Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The military industrial complex The NGO-industrial complex And now the ‘citizenship industry’ ‘Citizenship provides the foundation of equality on which the structure of inequality can be built’.  —Thomas Humphrey Marshall, 1950

“The bigger question to be answered is not ‘how on earth can we stop all these bogus asylum-seekers’ but what can be done collectively to ensure that Western economic, monetary and diplomatic initiatives do not destabilise ‘sending’ countries, as well as what can be done to help them achieve development and democratic rights sufficient to encourage their people to stay at home’.”

Pertinent. “This re-barbarization of the outsider takes the form of liberal sensibility. In learned discourse it takes the form of appropriating the anti-orientalist theses of Edward Said: in this way orientals, especially those who describe themselves, quite implausibly, as postcolonial, in objective complicity with fundamentalist priests of authenticity, merge into the vicious cycle of this discourse of singularity; orientals are thus reorientalized in a traffic of mirror images between postmodernists and neo-orientalists speaking for difference, and native orientals ostentatiously displaying their badges of authenticity, in a play of exoticism from outside and self-parody from the inside. I have shown this in various writings to be a species of false memory, of invented memory marketed like the retro features of the 1996 Vespa. In this context, the discourse of culturalist specificity – instead of that of economic and social inequality and inequity – devolves into a post-1989 postul...

On 1 January 1804, the Republic of Haiti declared independence. “Haiti offered asylum to enslaved people who could reach its shores. The Haitian Revolution inaugurated an independent Haitian trade, which sent free Haitians on business around the Caribbean and encouraged enslaved sailors to desert to freedom. Enslaved people also escaped to Haiti by other means. For example, in the Bahamas in 1822, slaveholders complained that more than 100 enslaved men and women from the island of Grand Caicos had overwhelmed their drivers and overseers, taken their children with them, and stolen open boats to flee to Haiti. Once on land in the Black republic, any person of African descent was free and eligible for citizenship. It was Haitian policy never to permit the re-enslavement of Haitian citizens or refugees. Robin Blackburn writes that ‘Haiti had saved the honor of the New World revolutions’, coming closer to realising the universal rights proclaimed by American revolutionaries than American fo...

But not the real thing Related Discovery of 92 naked migrants at Greece-Turkey border

Dear Priti, Rwanda is not deterring ‘aliens’ . What are you gonna do about it? Related A couple of figures in the article below are not inaccurate.  There isn’t a single mention of the stark hypocrisy, racism and double standard in migration policies. “Globally, this system of sealed borders and hostile migration policy is dysfunctional. It doesn’t work for anyone’s benefit.” Not true. A few people benefit of cheap labour and driving wages down, and others use restrictions on migration to win elections. The century of climate migration

 

The ‘same’ headlines, attacks and vilifications uttered and published when I first arrived in England 20 years ago. The difference today is that white Ukrainians are welcome as it was with Polish labour. Johnson warns of the ‘healthy young men’ or ‘economic migrants’ who come here under false pretences, sometimes posing as minors, in place of the truly vulnerable.  Fables of migration

Unwelcome to the ‘civilised’ nation state! “ When we moved into our room on Fitzjohn’s Avenue four years later, it was with the promise that we were finally safe. It had been a devastating journey and here we were in London about to begin a new life. But our expectations of London were impossible. We imagined a life that was easier – that somehow as soon as we arrived here we would put all that had happened behind us and move on – that the uncertainty we felt would evaporate as soon as we landed. So much depended on this fantasy. To survive the journey, we needed stories of hope. For us, that story was safety in London, but the reality was very different. To survive, we needed not only to speak a different language, but to learn new gestures, new stories and, most important, understand the currency that gave you access to society. In a country where your social capital is bound up in class and race, learning the social codes could determine the trajectory of your life.” What it’s reall...

Maesteg-based Sian Summers-Rees, chief officer of City of Sanctuary, said: "The asylum system itself is dehumanising. Sometimes the system can take years and the quality of the decision-making by the Home Office is not good." Asylum seekers ‘in limbo’ and unable [not allowed] to work

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled me...

This is a good summary, but lacks a political economy perspective. “The cycle will continue for as long as politicians refuse to address the reasons why people come to Britain to seek asylum. To take an example, the 120 people who were  intercepted in the Channel  on 4 August came from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Palestine, Sudan and Yemen. Of these countries, two were invaded in recent history by a coalition that included the UK; one has been pushed into famine by a Saudi-led bombardment using British weapons and military expertise; one is in a prolonged conflict with Israel, which like Saudi Arabia is a UK ally; and the others, most of which are former British colonies, are places where there is long-term, well-documented persecution of particular ethnic and social groups.” The more fundamental question of [failure of] economic development, the political economic policies pursued by the ruling classes in the aforementioned countries is missing. People bec...