Fathers and Refugees

On Fatherhood and Refugees

My father’s father was a refugee. His parents bought him a ticket on a ship coming to America, and charged him with the heavy responsibility of finding some way —in a land he did not know and a language he did not speak— of saving his family.

He was born and raised in a Greek city inside what is now Turkey. For centuries, Greeks and Turks had lived side-by-side there, in peace. But his parents could see a tide of angry nationalism rising. They saw their Turkish neighbors fill their hearts with bitterness; with grievances, some real, some imagined; with hate. So much hate.

My grandfather worked hard and landed a steady job in Colombia.  He brought over family members — sisters, brothers, cousins. By this time, the family-members who stayed behind had lost their homes and their possessions. Women were interred in concentration camps, men in prisons. His younger brother managed to escape by swimming, while manacled to another man, to an American Red Cross ship on a mission of mercy.

My grandfather was a a builder. He was the rock on which my family’s survival was predicated.

My father was a refugee’s son. Born in the U.S., he was proud to serve his country. Barely seventeen, he volunteered to fight in WWII. No good deed goes unpunished, as he would say, and a few years later, as a result, he was recalled to fight in Korea. He served in a frontline regiment with blacks and whites, Latinos and Asians, children of immigrants and children of native-born. For him, this mosaic was the strength and promise of America. It was a country where no one went to sleep fearing that their neighbors would turn them into the authorities for being different.

My father’s defining quality was loyalty. He worked for the same company all his life. When that company went bust, my dad indebted himself up to the eyeballs to keep part of it afloat, in an effort to save jobs, lives. He too was a builder. He fought in wars and forged a company that helped make the American dream possible for many, including my family and myself.

I am the grandchild of a refugee. I was not weighted down with the tremendous responsibilities my father and grandfather had to bear at an early age. I was not drafted. There was no draft when I came of age. I started no companies. I did not buy the life and freedom of family members with my first paychecks. I lived in easier, fatter times.

But I have not forgotten the lessons they passed down. I have no patience for intolerance and hatred of others, it does not matter what the reason. I have no respect for leaders who play on racism and resentment. I know that the fear of immigrants and refugees is more than just nonsense. It is evil nonsense. It is the triumph of the haters and destroyers. 

This week I watched my 14 year-old son graduate from middle school. He seemed suddenly so grown, so adult. My heart filled with pride (and my eyes with tears). I hope to charge him only with the following task — to live a joyous, productive life, in whatever manner he chooses. But, I will also make sure he remembers that he is the great-grandson of a refugee, and that those who do not fight to make history, are condemned to repeat it.

Read the full piece here: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/opinion/2016/06/17/opinion-on-fatherhood-and-refugees/

Supreme Court to Hear Argument on Fundamental, and Explosive Issue

Immigration is one of those explosive issues, like civil rights, that has overflowed the bounds of normal politics, and represents a fundamental battle over the nature and future of American society. I write about it here...

http://aldianews.com/articles/opinion/immigration-case-scotus-explosive-and-fundamental/43037

Accepting Syrian Refugees Will Make the US Safer

The very idea that U.S. governors would refuse to accept Syrian refugees, out of overblown fear and demagogic politics, fills me with despair at the complete eclipse of both reason and compassion. What has it come to? Do we turn away the victims of violence, because they frighten us so?

I am at a loss for words ... oh, wait...strike that... here are a few...

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/opinion/2015/11/19/opinion-accepting-syrian-refugees-makes-us-safer-from-terror/

Football's 'We Are the World' Moment

The refugee crisis is a major stepping-up moment for the world's most popular, and profitable, sport. Here is my take...

http://aldianews.com/articles/opinion/refugees-welcome-soccer-has-its-we-are-world-moment/40778

Pope Francis and the Refugee Crisis

As the refugee crisis shakes Europe, and immigration polarizes America, Pope Francis arrives in the US with a revolutionary approach.

http://aldianews.com/articles/opinion/pope-and-elephant/40502

The False War between Immigrants and the Poor

Street art in working class section of Rome.

In trying to understand the most recent outburst of racist and anti-immigrant violence in Italy, many mainstream analysts have described the clashes - in the poor peripheral neighborhoods of Rome or the public housing projects of Milan and the industrial North - as a war between domestic poor and immigrant poor. But this understanding of the violence, distorts the reality of the events and, in my view, leads to false conclusions. To depict xenophobic violence as a clash between local poor and global poor, is a convenient way for the Italian elite to let itself off the hook of institutional racism and political failure.

At first glance, of course, the idea of a war between national poor and immigrant poor seems reasonable. Poor and poorly educated immigrants do compete with local unskilled labor. They also compete, in Italy, for certain social benefits, like subsidized public housing.  Both of these competitive elements are highlighted by right and left-wing opponents of immigration. Particularly during a time of economic crisis, the argument runs, when there are no jobs and benefits to be had, these should go to citizens only. 

The argument has popular appeal. Xenophobia has done wonders for the National Front in France and is beginning to do the same for the racist Lega Nord in Italy. On the left, too, xenophobia has its converts. The anti-establishment 5 Star Movement  adopted an anti-immigration platform after vigorous internal debate. In the old Red Belt of Italy, old Communist Party voters, have begun drifting to the proto-fascist Lega, on the strength of the immigration issue. And, politically, what politician would pick to defend someone else's poor over one's own?

White Supremacist tag of Communist graffito.

But the very conception of this war between poor and poor is flawed. First, if immigration into a country has to wait for a moment in which there is no competition with locals for jobs and public resources, then it will never occur. In Italy, even during fat years, unemployment and lack of state aid are always issues for the poor. In this sense, Italy is always failing it's poor: failing to create enough jobs to bring unemployment and underemployment down to even US levels, and failing to provide sufficient benefits - public education, housing, social services like day care and health care - to lift the poor out of poverty.  There is never a time when these resources, jobs and benefits, for the poor, are not scarse. The precondition of no competition with the local poor, is tantamount to saying no immigration, ever.

Second, in this struggle of the poor against the poor argument, job competition is privileged to the exclusion of all other forms of social and economic activity.  Immigrant do compete for jobs, but they also rent rooms in poor neighborhoods, and buy food and clothing in local stores, and, if given a chance, open new businesses which create new jobs. In the United States, 17 percent of all new businesses are started by immigrants, according to the Small Business Administration. Almost all studies show a net positive effect between immigration and job creation - more growth and more jobs, eventually for all.

But for Immigrant to fully contribute to an economy, they have to be allowed to contribute to the society as well. Rules limiting what immigrants can do, and achieve, make immigration less valuable to the society. Ironically, by trying to protect the country's poor in the short-run, by making jobs and benefits harder to get for immigrants, Italy hurts their own economy, and their poor, in the long-run. 

By excluding immigrants from subsidized public housing, Italy closes it's eye to unsafe and unsanitary living conditions in illegal, but openly tolerated, camps and abandoned buildings. By making it harder to legalize one's status, Italy makes it likely to force people into informal and casual labor arrangements. The government drives people and jobs underground, in effect, reducing the amount of money that goes to the poor, and the local businesses that cater to the poor.

Public housing outside Rome, complete with swastika graffiti.

Not only has the Italian government chosen to make the life of immigrants more difficult, in a failed effort to discourage immigration - or rather partly failed, it has succeeded in keeping away educated, affluent professionals - but it has also made it difficult for their Italian born children to gain citizenship. This, of course, weakens the immigrant communities loyalty and commitment to life in Italy. It denies immigrants in Italy with one of the fundamental forces that bind immigrants in America to their new country, the future welfare of their American children. As a result, Italy is in danger of replicating a Middle Eastern rather than a New World model - not immigrants, rather guest workers, without rights or commitment or full involvement with the country.

But immigrants are not abstract entities, they have their own histories, religion and culture - and skin color - and here we come face to face with the social and cultural issues that fueled the anti-immigrant riots outside Rome, in the poor area of Tor Sapienza, Tower of Knowledge. The immigrants and political refugees huddled in fear inside the "welcome center" while a rampaging mob attacked the building with clubs and stones and fought with police, were black and Muslim, the rampaging mob was white and Christian. And this racial and cultural fact cannot be white-washed, as it were, in a discussion of poor vs. poor.  The mob was very clear about what it thought of black people. And that Italian racism deserves to be examined on its own, unqualified by discussions of poverty, in a post of its own. The next post.

The War on Immigrants

The riot police in full metal gear kept pushing the crowd back trying to get them to disperse. But every time the crowd dispersed only to reform again and attack the immigrant dormitory with stones and bats. Inside social workers barricaded themselves all night, manning barred doors and first floor windows, while refugees, many of them unaccompanied minors, huddled in fear in their rooms.

A scene from a movie? Children of Men? Or a dystopian novel on like Ink? No. This scene was all too real and happened last week at a refugee relocation center, a "welcome" center in Italian, on the outskirts of Rome. Tor Sapienza, the neighborhood is called, Tower of Knowledge.

Abandoned and decaying buildings dot the periphery of Rome.

The battle raged for three nights, and was followed by a major demonstration in which locals pelted the mayor of Rome with insults and demanded the closing of the center. Authorities decided to move the children to another facility, in another blighted neighborhood, Infernetto, or Little Hell, for their own protection. But this prompted a similar violent outburst in that neighborhood as well, and the frightened kids were bused back to Tor Sapienza.

At first, the Italian press depicted the violence as a spasm of racism. And, there is plenty of racism to go around -- from the demonstrators' descriptions, to the press, of black people as animals; to the targeting of all brown and black people for abuse and retaliation; to the chanting of the racist mantra that Italy is for the Italians, meaning whites only.

A Rom (Gypsy) camp in the outskirts of Rome.

But soon, the public discussion took a different turn, that of analyzing the incident as a war of poor against poor. A second set of neighborhood voices tried to tone down the racialist tones and emphasize that Italy, and the Italian State, has failed them. The pointed to rising crime in the neighborhood, the lack of public transport, the decaying infrastructure, the garbage that never gets picked up by the city... Locals complained that, in addition to the refugee dormitory, there was a Rom (ie Gypsy) camp nearby, which adds to the density of displaced, jobless, men floating through the area.

After three days of riots, and a couple of headlines noting his absence, the Mayor of Rome, Mayor Clown people are calling him,  finally visited the neighborhood to met with the angry locals. He immediately caved to demands to close the center to all except women and children. Prompting anger from both pro-immigration groups who want the center's work to be validated and protected and locals who want it shut completely.

Mayor Clown blamed the Government, that is, the Ministry of Justice which runs immigration policy. The Minister of Justice called Mayor Clown a ... well, clown, and also blamed the European Union for its inflexible immigration and refugee policies.

The right has doubled down on it's National Front-like strategy of riding the anti-immigrant wave to votes in the next election. The Left is torn between defending the migrants and rending their garments over the loss of working class (white) support.

But, in my opinion, to dismiss this violent spasm as a poor person's movement ("war between poor and poor") or a protest against the failure of the Italian State, or a popular rejection of immigration ("the illegal invasion" the right calls it), is to miss it's essence.  This is, I believe, a fundamental battle over the shape of Italian society and it's future. And I will spend the next few blog posts, teasing my ideas out.

6 Immigration Lessons from Italy (What Not to Do)

The failings of Italy's immigration law were made painfully and embarrassingly clear last week after two ships packed with over 700 refugees went down off the Italian island of Lampedusa. So far over 300 dead bodies have been recovered. The drownings have shone a spotlight on the disfunctional Italian immigration system, its negligent and overcrowded refugee camps, and its punitive legal treatment of migrants. 

Immigrant must check in with police on a regular basis.

6 Immigration Lessons from Italy

Italy’s current immigration law is a hardline, enforcement first measure. Know as Bossi-Fini , after its co-authors, the 2002 law greatly restricts legal immigration, abolishes many social services for immigrants, makes it difficult for children born in Italy to non-Italian parents to become citizens, and generally treats immigration as a law enforcement issue. In effect, the law is an anti-immigration measure, based on the notion that criminalization and zero-tolerance will repel migrants (illegal and legal). 

  

The problems of this approach are plain to see:

1.  By making legal immigration almost impossible, Italy has ensured that it receives only that form of immigration that is born of desperation. All those with skills and options, are driven elsewhere by bureaucratic barriers and government hostility. Its hardline immigration approch has resulted in exactly the clandestine migration it feared. 

Punitive legal measures that criminalize migrants, Italy have NOT prevented inflows of people. What these punitive measures have done is to make sure that those immigrants that do end up in Italy, often by harrowing illegal journeys during which they are at the mercy of criminal human trafficking cartels, have greater needs, are torn from their families, and have fewer social and economic resources at their disposal to make a new life for themselves. Once they are in country, their 'criminal' status renders them more vulnerable to abuse and fearful of authority. 

Graffiti in an immigrant social squat in Rome.

2. In addition to restricting legal immigration, Bossi-Fini also makes gaining Italian citizenship difficult for children born in Italy, to non-Italian parents. The result of this measure is to create a class of people who are born and raised as Italians, but who don't have the legal rights of citizenship. Thus, long term immigrants are prevented from putting down roots in the country. The result is a class of "guest workers" who live in Italy but heve neither full rights nor a stake in the future of the country.

4. Although Bossi-Fini allow for the the granting of asylum to refugees, there is little provision for how to deal with their presence. The asylum system is so starved of funds to the point of shame. Refugees spend years in overcrowded and underfunded camps. The  camp in Lampedusa was built for 200. It houses over a thousand, including unaccompanied minors mixed with adults. 

5. The idea that refugees, who are fleeing abject poverty of political violence will be deterred by the threat of a monetary fine is absurd and delegitimizes the justice system that has to prosecute helpless victims.  The magistrate charged with prosecuting the wretched souls who survived the shipwrecks last week spoke of his shame at enforcing the law. 

6. Italy itself is the victim of a European Union measure that required refugee seekers to stay in the country they first set foot in. Thus Italy, and Greece and Malta and Spain, poor countries by EU standards, are forced to carry a disproportionate share of refugees seeking entry to Europe. The last irony of Bossi-Fini is that most of the refugees and immigrants in the Italian anti-immigration system want to leave the country.

When Survival is a Crime

Two outrageous developments about the ship packed with refugees that went down off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy: 

In published interviews, some of the first rescuers, tourists boats and fishermen, describe a nightmarish scene in which the water was full of people calling for help and clinging to pieces of wood. They claim that the Italian coast guard ordered them back to port only to then to wait for "instructions" before beginning to rescue the drowning people. The coast guard deny this.

Under Italy's harsh immigration law, the survivors of the shipwreck, will be prosecuted for illegal entry into the country and face punitive fines. The magistrate's office has stated that they are ashamed of having to prosecute, but that they have no flexibility.

The Prime Minister and the Minister of Interior are making noises about modifying this "shameful" law. Meanwhile divers continue to bring up dead bodies from the sunken ship, 300 so far.

"The Mediterranean is a graveyard."

Ruined watchtowers dot the easternmost point of mainland Italy. 

A crippled ship weighed down with over 500 refugees caught fire and sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. A hundred or so were rescued alive, thanks to the unstinting bravery of Lampedusa's fishermen. But divers have filmed horrifying underwater images of the sunken ship, still packed with dead bodies, above and below deck, perhaps over 300.

The tragedy has set off a needed debate on how Italy, and Europe, treat the thousands of migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Africa and the Middle East. In Lampedusa, which is 70 miles off the Tunisian Coast and which has the largest refugee relocation center in Italy, the people held a moving candlelight vigil in remembrance and solidarity. The refugee relocation camp on the island has space for 250 people. It currently houses 1,200. The majority of refugees, including unaccompanied minors, sleep on the open ground for want of space. Other refugee centers in Italy are also overcrowded, and are reluctant accept more. Asylum requests can take years to process.

Sunrise over San Giovanni in Laterano, the Pope's Basilica.

Pope Francis, who has been a strong voice in favor of making immigration policy more humane, is offering the use of monasteries to house the refugees. The xenophobic right is calling for the use of the military to intercept and prevent refugees from approaching Italian shores. (The European Union already has a military border interception force --but it is housed in Warsaw, far from the Mediterranean.) 

But the tremendous scale of this tragedy has forced the Italian government to take action. They are ordering other refugee centers in the country to take more of the load. And they are calling on the European Union to change some of its more dysfunctional policies.

By European regulations, asylum seekers must remain in the first European point where they apply for asylum. This is to prevent migrants from moving about Europe, but the consequence is to put a tremendous strain on a few countries: Italy, Greece, and Malta, in particular.

Italy is calling on other European countries to accept to receive their fair share refugees. Currently three European countries receive a disproportionate amount of resettled migrants: UK, France and Germany. The smaller countries accept almost zero.

The tragedy has also opened debate over Italy's own highly restrictive immigration laws. (A magistrate has already announced that the survivors of the tragedy will face prosecution under the harsh Bossi-Fini immigration law in the books.) The law makes legal immigration to the country almost impossible, thereby exacerbating the use of desperate and dangerous illegal routes. Italy's immigration levels are higher than those of the small, exclusionary countries of Europe, but very low compared to the big three.

The vast majority of those who died this week were from Eritrea and Somalia -- the former a poor one-party state, and the latter a famously failed one. Both were once Italian colonies. Eritrea officially became an Italian colony in 1890, after Italy invaded and occupied Ethiopia. Somalia followed later. In 1936, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland were declared provinces of Italian East Africa. In 1941, when the British expelled the Italians from the Horn of Africa, almost 10% of the population of Eritrea was Italian.