Migrants Related Quotes

All we can infer (from the archaeological shards dug up in Berkshire, Devon and Yorkshire) is that the first Britons, whoever they were and however they came, arrived from elsewhere. The land (Britain) was once utterly uninhibited. Then people came.

Africa occupied a relatively blank space in the minds of most Americans, and when they stopped to think about it, aided by old and deeply ingrained habits of press coverage, all they could imagine was volcano, occupation, disease, and horror.

That Black migrant communities were systematically de-skilled upon their arrival is an often-overlooked facet of understanding Black poverty in Canada today. Indeed, it represents the power of anti-Blackness to transcend even economic interests: even in moments when Canada required highly educated professionals, Black migrants meeting those exact criteria were nonetheless largely streamlined into low-skilled work and relative powerlessness.

More broadly, it is vital for leaders to work across international boundaries to minimize the number of people who feel the need to leave their home countries in the first place. That requires building healthy democracies, fostering peace, and generating prosperity from the ground up. However, success in that endeavor demands a way of looking at the world that recognizes the humanity we share with one another, and the interests that nations have in common. Those who are content to look inward, and who see no higher purpose than to shield themselves from the different, the new, and the unknown, will be of no help.

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free.

The Chicago Commission on Race Relations found evidence of systemic profiling, abuse, and corruption. Officials testified that officers routinely arrested blacks on suspicion and brought them “into court without a bit of evidence of any offense.” A former chief of police admitted that black migrants “naturally” attracted “greater suspicion than would attach to the white man.” Such startling testimony proved that police bias and discrimination were baked into the arrest statistics, leading the commissioners to abandon

Charity had heard that the Trump administration might be using new arrivals from Mexico as weapons in a public relations war. When space in the migrant shelters ran out, ICE workers would drive these people into cities in the dead of night and just leave them there. “I’d heard that Trump was trying to create a crisis,” said Charity. “Trying to turn people against immigrants. It was just a rumor. But when I get there I find this is all true. They’re just dumping families on street corners at two in the morning. They were trying to create a disaster.

The phenomenon of laborers staying on at the end of their contracts with big public works companies is likely the biggest single source of Chinese migration to Africa. Workers would arrive from a given locality in China and discover there was good money to be made in some corner of an Africa they had never before imagined viable. Soon, they were sending word back home about the fortunes to be made there, or the hospitality of the locals, or the wonders of the environment, or the joys of a free and relatively pressureless life. In short order, others would follow. Li

In Europe, on the other hand, Muslims find themselves in the opposite position: they are the minority, but they are offered the equality of citizens. The acceptance of reason-based knowledge by Muslims would for them smooth the way to secular democracy, human rights, peace among democratic nations and above all cultural-religious pluralism. If Muslim migrants embrace these values and the related rules, it matters little whether Muslims constitute a minority or a majority. Some leaders of the Islamic diaspora are not favorable to this embracing and make the accusation of Islamophobia every time the shari’a is rejected. This accusation becomes an instrument for deterring any call for change and for incriminating any rational criticism. A call for an embracing of cultural modernity as a platform of peace between civilizations becomes in this perception an expression of Islamophobia.

Often they are mentioned in the same breath as drugs that are smuggled across, or terrorists that might try to be. What crosses the border is dangerous; the Southwest is our 'exposed flank.' There is a nagging fear that we've gone to sleep with the back door unlocked. "In Mexico the migration is less imagined and more concrete. It's something people from the poorest and most remote corners of the republic have participated in for years -- at least as far back as 1848, when the United States, through the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, acquired nearly half of their country, stranding many Mexican nationals in a foreign land. Then, as now, migration has been recognized to be a two-way street, of people leaving home for a while, working, and then mainly returning home. The relatively fast pace of American industrialization, coupled with Mexico's economic and demographic crises, has accelerated the movement north. Today, if you are among the majority of Mexicans -- those with very little money -- working in the United States is not merely something you hear about, but something you might consider. It is one of life's few options.

In just two years, none other than Donald Trump went from openly condemning Mexican migrants as rapists and “bad hombres” to embracing Mexico in trade and security deals that took bilateral relations to their friendliest and most productive in the history of both republics.

What grounds a universal politics, as well as giving it its emancipatory orientation, is the part of no-part: the universal reveals itself, after all, through what is missing, in what is abjected or doesn’t belong. All of our case studies have aimed at forefronting the latter: the socioeconomically dispossessed, the migrant/refugee, the racialized Black or indigenous woman, and so forth. It is they who make evident the failures, inequities, and cruelties of the system; hence their attendant universal call for égaliberté. For, without the ethico-political identification with the part of no-part, without an understanding that it is the underlying social antagonism—the social division between the included and excluded—that makes the global capitalist order possible, a universal politics loses its radical edge, descending into more of the same. The example of the celebrification of #MeToo discussed earlier is a good case in point, in which the powerful take up an important social cause, resulting in the privileging of the already privileged—a “pseudo-radicalization, which fits the existing power relations much better than a modest reformist proposal” (Žižek 1999, 230). It is only when the call for égaliberté is issued by the part of no-part that it becomes an “impossible” demand—one that requires reconfiguring, rather than tweaking or reforming, the system.

Migration from Eastern to Western Europe under Cold War conditions was restricted, because socialist states generally did not allow emigration, and the—not only metaphorical—Iron Curtain provided a very real obstacle to mobility. The main legal way to permanently emigrate from one’s homeland was through what this book refers to as ethnically coded family reunification, available mainly for citizens identified as Germans and Jews. In the highly regulated and strictly supervised East–West migration system that had been established by the early 1960s, legal emigration followed a prestructured path that led from the official exit gate of the country of origin to the official external immigration gate of the receiving country, passing through certain fixed routes and nodal points on the way. As long as people went through these official channels, control procedures were relatively simple. As a rule, an exit visa entitling its holder to enter Germany or Israel signaled to the receiving state that the sending state considered the migrant either German or Jewish.

Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades. Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited. For example, changes in climate, to which animals and plants cannot adapt, lead them to migrate; this in turn affects the livelihood of the poor, who are then forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children. There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever. Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering, which is even now taking place throughout our world. Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.

Both have full lips and a rounded nose – evidence, say some, that the Indus people were direct descendants of migrants out of Africa 80,000 years ago. Perhaps, as some historians have long argued, the Indus people were subsequently displaced from the valley by immigrant Aryans, thus becoming the non-Sanskrit-speaking ‘Dravidians’ of south India. ‘Meluhha’, the word that Mesopotamians used for people from the Indus valley, may be related to mleccha, the term that the Sanskrit-speakers used for anybody who could not speak their language – such as those in south India.

It does not take the constant barrage of bourgeois propaganda to reinforce the thinking among native-born white male workers that a woman, black, or migrant worker is a threat to his job security and wages. He already knows the competitive conditions of his class and the means by which his job and his wages are to be secured. He is King Rat, the guy who is going to survive in the middle of an all-sided struggle no matter how conditions deteriorate for the class as a whole in the open-air concentration camp of class society. His measure of success is not how he is doing in absolute terms, but how he is doing relative to other wage slaves.

There are many facets to the decline in fairness and opportunity in American life. Perhaps the worst are the conditions now imposed upon young children born into the underclass and subjected to the recent evolution of the educational system. They are related, and they reinforce each other; their combined result is to condemn tens of millions of children, particularly those born into the new underclass, to a life of hardship and unfairness. For any young child whose parents don’t have money, or who is the child of a migrant agricultural worker and/or an illegal immigrant, prenatal care, nursery, day care, after school, school nutrition, and foster-care systems are nothing short of appalling. And then comes school itself. The “American dream”, stated simply, is that no matter how poor or humble your origins—even if you never knew your parents—you have a shot at a decent life. America’s promise is that anyone willing to work hard can do better over time, and have at least a reasonable life for themselves and their own children. You could expect to do better than your parents, and even be able to help them as they grew old. More than ever before, the key to such a dream is a good education. The rise of information technology, and the opening of Asian economies, means that only a small portion of America’s population can make a good living through unskilled or manual labour. But instead of elevating the educational system and the opportunities it should provide, American politicians, and those who follow their lead around the globe, have been going in exactly the wrong direction. As a result, we are developing not a new class system, but, without exaggeration, a new caste system—a society in which the circumstances of your birth determine your entire life. As a result, the dream of opportunity is dying. Increasingly, the most important determinant of a child’s life prospects—future income, wealth, educational level, even health and life expectancy—is totally arbitrary and unfair. It’s also very simple. A child’s future is increasingly determined by his or her parents’ wealth, not by his or her intelligence or energy. To be sure, there are a number of reasons for this. Income is correlated with many other things, and it’s therefore difficult to isolate the impact of individual factors. Children in poor households are more likely to grow up in single-parent versus two-parent households, exposed to drugs and alcohol, with one or both parents in prison, with their immigration status questionable, and more likely to have problems with diet and obesity. Culture and race play a role: Asian children have far higher school graduation rates, test scores, and grades than all other groups, including whites, in the US; Latinos, the lowest.

Migration statistics offer a hint of the shift. More than 170,000 migrants and refugees arrived in Italy by sea last year; Syrians and Eritreans were the two largest groups among them, accounting for more than 76,000 people, according to Italy’s Interior Ministry. Gambians ranked a distant fifth. Yet during the first quarter of 2015, a relatively slow period with just 10,165 arrivals — Gambia was the leading country of origin, accounting for 1,413 of the migrants. The authorities have not published figures for April yet, but humanitarian and migration groups confirm that a majority of the arriving migrants came originally from sub-Saharan African countries — some directly, with Italy as a destination, but many end up here less deliberately.

Africa, I believe, is embarking upon an era of sharp divergences in which China will play a huge role in specific national outcomes—for better and for worse, perhaps even dramatically, depending on the country. Places endowed with stable governments, with elites that are accountable and responsive to the needs of their fellow citizens, and with relatively healthy institutions, will put themselves in a position to thrive on the strength of robust Chinese demand for their exports and fast-growing investment from China and from a range of other emerging economic powers, including Brazil, Turkey, India, and Vietnam. Inevitably, most of these African countries will be democracies. Other nations, whether venal dictatorships, states rendered dysfunctional by war, and even some fragile democracies—places where institutions remain too weak or corrupted—will sell off their mineral resources to China and other bidders, and squander what is in effect a one-time chance to convert underground riches into aboveground wealth by investing in their own citizens and creating new kinds of economic activity beyond today’s simple extraction. The proposition at work here couldn’t be more straightforward. The timeline for resource depletion in many African countries is running in tandem with the timeline for the continent’s unprecedented demographic explosion. At current rates, in the next forty years, most African states will have twice the number of people they count now. By that same time, their presently known reserves of minerals like iron, bauxite, copper, cobalt, uranium, gold, and more, will be largely depleted. Those who have diversified their economies and invested in their citizens, particularly in education and health, will have a shot at prosperity. Those that haven’t, stand to become hellish places, barely viable, if viable at all.

What grounds a universal politics, as well as giving it its emancipatory orientation, is the part of no-part: the universal reveals itself, after all, through what is missing, in what is abjected or doesn’t belong. All of our case studies have aimed at forefronting the latter: the socioeconomically dispossessed, the migrant/refugee, the racialized Black or indigenous woman, and so forth. It is they who make evident the failures, inequities, and cruelties of the system; hence their attendant universal call for égaliberté. For, without the ethicopolitical identification with the part of no-part, without an understanding that it is the underlying social antagonism—the social division between the included and excluded—that makes the global capitalist order possible, a universal politics loses its radical edge, descending into more of the same. The example of the celebrification of #MeToo discussed earlier is a good case in point, in which the powerful take up an important social cause, resulting in the privileging of the already privileged—a “pseudo-radicalization, which fits the existing power relations much better than a modest reformist proposal” (Žižek 1999, 230). It is only when the call for égaliberté is issued by the part of no-part that it becomes an “impossible” demand—one that requires reconfiguring, rather than tweaking or reforming, the system.

Another excluded group were the so-called ‘guest workers’, who are underscored as having played a crucial role in Germany’s spectacular social and economic ascent that was possible for the majority of working people at this time. This ascent ultimately rested in large part on an ‘underclass’ of migrant workers,66 who had been brought to Germany for repetitive and dirty work in a prospering industry, and then later, once the long economic boom was over, were coolly sent back home. Without them, there would not have been ‘normal labour relations’ in the form that we knew.

Meanwhile, Facebook censors Palestinian groups so often that they have created their own hashtag, #FBCensorsPalestine. That the groups have become prominent matters little: in 2016, Facebook blocked accounts belonging to editors at the Quds News Network and Shehab News Agency in the West Bank; it later apologized and restored the accounts.30 The following year, it did the same to the official account of Fatah, the ruling party in the West Bank.31 A year after Facebook’s relationship with the Israelis was formalized, the Guardian released a set of leaked documents exposing the ways the company’s moderation policy discriminates against Palestinians and other groups. Published in a series called “The Facebook Files,” the documents contained slides from manuals used to train content moderators. On the whole, the leaks paint a picture of a disjointed and disorganized company where the community standards are expanded piecemeal, and little attention is given to their consequences. Anna, the former Facebook operations specialist I spoke with, agrees: “There’s no ownership of processes from beginning to end.” One set of documents demonstrate with precision the imbalance on the platform between Palestinians and Israelis (and the supporters of both). In a slide deck entitled “Credible Violence: Abuse Standards,” one slide lists global and local “vulnerable” groups; alongside “foreigners” and “homeless people” is “Zionists.”32 Interestingly, while Zionists are protected as a special category, “migrants,” as ProPublica has reported, are only “quasi-protected” and “Black children” aren’t protected at all.33 In trying to understand how such a decision came about, I reached out to numerous contacts, but only one spoke about it on the record. Maria, who worked in community operations until 2017, told me that she spoke up against the categorization when it was proposed. “We’d say, ‘Being a Zionist isn’t like being a Hindu or Muslim or white or Black—it’s like being a revolutionary socialist, it’s an ideology,’” she told me. “And now, almost everything related to Palestine is getting deleted.

English, in this light, is the odd one out, and what distinguishes it from its relatives is that it underwent marauding hordes of Vikings who never went home, and proceeded to speak the language, as they did so much else, Their Way. They never wrote down that they were doing so—most of them couldn’t write anyway. But Icelandic stands as virtual confirmation that adult learners screwing things up was a key factor in how English came to be the way it is. The people who can still read ancient sagas live on a remote, undisturbed island. The people whose language became the most user-friendly member of the family live on an island nearer the Continent, that was, due to that proximity, lustily disturbed by invading migrants.

Poor migrants may seem an odd target for a kidnapping. Surely they have no money. That is why they risk their lives migrating. But even poor people have relatives with savings, and the Zetas can often get $2,000 from kidnapping migrants. If you multiply that by ten thousand, you get $20 million—truly kidnapping en masse.

I did not, and could not, know when writing this book that our nation would soon awaken violently from its brief colorblind slumber. In the final chapter, I did predict that uprisings were in our future, and I wondered aloud what the fire would look like this time. What actually occurred in the years that followed was, to paraphrase James Baldwin, more terrible and more beautiful than I could have imagined. We now have white nationalist movements operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and recruiting thousands into their ranks. We have a president who routinely unleashes hostile tirades against black and brown people—calling Mexican migrants “murderers,” “rapists,” and “bad people,” referring to developing African nations as “shithole countries,” and smearing the majority-black city of Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Millions of Americans are cheering, or at least tolerating, these racial hostilities. And yet, in the midst of all of this, we also have vibrant racial justice movements led by new generations of activists who are working courageously at the intersections of our systems of control, as well as growing movements against criminal injustice led by those who are directly impacted by mass incarceration. Many of these movements aim to redefine the meaning of justice in America. A decade ago, much of this progress seemed nearly unimaginable. When this book was first released, there was relatively little racial justice organizing, and “mass incarceration” was not a widely used term. Back then, the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as most civil rights organizations, did not include criminal justice issues among its top priorities. Little funding could be found for work challenging the enormous punishment bureaucracy

Understand that these early Christians did not meet in churches and sit apart from one another in pews, and then when the music ended get in their chariots and go home. No, their churches were small, and they met in homes or house churches. A recent study by a British scholar has concluded that if the apostle Paul’s house churches were composed of about thirty people, this would have been their approximate make-up:1 • a craftworker in whose home they meet, along with his wife, children, a couple of male slaves, a female domestic slave, and a dependent relative • some tenants, with families and slaves and dependents, also living in the same home in rented rooms • some family members of a householder who himself does not participate in the house church • a couple of slaves whose owners do not attend • some freed slaves who do not participate in the church • a couple homeless people • a few migrant workers renting small rooms in the home Add to this mix some Jewish folks and a perhaps an enslaved prostitute and we see how many “different tastes” were in a typical house church in Rome: men and women, citizens and freed slaves and slaves (who had no legal rights), Jews and Gentiles, people from all moral walks of life, and perhaps, most notably, people from elite classes all the way down the social scale to homeless people.

While many Europeans made world headlines when they rolled out the red carpet for refugees and migrants fleeing war and economic deprivation, the influx of arrivals also provided the hardline right with a renewed voice. “People coming from this war will act a certain way, so it’s not just the fault of Germans. But we aren’t animals.” Ramadan, like hundreds of thousands of others, waited eagerly to find out if his family would be able to join him. In the meantime, he spent each day waiting for his wife to call, waiting for another temporary assurance that none of his relatives had died.

Do you know why Chinese are out here doing this kind of work? It’s because the Europeans and Americans can’t.” “Why not?” I asked. “The French did the original work here.” Actually, the French used forced labor here and in other African colonies, as I indicated earlier. “Yes, but the French can’t work like that anymore. The Americans are a little bit better, but the French, definitely not. But it’s not because we can eat bitter; it’s because we have no choice. Of course we would like to live like Westerners. Of course we’d like to take vacations and to go home frequently, but we can’t. The Americans are smart. They take jobs that win them big profits. But we are a poor society and we’re struggling to rise higher. We’re stuck with work that doesn’t make much money.” I said the Chinese companies wouldn’t be out this far off the beaten path if there wasn’t decent money to be made. “The problem is that there are too many of our companies chasing after this kind of work,” he said. “China is screwed. We have so many people that we have no choice but to go overseas to look for whatever work we can find.” Narrowly speaking, he was absolutely right. But there was so much more to what had drawn China to a place like Mali. Rising powers throughout history have forever faced a simple but fateful choice: whether to take on the established players in their backyards, in places where their interests are greatest and most deeply entrenched, or try to expand into relatively uncontested zones of the world.

Thirty-eight of the seventy-three households in Mashai reported that they brewed and sold beer at least six times in the last year. Many brewed far more often than that, and some brewed once a week or even more. Brewing can bring in a significant amount of money. Most often about forty liters were brewed at a time, which could be sold for between M4 and M10 depending on the quality of the beer. The ingredients, which included a washbasin full of sorghum and a small bowl of maize meal for each forty liter batch, usually cost less than M1, so it was possible for a diligent brewer to net as much as M5, M10, or even more per week from beer. For many households which lacked wage labor, beer brewing was the main source of income (see Gay 1980a for an account of the economics and sociology of brewing in a lowland village). Beer brewing, like many other economic activities through which women support themselves, must be understood not simply as a productive activity, but as a mechanism of redistribution. Beer is sold only to local villagers, predominantly men, and brewing is first of all a way of obtaining access to the cash earnings of employed men. Production of beer is directly stimulated by the presence within the village of men with money to buy it, and it is best understood as one of a number of possible ways for women to get a piece of that money. Brewing is thus very much a dependent or derived form of production; without migrant labor, the villagers of Mashai could no more support themselves through beer brewing than Mark Twain’s famous townsmen could support themselves by taking in each other’s laundry. Understood in this way, it is easy to see why brewing is as much a social skill as a technical one, and why one’s ability to make money by brewing is not a simple matter of the amount of beer one produces. Beer drinking is the main social event in the village for men, and it goes on in small or large groups every day. To sell a lot of beer a woman must be a cheerful and congenial hostess, and have a strong social position in the village. Making money on beer requires the same kinds of skills and social assets as throwing a successful party. It is thus a form of economic activity which is deeply embedded in the social relations of the village. I shall return to this point later.

In the worldliness of migrant labor, migrant capital, migrant information, migrant cultures, migrant languages, migrant standards of legal rights and itinerant universalisms, the specific standards of (national) citizenship (jus sanguinis, “right of blood,” and jus soil, “right of soil”) cannot carry the same guarantee of determination as they may have under different regimes of relative motility operated by nations tied to land and states woven to nations.

When I was seventeen, I saw Prince Edward County for the first time as I accompanied my father to drop my grandmother off for the August church homecoming. Homecoming was traditionally a season where black migrants to the cities and the North returned to catch up with family and friends. It was also the time when children like my father, who were sent South for the summer, usually got to return home to the cities from whence they came. Held during the laying-by period when the crops needed little tending, the week of church and visiting relatives lasted from Saturday to Saturday and usually ended with the migrants returning home with extra bags of gifted produce