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.'