Starting Points: Refugee

Showing posts with label Refugee. Show all posts

Mar 30, 2010

Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingyas starve in Bangladesh | ABITSU - All Burma I.T Students Union

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Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingyas starve in Bangladesh | ABITSU - All Burma I.T Students Union

Feb 23, 2010

Europe's Stark Choice on Immigration

Europe is on track to lose 52 million workers between now and 2050—unless it begins embracing immigrants fast.

PHOTOS

Exposing Europe's Invisible Army

The 'new Europeans'—illegal immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers on the continent.

By Stefan Theil | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 19, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

You'd never guess it from the rants of America's talk-radio Jeremiahs, but U.S. immigration policy isn't really a disaster. In fact, Europe has recently begun studying it enviously—or was studying it anyway. Then the recession struck. Now it's open season on foreigners across much of the continent. Italy's interior minister, a member of the xenophobic Northern League, has sent armed carabinieri to clear out camps of jobless migrants in Naples and other parts of the south. In Britain, Tory leader David Cameron recently promised that if his party wins upcoming elections he'll slash immigration by 75 percent—and that's on top of the visa quotas imposed last year by the current Labour government. Ahead of key regional elections in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has launched a noisy debate about "French identity." Switzerland has outlawed minarets, and France, not to be outdone, is considering a ban on burqas.

The trouble isn't a shortage of immigrants. The European Union has attracted 26 million migrants in the past two decades—a full 30 percent more than America's 20 million over the same span. But most European countries tried to protect homegrown labor by shutting out foreign workers. The efforts mostly backfired, encouraging a massive influx of illegal aliens, who tend to accept rock-bottom wages and benefits because they have no legal recourse. At the same time, Europe's generous social benefits encouraged a massive surge of "welfare tourism." As a result, Europe has ended up with 85 percent of all unskilled migrants to the developed countries but only 5 percent of the highly skilled. Compare that with the United States, which has honed its innovative edge by attracting 55 percent of the world's educated migrants. And because immigration happens largely via networks, with established immigrants paving the way for their peers, such trends tend to endure. "It therefore takes decades to turn immigration policy around," says Thomas Liebig, a migration specialist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

For decades most European countries have consigned immigrants to the margins: in Germany, some professions were restricted to German citizens well into the 1990s, while eligibility for citizenship itself was based on bloodlines until a landmark reform in 2001. Millions of refugees were legally barred from working, which forced them into squalid welfare dependency. Muslims especially remain unintegrated and ghettoized in many European countries, including France, Britain, and the Netherlands. Now many European countries have tabled important policy reforms such as the drafting of a continentwide asylum policy and the formulation of smarter immigration criteria based on education and skills. Others, like Spain and the Czech Re-public, are actually paying migrants to go away. The danger is that Europe's worsening hostility toward foreigners will halt or even reverse efforts to assimilate those who are already there, spawning a fast--growing, permanent underclass. According to the OECD, immigrants have been losing jobs at almost twice the rate of native-born citizens during the current crisis, and in many countries the socioeconomic gap between immigrants and natives has begun to grow again.

All this comes at a critical moment for the global economy. Economists predict that global GDP will double in the next 20 years, and as many as 1 billion new, skilled jobs will be created. To avoid being left behind, Europe will need to upgrade its workforce to compete in knowledge-intensive sectors. It can't afford to neglect the education of its immigrant populations or to give up competing for its share of the global talent pool. If it makes the wrong choice, Europe will become smaller, poorer, and angrier. Instead of attracting newcomers, the continent will watch its own best and brightest decamp for better opportunities in the growing economies of China, India, and Brazil. (The economic booms in Poland and Romania have already been slowed by a severe dearth of skilled workers.)

As Europe fiddles, some countries aren't standing still. At the onset of the global crisis, the Canadian government briefly considered slashing immigration quotas to protect its labor market. It then decided to keep its borders open and even to speed up acceptance procedures for some highly skilled arrivals. While migrants have lost some ground recently, they're still twice as likely as native Canadians to hold doctorates or master's degrees. Even within Europe, there are a few countries doing it right. Sweden wasn't satisfied with merely implementing a new, skills-based immigration policy; it actually upgraded its integration efforts, including language and vocational training for existing immigrants, right in the middle of the crisis. But much more can be done to attract skilled migrants—raising the number of visas available in professions where shortages already exist, for example, or cutting the red tape that can make it all but impossible to get non--European diplomas recognized. Nations and companies could also do a much better job of recruiting more of the -estimated 1.4 million foreign students currently enrolled at European universities.

Europeans' concerns aren't totally misplaced. The rapid pace of immigration over the past decade has strained Britain's infrastructure and social institutions. Germans and the French are particularly worried about the underclass immigrants who have isolated themselves from society at large. But now the continent is facing a pivotal decision. Closing its borders will only divert more migration into illegal and uncontrollable channels. Europe is no defendable, homogenous island; it's surrounded by the wildly growing populations of Africa and the Middle East. Europe's choice is not whether to stop migration, but whether to channel it to its own advantage.

Aug 29, 2009

UN Decries Greek Detention of Unaccompanied Child Asylum Seekers - VOA

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By Lisa Schlein
Geneva
29 August 2009

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Schlein report - Listen (MP3)

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says it is alarmed by the detention of unaccompanied children in Lesvos, Greece. It says the children are living in appalling conditions at a detention center there.

The U.N. refugee agency says staff members were shocked when they saw the living condition of asylum seekers detained at the Pagani facility on the Greek island of Lesvos.

UNHCR spokesman, Andrej Mahecic, says more than 850 people are being held in the center, which is meant to hold only a maximum of 300 people. He says this group includes some 200 unaccompanied children, mainly from Afghanistan.

"The UNHCR staff described the condition of the center as unacceptable," said Mahecic. "One room houses over 150 women and 50 babies, many suffering from illnesses related to the cramped and unsanitary conditions of the center."

"The deputy minister of health and social solidarity has given UNHCR his assurances that all the unaccompanied children at Pagani will be transferred to special reception facilities by the end of the month. The ministry has already taken some measures to that effect," he added.

Mahecic says Greece's asylum system has big problems. Last year, he says, the UNHCR with the support of the Greek Ministry of Interior, made recommendations for a complete overhaul of the system, including specific measures to protect children seeking asylum. But, he notes, these proposals, so far, have not been implemented.

"In 2008, the Greek Coast Guard reported the arrival of 2,648 unaccompanied children, but many more are believed to have entered the country undetected. Greece has no process for assessing the individual needs and best interests of these children," said Mehecic.

Mahecic says the government has made efforts to increase the number of places for children at specialized, open centers. But, he says those arriving in Greece outstrip these efforts, so children remain in detention for long periods.

He says Greece accepts far fewer refugees than other European countries.

Aug 28, 2009

War and Family Left Behind, Lone Afghan Youths Seek a Life in Europe - NYTimes.com

Image by Zoriah via Flickr

By CAROLINE BROTHERS

PARIS — On the edges of a Salvation Army soup line in Paris, a soft-spoken Afghan boy told the story recently of how he ended up in Europe, alone.

The boy, who said he was 15 but looked younger, recounted how his family left Afghanistan after his mother lost her leg in an explosion in 2004. They spent three years in Iran, where he went to school for the first time, learning English and discovering the Internet. After his father suffered a back injury that made working difficult, the boy, who declined to give his name, headed west.

He spent two months working 11-hour days in a clothing sweatshop in Istanbul, he said. He was then smuggled into Greece, where he was forced to work on a potato and onion farm near Agros for nine months, finally escaping in the back of a truck. He reached Paris by train after nearly a year on the road.

“I want to go to school,” he said in English. “I would like it if I could be — it sounds like a lot to ask — an engineer of computing.”

Thousands of lone Afghan boys are making their way across Europe, a trend that has accelerated in the past two years as conditions for Afghan refugees become more difficult in countries like Iran and Pakistan. Although some are as young as 12, most are teenagers seeking an education and a future that is not possible in their own country, which is still struggling with poverty and violence eight years after the end of Taliban rule.

The boys pose a challenge for European countries, many of which have sent troops to fight in Afghanistan but whose publics question the rationale for the war. Though each country has an obligation under national and international law to provide for them, the cost of doing so is yet another problem for a continent already grappling with tens of thousands of migrants.

In Italy, 24 Afghan teenagers were discovered sleeping in a sewer in Rome this spring, and last year two adolescents died in Italian ports — one under a semitrailer in Venice and another inside a shipping container in Ancona. In Greece, which says it is overwhelmed by asylum seekers from many countries, there is no foster system for foreign minors; only 300 can be accommodated in the whole country, officials say.

And in Paris this year, Afghans for the first time outnumber sub-Saharan Africans as the biggest group of unaccompanied foreign minors to request admission to child protection services, said Charlotte Aveline, a senior adviser on child protection at City Hall.

“Some arrive very beaten, very tired, but if they stay put for just one week they very quickly become adolescents again,” said Jean-Michel Centres of Exilés10, a citizens’ organization that works with the mainly Afghan migrants who gather around Villemin Square, close to the Gare de l’Est.

“First they ask where they can go to have papers, then where they can go to school, and where after that they can get a job,” Mr. Centres said.

The European Union does not keep statistics on the number of foreign children who are wandering Europe without their families, and the records of aid groups and government agencies vary greatly. But requests for asylum by unaccompanied Afghan minors suggest that there are thousands across Europe. The requests provide a baseline, experts say, because many more youths do not seek refugee status.

Blanche Tax, a senior policy officer at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Brussels, said that last year 3,090 Afghan minors requested asylum in Austria, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany — the European Union countries where their numbers rose the most sharply — more than double the 1,489 requests in those countries in 2007.

“Afghanistan is hemorrhaging its youth into Europe,” said Pierre Henry, director of France Terre d’Asile, an organization that works with the European Union, the United Nations refugee agency and the French government on asylum affairs.

The five Afghan boys interviewed for this article told of being exploited as under-age labor in Greece and Turkey and dodging beatings by the police. None would give his name in order to speak more freely.

A 17-year-old from the Afghan city of Ghazni said the police repeatedly tried to remove him and another boy from trucks in the port of Patras, Greece, where the authorities destroyed an Afghan squatter camp on July 12.

Once in France, the boys face more hardship. The Paris police have started conducting nightly searches to prevent Afghan migrants from sleeping in Villemin Square. The 15-year-old was placed in a cheap hotel, while others were put in temporary shelter in an unused subway station. Others find their own shelter under bridges and beside a canal.

The housing, financed by the state, is administered by France Terre d’Asile. The group helps guide the boys through the process of requesting assistance from the French child protection agency, registers their names and gives them French lessons.

“We have had some very good success stories,” said Ms. Aveline, the adviser at City Hall.

The boys interviewed for this article said they were in limbo, dreaming of going to school and having a normal life.

One teenager who has been in Paris for two months was deeply worried about what lies ahead. “How should I make a future?” he asked. “I’m 15 already. I’m on my own. What can I do?”

Yet a few days later, he was full of excitement because France Terre d’Asile had taken him to a swimming pool, the first time he had ever been to one. He was also taking French classes. From his pocket he produced a pencil and paper with pictures of fruits. “I like bananas,” he said in French. “I like apples.”