Tarnished Name', (originally published in 2000), itself an extended version of a 1975 essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness titled 'Images of Africa'. That latter is a bitter analysis of what Achebe argues is Conrad's intense racism in Heart of Darkness and the lasting legacy of that writer's (quoting F.R. Leavis) "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery" in describing the continent.

Achebe: "In the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition: a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc."

In 'Africa's Tarnished Name' Achebe observes, "It is a great irony of history and geography that Africa, whose land mass is closer than any other to the mainland of Europe, should come to occupy in European psychological disposition the farthest point of otherness, should indeed become Europe's very antithesis."

He argues that Europe's perception of the alienness and otherness of Africa "was in general a deliberate invention" whose purpose was to allow, first, for the slave trade, and second, for the colonisation of the continent. The 'derogatory images' of Africa generated by this perception of alienness, he says, "gave the world a literary tradition that is now, happily, defunct, but also a particular way of looking (or rather not looking) at Africa and Africans that endures, alas, into our own day."

Achebe was writing in 2000, but 'our own day' as well describes 2010. A Google news search for 'africa "dark continent"' turns up four pages of results from just the past month - many, it is true, along the lines of "Some people still see Africa as 'the dark continent...", but indicative, despite their jaundiced tone, of the persistence of the myth given its literary imprimatur by Conrad.

While slightly hyperbolic, Rod Chavis in 'Africa in the Western Media' gives a good summary of this legacy: “Nouns and adjectives like hut, dark, tribe, King Kong, tribalism, primitive, nomad, animism, jungle, cannibal, savage, underdeveloped, third world, developing, etc., are pervasive when Africa is the story. Images of Africa in the Western Media, many times, are deeply troubling psychologically and emotionally, especially to those claiming her as primordial heritage, lineage, and descendancy. They portray a no there there: no culture, no history, no tradition, and no people, an abyss and negative void.

“With the stroke of a journalist's pen, the African, her continent, and her descendants are pejoratively reduced to nothing (but)… a bastion of disease, savagery, animism, pestilence, war, famine, despotism, primitivism, poverty, and ubiquitous images of children, flies in their food and faces, their stomachs distended. These "universal" but powerfully subliminal message units, beamed at global television audiences, connote something not good, perennially problematic unworthiness, deplorability, black, foreboding, loathing, sub humanity, etc.”

While the Western media's confused and flat-footed approach to describing events and life on the African continent is hardly news, this collection of essays is worthwhile both for the historical overview of European narratives of Africa it offers, and for the blade concealed within Achebe's scholarly tone, one which methodically (and sometimes savagely) deconstructs these narratives.

And although many of the essays in The Education of a British-Protected Child are a decade or more old, and the subjects they deal with many decades older, they still remain (incredibly, depressingly) relevant.  In 'Spelling Our Proper Name' Achebe writes, “The telling of the story of black people in our time, and for a considerable period before, has been the self-appointed responsibility of white people, and they have mostly done it to suit a white purpose, naturally….So much psychological, political and, economic interest is vested in the negative image.”

This is not the whole truth, of course, but the following elegant passage (from 'Images of Africa') gives a good summation of Europe's difficulty in 'storying' Africa: "As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray - a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate."

This post was guest-edited by Eadaoin O'Sullivan. Colin Murphy is away.

The Canal Communities Intercultural Strategy for Youth Work

The Canal Communities are the Bluebell, Rialto, Kilmainham, Inchicore, Islandbridge areas of south west inner city Dublin. This area is one of the most ethnically diverse in the country, with 17% of residents from minority ethnic backgrounds. The Canal Communities Intercultural Centre, running since 2004, works on integration in the area - in their words, 'an integration which celebrates difference but recognises our common desire to be respected parts of a dynamic, responsible, creative and caring community'. The centre has recently published a strategy for youth work, which was launched by the Minister for Integration, John Curran TD. Curran said he was 'very aware of the importance of focussing on younger immigrants and activities which encourage their greater participation in the community. Ensuring that migrant youth reach their full potential and feel part of the community is crucial not only for first generation migrants but, as international experience has shown, in some cases for second and third generations.'

In the Front Line of Integration: Young People Managing Migration to Ireland

A total of 169 young people aged 15-18 took part in this national study through participation in focus groups across the country. The study covered issues such as adjustment to life in Ireland, school life, links with their cultural heritage, relations with Irish young people, work and further study in Ireland and their experience of racism.

According to Minister John Curran, who launched the report, 'We can see from the research that many of the young people interviewed are ambitious and highly motivated to avail of the opportunities which Ireland offers them.'

Curran also noted that the demand for integration initiatives had not fallen with the drop off in immigration and rise in return-migration. 'In fact, at post primary level, the numbers increased slightly, he said. 'It is clear that the need for integration is not diminishing and reports like this remain important.'

The project was funded through the European Integration Fund and run by the Trinity Immigration Initiative and the Integration and Social Inclusion Centre. Download it here.

The OECD Report on Migrant Education in Ireland

The report presents policy options designed to respond to the main challenges, which the OECD has identified for Ireland in five key areas:

Early childhood education and care
School – primary and post-primary
Partnership and engagement – particularly with parents
Access to quality education
Data collection for evaluation and feedback.

John Curran said the report would inform the development of the Intercultural Education Strategy expected this spring.

According to Nick Gogan, 'Every Irish person remembers spending holidays at Mosney and it's incredible to see this familiar setting that still seems to resonate with so many of our pasts now used for a different purpose. The residents of Mosney each have their own story to tell, from the tragic to the heartwarming.'

As one resident of the centre says in the film: 'Do you know what it means to leave everything you have as a human being and come to a country where you are a total stranger? I mean, it's not something you just wake up and decide to do.' 

You can watch a trailer here, listen to an interview with the filmmakers here, download press materials here, and buy the film on DVD or download from Indiepix, here.

They will bring researchers, teachers, families and community workers together on the 20th, from 10am to 1pm at the Red Rua Art Centre in Tallaght (just by the Tallaght Luas stop) for a plenary session followed by the presentation of projects and a discussion.

Bilingual Forum Ireland is a group of researchers from universities across Ireland that aims to raise awareness about bilingual issues. They offer free information sessions and workshops and seminars on bilingualism to parents, teachers and community groups, and have an online forum. Amongst the discussions online is one on foreign-language playgroups, with details of various facilities for children in various languages.

Contact them at bilingualforumireland[at]gmail.com (replace [at] with @ - this is a convention to minimise spam).

The launch will be accompanied by a screening of the digital stories Living in Direct Provision, produced by FOMACS with Integrating Ireland and the Refugee Information Service. The launch is at 11am on the 18th in Buswell’s Hotel, Dublin. Contact campaigns[at]flac.ie.

The launch is also intended to mark the UN World Day of Social Justice on 20 February.

Incidentally, FLAC has recently launched an online audio archive to mark its 40th anniversary, for which I conducted a series of interviews with a range of people involved in FLAC over the years, including some of the founder members.

The film is narrated by mother and daughter, Noemi and Gracelle Barredo, from the Philippines. Separated from her daughter Gracelle at seven months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work in Malaysia to support her parents and extended family, before arriving in Ireland in 2000.

According to the filmmakers, Promise and Unrest is an intimate portrayal of a migrant woman performing caregiving and long-distance motherhood, while assuming the responsibility of sole provider for her family back in the Philippines.

Dublin may be a long way from Noemi’s hometown of Babatngon, yet she retains a sharp eye on the welfare of her family, attentive to a range of small businesses she has financed, paying for the education of her daughter and son, medication for her terminally ill father and her sister’s nursing degree.

Through the camera lens, the film captures the everyday intricacies of Noemi and Gracelle’s relationship, their reunion in Ireland and the beginnings o a domestic life together in the same country for the first time.

Tickets from the festival website or at (01) 6877974. The festival runs from February 18 to 28. We'll take a closer look at the programme here next week.

Rosebell Kagumire writes:

Though there are still hurdles, this doesn't mean African newspaper businesses should be seated idle waiting for a miracle of internet access for all for them to think of venturing into online media. Most media in Africa make efforts to include the youth in the normal newspapers, even if this group is not likely to buy a newspaper. However, they are the group that are educated, and who bother to access the internet. Newspapers are still stuck in age-old strategies and have yet to wake up.

I am in Costa Rica and get most breaking news from friends. It is frustrating that I have to wait for about 12 hours for a newspaper in Kampala to upload a story on their website. Some newspapers have started blogs for almost hourly updates and improved their online opinion pages to try to get the public interested. Others only have websites that carry months old news.
Much as there are still challenges for online news businesses, the owners aren't using even the limited access most countries have. I don't expect the African online media to necessarily take on the shape of the European or American way but we can use other advantages that are there in our communities.

I haven't seen any news outlet that has tried to use the wide spread of mobile phones and online news. Radios in my country have gained a lot from this because you can find more than 10 mobile phones in each village and this means information will be available faster. The African media market simply hasn't woken up to take advantage of the internet age in the best way.

Eugene N Nforngwa, editor of the Standard Tribune newspaper, Yaounde, Cameroon, writes:

One thing we cannot lose sight of is that online journalism is the future of African newspapers. The current skepticism is similar to that which followed the arrival of the mobile phone. We all know that this story is different today, wherever you are on the continent. With respect to many areas of innovation, Africa can be expected to experience huge technological bypasses. Take television for example. Most channels in my country are ignoring relay transmitters and hooking up on satellite and are able to broadcast to the entire world from day one.

One of the biggest challenges facing most of Africa's print media is infrastructure and cost. In Cameroon, there are only two printing presses serving hundreds of newspapers. Magazine publishers have to take their work to places like UAE and India to have good quality work. On top of all of that, sales are generally low and are set to keep falling, thanks partly to poor means of circulation.

Online publications offer both huge cuts in cost and wider reach. There is a huge market for African news in the Diaspora. This is the best way to attract younger readerships. It also offers a great way of bypassing the muzzling that is still very rampant in some of our counties. What is lacking presently is real investment in online journalism.

Eugene Nforngwa blogs here and tweets here.

Tobi Soniyi writes:

The fact that online journalism succeeded in Europe and America does not mean it would succeed in Africa, not to mention individual African countries. That is where the problem is. Literacy level differs from one country to another. In Nigeria, a lot of people buy papers because they identify with the region where they are published. A Hausa Fulani who cannot read and write will still buy a Daily Trust newspaper.

In Africa you pay heavily to get access to the internet and you also want them to pay to access a newspaper website? You are wasting your time.

Drew Sullivan of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project at the Center for Investigative Reporting, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, writes:

A large number of editors are not setting the standards necessary to build credibility with the public in many countries. It is worthless to use new technologies to enlarge your reach unless you succeed in dealing with this basic cornerstone of journalism: credibility. Otherwise you just turn off a larger circle of readers. We should all work hard -- much harder than we are working -- at building credibility. And that starts with accuracy and fairness in every single story.

I read media around the world.  We have a crisis in credibility in the developing world.  If we want to survive in a world of expanding information sources, I think we must resolve this first before we worry about much else.

Agenda Aloysius, a Masters student in Global Journalism at the University of Orebro, Sweden, writes:

The majority of African media and the rest of the media in developing nations need to build confidence in readers so as to consolidate present readership and attract more. Afterwards, they can look forward to expanding the media. Some are making frantic efforts on this.

The problem may also revolve around reading culture. Some traditional media may have a high readership not necessarily because of very good reporting but because a reading culture had been established in those societies and people can afford those papers or have more access to internet. This culture spans over centuries.

It is extremely important that editors in Africa and other developing nations make critical efforts to get more readers. I am from Cameroon, where this is not the case. News is just what happens by accident or what is said during press conferences and the details which some call "investigative" are often based on rumours which may not be false though can hardly be proven.

Aloysius blogs here.

In the programme, Neltah tells the story of her sister, Melody, and a man named Taurai, growing up together in Zimbabwe. Taurai was born albino and was taunted in the street. When he first asked Melody out, she refused, but her cousin 'blackmailed' her into accepting. She fell in love with Taurai, and shared in the abuse he received for being different. They also shared a life of laughs, cooking and gardening. They came to Ireland and had a daughter, Siobhán. Then, in 2008, Melody and Siobhán lost Taurai… Neltah's story recounts their joys and struggles.

The programme was broadcast in the Curious Ear slot last Saturday. Colin Murphy's short documentary for FOMACS, on immigrant participation in the local elections, was previously broadcast in this slot, and can be found here.

The film gives a rare and intimate insight into the lives of a migrant family in Ireland and their home country - in this case, the Philippines. Shot over five years, it follows Noemi Barredo, a care worker who left the Philippines in search of work when her daughter, Gracelle, was just seven months. Gracelle was left with Noemi's parents, as Noemi sought work first in Malaysia and later in Ireland. Noemi's earnings provided for her extended family in her absence, amongst other things building them a villa that contrasts sharply with the small Ranelagh bedsit in which Noemi lives in Ireland. Eventually, Noemi brought Gracelle to live with her in Ireland.

Promise and Unrest is ethnographic filmmaking, allowing the story of these people's lives to unfold with time, and with the sometimes chaotic and sometimes mundane pace of real life. While it is ostensibly about Noemi and Gracelle - both of whom emerge as strong and compelling protagonists - it could also be read as an oblique commentary on Irish culture and society. And of course the film has much to say - though never didactically - on the global regime regulating migrant labour.

The filmmakers (who are colleagues in FOMACS) are now looking to the next stage of distribution. At a Q&A after the film, Áine said they intended to develop an education pack to accompany the film in outreach work. I'll keep readers posted.

A short note on the website: the video is embedded using the popular alternative to YouTube, Vimeo. This is much the same as YouTube to use, but is higher quality. Vimeo only allows uploading of original material, and so has a more tangible community orientation than the more chaotic YouTube. For those who enjoy plunging into this kind of tech talk, there's a thorough comparison of various video sharing sites here.

As they say: 'We want to provide some connections for people and organisations hoping to relate to organisations in Haiti - when communications become possible. Plus, we all know from times like this that spaces to communicate, debate, and struggle with the meaning and implications of are vitally important. We have created these spaces through The CI and include links to these spaces here below.'

The resource is here.

The article is a paean to cities and their potential for both lifting people out of poverty (even in slum cities), and for boosting energy conservation and environmental protection. Brand references the UN study above:

The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”

Brand concludes:

Fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease and injustice as much as business, innovation, education and entertainment. The recent earthquake in Haiti demonstrates the danger of slum buildings. But if they are overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and with it everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.

And just as this was true during the industrial revolution, so the take-off of cities will be the dominant economic event of the first half of this century too. It will involve huge infrastructural stresses on energy and food supply. Vast numbers of people will begin climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder, from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat and soy to meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of it will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince them to stay in their villages. Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.

This week's Humanitarian Heads Up e-newsletter from Reuters AlertNet also looks at urbanisation.

Aid agencies will have to get urbanised, they report:

More and more vulnerable populations will settle on the outskirts of towns and cities across the globe in the next few years, a new report has found. Published by Humanitarian Futures Programme at King's College, London, and the Feinstein International Centre at Tufts University in the US called Humanitarian Horizons: A Practitioners' Guide to the Future, is one of two new reports highlighting the need for humanitarian efforts to be focus on the needs of the urban poor who have been largely been overlooked as the aid world concentrates more on rural development. The other is the World Bank's flagship Development Report 2010. About 810 million people already live in city slums, battling overcrowding, insecure tenure, landslides, flooding, poor sanitation, unsafe housing, inadequate nutrition and poor health. Humanitarian agencies will need to revise their mandates as emergency needs in urban areas have not been addressed. The World Bank report also examines the impact of climate change on urban populations. "Low-elevation coastal zones at risk from rising sea levels and coastal surges are home to about 600 million people globally, and 15 of the world's 20 megacities," it says. 

The presenter, Evan Davis (pictured), wrote about it in the Times, here. The documentary was reviewed in the Guardian here and the Independent here.

It was watched by 5.3 million viewers and a 21% share in the 9pm hour, reported the Guardian.

Evan Davis told the BBC:

'The programme started really with a hypothetical alternative world in which you ask 'what would society be like if we didn't have the immigrants here?'

'The conceit of it is to take immigrants out of Wisbech and to see how life continues there. We hear a lot of people saying that the immigrants have stolen our jobs, that there aren't any opportunities for Wisbech people.

'There are mixed results in the experiments we've done," he said.

'Some, you could see that the British workers were up to the job and could do it. And quite a few where you could say that the British workers didn't put their backs into it, didn't want to put their backs into it, or couldn't put their backs into it.

'What's undoubtedly the case is that a lot of these jobs are back-breaking jobs, and there is not a lot of demand by British workers to do these.'

Readers in the UK can watch the doc on the BBC's iPlayer here.

The film was made by Leopard Films.

Subtitled 'How my country manipulated and used me to fight my neighbours and how I learned to transform hate into pure love’, it documents Vais's experience in the Israeli army - in which he spent three years and saw active service in various missions - and how he 'mastered the art of being invisible and learned to transform hate into pure and unconditional love'. Vais subsequently spent time in an Israeli jail 'and had to learn the art of forgiveness in order to keep sane,' he explains.

Daniel Vais was previously based in Ireland, where he worked with the Limerick dance troupe, Daghda which introduced the innovative Mamuska Nights - a kind of artistic open-house that has since spread internationally.

In Limerick, Vais set up the dance troupe Lovespotters, featuring performers with Down Syndrome, and conducted a number of successful tours with the troupe.

He followed this with a festival of 'outsiders' art and dance, before relocating to London. I interviewed him in 2008 during a rather delightfully quirky solo dance tour on Cape Clear, an island off the south west of Ireland. From that article:

Anybody can be a dancer, he believes. Everywhere he goes, he seeks to lead people out of the physical and emotional cul-de-sacs into which their inhibitions and life experiences lead them. He leads them literally – he draws people out of the watching audience and encourages them to dance with him. It doesn’t necessarily make for good performance (in a conventional sense) – but it makes for intriguing social dynamics. And, Vais believes, it can make for positive social development. He calls it “social choreography”. “I set the conditions for things to happen,” he says. He blurs the boundaries between high art, outreach and avant-garde experimentation.

Vais's Belfast talk, with accompanying 'dance ritual', takes place at 1-3pm on Wednesday, March 24, as part of the gallery's two month exhibition, Exchange Mechanism, curated by Raimi Gbadamosi. (Download the programme here. More on Daniel Vais here.)

During this time, the gallery 'will operate as an alternative political space, where visitors encounter set works, complicated by ‘disruptions’,' they say. 'The intention is to present visitors with the opportunity to engage with ideas; explain, interpret and respond to the work in as many ways as possible, in the context of political debate and multiple channels of exchange:  artist, viewer, art; public, politics, ideas; visitor, city, gallery. Simultaneously functioning as a debating chamber, an installation of esoteric and popular media and an archive display, Exchange Mechanism seeks to challenge the abstraction of spontaneous public, political and artistic encounters from everyday life.'

The concept is inspired by the 'increasing regulation of public space, restrictions on mobility, and routine invasions of personal privacy', leading to 'an interrogation of the demands and denials of freedom alongside artists’ responsibility to actively engage with the political'.

'We want people to get involved as speakers, organisers, activists and volunteers,' they say. The exhibition runs till April 9.

Belfast Exposed was founded in 1983 as a community photography initiative, and now functions as a gallery for contemporary photography with an emphasis on commissioning and publication of new work. It holds a community photography archive (with a portion of this available online) and runs an extensive educational outreach network.

See, for example, the photos in the Parades series of the archive.

The exhibition is being curated by the Latin American Solidarity Centre (LASC) and Age Action Ireland, and will be displayed at the Irish Aid Volunteer and Information Centre, Dublin during April.

The curators have issued a call for photos for the exhibition, inviting those interested to send photos to  lascphotoexhibition10@gmail.com by March 15 (postal entries to Mara Sánchez, LASC, 5 Merrion Row, Dublin 2).

Entries are required to follow the principles of Dóchas Code of Conduct of Images (download pdf here). Dóchas is the umbrella organisation for Irish non-governmental development & aid organisations. See also the Dóchas report of a conference on how African and developing countries are portrayed in the media, here.

For more on 'food sovereignty', see here and also the LASC powerpoint on the issue, here. Upcoming events at the Irish Aid centre are here.

It is 'about the people who were forced to leave its geographic location but bound to carry with them memories of their home place,' he says. 'McCafferty’s thought-provoking new play brings us on a series of journeys with the protagonists, Ger (Karl Johnson) and Iggy (Ian McElhinney), from their public pasts and the contribution they made to the building of British transport systems, to their private memories of their youth and the burdens which they are now left with.

'Themes of masculinity, silence and invisibility are to the fore of the play. Ger tells Dotty that “Belfast men don’t dance”, a line his father used, and offers her a drink instead, while Iggy is forced to leave Belfast because he does not conform to the apparent norms of society. Both men may have lived the majority of their lives away from Belfast, yet they have carried with them the experiences and memories of their formative years, and the change of geographical locale has done little to change their lives.

'In recent years, the lives of Irish navvy workers in England have received much attention on stage and screen, and there is a feeling that we have heard many of Ger and Iggy’s stories before. However, McCafferty’s play does add a specifically Belfast dimension to these representations. As Ger longs to return to Belfast for one last drink, he wonders if the city has changed. The Belfast that Iggy and Ger left had particular notions about masculinity, the consumption of alcohol, the treatment of women, and cultures of silence – how does that world compare to a contemporary Belfast? Perhaps, in this linking of past and present, McCafferty raises the most pertinent question of the piece.'

The full review is here. Details of the play, which ends on Saturday February 27, are here. More on McCafferty here.

As well as reflecting on recent projects, the convention aims to report on the current situation of the Polish communities in the recession. Amongst the events are a group discussion on the needs of and challenges facing Polish migration and activist groups in Ireland, a seminar on networking in the NGO sector and a talk on being a social entrepreneur in Ireland.

Forum Polonia is a cooperative platform that brings together representatives of various Polish community organisations, the media, and individuals involved in projects relating to the Polish minority and its links to Irish society as a whole. The Forum maintains an active website, with an English version here (partially translated). Amongst the recent articles is one on the Walk & Talk initiative of Dublin City Council, which the council hopes to promote amongst immigrant communities as an integration initiative.

Forum Polonia can also be followed on Facebook.

Zoe O'Reilly is studying for a PHD in NUI Maynooth focusing on the use of participatory photography in researching migration and asylum in Ireland. The project in India, Súil Eile, was supported by the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund.

The Learning Lab sessions will be lead by three international public intellectuals:

Andrea Durbach, Director of Australian Human Rights Centre at the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia;

Handel Kashope Wright, Director of the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education, University of British Columbia, Canada and Board Member of the Highlander Research and Education Center, Tennessee, USA;

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, UK based broadcast journalist, writer and public speaker on race and cultural identities.

See the multimedia archive at the Learning Labs Library for more.

Boal invented a form of participatory, activist theatre known as Theatre of the Oppressed, inspired by the Pedagogy of the Oppressed of Paulo Freire (also Brazilian). In it, theatre performances are improvised for community audiences in order to dramatise problems being faced by (or within) the community; at key points in the play, the audience is invited to step on stage and become the protagonists, in order to act out what should happen to resolve the problem. It was a revolutionary idea, and Boal took it all around the world, helping to spread the use of theatre as a tool of rights awareness and social justice.

An obituary in the Guardian elaborated on how this method developed:

'Boal was influenced by the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s - he took agitprop shows into the countryside and pioneered a radical kind of "living newspaper" in which the audience helped decide the subject of the play.

'At one point, when Boal's agitprop group was preaching the necessity of taking up arms, a peasant in the audience stood up and suggested an armed raid on a local landlord. Embarrassed, the actors backed down. But the incident taught them to listen to the people.

'Abandoning crude agitprop, Boal developed the idea of the "Theatre of the Oppressed". At first, this involved asking audience members for ideas for alternative endings to plays about oppression. Then, after an angry woman was so dissatisfied with how his actors interpreted her suggestions that she came on stage and showed them what she meant, he developed shows with more audience participation.'

Later, Boal was elected as a member of Rio de Janeiro's city council, and used his theatre techniques to encourage participation in lawmaking, calling it legislative theatre.

Boal was a regular visitor to Ireland: there is a podcast of Boal speaking at the Abbey in 2008 on Indymedia.

Other links:

An interview with Boal by Tom Magill, Belfast-based community theatre activist, from 1998.

Amongst the prominent practitioners of Boal's techniques on these isles are the London-based theatre company, Cardboard Citizens.

Theatre of the Oppressed on Facebook.

The Irish memorial page on Facebook.

The International Theatre of the Oppressed Organisation.

As the Epidavros Project, their signature film project has been the documentary Well-Founded Fear, which took an unprecedented inside look at the asylum system in the US, with the pair gaining the trust, uniquely, of both officials and applicants. Well-Founded Fear debuted at the Sundance Festival in a two-hour cut and went on to screen on various US networks. It is available from Epidavros here, along with various educations modules aimed at both students and legal professionals. (It's also available on Amazon.)

The Sundance Festival wrote of it:

'In a film marked by exquisite production values and striking intelligence, the filmmakers have dedicated themselves to an evenhanded empathy and critique of officials and refugees alike. What they argue is that any process where life becomes a story, a man becomes a God, and justice becomes a lottery is an imperfect one.'

There are reviews here, here and here.

An earlier film by Shari Robertson from 1987 also dealt with refugee issues: Waiting for Cambodia looked at the human cost of the geopolitical impasse that left Cambodian refugees stranded in refugee camps on the Thai border from 1975 till, ultimately, the early 1990s.

Camerini, meanwhile, says his 'interest in what it means to be a foreigner' is the 'unifying theme' in his work.

Their 1995 film, These Girls Are Missing, has been translated into seven African languages, telling stories of women and girls in education in different African countries.

Robertson & Camerini elaborate their filmmaking agenda here:

If you make documentaries on "issues" you know it is surprisingly easy to end up with a work that covers no new ground, or is self serving, or only states the obvious or worst of all, is merely self-congratulatory. And yet, films are a uniquely powerful means of communication. Particularly with subjects where viewers already hold strong opinions or attitudes (even if these are not necessarily well thought-out), movies can still rattle or jolt out a new perspective. Film draws us in with its immediacy and its intimacy. It puts faces to complex dilemmas and vibrates to the larger questions, the abstracts beneath and around the life on screen. It opens a door to a new way of seeing and understanding situations and ideas grown too familiar, creating a context to provoke and inform further. So, a film is also about what happens when the lights come back up. Its meaning lies in the conversation begun, not just the narrative finished. A beautiful and well-made documentary film finds ways to encourage -- even insist on -- deeper engagement from those who see it, and to demand reflection and debate.

For their latest project, see the post below.

The thing that got us hooked on this story back in 2001 wasn't a passionate political position, but a report from a Washington think tank, a groundbreaking study by noted migration expert and founder of the new Migration Policy Institute, Demetri Papademetriou. Demetri and his team reframed the immigration debate in economic terms and outlined a plan to fix every aspect of American immigration policy in a way that would also offer millions of people living here illegally a way to become citizens.

They continue:

One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting access to film in exactly those places where this [lawmaking process] would have to happen -- offices in the Senate and the House. But Hill staffers do not seek the limelight, to say the least -- and they are rarely encouraged to do so. Congressional offices have very good reasons to be notoriously camera-shy. So we had to find a way to talk about what we had in mind that made it seem like a good idea, good enough to be worth the almost insane risk to them and their bosses. Something that would soften the horror.

Our films always end up being a collaboration with the people we're filming, so we like to be very clear about what we intend to do. When it came down to describing the idea we had in mind this time, the simplest and truest phrase was this: "how democracy works now". That seemed to sum it up -- we wanted to look into that black box between elections and legislation, and understand what sorts of collaborations and pathways were actually there. We kept kicking this idea around between ourselves, trying to think of a way to say it that sounded like a film title. And in the end, we just couldn't wait to come up with the right title, so we started explaining ourselves in the plainest terms possible, using the actual idea as the provisional title: How Democracy Works Now.

How Democracy Works Now sounds laughably earnest, it's true. It's a title only an educational film could survive, and probably not one that many people would ever see. And that worked out to be terribly useful. It became a stealth title that made us, and our camera, less threatening in places where cameras never go. And it tapped into a secret vein of altruism in a lot of the people we hoped to be filming as well. Hill staff jobs, and even the elected posts of those staffers' bosses, attract a surprisingly idealistic bunch of people. Participating in the working of democracy turned out to be exactly why a lot of them were there.

The website also features a lengthy, and fascinating, directors' statement, outlining the process of making the series:

We'd only been shooting for a couple of weeks though, and were barely getting started in the Senate when the attacks on September 11th, 2001 changed the course of US immigration history forever. Like almost everything else, immigration became just one more issue put aside as the country, and certainly Washington, DC, focused everything on the new reality of national security. There was nothing for us to shoot in Washington the next week. And nobody we'd been filming with really wanted to see us.

Many times over the years, we've wondered whether we shouldn't have stopped right then. Lots of film projects just don't work out. The key to survival as an independent is to recognize those and cut your losses in time. We'd done that in the past. This film idea barely started seemed like the least of the big problems - or even the big stories - right then, but somehow, we really didn't want to let it go. The idea of understanding what was inside that black box that fits between elections, how democracy worked in the America of the 21st century, had already gotten too deep a hold on us.

We stayed away from Washington for a while, and remembered a story we simply hadn't managed to shoot that had happened in Iowa over the previous summer. A local group of anti-immigration supporters had managed to hijack the High School Band's summer parade, and in the process, attract the attention of the national news which was zeroing in on anything and everything "immigration" at that point. We went out to see what was left.

There were wonderful possibilities for all sorts of documentaries right then in Iowa, of course. But with the 'how democracy works now' perspective, following the local City Council race in Mason City became our first object lesson in the big construct that ended up being the M.O. of the series and every film in it. The complicated ways that quite personal stories, particular immediate contexts and histories, accidents and coincidence play into an abstractly articulated framework of broad social policy goals and specific political aims to become the material of democracy -- that's what we ended up filming, and eventually editing to make these films.

We went back to Washington after the November elections in Iowa, and began our series of introductions and persuasion-assaults again. It wasn't exactly easy going, but it was fascinating. Gradually things began to melt a bit, and by winter 2002, we were on the way.

To see some brief clips from the resulting series, go here.

The website is a companion to the film project, with resources including an extensive series of character biographies (such as this one of FOMACS collaborator Frank Sharry), and an innovative text & video glossary, explaining key political concepts and jargon, and potentially of value to politics students in its own right. 

You can follow the How Democracy Works Now project via their busy feed on Twitter or on Facebook. US readers can view a film from the series, The Senators' Bargain, on March 24 at 8 pm on HBO2. This film features the late Senator Ted Kennedy and his battle for immigration reform as its centerpiece. The filmmakers are encouraging those interested to discuss the film on Twitter, using the #hdwn hashtag, and via liveblogging, with participants in the film, on the website.

Shanks has an elegant and busy blog here.

According to the release from the HII:

Computation, information technology, digital media, and social software meet the Humanities. Institutional investment in the Digital Humanities is accelerating. Is this to be a new discipline? What of traditional forms of Humanistic scholarship? What are the implications of digital culture for the Academy? Professor Shanks will acknowledge new trends and ground a critique of digitally-enabled Humanities in a fresh perspective on humanistic scholarship since the eighteenth century, broadening the context from the Academy to cover new developments in digital culture, including social software, located and ubiquitous media, virtual worlds and Web 3.0. As an archaeologist, his focus is through memory practices and archives, long term historical trends, and cultural heritage, on issues such as cultural property, globalization and social justice, identity and documentation, and materiality/immateriality.

Prof Shanks will argue that the key issues facing the contemporary Humanities are to do with the basic practices of that cultural sector typically called the public sphere. The forms of text, image, publication, dissemination, critique, commentary, and debate are achieving a fungibility that prompts a radical evaluation of how the Humanities address matters of common and pressing concern, requiring even an examination of the qualities of humane living.

Michael Shanks is a Director of Stanford Humanities Lab and is a founder of Stanford Strategy Studio. His lab in Stanford Archaeology Center is called Metamedia, and 'pioneers the use of Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate collaborative multidisciplinary research networks in design history, media materialities and long-term historical trends'.

According to Shanks:

Archaeologists do not discover the past; they work on what remains. Archaeology, the discipline of things, design and making, is about our relationships with what is left of the past. This means we are all archaeologists now; cultural heritage lies at the core of who we think we are, and how we might respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow.

As they explain, beyond providing video cameras and editing equipment, Witness helps broker relationships with international media outlets, government officials, policymakers, activists, and the general public so that once a video is made, it can be used as a tool to advocate for change. There is more detail on their mission, and an introductory video, here. 

The Witness store has a range of documentaries available to buy, including a series of reports on refugees and displaced people.

There are a series of Witness videos available to view on The Hub, the 'world's first participatory media site for human rights'. (More on The Hub in a later post.)

You can follow Witness on Twitter here.

The photo above is from a 2001 film, Expelled, on the Dominican government's practice of illegal expulsion of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian decent.

Free North Korea Radio is run from Seoul and broadcasts voices of dissent into North Korea. David McNeill wrote about the station and its founder, Kim Seong-Min, in the Irish Times recently.

Run by defector Kim Seong-Min, the small shortwave station has an apparently simple mission: to bring democracy to one of the world’s most paranoid, secretive nations.

“But first we must have a free media there,” says Kim. “That’s what we’re working on.”

Carrying out that mission is dangerous, and sometimes deadly. Kim (48) is protected round the clock by two armed police bodyguards. In 2007 many of the station’s original team of stringers were caught and tried as spies, then sent to labour camps – or perhaps executed. “We don’t know what happened to them exactly,” he says, adding that the detections “devastated” him.

“The stress of knowing that could happen again is very hard to bear. Honestly, I often just want to quit.”
Building up a new network of stringers took time. Today, 10 freelance journalists provide reports from behind the bamboo curtain on a retainer of about $100 (€73) a month. They include a university professor, a teacher, at least two soldiers and a North Korean security agent.

FNKR provides them with small digital recorders, which are used to record interviews, and mobile phones with signals that work across the Chinese border – Pyongyang’s fledgling mobile- phone system was bought from Egypt and is incompatible with the South Korean network.

The recordings are smuggled across the Chinese border and transported back to Seoul via a network of spies.
The results detonate on air during Voices of the People , where the raw views of the North’s citizens – electronically distorted – are broadcast back into their own country. Brainwashed automatons in so much reporting, the people heard here emerge as thrillingly human, alive and angry.

FNKR has also been covered on CNN, in the New York Times, and on National Public Radio.

Kim Seong-Min won the 2009 Asia Democracy and Human Rights Award last December.

Wikipedia has more on the media in North Korea and on censorship in North Korea.

The Theatre of Witness is described as ' new vision for performance where art and social justice meet' and bears the legend, 'Inspire, humanize, bear witness, transform, heal.' Developed by Teya Sepinuck, it is  performance method that aims to give voice to 'those who have been marginalised, forgotten or are invisible in society'. According to Theatre of Witness website:

Their true life stories, performed by the people themselves, are shared onstage so that audiences can collectively bear witness to issues of suffering, redemption and social justice. Theatre of Witness productions performed in spoken word, music, movement and film projection put a face and heart to societal issues of suffering, and celebrate the power of the human spirit to grow and transform.

Teya Sepinuck has been creating Theatre of Witness productions in the United States and Poland since 1986. Performers have included: refugees, immigrants, survivors and perpetrators of domestic abuse, teenage runaways, prisoners and their families, people living in poverty or without homes, families of murder victims, as well as women in transition, teen parents and people in recovery.

Some recent Theatre of Witness programmes have brought survivors of violence together with perpetrators and witnesses to explore issues of accountability, healing, guilt, restorative justice, forgiveness and redemption. The finished productions performed by the people themselves in prisons, theatres, schools, community centres and at conferences, create safe public forums for audiences to move beyond entrenched positions and ideologies towards understanding and healing.

There are video clips of various Theatre of Witness performances here, and more on past shows here. In Each Other's Eyes in 2002 looked at migration and diversity in the US.

We Carried Your Secrets brought together a group of fathers who were ex combatants during the 'Troubles' to tell their stories of the conflict and subsequent transformation, along with stories of the next generation, growing up in the shadow of the Troubles. It premiered in Derry and subsequently toured across Northern Ireland.

One of the participants is Robin, a former RUC officer and current Community Officer. He says:

My memories of cleaning up after so much carnage from the Omagh bomb earned me the right to speak. 
I've lived through the horror of seeing what human beings can do to each other and I now believe that we all have our part to play to turn this around for our children.

The follow up production is I Once Knew a Girl…, which will premiere this coming October, 2010, and will deal with the experiences of women in Northern Ireland. A documentary is being made on the process.

There is a podcast interview with Teya Sepinuck here and interviews with some of the participants here. The project was previewed in the Irish Times, here. Reviewing We Carried Your Secrets for Irish Theatre Magazine, David Grant wrote:

What sets it apart is the direct agency of its protagonists. Many theatre-makers in the past have sought to access the authentic experience of those involved, but this has usually been mediated by others – writers, directors and actors. The ‘performers’ in a Theatre of Witness production are the very people whose stories are being told.

Too often have well-meaning outsiders sought to engage the arts in the cause of peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland only to seem voyeuristic, disingenuous or exploitative. But any lingering cynicism must surely have been dispelled by the post-show discussion in which witness after witness spoke with candour and conviction about the positive impact the production had had on them.

One witness had seemed quite distressed throughout the performance and this gave rise to questions from the audience expressing legitimate concern about the ethics of his involvement. His response, that his brother with whom he had never discussed his feelings about the assassination of their father was in the audience for the first time, explained his demeanour. Although this in no way lessened the mutual discomfort of his exposure, it confronted us with the plain truth that understanding requires disclosure.

Flying in the face of the conventional concern for distance and objectivity, We Carried Your Secrets was in the purest sense a shared experience. In its refusal to recognise a hierarchy of suffering, it allowed everyone in the audience who lived through the ‘Troubles’ to acknowledge the lingering impact on our lives.

(More on David Grant here.)

This is the Irish manifestation of an international audio documentary project. In Dublin, murmur has collected stories and personal memories about Docklands from older people as part of the innovative Bealtaine festival.

The stories can be listened to online but, ideally, they should be listened to in the locations where they were recorded. View the map here, and walk to the locations marked on it with a 'green ear'. Once there, find the 'green ear' and phone the number on it to  listen to the appropriate story.

Murmur is also in Galway.

Murmur started in Toronto. Its intention is explained here:

Murmur is a documentary oral history project that records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations. We collect and make accessible people's personal histories and anecdotes about the places in their neighborhoods that are important to them. In each of these locations we install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number on it that anyone can call with a mobile phone to listen to that story while standing in that exact spot, and engaging in the physical experience of being right where the story takes place. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze.

The stories we record range from personal recollections to more "historic" stories, or sometimes both — but always are told from a personal point of view, as if the storyteller is just out for a stroll and was casually talking about their neighbourhood to a friend.

It's history from the ground up, told by the voices that are often overlooked when the stories of cities are told. We know about the skyscrapers, sports stadiums and landmarks, but [murmur] looks for the intimate, neighbourhood-level voices that tell the day-to-day stories that make up a city. The smallest, greyest or most nondescript building can be transformed by the stories that live in it. Once heard, these stories can change the way people think about that place and the city at large.

The stories are as personal as the relationship people have with the spaces they inhabit. Secret histories are unearthed, private truths unveiled and tales as diverse as the city itself are discovered and shared. All members of a community are encouraged to participate and contribute, so that the "voice" of [murmur] reflects the diverse voices of the neighbourhood. These are the stories that make up the city's identity, but they're kept inside of the heads of the people who live here. [murmur] brings that important archive out onto the streets, for all to hear and experience, and is always looking for new stories to add to its existing locations.

Murmur was developed originally with the assistance of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab. International media coverage of murmur is here.

These featured mini documentaries of individual emigrants, such as Mick Connery in Buenos Aires, who teachers hurling, a game which thrived amongst Irish emigrants in Argentina till the 1930s, to local children. (The concept and form was not unlike FOMACS's own series of ultra-short documentary portraits, The Richness of Change, produced with the Immigrant Council of Ireland.)

The Global Irish series can be viewed until April 5 on the RTE Player here.

Little was profiled in the Sunday Tribune here. Una Mulally, wrote:

As always, Little is ahead of the pack on this one. While Irish journalism is something of a backwater in terms of online media, both in content and understanding, if anyone is going to bring it out of the shadows, it's Mark Little.

According to his statement on leaving RTE:

The rise of social media platforms like You Tube, Twitter and Facebook provides an opportunity for journalists to change the way we report the world. I would like to take a more direct role in that transformation,' he said.

He can be seen elaborating on his vision for the media in a talk, 'The News is Dead, Long Live the News', in this videoed presentation at the Institute of International and European Affairs (which I highly recommend):

My theory is that there's a new consciousness in the way that we consume news that change the game completely...Suddenly now the means of production in journalism are in the hands of real people.

There's a terrific story in the first few minutes about the key moment that led him to move towards embracing new media: a trip to Afghanistan when he wasn't able to get a key story to air because of lack of space on Prime Time.

Little is a particularly prolific, and erudite, tweeter.

Sen has been increasingly influential in British politics, and was profiled last year by the New Statesman here, which included a key quote from Sen's recent work:

Responsible adults must be in charge of their own well-being; it is for them to decide how to use their capabilities. But the capabilities that a person does actually have (and not merely theoretically enjoys) depend on the nature of social arrangements, which can be crucial for individual freedoms. And there the state and the society cannot escape responsibility.

Sen's latest book is The Idea of Justice.

Separately, Sen has previously addressed issues of migration and development in this online interview with Radio Open Source, here. Open Source introduces this as follows:

Isn’t the immigration crisis the flip side of a development riddle? What would it take to make the lives of Mexican farmers sustainable in Mexico? How does it come to be that there are more African-trained nurses and doctors working in Europe than in Africa? Under the heading of “flood control,” what might the US be doing to address the tide of refugees from Latin America before they reach the Bush border fence?

Amartya Sen, the Lamont University Professor at Harvard, is of course an immigrant from India — in an America that he notes has always been hospitable to intellectuals and highly qualified specialists like him. Development economics is only one of his fields, and his technical studies are the least of his worldwide eminence. He is best known perhaps for the observed rule that famines simply do not happen in independent democracies with a free press; famines are invariably political and military “events,” as he first suspected on the basis of his own childhood witness of the famine in Bengal in 1943 which took 3 million lives. He is a feminist exponent of the argument that the single most important stroke in development policy (and population control) is the education of women. His new book Identity and Violence takes apart all the easy labels of ethnic and national destiny and smashes the monoliths of East and West: “Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.

The entry on Sen in Wikipedia is here.

'The play is about the insidious and corrosive effects of racism, but also about the difficulty of untangling truth from false perceptions,' says Kennedy. 'Kenneth descends into a hell that could be partly of his own making and partly a response to intolerable pressure, in a culture that he once thought he understood. He does desperate things because desperate things are done to him.'

The plays stars the Ugandan actor George Seremba, whose one man show Come Good Rain has been acclaimed and toured internationally.

Put Out the Light runs at the New Theatre in Temple Bar, Dublin, from March 29 to April 3. There will be a post show discussion with the Kennedy and Seremba on Friday April 2. 

Paul Kennedy's previous plays include Stopping by the Woods, in the Dublin Fringe 2009 and Testimonies, a documentary piece about suicide co-authored with Mary Moynihan. 

From the most recent article, 'Women seeking asylum: shame and isolation', by Debora Singer:

Rani escaped Sri Lanka after her husband was murdered and she was raped by soldiers.  She told me that at her asylum interview in the UK  “I was happy with a lady interviewer but not a male translator. ... Because he was a man I felt ashamed. If it was a woman I would have said more.”  Contrast this with a woman who goes to report a rape to the police - she can ask for a female police officer to be present at her interview and will be supported by a specially trained officer throughout the police investigation and at any subsequent trial.

The past ten years have transformed the way the UK criminal justice system deals with domestic and sexual violence.  A number of criminal justice reforms have been introduced, designed to improve the investigation and prosecution of rape and domestic violence cases, to prevent police, prosecutors and judges from using dubious stereotypes relating to a woman’s credibility, and to provide increased levels of support to female victims of such crimes.  While not offering a panacea, there is little doubt that these reforms have brought some benefits.

However, there is a marked disparity between the experiences of female victims of sexual and domestic violence going through the criminal justice process in the UK, and that of women asylum seekers who have experienced the same crimes going through the asylum process.  Whilst the purposes of the two processes are not the same – one is to investigate a crime and the other is to determine refugee status – the sensitivities required are similar.  To rectify this disparity, the gender sensitive culture developed for women in the criminal justice system needs to be transferred into the asylum system. Continued here.

In 'Cry of a Migrant', Filipino domestic worker Marissa Begonia describes her experiences as a migrant worker:

I may able to give my children whatever they may need and ask for but the sacrifices in exchange of all these is far cruel, I was not there to take care of them when they were sick, I never see them grow.....migrant or second class citizen I may be, I am one of the migrants who cry for any injustices and abuse in job, labour law and fellow mankind.

The series is supported by the Barrow Cadbury Trust, which provides grants to grassroots voluntary and community groups working in deprived communities and supports policy makers working on issues of equality.

The competition invited students around the country to watch a special 17-minute DVD and produce an art piece on the themes raised in the film.

Port of Memory follows the family of the filmmaker after they receive an order to evacuate their home in ‘Ajami, Jaffa's once prosperous seafront neighbourhood. Their lives and those of other residents are thrown into disarray as they lack the means to fight back. Radically poetic, Port of Memory is a reflection on the absurdity of being at once absent and present as a Palestinian living within Israel today.

There's also a photography exhibition, Intimate Portrayals, featuring Taysir Batniji's exploration of portrait photographs found in shops, cafes, factories and other places of daily work and life in Gaza, and Noel Jabbour' s Palestinian Interiors', which comprises a series shot in the Aqbat Jaber refugee camp, Hebron and Jerusalem focusing on decorated walls within Palestinian homes.

The festival's first week take place at the Barbican and it then relocates to SOAS. There's an article from the Guardian on the 2008 festival here:

If Palestinian cinema has the potential to speak for all the dispossessed of the world, overemphasising this runs the risk of ignoring all that is unique to it - in particular, a passion for films and film-making and a wry, everyday humour.

On paper the Akkouchs are a typical Neukölln family, struggling financially and under constant pressure to retain an Aufenthaltserlaubnis (Residence Permit). But the triumphs and tribulations of these teenagers challenge immigrant clichés; a fly-on-the-wall camera shows them joking and quarrelling; and animation is used in a moving passage about their temporary deportation to Lebanon. With a gripping storyline, breathtaking breakdancing and protagonists you root for all the way, the film is both insightful and very entertaining. NEUKÖLLN UNLIMITED  | Directed by Agostino Imondi, Dietmar Rasch (Germany 2010) with Hassan, Lial and Maradona Akkouch. German OV (with English subtitles). Opened in Berlin cinemas on April 8, 2010.

'I’m who I want to be’ – these were the words that opened a youth and digital communities masterclass at ‘Moving Worlds’ and which provided a rejoinder for the workshop’s title ‘I’m Not Who You Think I Am.’ Set against these statements, the notion of just being ‘yourself’ seems oddly antiquated and limiting – certainly for ‘teen influencers’ who have done so much of their growing-up online. Setting the scene for his presentation, Howard Pyle (global director of digital platforms at Oglivy & Mather NY) situated the ascendancy of the internet and self-help and guidance gurus in parallel with the collapse of the traditional institutions of church and state, underlining that what has taken place is nothing less than a cultural shift opening up new routes, real and virtual, to self and group identifications. As part of this process it was claimed that the definition of friendship too is being rerouted. Ironically, the outnumbered young people attending the workshop were the most vocal sources of objection to equations that for instance leveled ‘fb friends’ with ‘real’ relationships, and online communities with three-dimensional ones. 

For one objector, social media has spectacularly succeeded at misleading the millions of digital natives in its thrall into believing that something as sacred as friendship can be mediated in megabytes, while for another, the reality of people losing the capacity to laugh, other than in the abbreviated msn speak of ‘lol,’ was not far away. From the pro-digital media standpoint of the workshop, for the gaming geek whose school life offers a sure guarantee of solitude, skill and/or interest based communities provide opportunities to connect with people in ways that are emotionally real and engaging. Following this logic, a young person in Illinois who shares ‘Starcraft’ strategies with his friends in Korea and has ‘off-topic’ conversations in its online forums is nurturing a budding friendship. Although of the opinion that social media institute life enhancing and participatory spaces for communication, Howard didn’t fail to note that among the vast firmaments of social network constellations, cultural and racial tensions and the potential for online harassment do exist. However virtual, from the perspective of the abused, cyber attacks are real enough to do damage.

For the late developers attending ‘I'm Not Who You Think I Am,’ Howard’s insider trading tips gave them the net know how to scale the digital divide. Ironically enough though, in his parting words, Howard advises that despite all the digital expertise and social media finesse in the world, the generation gap will ensure that like the try hard dad acting matey with his teenager’s friends, face-booking outside your age range will never be cool.