OMNI
United Nations WORLD
REFUGEE DAY NEWSLETTER #8, June 20, 2019.
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, and ECOLOGY
(Newsletter #1 June 20, 2008; #2 Dec. 4,
2011; #3 June 20, 2012; #4, June 20, 2014; #5, June 20, 2015; #6 June 20, 2017;
#7, June 20, 2018 ).
UN World Refugee Day is held every year on June 20, a special day when the world
takes time to recognize the desperate needs and the resilience of forcibly
displaced people, and to plan ways to help them.
CONTENTS UN World Refugee Day June 20, 2019
Choosing the Right Words: Migrant v. Refugee
UN Report: Displaced from Poor Nations
US Repression of Aid Providers
Public Protests:
Alison Moore, “Liberty”
In Defense of Open Borders
UUSC: Children in Federal Detention
Whistleblower v. ICE’s Solitary Confinement
International Rescue Committee
How the Red Scare Shaped the
Artificial Distinction Between Migrants and Refugees BY SARAH LAZARE. In
These Times (10 February 2018).
Our
modern-day definitions of displaced
people emerged during the Cold War as a product of anti-communism.
UN REPORT: DISPLACED FROM POOR NATIONS
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REPRESSION: US VS. AID PROVIDERS
Scott Warren was arrested in 2018
for allegedly having “harbored” two fatally weakened undocumented migrants in a
facility run by No More Deaths
JOIN PUBLIC PROTESTS
Liberty
©2012 Alison Moore
She could
topple at any moment,
a plane
straying off course, a bomb
in someone’s
shoes. The golden door
is bolted shut
and we didn’t even hear
it close. They
opened part of her again,
you can look,
but you can’t come in.
Once upon a
time
there was a
country, there was a we
there was a
people made of us.
Now the woman
holding the light
sighs deeply.
She’s had enough. She’s yearning,
yearning to be
free somewhere else.
She lowers the
light and turns,
dragging those
broken shackles
into New
Jersey.
Cars whiz by,
honking. She’s barefoot
through the
Midwest, Missouri, Oklahoma
City looks oh,
so pretty on what’s left
of Route 66. A
trucker from Arkansas
stops. She
climbs in, clanking.
“Holy shit,” he
says.
She takes off
her crown, sets it
on the
Naugahide seat. Props
her enormous
green feet on the dash,
the broken
chain dangling.
“Where you
headed?” he asks.
“I’ll know when
I get there.”
“How about a
little country music?” he asks.
“Which
country?” she says.
“Oh, come on, you
know,” he says.
“Perhaps some klezmer from Poland?”
“I’m talking
‘bout Johnny Cash. Where you been?”
“I’ve been
standing in one spot
for well over a
hundred years.”
So it’s “Cry,
Cry, Cry,” all the way through
Tucumcari, “I
Walk the Line” way past Flagstaff,
She tells him
about the millions
who cried when
they saw her light. How terribly
lonely she’s
been lately. He tells her
how he traded
the farm for the truck,
went in hock
for the insurance. She nods.
She knows. It’s
expensive to be free.
And so it’s
“Folsom Prison Blues”
all the way to
Kingman, then down,
down toward
Calexico and Tijuana.
Just north of
the border, a yellow warning
a shadow
family, hand in hand, running
across the
highway. “What’s that?”
she asks.
“Illegal Immigrant crossing,”
he says. “Let
me out,” she says. “Right here.”
“Didn’t get
your name,” he says.
“You know,” she
says. “Or used to.”
She strides
through the desert,
tramples the
prickly pear without a scratch.
Stops when she
gets to the border fence.
She fires up
the lamp, hoists the light,
puts the crown
back, a little crookedly
on her head.
She waits.
Before long, a
family of four crawls
through the
fence. She starts to speak
to them. “Give
me…”
It’s been so
long. One of the children
prompts her,
the boy, who’s been in school.
“You’re tired,”
he says. “You’re poor.”
“Yes,” she
says, “I am.” The girl climbs
on to the ledge
of her big toe.
That’s what
gets to her—
the wonderful
weight of this child,
not huddled at
all. Liberty weeps,
from all that
time alone welcoming everyone.
And this one
here, standing on her foot,
what does she
want? Health insurance?
An E-ticket
ride in Disneyland? The child turns,
shines a
flashlight upward onto Liberty’s face.
“Libertdad,”
the child says, to remind her why she came.
“Libertdad.”
Alison Moore, short story writer, poet,
song-writer, guitarist-singer. Don’t
miss her.
IN DEFENSE OF OPEN BORDERS (speaking
of UK)
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5:13 PM (2 hours ago)
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Excerpt from a speech by Gary Younge, editor-at-large for The Guardian, a columnist for the Nation
and the author of Another Day in the Death of America.
...It would be useful to deal pre-emptively with some of the
more obvious retorts regarding open borders.
The first relates to security. If we open the borders we will compromise our
security, goes the claim. Well, the overwhelming majority of people who have
committed terrorist attacks here were either born here or are here legally.
That shouldn’t surprise us. So long as Britain has had colonial or imperial
interests elsewhere, it has had a terrorist problem. We have been growing our
own terrorists for years.
For
the better part of a century, we mostly were engaging with Ireland. The
security that came after that conflict emerged not as a result of tighter
borders or more stringent policy, but from a political settlement. Similarly,
the source of our terror problem is not the result of stringent or lax borders,
but a thoroughly misguided foreign policy in which we either commit acts of
state terror ourselves, as in Iraq, or profit from the weaponising of others to
do it, as in Yemen.
It
would also help if we addressed the problem with the issue of refugees. First of all, we don’t take
anything like our fair share of refugees even compared with other European
countries, let alone the rest of the world. But it is particularly galling
because a significant number of refugees are fleeing wars that we have
created and states that we have failed, regimes we have subsidised and regions
we have disabled. If we don’t want people to come here, then maybe we could
start by not going there and messing it up.
Similarly
with our trade policies, which punish poorer countries by preventing them from
developing as we did with nationalised industries protected by subsidies and
thereby confine them to the volatile markets of raw materials and the whims of
multinationals.
These
are often countries that Britain and other western nations actively and
intentionally underdeveloped during colonialism. There we have a historical
responsibility. Much of the migration in the world at present, it should be
pointed out, is not voluntary but forced, by extreme poverty, natural disasters
and wars. It would be a better world if people only moved if they wanted to and
if they did not have to move to eat. Environmental policies, particularly on
climate change, arms controls and responsible foreign and trade policies, would
assist in allowing many people to stay where they would rather be – at home.
Put another way, those who insist
that we cannot afford to take in the world’s misery should make more of a
concerted effort to ensure that we are not helping to create the world’s misery....
We need you for this Week of Action
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7:20 AM (12 hours ago)
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Refugees from Syria & Elsewhere.
Book by David Miliband. Rescue: Refugees and the political crisis of our time. We are in the
midst of a global refugee crisis. Sixty-five million people are
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David Miliband is President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC),
where he oversees the agency's humanitarian relief operations in more
than ...
United
Nations WORLD REFUGEE DAY NEWSLETTER #7, June 20, 2018.
END UN REFUGEES DAY NEWSLETTER #8
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