******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Harsha Walia is with No One Is Illegal It's been a tremendous week in migrant justice. Like all of you, I am continuously horrified and pained at the photos pouring in of the global refugee crisis unfolding before our eyes. This has been going on for years and then last week the photos and news hit of the Kurdi family and their attempts to come to Canada. This has, finally, rightfully sparked national and international outrage, as well as immense solidarity. The Kurdi family are three of almost 60 million displaced people around the globe this year, and over 45,000 people have died crossing borders since 2000. Even though international leaders posture about 'humanitarian solutions', the reality is that the roots of the crisis remain unaddressed and borders remain closed. As Max Fisher writes, “a single dead refugee child is a tragedy, but a million suffering refugees are a threat." The number of refugee claims in Canada decreased by 50 percent and the number of accepted refugees dropped by 30 percent between 2006 and 2012. The federal government deported 117,531 people between 2006 and 2014, including to countries with official moratoriums on deportation. I know these statistics inside and out because this week we released our multimedia project http://www.neverhome.ca on this government's discriminatory immigration and refugee policy over the past decade. Never Home has garnered lots of attention and the Toronto Star calls it "an innovative multimedia project that puts a human face on the impact of the drastic changes made by the Conservative government to the immigration and refugee system in the past decade." Here is an oped I wrote on it in the Vancouver Sun: http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Opinion+does+Canada+jail+migrants/11330390/story.html Fifty people have spent over one thousand unpaid hours to bring these stories and information to you because we know that lives depend on it. Lives like the Kurdi family. As Diana, shares in Never Home, "It was the Canadian government that really killed my dad... I don’t want this to happen to anybody else like it did to my family." Our comprehensive Never Home website features a report with multilingual resources, videos and stories of migrants, and high impact visuals. I ask you to take some time to check out Never Home, to talk about it with your friends and family, and share it with your networks. This week newspapers are also filled with headlines of Harper and European leaders saying that further military action in Syria is necessary to resolve the crisis. (Here Sozan Savelaghi’s response to this on CTV National News Channel: http://on.fb.me/1NWtrNV) This makes me so angry and I have a lot of rage. Rage because further militarization will not bring liberation and exclusionary border policies kill. Rage that families have to make *private* sponsorships and wait over a year instead of the government welcoming refugees. Rage that many Canadians believe refugees are terrorists, undesirable, unwelcome. Rage that politicians have no context for living in war zones, have no context for deep poverty, for trauma, for running from bombs and still feel they can judge whether others are 'legitimate' refugees or not. Canada is not only complicit in refugee exclusion, but also complicit in creating massive displacement around the world, just as it does upon these Indigenous lands – from its role in the coups in Haiti, to Canadian corporations creating devastation like Nevsun in Eritrea or Goldcorp in Honduras, to Canada’s overwhelming role in causing climate change that impacts countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines and at the same time forcing export-free zones and Structural Adjustment policies that ensures the exploitation of labour within (like sweatshops) and from (like the temporary foreign worker program) these countries. Naomi Klein focused a talk yesterday on the refugee crisis and these kinds of connections, watch here: http://youtu.be/a5LuIAJEFUc This is not inevitable. We can all create the momentum necessary to shift from indifference and racism to solidarity. Around the world and across Canada, tens of thousands are taking to the streets declaring "Refugees Welcome.” I have received dozens of humbling messages from Indigenous land defenders, friends and mentors offering refuge based on Indigenous laws and protocols, affirming No One Is Illegal, Canada Is Illegal. German residents have convinced their government to allow over 800,000 refugees to enter the country, while over 10,000 Icelandic families have opened their homes to refugees. It’s time for us to collectively assert the freedom to move, stay and return. In the words of late great Eduardo Galeano "The world was born yearning to be a home for everyone." Thanks for reading xo Harsha _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
