Latest Migration Trends, Return of Diasporas and Regional Integration, Discussed this Week at the International Migration in the 21st Century Conferen

Posted on Tuesday, 31-08-2010

Argentina - Migration experts from international organizations and academia, as well as government officials from MERCOSUR countries and other national and regional entities are coming together this week in the Argentine city of Iguazú for the International Migration in the 21st Century Conference.
Under the auspices of the Argentine Ministry of Interior Immigration Directorate, participants will exchange information and best practices on issues of common concern related to international migration.

"With human mobility and integration at the top of the migration agenda for receiving countries, it is vital for IOM to foster these regional gatherings where policy makers can discuss mutual concerns," says Juan Artola, IOM Regional Representative in Buenos Aires.

What were migrant countries of origin just a few decades ago today are destination countries, as in the case of Argentina. However the countries receiving migrants today are also seeing their nationals migrate in search of better economic opportunities. Countries that built and developed their economies using foreign labour are now closing the doors to foreign workers.

"Although today's world is very much interdependent, governments and policy makers are realizing that regionalization can be a viable option when faced with globalization. And paradoxically, the right to migrate is being discussed more and more these days," adds Artola.

Prompting discussion amongst governments can guide policy makers towards sound migration policies that would decrease the largely illicit and irregular migration with all the risks that it entails.

The two-day event includes four roundtables where participants will discuss migration issues affecting their societies, including: reaping the development potential of migration, migration as a fundamental human right, involving the diaspora in the development of their country of origin, brain drain and brain gain, regional integration of migrants, climate change and migration, and regional consultative processes.

Some of the participants include: Lorena Escudero, Minister of SENAMI (National Migrant Secretariat) of Ecuador; Costa Rica's Vice Minister of Public Security, Mario Zamora; Alvaro Calderon, Director of Colombia nos Une (a virtual platform created by IOM and Colombia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to reach out to the Colombian diaspora); Izaura Miranda, Director of Immigration of the Brazilian Ministry of Justice; and Martín Arias Duval, National Director of Migration of Argentina.

For more information, please contact:

Mariana Bocca
IOM Buenos Aires
Tel: +54 11 5219 2033/34/35
E-mail: mbocca@iom.int
http://www.iom.int

Sarkowzy vows to continue expulsion of Roma from France

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he will continue his controversial crackdown on Roma (gypsies).

He was speaking at his first cabinet meeting after the summer break, amid growing questions over his leadership.

Hundreds of Roma have been sent back to Romania and Bulgaria and more than 100 illegal camps dismantled.

The operation has been criticised by human rights watchdogs and Mr Sarkozy's opponents, who accuse him of using the issue to boost his flagging support.

Mr Sarkozy is under pressure to tackle soaring public debt, but unions are threatening major strikes over plans for pension reforms.

Romania has questioned whether the repatriations comply with European law and the EU Commission has said it is concerned about them. The Commission is to report on the expulsions next week, says the BBC's Christian Fraser in Paris.

France, which says it expelled 10,000 Roma last year, says it is acting in accordance with EU law by repatriating Roma who have been in France for more than three months without work. It also says most of the repatriations are voluntary.

About 635 Roma have been sent back to Romania and Bulgaria, after their camps were shut down in a crackdown announced last month, Immigration Minister Eric Besson said on Wednesday.

By the end of the month "around 950" will have been repatriated, he told Europe 1 radio.

Read full article here.

Britain moves against illegal immigrants

BRITAIN HAS stepped up its campaign against illegal immigrants and already two Jamaicans have been nabbed as the UK Border Agency embark on a nationwide prowl.

Damian Green, the country's immigration minister, has said illegal immigrants are a burden to his country. He says his government is committed to getting rid of them.

"The Government has tasked the UK Border Agency with carrying out an intense period of enforcement activity over the summer. We are determined to make it harder than ever for illegal immigrants to come to the UK," Green said.

UK Border Agency officers arrested two Jamaican men - aged 26 and 44 - when they visited Hylands Park, England, on 18, 19 and 20 August. Both men had overstayed their visas. The Jamaicans, and the man from Burma, were caught working illegally on food stalls on the site.

"Illegal immigration puts pressure on public services, local communities and legitimate businesses at a time when this country cannot afford it," Green said.

Read full article here.

72 Migrants found dead at Mexcio/US border

MEXICO CITY -- (08/26/10) -- Mexican government officials say 72 migrants found dead at a ranch near the U.S. border may have been killed by the Zetas drug cartel.

Navy Vice Adm. Jose Luis Vergara says a wounded survivor reports that gunmen who identified themselves as Zetas kidnapped him and other migrants and took them to the ranch in San Fernando, a town south of Brownsville, Texas.

Vergara said Wednesday that investigators believe the migrants were from Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras.

A wounded Ecuadorean who escaped the killing ground in Mexico's Tamaulipas state told authorities that the migrants' abductors identified themselves as Zetas, a drug gang whose control of parts of the state is so brutal and complete that even many Mexicans avoid traveling its highways.

Migrants running the gauntlet up Mexico to reach the United States have long faced extortion, violence and theft. But reports have grown of mass kidnappings of migrants, who are forced to give the telephone numbers of relatives in the United States or back home who are then required to transfer ransom payments to the abductors.

Read full article here.

Caribbean Civil Society Unites To Tap Eu Development Funds

by Peter Richards (Bridgetown, Barbados)Monday, August 23, 2010
Inter Press Service
Roosevelt King, the secretary general of the Barbados Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (BANCO), believes that Caribbean governments have dropped the ball when it comes to their commitment to support the initiatives of civil society.

He says their lack of commitment dates back to the Cotonou Agreement that was signed in 2000 and regarded as the framework for the European Union's relationship with the 79 countries of the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) regions.

'If you look at the handbook for non-state actors, you will see that our governments have done absolutely nothing to allow us to reach that level of participation,' King told IPS ahead of the first ever meeting of civil society organisations from across the Caribbean, which are seeking to develop a proposal to access assistance from the European Development Fund (EDF).

'At least, I should say they have taken us to the threshold but are not allowing us to cross. If it were not for the active vigilance of the EU to ensure that their Euros are properly spent to achieve development through cooperation, we would still be out to sea,' he said.

Read full article here.

Obama signs $600M Bill to Increase Militarization of US/Mexico Border

President Obama has signed into law a $600 million bill to deploy some 1,500 new Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials along the border, as well as two aerial surveillance drones. The bill was quickly passed by Congress in a rare display of bipartisanship. We speak to Arnoldo García of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

See full story here at Democracy Now.

In the Diaspora: The Life and Death of a Nation

Aaron Kamugisha is a Caribbean citizen and a lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. He can be reached at aaron.kamugisha@cavehill. uwi.edu“

Physically burdened as I am, I feel impelled to overcome my difficulties to the extent that that is possible and tell you what are my political views in the present crisis. It is the most desperate that the WI (West Indies) have faced since the emancipation from slavery. The idea of a West Indian nation cannot dissolve… For me this is not a question of governments but of people, of what world the young people will grow up into, what spirit they will have…But what I fear is that the whole conception and organization of a WI nation is on the way to being destroyed or corrupted… This is a matter of the life and death of a nation…

C.L.R. James, 1961

C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Marxist Pan-Africanist intellectual wrote the above words when convalescing in Barbados – probably illegally – from a car accident that almost took his life in Jamaica. James’s anguish at the slow demise at the federation, which he foresaw in a letter to George Padmore on his departure for Trinidad in 1958, is as difficult a read as any document of its time in its slow realisation of the crushing forces preventing a progressive alternative to the colonial status-quo, its resignation at the vacuity of the new middle classes who were to lead the Caribbean nations into independence, and doubts of the future. He wrote it in Barbados, a country which fascinated him throughout his life for reasons both idiosyncratic to him, and shared by a wider Caribbean community.

Read full article here.

France pushes forward Roma deportations: 'They are trying to get rid of us all'

Outside No 431, rue de Lyon, the Mediterranean sun beat down on the pavement and an old man lay in wait for the police. Inside, behind the long grass and a dilapidated green gate, the women were preparing themselves for the worst. "We are getting things ready," one explained, pointing at a half-packed suitcase. In among the ramshackle sheds and squealing toddlers, they took turns at holding a six-week-old baby in their arms.

Today, as the French government pushed forward with its mission to rid the country of foreign Roma it deems to be living there illegally, Marseille's most marginalised community was in the grip of both fear and resignation: fear because the authorities have in recent weeks ratcheted up the pressure, and resignation because, after years of repeated expulsions and unrelenting social isolation, many of them have seen it all before.

"That's France for you," said one middle-aged woman, sitting dejectedly in pink flip-flops at the rue de Lyon squat. She, like all other Roma to whom the Guardian spoke, was unwilling to be identified. Intense media interest since the start of Nicolas Sarkozy's crackdown on crime and illegal immigration last month has made them uneasy in front of the cameras.

Known as the melting pot of the south, Marseille is home to a large proportion – possibly up to a fifth – of France's total Roma population, itself estimated at between 15,000 and 20,000. Despite its reputation for successful integration, however, the city's Roma, as in so much of Europe, live apart from mainstream society. Observers say routine expulsions and endemic discrimination have pushed them to the outer limits, both physically and psychologically.

Read full article here.

Kolkata memorial for indentured servants

By Vishnu Bisram

A memorial monument, designed to bring the descendants of Indian indentured servants, including Guyanese, in touch with their past, is set to be constructed at the Port of Kolkata (Calcutta), India. The monument is a tribute to the millions of indentured servants who left India for other shores during the period 1834 to 1917 is set to be constructed. Guyanese nationals Ashok Ramsaran and Vishnu Bisram, along with nationals of other countries, lobbied the Indian government for the monument through GOPIO and the government has agreed to the proposal. It is a momentous achievement for the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin which has been working closely with the Indian government on projects beneficial to the overseas Indian communities.

Read full article here.

The Return of Bouterse and CARICOM

THE INAUGURATION ceremony is over. It is official: Desi Bouterse, Suriname’s 64-year-old former military commander who first seized political power in a coup 20 years ago, is again controlling the reins of state power. As of yesterday he is functioning as the new constitutionally and ceremonially sworn president of that former Dutch colony. According to reports out of the capital Paramaribo, the only Caribbean Community representative, at prime ministerial level, to attend the inauguration would have been Prime Minister Samuel Hinds of Guyana, representing President Bharrat Jagdeo, who had lost no time in congratulating Bouterse.


Suriname and Guyana are the Caribbean Community’s two mainland states located on the continent of South America. They are multi-ethnic and multicultural and have a colonially-inherited territorial dispute, arising from Surinamese claim to Guyanese demarcated territory in the New River triangle area, reputedly with hydro-power potential. Both the secretariats of the Organisation of American States (OAS) and CARICOM were reportedly invited to have an official presence for the inauguration of Bouterse, who succeeded the three-term elected mathematician Runaldo Venetiaan. Among CARICOM states not represented, at any level for Bouterse's inauguration, were Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, as confirmed by this columnist; and related to stated absence of any official invitation.

Read full article here.

Republican Candidate Advises Putting Illegal Immigrants in Camps

Tom Brokaw dubber WWII "The Greatest Generation," but some bits of that history, like the internment of the Japanese in America, are moments most of us look back on with regret.

But one Republican candidate for state legislature in Florida thinks the idea should be readopted, this time as a way to hold illegal immigrants.

Via Salon's War Room:

In an interview with Salon today, a Republican candidate for the Florida state Legislature stood by her controversial idea to arrest illegal immigrants and send them to "camps" where they can be held en masse.

"We can ship them out to the middle of the country and put up high walls and leave them there," said Marg Baker, the middle-aged real estate broker vying for the Republican nomination in the state's 48th district, north of Tampa.

Read full article here.

CRAICOM's tortuous governance path

By Rickey Singh
Story Created: Aug 11, 2010 at 2:02 AM ECT
Story Updated: Aug 11, 2010 at 2:34 AM ECT
AS ARRANGEMENTS are being finalised for next Tuesday's special meeting in Grenada of seven Caribbean Community Heads of Government to discuss the critical matter of governance, the big question remains:
How seriously committed are the leaders of this region's 37-year-old economic integration movement to grappling with the elusive but very vital issue of governance on which they have been doing the ritual political merry-go-round ever since the 1992 "Time for Action'' report by the West Indian Commission?.
After all, a new governance system, relevant to the challenges of our time, have been on and off Caricom leaders work agenda for at least 14 years, dating back to the West Indian Commission's 1992 report and a subsequent report in 2006 from a Technical Working Group (TWG) on "matured regional governance''. A litany of deferred decisions on governance has been the norm.

Read full article here.

In Illegal Immigration Debate, To Hire Or Not?

American families who hire illegal workers to trim yards, clean toilets and paint walls are helping fuel the underground economy that attracts some 11 million undocumented workers to the U.S.

In the Western U.S., it's not hard to find someone who hires illegal immigrants. The real challenge is finding someone who will admit it on tape.

Annette — who agreed to give only her middle name — owns a two-bedroom condo in Phoenix, which she rents out. Her last tenant, a smoker, just moved away, and in order to fix the lingering cigarette smell, she needs a paint job.

Read full article here

Resolutions Passed By The Fifth Assembly Of Caribbean People Barbados, August 5 & 6, 2010

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

We, the delegates of the Fifth Assembly of Caribbean People, meeting in Barbados at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of West Indies affirm that our Caribbean nations are caught in a trap of unsustainable foreign debt, much of which is a result of an inherently unjust and exploitative capitalist dominated international economic order, and concede that the current international financial and economic crisis, which has its origin in the deeply flawed and exploitative system of North America and European capitalism, is threatening to devastate our already hard pressed Caribbean economies and to subvert the social welfare condition of our people.

We therefore resolve as follows:

1. To issue a CALL and agitate for the governments of the Caribbean to come together collectively and implement a process of cancellation of the admittedly largely unpayable and unjust foreign debt of the Caribbean, and to link such a campaign of debt cancellation to the historic and sacred demand of the Caribbean people for the payment of Reparations by the relevant national governments, companies and institutions of Europe and North America for the centuries of slavery, slave trade, colonialism, genocide of indigenous peoples and indentureship that were inflicted on the people of the Caribbean:

2. To engage in a collective Pan-Caribbean Campaign of mass education about the inter-linked issues of debt cancellation and Reparations, and to develop relevant linkages between our campaign and already existing debt cancellation and Reparations efforts such as the Campaign of the international non-governmental organization known as Jubilee 2000:

Read full Resolution here

Carrington's departure to renew CARICOM

Edwin Carrington's announcement that he will, at the end of the year, leave as secretary general of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), after nearly two decades at the helm, is of itself not an unwelcome development.

After all, 18 years is a long time for a single individual to be at the head of any institution, especially one like CARICOM - and its secretariat - that, as is widely acknowledged, is under pressure to convince its constituents of its relevance and is in need of new energy and focus. And Edwin Carrington is 72.

It would, however, be a grave disservice to Mr Carrington, and a display of ignorance about the administration of the regional project on the part of those who would do so, to lay all the blame for CARICOM's weaknesses and failings at the door of the secretary general. It would be equally bad to attempt to belittle the institutional advances of CARICOM during Mr Carrington's watch.Edwin Carrington, a former secretary general of the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries, arrived at the CARICOM secretariat in the immediate aftermath of the decision of the regional leaders to transform the free trade and functional cooperation group to a single market and economy, which was followed closely by the recommendations of Sir Shridath Ramphal's committee on how to improve decision making and policy implementation in CARICOM.

Read full article here.

EDWIN CARRINGTON leaving CARICOM

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 18:53:00

Edwin Carrington
Less than a month after telling journalists that he “never came to stay forever”, Edwin Carrington has informed Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders of his intention to step down as the region’s premier public servant at year end.

After 18 years on the job, Carrington is the longest serving CARICOM Secretary General and has been the recipient of national awards from Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago as well as from the Dominican Republic, Italy and Spain.

But in recent months, the leadership of the Georgetown-based CARICOM Secretariat had been called into question and during the just concluded summit of regional leaders in Jamaica, newspaper editorials fingered the 72-year old Carrington as among the main culprits.

Read full article here.

French police accused of rough tactics in immigrant eviction

A disturbing video showing French police evicting immigrants of African descent is causing an uproar in France. The video shows police dragging away women who were demonstrating against their eviction from a block of flats.

Click here to see the video. Warning: this is upsetting imagery.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/aug/02/france

Israel modifies plans to deport migrant worker families

Little Eustace Uzoma plays happily in a Tel Aviv park, near the home in which she has lived ever since she was born.

The shy five-year-old speaks fluent Hebrew and is already in the school system.

But she is almost oblivious to the fact that there are some people in the Israeli government who want to deport her and other children who are fully assimilated into Israeli society, because their parents are here illegally.

Israel has approved plans to deport the families of illegal migrant workers, and government spokesman Roei Lachmanovich told the BBC the plan would affect some 400 children and their parents.


Vincent Uzoma says Israel should recognise the birthright of children born within its borders
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the move was made because the country faced increasing illegal migration, which was a threat to its Jewish character.

Read full article here.

New Mexico has a different approach than Arizona to the issue of Immigration

While one state attempts to introduce tough new law enforcement measures which critics condemn as unconstitutional and opening the door to racial profiling, the other continues to pursue some of the most permissive policies in the country.

In liberal Santa Fe, which this year celebrates the 400th anniversary of its founding as capital of the Spanish colony of New Mexico, people are quick to condemn Arizona's new legislation, the most controversial parts of which are now the subject of a court injunction.

"I think Arizona, under that governor and that legislature, went in the wrong direction," says Santa Fe Mayor David Coss.

"I think our traditions speak to what's been the best of American history about immigration. I think Arizona's speak to the worst."

New Mexico's long-established Hispanic population is the largest, proportionally, of any state - at 45% - and one of the most influential.

As a result, the state boasts two laws which make it easier for illegal immigrants to thrive.

Driver's licences - a valuable piece of identification - are readily available, while in-state tuition fees and lottery-funded scholarships are available for undocumented students.

Read full article here.