[-empyre-] Welcome to February 2016: Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee? The Numbers Now and The Number Then

Mon Feb 8 20:55:30 AEDT 2016

Hi,

I am just back from Calais jungle where I spent the weekend as I want to
make machinima workshops there about daily lives in the jungle. On the
sencond day I only succeeded to give an english lesson through a machinima
software to 2 young kurds, but what I saw there is full of energy,
settlement, more looking like an emerging ephemeral city than a camp. There
are now two schools, two libraries, a disco, many restaurants, etc.. The
governmental answer to that is the will to destroy this and reemplace the
jungle by a camp, closed and securised, full of white, unhuman containers
looking like cattle pen.
What I also saw made me think to a taz, perh

[image:
http://www.isabellearvers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/animLogo.gif]
<http://www.isabellearvers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/animLogo.gif>
Isabelle Arvers
Curator and art critic
+33 661 998 386
http://www.isabellearvers.com
Director of Kareron
www.kareron.com
twitter: @zabarvers
youtube.com/zabarvers
Skype ID: zabarvers

2016-02-08 3:48 GMT+01:00 Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> In all my visits to Palestine Damascus Jordan and Baghdad I met both
> Muslims Christians and secularized ppl, "freelance muslims" as much I am a
> "freelance catholic". In Damascus I interviewed Khaled Meshal Hamas
> political leader at that time the Hamas direction was in Damascus now they
> are resettled in Qatar since they don't support Assad's regime in Syria.
> Meshal was living as a refugee among refugees in a poor neighborhood of
> Damascus. The creation of the state of Israel created millions of refugees
> the difference between the people reaching Europe today is the Palestinian
> created refugee camps in all the countries around Palestine and they were
> welcomed by Syria Jordan and Lebanon.
> The English writer John Berger, himself living in exile from his native
> UK, in a peasant village in the mountains in France near Switzerland, wrote
> once: "The 20th century was the first time in human history the concept of
> home dissapeared. The home heimat le pays all aceptions of the same feeling
> of belonging to a place to a country they are shattered now."
> Millions are on the move settled and resettled the maps are being redrawn
> nobody is home any longer.
> When I came to Palestine for first time and told them I lived in Sweden in
> exile because I was sent there by the United Nations directly from jail
> many of our new friends laughed and told me they had also being in Israeli
> jails at different occasions.
> And back in Uruguay I joke with friends and tell them before you could ask
> ppl where do you live, have we being neighbors?  Did we go to thr same
> school?
> Now we ask you seem known to me I recognize you in which jail or military
> caserne we met?
> The jail or the refugee camp risk to become the world's common denominator
> Ana
> Den 8 feb 2016 02:22 skrev "Babak Fakhamzadeh" <
> babak.fakhamzadeh at gmail.com>:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Hey Ricardo, all,
>>
>> It's true that the numbers related to the current refugee crisis
>> surrounding Syria are not as excessive as during the second world war.
>> In relative terms, with Europe at about 550 million inhabitants around
>> 1940 compared to 730 million now, the scope was even bigger, then.
>>
>> Yet, there are also significant differences such that just looking at
>> the numbers is not fair to either event. During the second world war,
>> Europe itself was in turmoil, whereas surrounding the Syrian refugee
>> crisis, the turmoil is wholly happening outside of Europe's borders.
>> Second, the differences between Syrian refugees and, say, the average
>> Dutchman (which of course doesn't really exist), now, is probably
>> bigger, and occurring on a wider scope, than the differences between,
>> say, the Czech and, say, Polish middle class during or close to the
>> second world war. It's simply easier to reconcile oneself with others
>> who are more similar than with those who are more different. That's
>> not a matter of being racist, it's human nature. To go beyond that, to
>> step over that prejudice, if you will, takes effort and has to be done
>> consciously.
>>
>> As you suggest, Ricardo, there might be a greater neo-liberalist plan
>> to profit from all this, but that also doesn't automatically mean that
>> the crisis is fabricated in order to make a profit. It seems to me
>> there's a lot of opportunism and incompetence at work. As well as
>> convenient negligence by the media, but all these are other stories.
>>
>> But, none of this says anything about what the not-so-distant future
>> might bring. Will western Europe's xenophobic flames be fanned by the
>> relatively large influx of non-Europeans?
>>
>> Babak
>>
>> --
>> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamzadeh at gmail.com |
>> http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
>>
>> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 1:22 PM, Ricardo Dominguez <rrdominguez at ucsd.edu>
>> wrote:
>> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> > Hola Tod at s and Babak,
>> >
>> > I look forward to our dialogue about how the history of "kinopolitics"
>> (the
>> > politics of movement)
>> > will re-produce segmentation and segregation or integration and
>> citizenship
>> > (Echoes of Rome)?
>> > Or perhaps some other unexpected social formations will happen beyond
>> these
>> > histories
>> > (my anti-anti-utopain tendencies speaking here).
>> >
>> > Of course the processes of integration vs. segregation does seem to
>> depend
>> > on where the
>> > movement and flows starts and to lesser degree where it ends.
>> >
>> > If you look at numbers of recent flows of communities into the E.U.
>> starting
>> > from World War II to the
>> > present moment the numbers flowing are worth considering.
>> >
>> > The movement of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees was over 15
>> million
>> > between
>> > 1939 to 1945, while right now Syrians leaving the wars zones number
>> around
>> > 4.1 million
>> > since 2010. One can add a few million more flowing away from other
>> conflict
>> > zones north
>> > to the E.U. and these current numbers are not even close to reaching the
>> > numbers of migrants,
>> > asylum seekers, or refugee that occurred during WWII:
>> >
>> > https://newint.org/features/2016/01/01/global-refugee-crisis-the-facts/
>> >
>> > (The link to an infographic that might be useful to consider.)
>> >
>> > So the "crisis" is not about the "numbers"-but about the social
>> imaginary
>> > anchored on to
>> > the bodies that moving that are activating violent atavistic response
>> > (racist politics) that
>> > neo-liberalism(ism) can profits from via private detention centers and
>> > prisons and
>> > corporate controlled border gates.
>> >
>> > So it is not about the numbers or the facts of crossing-but the where
>> they
>> > coming
>> > from that is the "crisis."
>> >
>> > Ricardo
>> >
>> >
>> > On 2/7/16 2:29 AM, Babak Fakhamzadeh wrote:
>> >>
>> >> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> >> Hi all,
>> >>
>> >> We've got quite a big topic on our hands, making it harder to single
>> >> out a particular angle or narrative. Perhaps not an unreasonable
>> >> starting point is the current refugee crisis in Europe. As Renate in
>> >> the opening email hints at, Rome was at its peak when it actively
>> >> incorporated the peoples, barbarians perhaps, on their frontiers,
>> >> Caesar himself extending Roman citizenship to the Gauls and others.
>> >>
>> >> Europe has been a continent of immigrants, virtually all 'native'
>> >> Europeans originally descending from immigrants coming in from the
>> >> Eurasian plains(, with perhaps only the Basques being the exception).
>> >> So, in many ways, the recent new arrivals coming in from the direction
>> >> of the Middle East are just the latest in a long line of immigrants.
>> >> Yet, the negative European backlash is strong. Perhaps driven by the
>> >> recent and, also strong, undercurrent of xenophobia in many European
>> >> countries, the 'otherness' of the Syrian arrivals is emphasised and
>> >> their presence actively resisted.
>> >>
>> >> Now, I wonder, my question to us on the list, what are the
>> >> consequences of the arrival of this sizeable group of immigrants going
>> >> to be, for Europe, over the next 5 to, say, 10 years? Will the whole
>> >> issue simply fizzle out and the immigrants simply be integrated? Will
>> >> the EU fall apart? Will some countries secede from the Union? Will
>> >> some countries turn into virtual police states?
>> >> And, why?
>> >>
>> >> And, related, how are those countries that do take in larger number of
>> >> immigrants going to deal with making sure their integration is not
>> >> going to be botched in the same way that Germany, Holland and France
>> >> botched the integration of specifically Turkish and Moroccan
>> >> immigrants in the 1960s and onwards?
>> >>
>> >> Looking forward to the responses :)
>> >>
>> >> Babak
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> Babak Fakhamzadeh | babak.fakhamzadeh at gmail.com |
>> >> http://BabakFakhamzadeh.com
>> >>
>> >> Ask me for my PGP public key to send me encrypted email.
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> empyre forum
>> >> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> >> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>> >
>> >
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