OMNI
GLOBAL REFUGEES/DISPLACED PERSONS NEWSLETTER, August 1, 2014.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a World Culture of Peace
and Justice.
What’s at stake: It is essential to identify the most
vulnerable refugees and displaced persons and to work for the adoption of effective
human rights, humanitarian, and rescue policies. Thus
we must hold nations and officials accountable for meeting the needs of people
displaced by human conflict and natural disasters. A comprehensive immigration reform bill now
before the Senate includes
unprecedented protections for stateless people in the United States. Help OMNI pursue these goals; call 935-4422.
My blog:
War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters
Index:
See:Arab Spring, Central
American Children, Displaced Persons, Hurricanes/Typhoons,
Indigenous People Genocide, Islands
(Rising Seas), Jewish Holocaust WWII, Korea, Rising Seas, Syria, Tibet,
Vietnam, Warming, Wars
Please forward or notify your
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Contents Refugees/Displaced Newsletter #1, August 1, 2014
Central American
Children Seeking Asylum 2014
Dick, Protect the
Children
Michelle Goldberg, US Refugee Crisis
Steven Hsieh on detention centers for underage migrants
United Nations and
Other International Organizations
UNHCR
Refugees International
Center for Study of Climate Displacement
International Holocaust Remembrance and Combat Genocide
New Books on
Education for Refugees
Buck and Silver, Educated
for Change? Muslim Refugee Women in the
West. 2012.
Brown and Krasteva, Migrants
and Refugees: Equitable Education for
Displaced Populations. 2013.
Contact Your Senators at end.
LETTER TO NWA
NEWSPAPERS,
SUBJECT: CENTRAL
AMERICAN CHILDREN REFUGEES 284 words
Dear Editor:
On July 27, 2014,
two columnists and the subject of your editorial advocated a policy of care and
love for the children fleeing life-threatening dangers in Central American
countries. Regular columnist Doug Thompson writes: “Stop thinking about the kids coming this way
as an immigration issue. Start thinking
of it as a child protection issue.” “The
lack of a decent life is what those kids are fleeing.” Columnist Rev. Lowell Grisham asks what a
Christian should do for these children, and replies: “we are to love them!” And the children come to us legally. Rev. Ronnie Floyd, according to the
editorial, went to the border to see for himself, and returned calling “on
Christians to help comfort and care for the children.”
They suggest
various methods. Thompson urges us to be
informed, citing the March 2014 report by the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees, and to patronize businesses that share their profits with Central
Americans. Rev. Floyd urges a “spiritual awakening among
those able to help and prayer for government leaders so they’ll make the right
decisions,” adding: “the first
obligation we have to each other is compassion and love,” to which the
editorialist agreed: “it’s hard to argue
with that.” Rev. Grisham reminds us that
most of the children have relatives in the U.S. and should be reunited with them
under the supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services. The remaining 15% should be welcomed by our
communities. Already some churches and
towns are starting to do this. (Money raised by the OMNI Center at a rally on July 21 was sent to a welcoming border church at McAllen, TX.) Like Rev.
Floyd, Grasham concludes, “You simply love them.”
In this spirit
of compassion, with these methods of practical assistance, the citizens of Arkansas
can help children “fleeing exploitation and violence.”
Yes, Mr. President, the
Border Kids Are Refugees
The
52,000 unaccompanied children who have shown up at the border are fleeing gang
violence and have valid claims to asylum.
[Goldberg suggests these
remedies: Treat this as a refugee crisis (asylum applications increased 712%
between 2008 and 2013), provide safety for the kids, and work with the UN to improve
processing of the applications in their home countries. –Dick]
Michelle Goldberg July 16, 2014. This article appeared in
the August 4-11, 2014 edition of The Nation. [The title in my copy is “Our Refugee Crisis.” --Dick].
Immigrants from Honduras and El Salvador who crossed the
US-Mexico border are stopped in Granjero, Texas. June 25, 2014. (AP Photo/Eric
Gray)
In July, in Murrieta, California, right-wing demonstrators
confronted busloads of people, many of them women and small children who had
crossed the border fleeing horrific violence. “Nobody wants you! You’re not
welcome! Go home!” they shouted. According to the Los Angeles Times,
the migrants were on their way to a supervised release program overseen by a
religious volunteer group. Instead, blocked by the protesters, they had to
return to a border patrol station in San Diego.
The gratuitous cruelty of the American right, of course,
isn’t much of a surprise. More shocking is the response of the Obama
administration, which is scarcely more hospitable. As the United Nations and
others have said, the situation on the border, where 52,000 unaccompanied
children have arrived from Mexico and Central America since October, is more a
refugee crisis than an immigration one. But rather than acknowledge this, the
White House has suggested that it wants to strip some of these children of
rights they have under the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection
Reauthorization Act, a 2008 law signed by George W. Bush. According toThe New
York Times, Obama is considering seeking “flexibility” in the law’s
requirements, which gives lone child migrants from countries other than Mexico
and Canada the right to an immigration hearing and, in the interim, release
into the “least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.”
Even with the law in place, we’re seeing flagrant abuses of
border kids’ rights. At some stations, children in diapers have been held in
jail cells. “It was horrible,” says Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren of
California, who recently visited a facility in Brownsville, Texas. “There were
hundreds of kids, little kids. I saw a 3-year-old—at least they said he was 3.
I don’t think the kid was that old.” He was being cared for by a rotating group
of preteen girl detainees, Lofgren says. “There are 8- and 9-year-old kids
sleeping on cement floors with aluminum foil blankets.”
After she and some of her colleagues complained to the
Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell promised
to have all children under 5 removed from jail. That is good news, though it is
not the sort of thing that should require congressional action.
Meanwhile, the administration must acknowledge that many of
the children—who largely hail from gang-ridden Honduras, the country with the
world’s highest murder rate, and neighboring El Salvador and
Guatemala—have
valid claims to asylum. “The UN said that in their judgment, we should call
this a refugee matter, and I think they’re right,” says Lofgren. Indeed, she
argues, calling the underlying problem gang warfare minimizes it: “These are
armed warlords competing for governance of the countries.”
In recent years, violence has surged in the region, in no
small part because of American policies. “The United States has chosen to fight
a ‘war on drugs,’ which has consisted of trying to break apart large cartels,”
says Elizabeth Kennedy, a Fulbright fellow in El Salvador who works with child
migrants. “There’s evidence that in breaking apart the cartels, you actually
increase the violence for people living in those communities.” With the demand
for drugs still ravenous, smaller groups emerge to fill that demand, warring
with each other and setting up in new countries. “When we fought the war on
drugs in Colombia, the cartels moved into Mexico with greater force, and crop
growth moved into Ecuador and Peru,” Kennedy says. “And now we’re seeing that
they’re moving to the Caribbean and Central America.” In Honduras, the problem
has been exacerbated by the 2009 right-wing military coup, which, as the
International Crisis Group writes in a recent report, “weakened already fragile
institutions of law enforcement and justice.”
In countries where the cartels are most active, children
reaching adolescence face a choice between gang membership and death. Kennedy
recently wrote a report for the Immigration Policy Center, “No Childhood Here:
Why Central American Children Are Fleeing Their Homes,” which notes that 59
percent of Salvadoran boys and 61 percent of Salvadoran girls list crime or
violence as a reason they decided to make the perilous trip north. Lofgren met
a grandmother from Honduras who’d fled with three adolescent girls after a gang
leader threatened to seize them. “She probably saved their lives,” says
Lofgren.
Despite the right’s canard that kids are fleeing to the
United States because they think Obama has promised them amnesty, Kennedy says
that only one of the more than 400 kids she has interviewed knew anything about
the Dream Act or the president’s 2012 executive order halting deportation of
some young immigrants. Indeed, people from the most violence-wracked states are
also fleeing to neighboring countries, belying attempts to blame Obama for
their migration. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),
between 2008 and 2013 there was a 712 percent increase in the number of asylum
applications from citizens of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador seeking
refuge in Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize.
Greater border enforcement is not going to stop desperate
parents from trying to get their kids out of imminent danger. Migrants know
they’re likely to be deported, and many reach the United States only after
multiple failed attempts. “Many children say, ‘It’s a sure death if I stay, and
it’s a possible death if I go,’” says Kennedy.
Treating this as a refugee crisis does not mean simply
opening the borders, which could empower the smuggling rings that profit by
bringing children to the United States. It means providing safety for the kids
who are already here and working with the UN to create centers in their home
countries where those whose lives are in danger can apply for asylum in the
United States or other nations. “To me, it’s recognizing reality,” Lofgren
says. “You can say it’s not a refugee crisis, but it is, and we have tools in
our toolbox, including UNHCR, to deal with a refugee crisis.”
Read Next: Steven
Hsieh on detention centers for underage migrants
Michelle Goldberg July 16, 2014 This article appeared in
the August 4-11, 2014 edition of The Nation. [“The Refugee Crisis.”]
UN HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR REFUGEES (UNHCR) (August
15, 2013).
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The Bacon Center for the Study of Climate Displacement was established at Refugees International in August 2009 thanks to a generous financial contribution made by Ken & Darcy Bacon just before Mr. Bacon’s death. The Center works to enhance understanding of the complex relationship between environmental degradation, natural disasters, climate change, and displacement, and to address the shortcomings in related legal, policy, and institutional frameworks. In assisting populations experiencing or at risk of climate-induced displacement, we have found that vulnerability to climate change is a function of a country’s exposure to natural hazards such as floods, storms and droughts as well as underlying factors such as poverty, social injustice and weak government capacity to respond. Thus, most at risk are not only the world’s poorest countries – such asHaiti and Bangladesh
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The Bacon Center for the Study of Climate Displacement was established at Refugees International in August 2009 thanks to a generous financial contribution made by Ken & Darcy Bacon just before Mr. Bacon’s death. The Center works to enhance understanding of the complex relationship between environmental degradation, natural disasters, climate change, and displacement, and to address the shortcomings in related legal, policy, and institutional frameworks. In assisting populations experiencing or at risk of climate-induced displacement, we have found that vulnerability to climate change is a function of a country’s exposure to natural hazards such as floods, storms and droughts as well as underlying factors such as poverty, social injustice and weak government capacity to respond. Thus, most at risk are not only the world’s poorest countries – such as
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Today, more and more people are being forced from their homes by weather-related disasters, environmental degradation and changing climactic conditions. Over the past several decades, natural disasters have increased in force and frequency and are responsible for displacing over 36 million people in 2008 alone. In addition, growing water scarcity, desertification, and decreased agricultural output are causing more people to migrate to support livelihoods. Access to scarce natural resources has the potential to exacerbate conflict. The war inDarfur ,
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degradation.
Today, more and more people are being forced from their homes by weather-related disasters, environmental degradation and changing climactic conditions. Over the past several decades, natural disasters have increased in force and frequency and are responsible for displacing over 36 million people in 2008 alone. In addition, growing water scarcity, desertification, and decreased agricultural output are causing more people to migrate to support livelihoods. Access to scarce natural resources has the potential to exacerbate conflict. The war in
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Dear friend,
We at Combat
Genocide are pleased to commemorate
with all of humanity the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today we mark
68 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, also known in Hebrew as “planet Auschwitz ”, one of the most horrific worlds ever created
by man.
As members of the Combat
Genocide Association a
Jewish yet universal organization, we have dedicated the past seven years to
educating and teaching thousands of teens and adults around Israel
Unfortunately, the
majority of the Israeli public knows little about the genocides that have
occurred before and after the Holocaust. The Jewish spirit weakens due to the lack
of interest in the cruel fate of other nations. The result of this is seen in
the attitude of Israel
towards refugees from the genocide in Sudan
We have labored over three years formulating the "Bill
of Treatment and Responsibility for Asylum Seekers and Refugees". We hope our new government
will pass this bill. We also hope that it will officially recognize the Armenian genocide. We look forward to
any assistance you could give us in these efforts.
We are very concerned
about the torture camps in the Sinai where Ethiopian, Eritrean, Sudanese, and
other immigrants and refugees, are kidnapped. During their kidnapping they suffer abuse,
which includes beating, electrocution, severing of body parts and possibly
harvesting of body organs. During these horrendous events in the last two
years, approximately 4000 human beings have been slaughtered.
We acted against it in several ways:
1. We have approached The Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the
leaders of the Egyptian Intelligence in a request to bring down the torture
camps )attached please find our
letter. (
2. We have requested and received custody of four Christian
Ethiopian girls survivors of torture camps, and who were held at the detention
center.
3. We have given lectures to thousands college students, thousands
high school students and thousands of IDF soldiers on this subject.
This coming March, 650 youth movement members are going on
a journey to uncover the routes of the Zionist revolution, the Holocaust, and
heroism in Poland Warsaw we will commemorate 25
years of youth journeys to Poland
We would also like to be in contact with organizations,
researchers, activists and academics involved in the struggle against genocide,
especially to bring to justice the Sudanese president who was indicted by the
ICC for the crime of genocide.
Wishing you a good year, and a meaningful Memorial Day.
Uriel Levy
Director of the Combat
Genocide Association, Israel
2 attachments — Download
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Migrants and
Refugees:
Equitable Education
for Displaced Populations
Elinor
L. Brown,
Anna
Krasteva, New
A volume in
the series International Advances in Education: Global Initiatives for Equity
and Social Justice
2013.
Paperback 9781623964665 $45.99. Hardcover 9781623964672 $85.99. eBook
9781623964689 $50
International
Advances in Education: Global Initiatives for Equity and Social Justice is an
international research monograph series of scholarly works that
primarily
focus on empowering students (children,
adolescents, and young adults) from diverse current circumstances and
historic beliefs and traditions to become non-exploited/non-exploitive
contributing members of the global community. The series draws on the
research and innovative practices of investigators, academics, and community
organizers around the globe that have contributed to the evidence base for
developing sound educational policies, practices, and programs that optimize
all students' potential. Each volume includes multidisciplinary theory,
research, and practices that provide an enriched understanding of the drivers
of human potential via education to assist others in exploring, adapting, and
replicating innovative strategies that enable ALL students to realize their
full potential. This volume provides the reader with promising policies and
practices that promote social justice and educational opportunity for the
many displaced populations (migrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, and
immigrants) around the globe. The volume is divided into four sections that
offer: (1) insights into the educational integration of displaced children in
industrialized nations, (2) methods of creating pedagogies of harmony within
school environments, (3) ways to nurture school success by acknowledging and
respecting the cultural traditions of newcomers, and finally (4) strategies
to forge pathways to educational equity. Overall, this volume contributes to
the body of knowledge on equitable educational opportunities for displaced
youth and will be a valuable resource for all who seek to enable the
displaced a place at the political, economic, and social table of civil
society.
Educated
for Change?
Muslim
Refugee Women in the West
Patricia
Buck,
Rachel
Silver, Matawi, Inc.
A volume in
the series Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies
2012.
Paperback 978-1-61735-620-9 $45.99. Hardcover 978-1-61735-621-6 $85.99. eBook
978-1-61735-622-3 $50
Educated
for Change?: Muslim Women in the West inserts Muslim women’s voice and action
into the bifurcated, and otherwise male dominated, relations
between the
West and the Islamic East. A multilayered, multisite, educational
ethnography, Buck and Silver’s study takes a novel approach to its feminist
charge.
Drawing upon thick description of refugee women’s school experiences in two
seemingly distinct locations, Educated for Change? engages the dual nature of
schooling as at once a disciplinary apparatus of local, national, and
international governance, and paradoxically, a space and process through
which school community members wield the power to observe, deliberate, and
act as agents in the creative and willful endeavor of living. In doing so,
the text locates formal schooling as a
key location at which one can witness the politics of cultural change that
emerge when Western and Islamic communities converge.
Following
an initial introduction to the ethno-historical formation and dissolution of
the Somali postcolonial state resulting in a prolonged exodus of Somali citizens,
the text is divided into two parts. Part One features an examination of young
women’s approaches to schooling in the Dadaab refugee camps of northeastern
Educated
for Change? concludes with an analysis of the implications of Somali refugee
women’s schooling experiences for working definitions of global social
justice that undergird feminist political scholarship and gender-sensitive,
humanitarian aid policy and practice.
CONTACT
END REFUGEES NEWSLETTER #1
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