With the Sri Lankan government set to release roughly 130,000 more Tamils, who have been forcibly held in detention camps for the past half year, we can expect to see a variety of social problems escalate.
To begin with, it appears that the lead military official responsible for quelling the Tamil Tigers' (LTTE) resistance, General Sarath Fonseka, will be seeking presidential election. Should he be elected, can Tamil civilians truly expect a Sinhalese military official to treat the minority Tamil population fairly, coming off the heels of a 26-year civil war?
Furthermore, as more and more Tamils return "home," it is doubtful that they will find the key institutions necessary to build a health community -- families, schools, government, work -- in tact (see "Tamil activists' shock on return to Jaffna" & "Life as a Sri Lankan war refugee"). Governmental oppression may keep an overt Tamil resistance repressed, as already seen through the ongoing inspection of Tamil detainees and exclusion of foreign media. However, with key institutions destroyed or access to them denied, not all forms of resistance and survival seeking tactics can be stopped.
In particular, the number of Tamil asylum seekers will surely increase, risking their lives by taking unpredictably dangerous, lengthy trips to escape their oppression. While the international community gives very moderate attention to this conflict and lightly applauds the Tamils' release, this minority's future in Sri Lanka will not likely include significant improvements in education, work, or politics. The outcomes of such conditions are never positive. From the following Al Jazeera story: "Tamils risk all to flee Sri Lanka":
Irene Khan, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, says the international community should be more involved in finding a safe home for Sri Lanka's Tamils.
"These people are in search of protection, the international community is doing very little," she told Al Jazeera during an interview on Sunday.
"There isn't any resettlement of refugees taking place, refugee protection is very weak and, therefore, people are taking the situation into their own hands to desperately find a place where they can have safety.
"It is not people smuggling. I would call it a flow of asylum-seekers."
According to Khan, asylum seeking is a growing trend.
"The numbers of people seeking asylum are going up precisely at a time when borders are closing, which creates a very serious humanitarian situation," she said.
[...]
"There is a lot of fear and negative propaganda about refugees and asylum-seekers - that these are people looking for a better life, when really, in effect, they are fleeing to save their lives," she said.
"There has to be a change in public opinion. Political leaders, and governments in particular, need to take charge to change the way in which refugees and asylum seekers are viewed - these are desperate people in need of protection and it should be provided to them."
One of my favorite books is William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. Among many other points, one of the important issues Wilson raises is the further damage done to poor African American communities when successful professionals move away to live in wealthier neighborhoods. Given the elevated levels of drug trafficking, property crime, and violence that exist in pockets of destitute communities, one cannot blame those who can afford to move out when they do so.
However, their departure lessens poor communities' social capital, including (1) the number of professional role models for youth; (2) the professional networking opportunities for adults; and (3) the number of accessible jobs that come along with those professionals' businesses if they practiced in those communities (e.g., administrative support staff). So in addition to the already high levels of unemployment, the collective attitude of impoverished communities dampens in other ways.
The following article from the Los Angeles Times documents how this phenomenon is impacting an entire country: "Philippine workers abroad: The boon has a price." According to the article, "The poverty-stricken nation of 90 million has seen 10 million workers -- more than 10% of its population -- join the overseas labor force."
Oddly enough, the country's current government supports the mass exodus of its professional and working-class demographics, as they send back literally billions to their families in remittances.
Filipinos sent a record $1.5 billion home in June as more sought work abroad. Remittances for the first six months of 2009 reached nearly $8.5 billion, a 2.9% increase from the same period last year.
In her annual state of the nation address in July, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo hailed remittances as a driving force behind the economy. Labor Secretary Marianito Roque separately described the remittance system as a source of pride.
"The flow of overseas worker money in an unstable global economy demonstrates the resiliency of the Filipino people," Roque said. "Under the worst circumstances, our workers are getting jobs and sending home more money than ever. They are keeping the boat stable."
Is the boat stable or sinking? As Wilson states for America's black underclass in When Work Disappears, the same "brain drain" phenomena are happening in the Philippines. Moreover, struggling families are becoming further fractured, leading to rippling effects in the form of increased juvenile delinquency and school dropout. Overseas workers also run into marital stress and inadvertently discourage those back home to seek out employment and/or be innovative entrepreneurs.
The exodus of trained teachers, health professionals and engineers, some say, has done the Philippines more harm than good as those much-needed services go elsewhere.
[…]
The remittance system has also altered the lives of the stay-at-home families of overseas workers.
A recent International Monetary Fund study found that many extended families of overseas Philippine workers are refusing to pursue jobs at home that they consider too low-paying, preferring to rely on their monthly remittance cut.
There are social problems as well.
As parents leave home, children get left with relatives or friends who may not provide adequate supervision, which can lead to substance abuse and gang membership, says Tony Sarmiento, a Santa Barbara city official in charge of monitoring his town's overseas workers.
As a result, Sarmiento says, some workers abroad return home expecting to realize a dream of sending their children to college only to find that they dropped out of school in their absence.
"The worst part of this human export policy is that [the government doesn't] make the hard choices back home," said Benjamin Diokno, a professor at the University of the Philippines School of Economics.
"We don't work toward a dynamic economy that would create more jobs," Diokno said. "Instead we rely on that paycheck from abroad."
The bottom line -- this global system is one that fosters international dependence and internal anomie. In the global free market, developing countries essentially export their citizenry as commodified labor for high-income countries, who then exploit the working class, thereby extending their global prosperity.
Working class Filipinos are exploited as maids in Hong Kong, as construction workers in Dubai, as gardeners in Honolulu. This globalized, capitalistic system is reminiscent of Hawaii's plantation society from the 19th century where America's wealthy plantation owners simply imported Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Puerto Rican laborers as expendable plantation workers (not to mention colonization of the indigenous population).
Even highly educated professionals from developing countries are frequently underpaid once living in high-income countries relative to their western counterparts. But because their income in countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom is still higher than what they would earn in their country of origin, they suffer the stratified pay difference in order to improve their own life and/or send money back home.
As an interviewee from the article states, "It's a toxic choice, but we have to go." Well, they wouldn't have to if (1) institutions in high-income countries did not exploit them as expendable labor; and (2) their country of origin revamped its economy so there was more incentive to stay home.
When communities are poor, have little opportunity structure and social capital, and are muddled with different types of crime, they are said within the crim literature base to be socially disorganized.
Another commonly cited indicator of social disorganization is a high level of transience. As William Wilson illustrated in When Work Disappears, those who can afford to leave financially distressed neighborhoods do, thereby leaving the poorest of the poor behind, furthering the lack of resources and role models in the urban ghettos.
So it was shocking to read that in El Salvador, over one fourth of the entire population had bailed to work in the United States. From an NPR story, “Social Inequities, Discontent Grow in El Salvador”:
One of the most telling facts about how tough life is in El Salvador right now is that a quarter of its population chooses not to live here. An estimated 2 million Salvadorans out of a population of less than 7 million live and work in the United States. Remittances from those migrants rival exports as the leading source of revenue for the country.
To make matters worse, with construction and manufacturing work disappearing in the U.S. and fewer people buying retail items made from the garment industry, those remittances are surely dwindling. In any case, when 25%+ of an entire country’s population is looking for labor elsewhere, it tends to mean more than pervasive joblessness.
James Diego Vigil’s A Rainbow of Gangs notes that the civil war in El Salvador (1980-1992) sparked massive conflict and emigration, largely to Southern California, and Los Angeles in particular. With L.A.’s schools and police departments under equipped to cope with such a rapid rise in immigrants, El Salvadorian gangs began to surface.
Conspicuously, many of these immigrants were undocumented since the United States wouldn’t accept them as political refugees seeking asylum – never mind the U.S. helped to fund military forces in the Civil War. As undocumented immigrants/refugees, they couldn’t get conventional jobs, and shazam, another contributor to gangs materializing. Vigil also comments that many of the El Salvadorian gang members that mushroomed in Los Angeles were deported to El Salvador.
Sending gang members to a locale characterized by over-population, poverty, and a lack of opportunity – talk a bout a recipe for disaster.
Crime is rampant. The birthrate is high. Social mobility remains limited, in a place that just fought a civil war over its vast inequities in wealth.
Presently, it appears major sectors of El Salvador are more or less run by gangs, who extort small businesses and even hospitals for rent money and infiltrate the police. From a related story, “Extortion, Gang Violence Terrorize El Salvador”:
Jose Eduardo Martel, a subinspector at the local police station, says extortion is a huge problem in El Salvador, and he says it is currently his district's biggest crime problem.
All types of businesses — stores, beauty salons, barbers — have to pay la renta to the gangs, Martel says.
Accompanying the extortion rackets is violence — which breaks out when gangs fight over territory or when people for some reason don't pay. The dominant gangs are the Mara Salvatrucha and Diez y Ocho, or 18, but Martel says there are others, too.
According to a 2002 report published by the World Health Organization, El Salvador has the second highest homicide rate of those ages 10-29 in the entire world at 50.2 persons murdered per 100,000 (Colombia has the highest at 84.4/100,000).
So looking back on this colossal problem weighing down on El Salvador: they had a civil war that the U.S. formally acknowledged, but then denied political asylum to those threatened by the war, thereby making those who had to leave illegal immigrants who couldn’t work in the U.S., some of whom then turned to gangs as a means to make it. When the gangs become a problem, our answer is to ship ‘em back; just move the problem elsewhere. And now look at the massive gang problems in El Salvador.
The U.S. can't solve every international problem, but its complicity in exacerbating major crises can't be denied either. Couldn’t our policy makers have better foresight?
NPR had a good discussion up this past Thursday (3/12/09) about climate change and its effects on humanity. Their basic premise was that although most people see climate change affecting rain forests, glaciers, polar bears and so forth, they fail to see global warming's direct impact on people.
Their guests had some excellent things to say from first hand experience. Christina Chan of CARE USA:
I don't think that climate change has been an underlying cause of the poverty and injustice we've seen in the past. Poorer communities have dealt with drought, floods, cyclones, hurricanes for generations. The difference now is in terms of the frequency, intensity, and severity. There will be more.
A drought or a flood might hit a community and hit the poorest of the poor in that community, maybe every seven years. What we see happening now is an increase in the intensity, frequency, and so there's less time to recover. And so if it's happening every year or every other year, a drought in one year, a flood in another, families, especially families with very little assets can't recover as quickly. The resilience is lower. So what we're seeing is the challenges we've been facing for say the last 60 years are going to be that much more complex and difficult with climate change.
Cynthia Awuor of CARE Internationa added her perspective, describing some of the tangible effects of climate change now manifesting in developing countries, in this case, Kenya:
With increased droughts, food production is being affected negatively, so there's repeated crop failures. And even at the moment as I speak drought has been occurring in Kenya and we have famine. We are experiencing famine at the moment that's affecting about 10 million people out of a population of about 38 million.
And the women that we work with in some of the regions are saying that they're feeling that the temperatures are becoming higher, so it's become hotter, and it becomes taxing on their bodies when they have to walk long distances to actually look for water because sometimes the search for water takes up to six hours a day.
Chan went on to add that those in high-income countries need to care and push their policy makers to address the issue:
What people here in the United States can do, I think it is important to watch as individuals our own carbon footprint. But I think it's really important as citizens of the United States to really put pressure on our policy makers cause they're not hearing it. Especially these days with the economic situation, my fear is that climate change will be put on the back burner.
It's a good 7 minute discussion definitely worth listening to HERE.
I did think, however, that while the typical NPR listener might be interested in the piece, a majority of the public wouldn't give a rip since the piece indirectly intimated that global warming wasn't having any significant impact on them. In short, nothing in the piece suggested global warming would affect people in the U.S.
The thing is, even popular media has occasionally reported the long-term effects global warming will have on mass migration, as those in the most affected areas are forced to leave their homelands. Looking ahead to 2050, a Reuters article notes:
The daunting prospect of mass population movements set off by climate change and environmental disasters poses an imminent new challenge that no one has yet figured out how to meet.
People displaced by global warming ... could dwarf the nearly 10 million refugees and almost 25 million internally displaced people already fleeing wars and oppression.
And not surprisingly, should mass migration inflate to unprecedented levels, in all likelihood xenophobic reactions will inflate accordingly.
Refugees may also feel the world has less room for them as they try to cross borders into countries where hostility to migrants of all sorts has grown, compared with the Cold War era when fugitives from communism won sympathy and asylum.
Of course this is not to suggest that we should get people to care about the earth by scaring them with the potential influx of immigration and refugees. However, we do need to wake up and realize that global warming will directly affect those in high-income countries as resources inevitably shrink.
But that's 2050, a good forty years away. Maybe our kids or grand kids will have to worry about it, but not us. In the spirit of typical American individualism, it's a "them" problem for them to figure out. Not so according to the Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World report, published by the U.S. National Intelligence Council.
The report itself is quite lengthy, a good 100+ pages. However, it has important sections focusing on climate change and its varied ramifications. In Chapter 4, titled "Scarcity in the Midst of Penty?", the authors write of global warming's global impact:
Most displaced persons traditionally relocate within their home countries, but in the future many are likely to find their home countries have diminishing capabilities to accommodate them. Thus the number of migrants seeking to move from disadvantaged into relatively privileged countries is likely to increase. The largest inflows will mirror many current migratory patterns—from North Africa and Western Asia into Europe, Latin America into the US, and Southeast Asia into Australia. (p. 53).
And again, we're talking 2025, a mere 16 years from now. If our current global economic crisis is a problem, think about the sheer number of people who simply will not be able to live at a subsistence level, how that number will explode, and how it will increase mass dependence and competition. Furthermore, the report explicitly states that climate change can and often does stimulate war.
Climate change is unlikely to trigger interstate war, but it could lead to increasingly heated interstate recriminations and possibly to low-level armed conflicts. With water becoming more scarce in several regions, cooperation over changing water resources is likely to be increasingly difficult within and between states, straining regional relations. (p. 66).
Recall what served as the catalyst for ethnic genocide in the Sudanese region of Darfur back in 2003. While fundamental ethnic differences set the stage for divided groups who would soon be in major conflict, it was a loss of crops due to climate changes that sparked the conflict.
Either we get a handle on global warming now, or we see Darfur more frequently, with greater intensity, and closer to home before we know it. (Photo courtesy of Reuters)
My American centered point of view frequently makes me forget that the United States is not the only country with overly stringent immigration policies. I suppose this would be true if global stratification only existed in and around North America.
But over in Italy, an influx of migrant workers from North Africa has led their government to propose immigration policies that don't exactly coincide with basic human rights and certainly won't stop the broader global conditions that cause immigration in the first place. From a story on BBC News:
Last month, an emergency decree designed to tackle rapes - many of which have been blamed on immigrants - gave official blessing to the formation of citizens' street patrols.A security bill awaiting final approval in the Italian parliament also contains several controversial provisions, including:
procedures for medical staff to denounce illegal immigrants
making illegal immigration a criminal offence punishable by a fine of 5,000-10,000 euros (£4,400-8,800)
prison terms of up to four years for those who defy expulsion order
The story also notes that on the Italian island of Lampedus, where many of these migrants first arrive, "...the men are living in shelters made from cardboard boxes, squatting while they look for work picking citrus fruit in the fields of Calabria, on the country's southern toe." So let me get this straight, they're going to deny medical attention to those who are surely disproportionately poorer in health?
And let's get back to that criminalizing thing. Not only will these men face "prison terms of up to four years" if they disobey deportation. In addition, they are being characterized as rapists, in all likelihood so that these xenophobic policies are approved and enforced. Italy's Northern League interior minister, Roberto Maroni, justifies the proposed security bill:
"The percentage of crimes linked to non-Italians was more than 35% and the non-Italians do not account for 35% of the people in Italy ... All interpretations are legitimate. My concern as interior minister is to guarantee the highest possible levels of security, first and foremost by combating clandestine immigration."
According to the BBC article, some accounts say Italy's immigrant population stands at almost 7%, making their alleged contributions to 35% of all crimes heavily disproportionate. But again, it appears that in order to push the bill through, these migrant workers - notably men of color - are being characterized as rapists in particular, even though rape is one of the least common criminal offense types in high-income countries.
Gee, haven't we seen this characterization of black men elsewhere? Uh, maybe in the United States, enforced most heavily during and just after the abolition of slavery? And why was that racialized portrayal of black men created, along with the brutal enforcement policies that accompanied the portrayal? To keep black communities from advancing economically.
Okay, this isn't exactly the same situation, but the overlap is not insignificant. If 35% of all Italy's crime can be attributed to immigrants (and if that figure is legit, as Mr. Maroni claims), how much of it can be attributed to North African migrant workers, and how much of it is property crime, as opposed to violent crime? Furthermore, if most of the crime is property crime (e.g., theft), then why the particular focus on rape, especially when the perpetrators of those rapes have yet to be convicted?
This pattern of using one of the most hideous crimes in order to impact social policy, in a way that has clear racial overtones and implications, just doesn't get old.
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