Archive for the ‘Migrant Crisis’ Category

Making Home Weaves Stories of Immigration Through Art – Houstonia Magazine

On view at the Asia Society Texas Center through July 3, Making Home is an intimate and sobering look at the nuance of immigration. The exhibition explores ancestry, displacement and isolation in four parts.

The exhibition opens with a four-channel film by Vietnamese filmmaker and artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. In nearly 29 minutes and cycling through four 15-foot-wide suspended projector screens, The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019) focuses on Senegalese soldiers who fought in Indochina to defend French colonial rule in Vietnam. Captured in collaboration with four Senagalese-Vietnamese families in Dakar, the film is an immersive and poetic look at memories of migration, cultural assimilation and colonial war legacy.

The show continues withPhung Huynh, who illustrates her personal immigration story as a Vietnamese refugee turned California resident through four different bodies of work. The most striking are three charcoal drawings based on I.D photographs taken of her infant self and her parents, and a series of snow globes that subvert the typical American tourist trinket by injecting memories from her familys archive.

In the third gallery, keeping with her signature engagement with thread, Beili Lius installation and performance piece, Each and Every/Houston (2022), looks at the effects of displacement on children. Neatly arranged throughout the gallery floor are articles of child-size clothing hats, socks, dresses and shirts all covered in cement with countless strings of thread suspended above. This timely and relevant artwork reckons with the trauma and urgency of the child migrant crisis of today. Lui will activate the installation during a performance in the gallery on June 18.

Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya closes the show with Very Asian Feelings, a mural scale installation that reflects and celebrates the Asian American experience. The gallery was painted in a bold turmeric color, where a series of sculptures and a textile painting hang adjacent to a floor-to-ceiling-size mural of a family. Food packaging, household objects, a graduation cap, pointe shoes and more relics fill the gallery as symbols of nostalgia and community.

The exhibition also incorporates the voices of local Houston artists Brandon Tho Harris, Preetika Rajgariah and visitors who responded with poems and statements to individual artworks. A wall full of handwritten notes fills the main gallerys exit as viewers share their accounts of ancestry and movement.

Making Homedives successfully into the interpersonal impacts of immigration on an individual and collective scale through the lens of four distinct artistic voices.

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Making Home Weaves Stories of Immigration Through Art - Houstonia Magazine

European Parliament accused of censoring press freedom report that criticised Greek suppression – The Telegraph

A press freedom report criticising Greece for suppressing coverage of migrant pushbacks was censored by the European Parliament, it has been revealed.

Reporters Without Borders issued a report saying Greek police regularly resort to violence to stop journalists covering the refugee crisis, as well as demonstrations against Covid measures.

Greece tumbled from 70th place to 108th in its latest press freedom league table as a result, lower than any other EU country and lower even than Albania.

But despite regularly voicing support for both media freedom and Reporters Without Borders, the European Parliament deleted the report from its website on the grounds that it was "not in line with the editorial guidelines".

Jaume Duch Guillot, a spokesman for the European Parliament, said it was because the report made no mention of "the parliaments activities and agenda".

But the deletion of the report followed a virulent reaction from the Greek governments supporters. A lawmaker from the ruling New Democracy party labelled Reporters Without Border a leftist NGO and losers from abroad.

There has been some suggestion that the decision to delete the report was made by Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament.

Both Ms Metsola and New Democracy belong to the centre-right European Peoples Party (EPP), the parliaments largest political group.

Metsolas effort to protect the last strong EPP government in Europe can be partly understood, said Sarantis Michalopouloss, a columnist with Brussels-based website Euractiv. What cannot be understood and tolerated is the lies of an EU institution which gets paid by EU taxpayers money, who are suffering from soaring prices across the bloc.

Ms Metsola's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Amendments to Greeces criminal code "passed under the pretext of fighting the Covid-19 pandemic" have harmed press freedom, the report stated.

The spreading of false information is now punishable by five years imprisonment, which Reporters Without Borders said represents a serious threat to journalists right to publish information in the public interest, and increases the risk of self-censorship.

The police regularly resort to violence and arbitrary bans to hamper journalistic coverage of demonstrations and the refugee crisis on the islands, the report reads.

One Dutch journalist had to leave the country for her own security after she was attacked in the street following a smear campaign by the pro-government media over her heated exchange with the prime minister about migrant pushbacks.

The Greek government was also criticised for dragging its feet after promising a probe into the murder of Giorgos Karaivaz, a veteran crime reporter who was gunned down outside his Athens home in broad daylight.

The UK rose nine places in the reports ranking, to 24, although media freedoms were said to be "worrisome".

Report authors pointed to an alarming proposal for reforms to official secrets laws that could see journalists jailed for espionage.

Journalists in the UK faced extensive freedom of information restrictions, with reports surfacing of a secretive government clearing house for freedom of information requests.

The report also mentioned alleged governmental interference surrounding the failed appointment of Paul Dacre as chair of Ofcom, the UKs communications regulator.

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European Parliament accused of censoring press freedom report that criticised Greek suppression - The Telegraph

The European country where replacement theory reigns supreme – Vox.com

On May 16, just days after the deadly mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, motivated by conspiratorial fears of white Westerners Great Replacement by minorities, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn endorsed the shooters ideology in a nationally televised speech.

Part of the picture of the decade of war facing us will be recurring waves of suicidal policy in the Western world. One such suicide attempt that I see is the great European population replacement program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilizations, Orbn said.

Orbn is a close observer of American politics; the speech literally contains an exhortation to make Hungary great again. It is implausible, as the Guardian notes, that he was unaware of the concern in Washington over Great Replacement ideology a conspiracy theory that posits a shadowy plan to replace the white Western population with immigrants and the children of nonwhites.

But Orbn is not adopting this language in response to events in America: It has been a central element of his ideology for years.

I think there are many people who would like to see the end of Christian Europe, he said in a representative 2018 radio interview. They believe that if they replace its cultural subsoil, if they bring in millions of people from new ethnic groups which are not rooted in Christian culture, then they will transform Europe according to their conception.

In contemporary Hungary, we see a country where Great Replacement theory dominates not just official rhetoric but also policy. Migrants are treated cruelly at the border, while the government casts LGBTQ minorities as a threat to Hungarian birthrates and pushes a message to convince women to take up traditional roles as homemakers and mothers. Advocates for immigration and immigrant rights, like the Hungarian American Jewish philanthropist George Soros, are described as enemies of the state and attacked accordingly.

Meanwhile, Republicans are increasingly seeing Orbnism as a model. Currently, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) is holding a major conference in Budapest. Orbn gave a speech Thursday morning; both Tucker Carlson and Trumps former chief of staff Mark Meadows will be giving addresses by videoconference. The event serves as ratification of a trend Ive been writing about for years: the GOPs evolution into an illiberal faction that closely resembles Orbns Fidesz party.

At the conference, my colleague Noel King met with Istvn Kiss, the executive director of the Danube Institute, a government-sponsored think tank with links to prominent Western conservatives. She asked Kiss directly whether his governments embrace of replacement theory bothered him. He said, more or less, that it didnt.

If Hungary changes, then Hungary no longer exists, he says. If you have a society or civilization which is unwilling to reproduce themselves, then that shows that theres something wrong within our societies. Because thats strange; thats kind of suicidal.

These are the ideas spreading out from Budapest to Washington. And the implications for America are more than a little ominous.

In the United States, replacement theory has been popular with the racist fringe people like the Buffalo shooter and Charlottesville, Virginia, marchers for decades. Only recently has it made its way into the GOP mainstream, due in no small part to the influence of Carlsons Fox show.

In Europe, the idea is widespread among both neo-Nazis and the continents far-right political parties, like the Netherlands Freedom Party and Germanys AfD. After these parties surged in popularity in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, such ideas moved closer to the political mainstream. During the 2022 French presidential election, Valrie Pcresse the candidate of the center-right Republican party used the term Great Replacement in a campaign speech railing against immigration.

But nowhere has the idea been more influential than Hungary, where Orbn and his increasingly far-right Fidesz party has engineered the political system to give itself a virtual hammerlock on power without parallel in the European Union. The Hungarian prime minister has elevated fear of demographic replacement into a central governing ideology, serving as justification for a policy agenda that demonizes minorities and helps cement his hold on power.

Orbns vision goes like this: Hungary is a small country of about 10 million people, with a unique culture and language, that has been repeatedly invaded and subjugated throughout its history. Today, the biggest threat to this nations continuation is low birthrates: Hungarians are an endangered species, as he once put it.

Immigration to Europe from the Middle East and Africa is, in this worldview, the principal reason for this endangered status. Because Orbn sees Hungarianness as defined in ethnonational terms, there is no sense that the children of migrants could ever become Hungarian. By bringing in their own cultures and languages, he believes, they pose an existential threat to the Hungarian nations future.

We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children. In our minds, immigration means surrender, as he put it in a 2019 speech. If we resign ourselves to the fact that we are unable to sustain ourselves even biologically, by doing so we admit that we are not important even for ourselves.

Only about 2.1 percent of the Hungarian population is foreign-born, according to 2020 data (though thats up from 1.6 percent in 2018). Most hail from nearby European states, like Ukraine and Romania; 97 percent of the countrys population is currently made up of ethnic Hungarians. Yet Orbn still describes migration as a deliberate plot against Hungary an intentional replacement orchestrated by bureaucrats in Brussels and George Soros.

What they want is that henceforward it will increasingly not be we and our descendants who live here, but others, he said in a speech commemorating the countrys 1848 revolution. External forces and international powers want to force all this upon us, with the help of their allies here in our country.

The upshot of this conspiracy theory is that Orbn and his allies in Fidesz are justified in doing nearly anything however cruel and authoritarian in service of preventing migration. They have built a fence on the border with Serbia to block migrants from entering; when I visited there in 2018, I saw a detention center, with some migrants stuck in a miserable processing system while others slept in squalid tents on the Hungarian side.

That year, the government passed something called the Stop Soros law: a bill punishing Hungarian people and organizations for promoting and supporting illegal migration, with provisions so broadly worded that, in theory, the government could arrest someone who provides food to an undocumented migrant on the street or attends a political rally in favor of their rights.

Replacement theorys influence extends beyond immigration policy. Orbns anti-LGBTQ rhetoric centers on the idea that gender ideology poses a threat to Hungarian continuity by allegedly weakening the heterosexual family (and thus discouraging reproduction). This view is so central to Fideszs thinking that, in 2021, it codified it as a constitutional amendment.

Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman established by voluntary decision, and the family as the basis of the survival of the nation, the amendment reads. Family ties shall be based on marriage or the relationship between parents and children. The mother shall be a woman, the father shall be a man.

Some of Hungarys birthrate-related policies are less alarming: Subsidies for families with children, in particular, are entirely defensible social policy. However, they take place in a broader context of government rhetoric and policymaking that sees women as obligated to serve the nation by becoming mothers and homemakers.

Id like to have an agreement with the Hungarian ladies, and their role in the nations future, the prime minister once said. Childbearing is a private matter, but also a very public one.

Its unclear how much Orbn actually believes his Great Replacement theorizing. In the 1980s and 90s, he positioned himself as a committed political liberal before making an abrupt right turn. Hungary is a socially conservative country by European standards, so some of his polices on this front are genuinely popular. And many of the policies justified by replacement rhetoric just so happen to weaken his enemies and expand state power to stifle dissent, furthering his undemocratic regimes primary goal of staying in power.

Regardless of his true beliefs, Orbn is now very committed to the politics of replacement and has invested in exporting it attempting to build an alliance of far-right Western politicians, bringing prominent right-wing intellectuals to meet with him in Budapest, and even funding institutes and journals that spread the tenets of Orbn thought in English.

He seems to have found his greatest success in the United States, where the leading figures in the Republican Party are seeing him as a model.

In January, Donald Trump endorsed Orbn in the latters reelection bid, calling him a strong leader who truly loves his country and wants safety for his people. Later that month, the partys leading media ally Tucker Carlson released a special titled Hungary vs. Soros that attempted to disseminate Orbns Great Replacement mythology to an American audience.

In the episode, Carlson argues that migration to Hungary is akin to an actual military invasion one in which migrants are effectively trying to colonize Hungary and replace its population with their babies.

Unlike the threats from the Soviets and the Ottoman Empire, the threat posed by George Soros and his nonprofit organizations is much more subtle and hard to detect, Carlson says. Not coincidentally, Carlson is the leading mainstream exponent of the idea that a similar process is underway in America: arguing that Democrats are using immigration policy to conduct the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.

And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis a leading figure in the GOP and potential 2024 candidate is pioneering a kind of American Orbnism. While DeSantis has not openly endorsed Orbns replacement rhetoric in the way Carlson does, he has picked up on the style of using social conservative ideas as a justification for policies that attack ones political enemies. Theres some evidence that his infamous Dont Say Gay bill was directly influenced by Hungarys recently passed restrictions on LGBTQ speech.

Which brings us back to CPAC in Budapest. The group has held international events before in attempts to build cross-national conservative linkages, but this is its first conference in Europe. Even though few prominent Republican politicians are attending in person, the significance for the direction of the conservative movement is lost on no one.

The trans-Atlantic mainstreaming of Great Replacement rhetoric is especially troubling, given that it has inspired white supremacist attacks on mosques in New Zealand, Latinos in El Paso, and, most recently, Black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket. It is a style of thinking that is not only conspiratorial, but inherently prone to justifying violence and repression. It posits that the very existence of nonwhite people in a country is a threat to the body politic.

We have seen how this has facilitated the development of an illiberal authoritarian state in Hungary; it seems the Republican Party has no qualms about traveling down a similar path. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the No. 3 ranking Republican in the House, has shown no contrition for her past comments endorsing replacement theory. And there are no signs she will face any consequences.

During Orbns address at CPAC Budapest, he outlined a 12-point recipe for political success that the American right could borrow. The very first point, he said, is that we must play by our own rules that conservatives must not be discouraged by being shouted at, by being labeled unfit, or by being treated as troublemakers.

In context of recent developments, this advice sounds less like friendly pointers and more like the words of an enabler. And its clear the Republican Party is taking the idea to heart.

Today, Explained, Voxs daily news explainer podcast, is following CPAC to Hungary. In a three-part series May 18-20, host Noel King reports on why American conservatives want to align themselves with and express such admiration for an increasingly authoritarian country. Listen to Today, Explained wherever you find podcasts.

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The European country where replacement theory reigns supreme - Vox.com

The Kala Pani Migration: An Indian Story Thats Hardly Discussed in India – The Wire

In India, Kala Pani is associated with the Cellular Jail in Port Blair where freedom fighters and dissidents were sent by the British colonial authorities in the early 20th century. When used in the diaspora, it refers to the large-scale migration out of India in the 1830s when hundreds of thousands of Indians, both willingly and unwillingly, left the subcontinent and crossed the Kala Pani (the Black Waters) to work in the sugar colonies as indentured labourers, or bound coolies. These emigrants were responding to the need for labour on plantations after slavery was abolished in 1834 and terminated in 1838. Some 1.25 million emigrants were taken to Fiji and Mauritius, as well as the British, French and Dutch Caribbean.

Kala Pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th Century Migrations From Indias PerspectiveEdited by Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Judith Misrahi-Barak Routledge, 2022

However, even if the historiography is now abundant and detailed, even if the academic criticism that has been published has made creations in literature, film and the arts shine brighter, the diasporic point of view has prevailed. Ashutosh Kumar had remarked there was a curious lacuna regarding indenture as far as 19th century mainstream Indian political and politico-economic discourse [was] concerned. And yet, it seems that by the time MK Gandhi returned to India in 1915, the tragedy of the indentured labourers had found a firm and sympathetic expression in literary works emerging from Bihar and eastern UP, the area that had witnessed most of the migration. Consequently, several major journals dedicated large sections to the distressful condition of indentured labourers in Mauritius, British Guiana, Fiji, and South Africa.

Chandwas among the most influential Hindi journals of that era. Itdevoted an entire issue (January 1926) to the migration, and Premchands short storyShudrawas the highlight. Kamal Kishore Goenka callsShudrathe first work of Hindi fiction on the indentured, and perhaps the first Indian work as well.

There is thus a curious imbalance in the fact that while the diaspora literature written by those whose forefathers left India to work as indentured labourers has been a topic of major academic and political discourse, very scant attention has been given in India to those members of the early diaspora and to their descendants. Their stories and memories continue to exist in the popular imagination, but do not figure in curricula or political manifestos.

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, however, an internationally acclaimed writer of Indian origin, an American journalist of Indo-Guyanese descent, and an Indian academic provided a game-changer. Between 2008 and 2015, Amitav GhoshsIbis Trilogywas published. Gaiutra BahadursCoolie Woman: the Odyssey of Indenturewas published in 2013. And Ashutosh KumarsCoolies of the Empirewas published in 2017. In less than 10 years, novel writing, non-fiction, archival work and academic research operated in striking conjunction to give Kala Pani crossings fresh momentum.

As this volume was being prepared, the Covid-19 crisis shook us out of our certitudes. How tragically ironic that the phrase migrant crisis, which used to refer to the Mediterranean in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011, now refers to India during the Covid-19 pandemic. The 1830s migrations were prompted by the colonial powers out of greed, though the indentured eventually negotiated it to their advantage and managed to wrest a narrative, a house of their own. A century later, the post-Partition migration was the complicated consequence of colonial rule, communalism and failure of Indian politics. But in the 21st century, the Indian state cannot blame any outsider for the misery. A large number of those on the roads in the spring and summer of 2020 are natives of the villages and towns in UP and Bihar from where indentured labour had migrated. Those who couldnt migrate to foreign shores two centuries before and shifted to Indian cities after Partition were now forced to return to what the state believes is their original land.

When a possible discourse on Indian perspectives of Kala Pani migrations began to emerge in the transnational conversations between the co-editors of this volume, one Indian and the other a diaspora scholar based in France, neither realised the waters that would be crossed. Questions were raised how come this history is better known out of India than in India itself? Doesnt one need, at some stage, to invert the mirror, to look within and retrieve this forgotten chapter of Indian history? What would be the advantages of shining a torch onto a history that had been kept invisible? Had it been neatly made invisible, by design or default, or are we once again dealing with the messy business of memory, history and historiography? How can those archives of the past bear an impact on our reading of the present and influence our shaping of the future?

(Excerpted with permission fromKala Pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th Century Migrations From Indias Perspective, Routledge India)

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The Kala Pani Migration: An Indian Story Thats Hardly Discussed in India - The Wire

Attacking abortion rights, migrants babies, and more — how right-wing media is exploiting the baby formula crisis for the GOP’s culture war – Media…

Right-wing media are weaponizing fake outrage about a severe baby formula shortagein the U.S. for political gain, using the crisis to attack migrant babies, bash abortion rights, complain about aid to Ukraine, and accuse President Joe Biden of mismanaging and exacerbating the shortage.

The U.S. is facing a dangerous formula shortage that has parents scrambling to feed their babies and stores rationing products. In some states, over 50% of formula products are out of stock. Less than half of infants in the U.S. are exclusively breastfed through 3 months of age, so most parents rely on formula to help feed their children before they are ready for solid foods.

The shortage is partly a result of corporate conglomeration as of 2018, just four companies control nearly 90% of the formula market. In addition, poor federal oversight and weak safety standards at key manufacturing plants led to massive recalls for contaminated formula. Supply chain issues exacerbated by the pandemic have only made the shortage worse.

In response to the shortage, the Biden administration has said that it is working with the Food and Drug Administration to increase production and potentially loosen restrictions on imported formula, and it has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price gouging. And chief of staff Ron Klain has reportedly told a member of Congress the White House is also absolutely and strongly considering having President Joe Biden use the Defense Production Act to increase the supply of formula.

Meanwhile, right-wing media outlets, figures, and guests have been fueling their ongoing culture war by linking the formula crisis to hot-button issues like abortion and Ukraine to further outrage their audience.

Fox News hosts and other right-wing pundits suggestedthat the government should starve migrant babies in detention because U.S.-born babies and their parents are facing a formula shortage. Aside from the obvious moral duty to feed human beings in its care, the government is legally required to provide adequate nutrition including formula when appropriate for incarcerated immigrants.

Some right-wing pundits claimed that the Biden administration doesnt care about the formula shortage because it is pro-choice and wants to kill babies, or that the Biden administration is proposing abortion as a solution to the formula shortage. Some claimed Democrats are hypocrites, implying they are only worried about abortion rights and not the formula shortage.

Some right-wing media figures and guests suggested that instead of attempting to send $40 billion to Ukraine to help the country fend off the Russian invasion, Congress should use that money to produce baby formula. Others claimed that Bidens support of aid for Ukraine during the formula shortage proves he doesnt care about the welfare of people in the U.S.

Right-wing media figures accused the president of not taking the shortage seriously and demanded that he address the crisis from his bully pulpit. Some claimed the shortage was the latest casualty of inflation, which they also blamed on the president.

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Attacking abortion rights, migrants babies, and more -- how right-wing media is exploiting the baby formula crisis for the GOP's culture war - Media...