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Leader of Italy's far-right League party Matteo Salvini addresses a news conference with centre-right senator and regional candidate Lucia Borgonzoni, in Bologna, a day after a regional vote in Emilia-Romagna.

MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images

Matteo Salvinis determined campaign to win a key regional election in Italy ended in failure, a significant blow to his plans to topple the fragile Italian government and install himself as the far-right, anti-migrant prime minister of the European Unions third-largest economy.

The polls had suggested an exceedingly tight race in Emilia-Romagna between Mr. Salvinis populist League party and the centre-left Democratic Party. The wealthy north-central region, which is home to Ferrari, Lamborghini and Parmesan cheese, has been a left-wing, and sometimes communist, bastion since the late 1940s.

A League victory would no doubt have accelerated the demise of the national coalition government that was formed last summer between the Democrats and the 5-Star Movement (M5S) after Mr. Salvini, who was deputy prime minister and interior minister, pulled the plug on its coalition with M5S.

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Italy's right-wing leader Matteo Salvini failed in his effort to overturn decades of leftist rule in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna on Sunday in an election that he hoped would bring down the current national government. Reuters

But Mr. Salvinis gambit to finish off the coalition by destroying the Democrats stronghold in Emilia-Romagna was met with fierce resistance by the Sardines, the youth-led movement who packed the squares of Bologna, Parma and other cities in the region with tens of thousands of anti-League protestors, some of whom called him a neo-fascist. The high youth turnout at the polls was instrumental in swinging momentum away from the League.

Nicola Zingaretti, the Democrats leader, gave his immense thanks to the Sardines for their anti-Salvini rallies.

The early results gave the Democrat-led list headed by Stefano Bonaccini, who has been Emilia-Romagnas president (effectively governor) since 2014, more than 51 per cent of the vote. The League candidate, Lucia Borgonzoni, and her allies, which included Silvio Berlusconis Forza Italia party, took just under 44 per cent of the vote. Voters delivered a crushing defeat to M5S, the anti-establishment party which had placed first in the last national elections, in 2018; it landed at a mere 3.5 per cent, reflecting its crumbling support throughout Italy.

Mr. Salvini worked hard in Emilia-Romagna in recent weeks, making as many as a dozen appearances a day in a whirlwind campaign. On Saturday, he was so confident of victory that he used a tweet about the eviction notice he intended to deliver to Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.

In effect, Mr. Salvini turned the election into a referendum on his own popularity, political analysts said. Salvini became the victim of his own hype, turning a strong result on enemy territory into a crushing defeat for himself and his party, said Francesco Galietti, chief executive of Policy Sonar, a Rome geopolitical consultancy.

His campaign in Emilia-Romagna reinforced his status as Italys anti-migrant champion, a strategy that has won him millions of supporters among Italians who are convinced that Italy took an unfair burden of the European migrant crisis and that migrants are taking their jobs. A video showing Mr. Salvini buzzing the intercom on the door of Tunisian migrants in Bologna to ask them if they were drug dealers triggered a diplomatic row with the Tunisian ambassador.

In spite of the Leagues loss in Emilia-Romagna, the party remains a potent and rising force, even in Emilia-Romagna, where it won only 5 per cent of vote in the 2014 election. In Italys other regional election on Sunday, in Calabria, in the deep south, a centre-right coalition backed by the League handily defeated the Democrats. Nationally, the League still tops the polls and would probably win a snap-election.

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But Mr. Conte, the Prime Minister, has vowed to keep the Democrat-M5S coalition intact. Whether he will be able to do so as support for M5S vanishes is an open question. The party, which was launched in 2009 by the comedian Beppe Grillo, thrived in opposition but has had trouble making the transition to government. Sensing that MS5 is near collapse, Luigi di Maio resigned as party leader last week, though he remains as Foreign Minister.

Investors cheered the Democrats victory in Emilia-Romagna. They had feared that a victory by the euro-skeptic League would have triggered national elections and heightened tensions between Brussels and Rome. In early European trading, Italian benchmark bonds rallied, with the yield on 10-year debt falling 0.16 per cent to 1.07 per cent (yields move inversely to prices).

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Regional election in Italy delivers blow to populist leader Salvini - The Globe and Mail

TAPACHULA, MEXICO Almost a million migrants have entered the US via the southern border in the past 12 months. Further south, hundreds just this week waded across the Suchiate River into southern Mexico in a new test of President Trump's controversial Central America policy called "Remain in Mexico" designed to keep them away from the US border.

That strategy has slowed the rate of migrants streaming over the border, and arrests have fallen 94 percent since the policy was enacted in May of 2019.

CBN News recently traveled to Mexico to talk with those who hope the policy and the president who made it will soon be voted out of office.

We spoke with a 26-year-old Honduran who wanted to remain anonymous. Hewas deported from the United States several years ago. When he tried to return, he got stuck in Mexico."We haven't had any answers from the immigration," he told CBN News. "There's no way we can get work, there's no way we can have like a work permit. So we're basically stuck with no money, no information whatsoever about what's going on with our paperwork, and we're just signing and waiting."The Trump administration has put the burden of the migrant crisis back on Mexico, and what that means is that Mexico is taking a much stronger stand against illegal migration.Manuel Zepeda, a Tapachulan businessman says the policy has stopped them. "I mean, the Mexican policies are not as easy now, it's getting harder for them to get the visa for traveling in Mexico."The small fishing village of Barro de San Jose on Mexico's Pacific coast is one of the places where immigrants are getting in, according to the Mexico Federal Police. They use boats to get around the roadblocks so they can make it illegally into the United States.

But this technique has had some negative consequences. Just a few months ago, several African migrants washed up dead on the shore north of Barro de San Jose. It shows the lengths that these migrants are willing to go to try to make it to the US border."The answer to migration? There is no answer. It's a phenomenon throughout the whole world. They're just running out of their countries because there's nothing for them there," Zepeda said.Another caravan is reportedly starting in Honduras, and it may pass through Tapachula in the next few days. The rumor on the street is that it may be made up of many of those who were deported from the first caravan in 2018."My idea is to go to Tijuana, and in Tijuana, I'm going to try and go ahead and make a living until Trump leaves office," the deported Honduran migrant said. "Once he leaves office hopefully everything is going to go back to normal or the situation is going to get better for immigration laws and we're going to go ahead and try to get up there."

Excerpt from:
Illegal Immigration Slows Under Trump as Migrants Say They'll Wait Out His Term in Mexico Before Trying Again - CBN News

Over the last decade, migration has become an urgent political issue. The 2010s have been marked not only by the global movement of people across national borders but also attempts by governments to erect walls and fences in their path. Weve seen nationalism winning votes and the worldview of the far right mainstreamed.

Flow, flood and crisis. Media imagery and language has shaped public opinion. Of course, migration from the global south to the north intimately connected to the legacy of colonialism and the wests military machinations has been happening for decades. But the 2010s has seen a higher number of people from the south moving towards the north. In particular, Europe has seen hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, the Middle East and south Asia, fleeing chronic poverty, political instability, wars, and the climate crisis in countries often laid to ruin by western-backed institutions.

Libya had always been the migratory destination for many sub-Saharan Africans because of its employment opportunities. Following the suppression of the 2011 Arab spring and Natos intervention in Libya, a lawless society emerged, with racial hatred against sub-Saharan Africans unleashed. Many escaped forced labour and torture, climbed into dinghies and began the dangerous sea journey across the central Mediterranean. But when they landed in Europe, they didnt come to safety. Instead, they found themselves in the centre of a white, Eurocentric discourse a problem to be blamed for societys ills.

Throughout this time, when tens of thousands died at sea trying to reach Europe, Europe has imagined itself to be the victim of a migrant or refugee crisis. The concept of a crisis caused by the movement of people into the European continent has always been embedded in the Eurocentric way of seeing things. This rupture brought about by the arrival of the other creates anxiety and fear in the European mind, as the sociologist Encarnacin Gutirrez Rodrguez has pointed out thus the need to create neverending irrational, ideological justifications for that anxiety and fear.

This can be seen in the way migration into Europe has been portrayed as an invasion of different cultures and a clash of civilisations in a way that is similar to the justifications of the colonial era where the colonised were cast as racially inferior beings. Colonialism still casts its shadow over the immigration debate. For Europe, the other challenges its way of being as its presence is a reflection of Europes past imperialism, upon which much of the continents wealth was built.

In the past decade, weve seen anti-migrant policies and racism flourish across the world. The EU implemented the hotspot system, filtering people and categorising them as asylum seekers or economic migrants. Europes patrolling of its southern borders intensified, resulting in deals with Turkey and Libya. Since Italys then-interior minister Marco Minnitis agreement with Libya in 2017, Italy has supplied technical support to the Libyan coastguard, fending Africans away from European waters.

Restrictions were also imposed on NGO search-and-rescue activity in the Mediterranean. These policies under the centre-left Democratic party (PD) were later continued and elaborated on by the hard-right Matteo Salvini of the League from the summer of 2018 and now carry on under the PD/Five Star coalition. Thousands have died as a result.

Back in the 1970s, the critic and writer John Berger depicted Turkish migration to Germany in A Seventh Man, which charted migrant workers journeys in Europe through their departure, work and return. The return represented the future, where a worker could travel freely and see lives improved for his family when he visited home. But in the 2010s, this cycle has been disrupted many migrants and asylum seekers irregular status prevent them from visiting home. Instead, they are forced to live invisible lives, illegalised, entrapped and segregated.

In Britain, the Conservative government has persistently refused to receive refugees only 3% of asylum applications in Europe are lodged in Britain because refugees are commonly denied entry. In 2016, when the refugee numbers were at their highest across the continent, Britain only received 38,517 applications for asylum, compared with 722,370 applications in Germany, 123,432 in Italy and 85,244 in France. Britain, simply put, has one of the lowest refugee acceptance rates in Europe.

Plenty of efforts have also been made see the Home Offices hostile environment to make life unbearable for asylum seekers and migrants in Britain. Over the decade, I have witnessed asylum seekers leading a subhuman existence, deprived of rights to work (despite the substandard state support) and made to pay for healthcare. They live in desperate limbo, pushed into the world of exploitation and forced labour. As a Chinese builder said to me: If you didnt die in the back of a lorry, you could die working here.

And there are many migrants who are effectively imprisoned. Throughout this decade, I have visited many people detained in Dover and Yarls Wood removal centres, held without time limit, and despite committing no crime. Today, Britain remains the only European country to practice the indefinite detention of asylum seekers and migrants. Over this Christmas, 1,826 people were incarcerated in these centres.

While large numbers of people across the globe continue to be denied freedom of movement and illegalised, their determination to survive will not be defeated by walls and borders. Migrant protest movements such as the black vests (gilets noirs) in France and the black sardines (sardine nere) in Italy show that there is plenty of resolve and a willingness to fight back. We can join them by fighting for the regularisation of peoples immigration status but also by challenging the system that enables their marginalisation and racial segregation. We must offer a different way of seeing migration; a real alternative that addresses colonialism and the massively unequal world that it has created.

Hsiao-Hung Pai is a journalist and the author of Chinese Whispers: The Story Behind Britains Hidden Army of Labour

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The refugee crisis showed Europes worst side to the world - The Guardian

For many exiles fleeing war or persecution in the Middle East, the European dream has become a nightmare of alienation and bureaucracy. By Oliver Moody

The Times,January 2 2020, 5:00pm

The Swedish bank cashier wrinkled her nose with displeasure when Ghayath Almadhoun presented his refugees identity pass. How do you have this? she said. Youre not allowed this. She tossed his bank card back across the counter.

Fuming, he went outside and plugged it into a cash machine, only to discover that the card was blocked. The cashier had frozen his account on a whim.

Life in Europe is often cast as the fulfilment of a dream for the millions of Arab migrants like Mr Almadhoun who have travelled west over the past decade.

Long before the 2015 migrant crisis, more than 200,000 people a year sought refuge in the EU, many of them fleeing war or persecution in the Middle East.

Sweden granted permanent

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The racist reality for migrants seeking a new life in Europe - The Times

At the opening of Jeanine Cumminss devastating and timely novel, bookshop owner Lydia and her eight-year-old son, Luca, are the only survivors of a targeted massacre by the Mexican cartel that dominates and terrorises their home town of Acapulco. Sixteen of their relatives have been shot at a family barbecue, including Lydias husband and Lucas father, a journalist who had been investigating and reporting on the drug traffickers.

What follows is the story of a mothers desperate attempts to keep her son alive, away from the cartel whose influence stretches across Mexico and from whom she knows they will never be safe. It is through their ordeal that Cummins humanises the migrant crisis, delivering a powerful portrayal of the extraordinary lengths people will go to in order to save their loved ones. It is a moving portrait of maternal love and an unflinching description of the experiences of wretched, displaced people on the move.

Lydia and Lucas journey towards the US border is perilous and terrifying. More than once, Lydia has to run alongside a high-speed train with Luca at her side, scrambling on board with their backpack as it hurtles along. Cummins does not hold back in describing the fate of those who do not time their jump successfully.

Along the way there is hunger, cold and the cruelty and occasionally kindness of strangers, while the gnawing terror of discovery by their murderous pursuers is ever present. During the journey, they meet and befriend other migrants, each with their own harrowing story about their need to escape. Two teenage sisters fleeing sexual exploitation are particularly affecting, the brutality of their experiences juxtaposed against their fiercely protective sibling bond.

It is this contrast familial love against external atrocities that gives the novel its immediacy and power. Small details as when Lydia risks losing the rest of their group in order to put a plaster on Lucas blister are quietly heartwrenching.

What Cummins does so skilfully in the novel is to subvert popular preconceptions about migrants. Lydia is educated, middle-class, escaping to America not in search of better economic opportunities but simply to survive. She and Luca are actual migrants All her life shes pitied those poor people. Shes donated money. Shes wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite, how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they came from, that this is the better option.

Cummins answers this question so compellingly that it is hard to imagine there will be a more urgent or politically relevant novel this year.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is published by Headline (14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over 15

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American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins review panic and pathos on the run from the cartel - The Guardian