#our government banned chinese immigrants from entering for decades

[chicktwine60]

Itseasy Passport & Visa

For emergency passport or visa providers, please contact our office 24 hours a day at ITS-EASY. When attending the approved consular interview, the applicant must present the passport with which they may intend to journey and the finished visa software type. The visa is valid for three months, as soon as the applicant has entered China they're required to stay there for a continuous interval of 30 days. Use your personal digicam within the consolation of your house or workplace. We will take care of the remaining ensuring your photo meets government and consular necessities. Have an pressing visa software that carries a tight deadline? CIBTvisas may help you to avoid wasting useful time and keep away from costly delays. A CIBTvisas skilled will review your whole paperwork to verify your application is correct, full and ready for submission. We will contact you personally to quickly handle any mistakes guaranteeing your utility is submitted correctly. Applicants shall be informed on their assortment date on the spot or after they submit their functions. In some cases, you must cross the medical examination earlier than you apply for an X1 visa. You will have to submit the completed Foreigner Physical Examination type together with your visa software. As all Filipino nationals have been exempt from visa necessities on 1 November 2017, they were not capable of register for the certificates from that day onwards. All certificates have been additionally now not legitimate for entry since 31 October 2017. Passengers entering Taiwan previous to 1 November 2017 were nonetheless allowed to stay for up to 30 days, while these entering Taiwan on or after that day can only stay for up to 14 days. Visa Software These visa facilitation decisions are unilateral and do not supersede the visa facilitation agreements signed with different countries, which can supply visas with longer validity or lesser fees based solely on their nations of nationality. Permanent residents of Hong Kong and Macau with multiple entry visas can apply for a separate sheet of paper at border checkpoints in Shenzhen and Zhuhai for Chinese entry and exit stamps. 2 - for holders of diplomatic or official passports solely; visa isn't required for holders of regular passports. Travelers utilizing the 72-hour transit scheme are only approved to go to certain municipalities or provinces listed beneath, can not depart the municipalities or provinces and must depart from the same port of entry. The Constitution could not settle the struggle between the chief and legislative branches over the foreign affairs energy, however it limits the wrestle to the federal department. Those states and municipalities that are adopting selective purchasing legal guidelines that prohibit public companies from purchasing items and services from companies doing enterprise in or with explicit target nations are overstepping their bounds. The Clinton administration should join forces with these representatives of the enterprise group that have filed a swimsuit to enjoin Massachusetts from imposing its legislation that might successfully ban the state from doing business with firms lively in Myanmar. China’s central immigration law, the 2012 Exit-Entry Administration Law, was developed via a number of drafts over a decade. With sections on nationwide safety and irregular migration, the regulation strengthened the government’s control over immigration but was largely silent on migrant rights and integration. Such application is to be made at the customer support offices of the National Immigration Agency positioned in the respective cities/counties by which the students are residing. Before official registration, the relevant authority will problem college students with an ARC allowing residency rights for an appropriate length. After official registration, students are requested to use their pupil cross to increase the validity of their ARC. The period of stay is 60 days per entry for the L Tourist and M Business visas, ninety days for the S2 Short-term Private Visit visas, and 120 days for the Q2 Family Visit visas. Visa applicants can enjoy a 180-day period of keep when applying for Q2 visas if they have "particular needs". The software fee for a Chinese visa is US$140 for normal processing and US$160 for expedited processing (2-3 enterprise days), while 1-business-day rush processing is US$170 and only at the discretion of the consulate or embassy. China Visa Information Citizens from eligible international locations can enter Malaysia for intervals of up to 30 days. It is now not required to submit passport and unique paperwork by way of mail to the Royal Thai Embassy. Per the regulation, the Embassy "can not" concern a visa for foreign nationals who are at present in Thailand. CIBT is the leading world provider of immigration and visa providers. Upon arrival on the South African border, they will be asked to point out their travel documents and permissions. The passport must be the same because the one used in the course of the e-Visa application. Once the online visa request has been permitted, the applicant will obtain their e-Visa by e mail. Travellers can complete the application type from their smartphone, laptop computer, or other digital gadget. Thanks to this new scheme, authorisations for trusted travellers and returning South African nationals shall be processed electronically, eliminating the necessity to go to an embassy or consulate. Evidence that the applicant requested an expedited or rescheduled appointment at an ASC before leaving the United States, or an evidence of why they did not request an expedited or rescheduled appointment. You must make an appointment by e-mail to visit USCIS Beijing. A .gov web site belongs to an official authorities group in the United States. The workplace you want to apply by way of is determined by where you live. You can also have to offer biometric data within the form of a scan of your fingerprints and a digital photograph. If you want to remain on travel.state.gov, click on the "cancel" message. You will be asked in your application ID and answer a security question. If you prefer that we return your passport by mail , a self-addressed Canada Post Xpresspost return envelope must be enclosed. This workplace assumes no responsibility for any damages, losses, or delays due to this fact incurred. Due to the continued pandemic doc drop-off and collection from our workplaces will have to be coordinated with our staff via chat or telephone assist. Following are latest questions and solutions from our webusers and customers. Visitor Visa Utility The longest attainable validity is five years and the visa allows the customer to enter numerous times. The processing time for a Japan vacationer visa is roughly 5 working days from the day the application is submitted. However, Chinese vacationers should apply as early as possible to allow further time for processing. 2.2 To provide purchasers with intermediate business services, together with laptop entry of primary information, and transmission of passports, visas and Clients' Information between Embassies and Consulates and the Application Centre. Applicants solely should pay the fee if the application is successful. The fees are about three,000 yen for a single-entry visa and 6,000 yen for a multiple-entry visa. Under no circumstances will the Application Centre be accountable or liable for any delay of journey arrangement as a end result of a Client's inappropriate motion in regard to the time of submitting the visa application or the visa assessment result of the Embassies and Consulates. 3.5 Clients must carefully check all the knowledge on the visa issued to them and make certain that it is appropriate at the time when they acquire their passports containing the visas. If any errors are discovered, they must contact the Application Centre instantly. The Australian authorities has implemented anelectronic visa systemthat allows travellers to obtain their visa online. 1.9 “Website” refers to the web site located at the place on-line companies are provided to shoppers, such as info announcements, on-line application kind completion, on-line appointment and visa utility standing query companies. For the primary time, Chinese travelers may enter Saudi Arabia by simply filling out a web-based kind. The software to acquire a Saudi Arabia eVisa from China is part of an entirely digital procedure. Am I Able To Travel To China 2021, Tips On How To Apply For A New Visa To China From March 2021, the PRC started offering visa facilitation to international nationals which have been inoculated with COVID-19 vaccines produced in China and that had been planning to journey to China to conduct important business actions or to go to family members. Foreign nationals and their members of the family visiting the mainland of China for resuming work and production in varied fields want solely to offer the documents required before the COVID-19 pandemic when making use of for a visa. The Invitation Letter , Invitation Letter or Invitation Verification Notice issued by the international affairs places of work or the departments of commerce of the provincial governments or the headquarters of central state-owned enterprises are no longer required. “China is actively pushing the mutual recognition of vaccines to renew personnel exchanges, and I believe international vaccines will finally be recognized,” Butcher stated, but he is not positive whether Western international locations can cast apart bias and do the identical. He mentioned that if the same 70 international locations which have imported vaccines from China improve their vaccination charges, it could not help forestall the disease and as an alternative might lead to variants of the virus because of the ineffectiveness of the Chinese-made vaccines. Lo mentioned China should neither politicize its epidemic prevention efforts nor block other international locations' highly effective vaccines to promote its personal vaccines or vaccine nationalism. An American citizen told VOA Mandarin that he would possibly wait for a truly quarantine-free vaccine passport to be introduced before contemplating getting vaccinated. 台胞證台中 in at least 20 international locations have, as of Tuesday, begun providing facilitation to visa candidates who have been inoculated with China-produced COVID-19 vaccines as a half of efforts to renew international exchanges beneath strict epidemic prevention measures. Holders of valid APEC business journey playing cards might apply for the M visa by presenting the unique valid APEC business travel card and the invitation letter issued by the inviting party within the mainland of China. Effective June 16, 2020, and for the period of the pandemic or until further notification, CBP will allow the owners and operators of business aircraft to submit CBP Form 7507 by way of e-mail at ports of entry nationwide. Travellers from several countries, including Japan, Israel, Thailand, Pakistan, and Micronesia can now enter China if they have been previously vaccinated against COVID-19 with Sinovac or Sinopharm jabs, and they can prove it via a proper well being pass. For the time being, to be certified for Embassy's newest discover as quoted in your e-mail, an applicant could get vaccinated legally from a 3rd country the place China-made Vaccine is officially accredited and adopted, and will be ready to current official certificates of this profitable Vaccination. Meanwhile, the airline boarding requirements by China for Certificates of Negative Nucleic Acid and Anti-Body Blood Tests Results stay unchanged. After entering China, please abide by China’s regulations on quarantine and observation. The Method To Study Overseas Due to volume of work the UK firm are look for me to reside just about full time in China returning to the UK possibly every 3-4 months for durations of just 1-2 weeks. I’ve seen no steerage on whether or not a non-work residence allow holder can conduct enterprise in China. I suspect the answer is yes, however keep in mind that the road between legitimate “business” and unauthorized “work” may be blurry. Passport photographs are a sort of photograph with specific measurement, shade, and composition requirements. Every country has their very own requirements, so be certain to examine the necessities for the photographs you want earlier than having passport pictures taken. These websites are very useful for quickly figuring out whether you're required to acquire a visa and whether or not an in-person appointment is required. For example, merely labeling the foreigner an “independent contractor” or a “freelancer” will not be a cure where the facts set up that there is a labor relationship. Working in China and not utilizing a work-type residence allow is partaking in high-risk conduct. Similarly, don’t come on the promise that after arrival the employer will search authorization so that you simply can work. Nor can international nationals escape legal responsibility for unauthorized employment by claiming they're self-employed in China. Chinese regulation acknowledges something much like self-employment, particularly, the individual industrial and commercial enterprise (IICE or 工商个体户). (General Principles of Civil Law, artwork. 26, adopted by the NPC and promulgated by the President on Apr. 12, 1986; Regulations on Individual Businesses, artwork. 2, adopted by the State Council on Mar. 30, 2011). Chinese Language Visa, China Visa Application This request will be forwarded to the respective Governments/ Diplomatic Missions since they're the data controllers and further action might be taken by VFS GLOBAL primarily based on the instructions obtained by the respective Governments/ Diplomatic Missions. All such data, posted, furnished and submitted by the Applicants while scheduling an interview appointment is converted into such codecs as may be required and communicated to the respective Diplomatic Mission having jurisdiction to obtain such application/s. Harvest or otherwise collect information about other users, their details, or any info regarding some other user’s passport particulars, e-mail addresses, etc. These phrases and circumstances shall be governed and construed in accordance with the legal guidelines of DRC. Any claims or disputes arising in relation to the providers offered by Chinese Visa Application Service Facility to the applicant shall be topic to the unique jurisdiction of the courts in DRC. While Taiwan is claimed as a “Province” of China, the nation has considerably totally different entry and exit requirements, giving Americans 90-day visas on arrival. Mainland China, that is the People’s Republic of China, has the strictest visa regulations of the three. A Chinese visa software is often a daunting piece of paper for model spanking new and experienced vacationers alike. Even with English translations supplied for the Chinese characters, you might be concerned about putting in the right piece of information in the right field, or selecting one of the best clarification for the purpose of your visit. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan residents with Resident Permit are additionally exempt from TTP requirements. Foreign diplomats and journalists are prohibited to journey to Tibet without the permission of the Chinese authorities and, if accredited, can only be part of tours that are accompanied and arranged by Chinese authorities officials. Passengers who don't maintain an NZeTA once they check in for their flight will not be allowed to board. The NZeTA is required for journey from 1 October 2019 for residents of Visa Waiver countries. The NZeTA request system will be obtainable from July 2019. Obtaining A Student Visa Lastly, you will need to pay the application fee, which is set based on the type of non-immigrant visa and your nation of origin. 台胞證 are for people who discover themselves visiting the US as a half of an international cultural trade program. This implies that they will share their history, culture, and tradition in the US. E-3 visas are only for nationals of Australia who shall be working in specialty occupations. If a person from Australia qualifies for an E-3 visa, then so does the partner and the children; nevertheless, for the spouse, a marriage certificates must be offered. Tourist or business travelers who are residents of taking part nations may be eligible to visit the United States without a visa. You must be very convincing to the consular officer, as a result of even their smallest doubts will end in a visa denial for you. During your visa interview, a consular officer will decide whether or not you would possibly be certified to receive a visa, and if so, which visa category is acceptable primarily based in your objective of journey. You will need to set up that you meet the requirements beneath U.S. law to obtain the class of visa for which you may be making use of. The dual intent visa class permits a nonimmigrant status visa holder to return to the United States with the eventual intention of changing into a permanent immigrant. This permits visa holders corresponding to H-1B professionals to enter the us whereas simultaneously in search of lawful permanent resident status . E, H-1 and L nonimmigrant classes are also allowed to enter and remain nonimmigrants while simultaneously pursuing permanent resident standing. Once you are allowed to enter the United States, the CBP official will present an admission stamp or paper Form I-94, Arrival/Departure Record. In uncommon circumstances, Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act permits for the momentary entry of certain aliens who would in any other case be prohibited from coming into the United States. The person applies for a Hranka waiver and pays the submitting payment. If permitted for a Hranka waiver, the applicant would need to have this documentation when requesting entry to the United States. Citizens or permanent residents will still want a visa. When you get your US visa sticker affixed to you passport, there's a date that exhibits whenever you visa expires. However, that doesn't imply you can stay in the US till then, just as getting a visa does not grant you with the proper to enter the US. It is the US immigration officer of the Department of Homeland Security at the port-of-entry that decides whether or not you should be allowed to enter and the way long you can remain in the US. The expiration date in your visa sticker solely signifies that you need to use it to reach within the US until that time.

#china visa

[bfpnola]

Part of our work as activists and citizens of this country is to always work towards bettering our environment, to critique our government and leaders so we have the safest possible place to thrive. But how can we do that if we don’t understand any of that political jargon? Well, @/nowsimplified has officially broken down what our new president plans to do on Day 1. 

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Biden’s Day 1 Plans For His First Day In Office - Simplified

As President-Elect Biden prepares to be sworn into office on January 20th, all eyes are on his first day agenda. He made a variety of campaign promises that he’s expected to uphold. While Biden’s agenda is primarily focused on recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, he has also promised to enact immediate executive orders that would effectively reverse key policies of the Trump administration. Let’s take a look:

Tackling COVID-19

On Day 1, Joe Biden will enact a mask mandate on all federal property.

He has also announced his COVID-19 Task Force and Response Team, comprised of diverse medical and health professionals, to aid him in combating the coronavirus pandemic. He plans to utilize the Defense Production Act to aid in production of PPE and vaccine supplies.

The President-elect also plans to specifically invest $25 billion into vaccine roll-out on his first day in office to ensure that distribution is as equitable and efficient possible.

“Dealing with the coronavirus pandemic is one of the most important battles our administration will face, and I will be informed by science and by experts.”

Rejoining the WHO

On July 7th, 2020, the White House formally announced the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization, effective July 6th, 2021. Trump said he decide to withdraw as a result of the WHO “[misleading] the world when [COVID-19] was first discovered by Chinese authorities.”

In June, the National Security Council barred U.S. health officials from collaborating with the WHO unless it was “necessary for national security and public health safety.” The implications of that decision go well beyond COVID-19.

Biden announced that the U.S. would rejoin the WHO on his first day as president. Biden’s reversal would have a significant impact, both with financial support and by placing trust back in science.

A New Tax Plan

One of the most talked about campaign promises that Biden’s corporate tax increase.

The President-elect vowed to increase corporate income taxes from 21% to 28% and raise taxes on top earners, but Biden has repeatedly promised that no one making under $400,000 will receive a tax increase.

According to the Urban Institute, Biden’s tax policy is expected to raise $4 trillion in federal revenue over the next decade.

Reuniting & Saving Families

President-elect Biden plans to issue an Executive Order establishing a federal task force to reunite families that had been separated at the border. As of January 2021, there are 628 children whose parents have yet to be located.

He has also vowed to end the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy and family separation once he enters office.

Additionally, Biden plans to extend the federal eviction moratorium on Day 1.

Immigration

Biden has also proposed a series of immigration-related initiatives for his day one agenda:

Overturn Trump’s Executive Order 13769, commonly known as the “Muslim and African travel ban”

Make Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) a permanent program, in direct response to the Trump administration’s efforts to get rid of the program

Legislate a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, including DACA recipients

Biden is expected to unveil this sweeping immigration reform bill on 1/20.

A Stance on Climate Change

On December 12th, 2020, Biden addressed over 70 nations for the fifth anniversary of the Paris Climate Agreement. He announced that the U.S. will reenter the Agreement on his first day in office and will aim to reach “net zero emissions by 2050.”

Biden also plans to immediately cancel the controversial permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, a win for climate activists.

The U.S. has the second highest levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, behind China. After reentry, Biden will have to provide a comprehensive plan and targets to reduce carbon emissions.

“I’ll immediately start working with my counterparts around the world to do all that we possibly can, including by convening the leaders of major economies for a climate summit within my first 100 days in office.”

Biden’s day one agenda is ambitious to say the least. But with so many crises affecting the country and the world, Biden is operating as if there is no time to lose.

We’ll be here to simplify what the Biden-Harris administration does along the way.

#black liberation #black lives matter #blm #immigration #immigrants rights #anti racism #covid 19 #coronavirus #poc #bipoc #gen z #millenials #politics #us politics #history #health #education #kamala harris #black women #womens rights #prochoice #climate change #climate justice #tax the rich #democrat #liberal #leftist #conservative #trump

[xtruss]

These Travel Restrictions Must End

Closed Borders Over a Virus That is Everywhere. Hilarious. And Tragic.

— By Jeffrey A. Tucker | September 15, 2021 | Brownstone Institute | Covid Pol Pots

On matters epidemiological, I’m a dedicated follower of Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, scientist and novelist. It was she who granted me a broad understanding of the relationship between society, freedom, and infectious disease.

She explained the urgency to get this right lest we recreate and institutionalize a caste system that delineates one group from another based on perceived cleanliness and thus harms everyone while setting back human rights and freedoms.

Looking at data only gets one so far. We all need deeper understanding. She gave me that.

Also, she is a wonderful person.

So of course I wanted to bring Sunetra to the United States for a Brownstone Institute event. She is a hero among many in the United States, and people deserve to meet her and get her thoughts. She lives in London. It’s a nice flight from there to here. Why not?

It cannot happen, at least not now. Since March 2020, UK citizens cannot travel to the US unless they have some special exemption granted by the US government. I’m not even sure I would know how to obtain that. I’m guessing that the Biden administration is not likely to grant an exception for her.

So we are stuck. She is stuck. Here is the map of the world from the point of view of UK travelers. Only Mexico and Columbia are fully open. The states in orange are restricted. The states in red are closed.

Hundreds of millions of people are stuck. Billions. We are all prisoners at some level and in some ways. We cannot have guests visit us from Europe. In retaliation, Europe is mostly closed to the US. The US has loosened restrictions for Australians but Australians are not allowed out. Or have a look at Sweden, one of the few states in the world that did not lock down. They are not allowed to travel much at all outside their own borders due to restrictions from other nations.

Why some nations are open, and others are not, is a mystery. There does not seem to be any rational reason except for vague claims of the need to be safe from Covid. Our governments did this to us. They intervened in a world of happy world travelers and smashed it, in the name of controlling a virus that is absolutely everywhere and has been for two years.

There is no precedent in modern history for such restrictions. There is also very little debate about this, which is shocking. The world spent decades in outrage about the closures between East and West Germany. Tear down this wall! When the Berlin Wall fell, the whole world celebrated. Now the world is filled with walls, not just to migration (though it’s bizarre that the US actually has huge immigration inflows from the Southern border) but even to normal travelers.

Much of this began January 31, 2020, when Trump banned travel for non-US citizens from China. It was a controversial decision within the administration, even among public-health experts, because it had long been conventional wisdom that such travel bans are harmful.

The virus was already here and spreading, though in those days the US had very little testing and so Trump believed that he could perhaps keep the virus out. He was wrong about that. Even so, I recall some people on the left objecting but the travel ban connected with many people’s intuition that the way to deal with a virus is to force some kind of separation.

That travel ban unleashed two habits of thought that ended up driving the rest of the lockdowns.

The first habit was to believe that the virus is over there but not here. It doesn’t matter where the “there” and the “here” is; it’s just a reflection of a primitive belief that “they” are dirty and “we” are clean, or that the virus is some kind of miasmic fog floating somewhere where we are not. If you live in the miasmic zone, some of the bad air might stick to you. This later came to be the driving impulse behind state-level quarantines and restrictions.

You probably noticed this yourself. No matter where you live, the people there always imagined that they were in some kind of disease-free bubble that could be easily penetrated by invaders. This attitude still persists. In the Northeast of the US, vast numbers of people are somehow convinced that Texas and the South are full of disease, such that if you travel there and come back, you are likely carrying this virus. And this isn’t just about the vaccination rates; this habit of mind was there from the beginning.

That connects directly with the second habit of mind: the belief that the way to control the virus was via human separation. One you start to think this way, the logic becomes unstoppable. It’s not just about the Chinese. It’s about everyone outside the border. Outside the state. Outside the county. Outside the neighborhood. Outside the home. Outside this room.

The implications of this view are profound. It impacts directly on the possibility of human freedom itself.

On March 12, 2020, Trump announced the next step, which shocked me but should not have. He blocked all travel from Europe. He said this would reduce the threat and ultimately defeat the virus – a statement that embodies his highly confused views on this matter from the beginning. He also garbled a sentence that ended up having a devastating economic result. He meant to say that the ban would exempt goods. Instead he said the following: “These prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing.” The stock market immediately tanked.

I had no idea that the US president even had such power. I certainly never imagined he would use it. On the other hand, it made sense in a crazy way. If he could stop travel from China to keep the virus out, he could stop travel from anywhere. As a result of one man’s decision, world travel and vast amounts of normal commerce came to a halt.

The virus circulated anyway, not only in the US but everywhere in the world. These days the world makes fun of places like Australia and New Zealand where they imagined that they could somehow keep the virus out by controlling people’s movements in and out of the country. But that is precisely what Trump was doing too!

As a result of his edict, millions of Americans living abroad desperately bought tickets to get back to the US before the ban went into effect. They arrived at international airports that were wildly crowded at all the immigration and customs chokepoints. The waits in Los Angeles and Chicago were many hours, even up to 8 hours, standing shoulder to shoulder with people who had flown in from all over the world. This was happening the same day that Drs. Fauci and Birx were lecturing Americans to “socially distance” and stay away from other people in order to control the virus. The whole scene was emblematic of two years of policy chaos, with leaders ordering people around in ways that made the chaos worse rather than better.

During the remainder of the Trump term, between March and January, people inside the administration were trying their best to stop these preposterous rules. But there was always a problem. The danger was that opening up travel again could somehow be associated with increased cases and deaths from Covid, and that contract tracing would be deployed to show it. In that case, whomever was responsible for reopening would catch the blame. No one inside the Trump administration was willing to take the risk. So everything stayed shut.

The Biden administration could have opened also but the same problem presented itself. The borders were shut to the world, and no one wanted to take the risk of reopening, even though the virus was already here, there, and everywhere. Opening would not have made any difference. Would it have increased the “spread” of the virus or its prevalence? Not any more than was already the case.

Further, we know for sure that being exposed to the virus is the best means to obtain immunities from it, from which we get the counterintuitive conclusion that it would actually be safer for everyone to have people travel here from countries that had already dealt with the virus. After the vaccine came along, one might have supposed that there would be opening at least to those who took the jab, but there was another problem: the gradual realization that the vaccine doesn’t actually stop infection or spread. Thus are the borders still closed to this day.

There was no consensus in public health for the travel bans. On March 2, 2020, 800 public health experts signed a letter that recommended against them. “Travel restrictions also cause known harms, such as the disruption of supply chains for essential commodities,” they wrote, while citing a piece in Science Daily that reviewed thousands of studies on travel bans that was unable to come up with any conclusive evidence that they accomplish anything in terms of disease containment.

Already back in 2006, Donald Henderson had echoed the conventional wisdom, not only of his colleagues but also of the World Health Organization.

Travel restrictions, such as closing airports and screening travelers at borders, have historically been ineffective. The World Health Organization Writing Group concluded that “screening and quarantining entering travelers at international borders did not substantially delay virus introduction in past pandemics . . . and will likely be even less effective in the modern era.”

Similar conclusions were reached by public health authorities involved in the international efforts to control SARS. Canadian health authorities report that “available screening measures for SARS were limited in their effectiveness in detecting SARS among inbound or outbound passengers from SARS-affected areas.” A review by a WHO Working Group on SARS also concluded that “entry screening of travelers through health declarations or thermal scanning at international borders had little documented effect on detecting SARS cases.”…

It is reasonable to assume that the economic costs of shutting down air or train travel would be very high, and the societal costs involved in interrupting all air or train travel would be extreme.

The longer these restrictions exist to travelers from other countries, the more resentment that foreign nations feel. They are retaliating. Indeed, states all over Europe have removed the US from the list of countries to which it is considered safe to travel. Even Sweden is in on the act, banning nonessential travelers from the US. The restrictions are getting worse, not better.

The US could end this escalation of restrictions that have shut down the beautiful world of travel simply by reopening to the world, same as was true before the Trump administration embarked on this wild experiment. The emergence of global travel in the 20th century – its universal availability and practice – was one of the great triumphs of liberalism and modernity.

We rejected the isolation, parochialism, and local stagnation of the past and sought out knowledge and adventures all over the globe. We encountered new people, new places, new experiences. The world became open to all, thanks to commercialized flight. This also generated an incredible positive externality for public health. More exposure to the world improved immune systems for individuals the world over – a point first made to me by Professor Gupta.

Then in an instant it was closed. International tourist arrivals are down by 85% from 2019. A third of the world’s borders are shut. There seems to be no movement in the direction of reversing this disaster and reinstituting the wonderful world of 2019. In fact, there seems to be very little awareness that this has happened to us much less of the terrible consequences. Forget the freedom of movement; the Biden administration has only promised to open up “when it is safe to do so.”

Why is there so little controversy about this and no real political pressure from anyone to do something about it other than a handful of business lobbyists? It’s like many other aspects of lockdowns. Both parties and ideologies are implicated in them. If everyone’s hands are dirty, there is no one available to clean up.

Sunetra Gupta is one person among billions who cannot come to the United States by virtue of having the wrong citizenship identity and passport. She is locked out, in the name of virus control. There should be outrage, and would be if the restrictions on travel did not compete with so many other policies worthy of outrage.

— Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. [email protected]

[billyagogo]

Special UK visa for Hong Kong residents from Sunday

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/01/29/special-uk-visa-for-hong-kong-residents-from-sunday/

Special UK visa for Hong Kong residents from Sunday

media captionWhat is the BNO visa for Hong Kongers?

About 300,000 people are expected to leave Hong Kong for Britain using a new visa route which opens on Sunday.

Hong Kong’s British National (Overseas) passport holders and their immediate dependants will be able to apply for the visa using a smartphone app.

But the Chinese foreign ministry said it will no longer recognise the BNO passport as a travel document.

It will not be accepted as proof of identity, China said, and they “reserve the right to take further measures”.

The visa was announced in July after China imposed a new security law in Hong Kong.

Beijing has previously warned the UK not to meddle in domestic issues.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the move honoured the UK’s “profound ties of history and friendship” with the ex-British colony.

About 7,000 people from Hong Kong have already been allowed to settle in the UK since July, the Home Office said.

Those who apply and secure the visa will be able to apply for settlement after five years and then British citizenship after a further 12 months.

Although there are 2.9 million citizens eligible to move to the UK, with a further estimated 2.3 million dependants, the government expects about 300,000 people to take up the offer in the first five years.

The 7,000 who have already arrived were allowed to settle before the scheme began by being granted Leave Outside the Rules, which gives the government discretion over immigration rules on compassionate grounds.

Mr Johnson said: “I am immensely proud that we have brought in this new route for Hong Kong BNOs to live, work and make their home in our country.

“In doing so we have honoured our profound ties of history and friendship with the people of Hong Kong, and we have stood up for freedom and autonomy – values both the UK and Hong Kong hold dear.”

Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian called the scheme a violation of China’s sovereignty and gross interference in Hong Kong and China’s internal affairs, the country’s state-affiliated news website The Paper reported.

“The British side disregarded the fact that Hong Kong returned to China 24 years ago,” he said.

China will no longer recognise the BNO passport from Sunday. It is not yet clear what this move will mean.

Hong Kongers use their own Hong Kong passport or ID card to leave the city. To enter mainland China, they need to use their Home Return Permit, issued by Chinese immigration, unless they use a full foreign passport and apply for a visa to enter as a foreigner.

The only time they might use a BNO is upon arrival into the UK, or another country that recognises the document.

The new visa system helping British nationals escape Hong Kong is perhaps the clearest example yet of the government’s promise to be a force for good in the world.

It is one thing to condemn oppression. It is another to do something about it.

And here the UK is delivering on a promise made more than two decades ago to those it has a duty to protect.

What support are these migrants going to have?

In the long term they may well enrich Britain’s economy and culture, but in the short term, they will need help.

Where are they going to live? Where are they going to find jobs? What if more than the predicted 300,000 or so come in the first five years? How will people in Britain respond to seeing their borders opened up?

And above all, how will China retaliate, as they have promised? Will Beijing ban BNOs from public office, from voting or even from leaving? What will the UK do then?

Those eligible for the new visa can apply online and will need to book an appointment to attend a visa application centre.

And from 23 February, BNO status holders who hold an eligible biometric passport will be able to use an app to complete their application from home.

The visa fee to stay for five years will be £250 per person – or £180 for a 30-month stay – and there is an immigration health surcharge of up to £624-a-year.

Nathan Law, a pro-democracy campaigner who fled Hong Kong and now lives in exile in the UK, welcomed the announcement.

“It’s a commitment to the historical agreement to Hong Kong and I think it’s important that we offer safe exit for the people who are facing political suppression in Hong Kong,” he told the BBC.

media captionTea, drugs and war: Hong Kong’s British history explained

Home Secretary Priti Patel said this was to give applicants greater security amid fears they could be identified and targeted by the authorities.

“Safeguarding individuals’ freedoms, liberty and security is absolutely vital for those individuals that go through this process,” she said.

The BNO status was created before the UK handed responsibility for Hong Kong back to China in 1997.

Before Hong Kong was returned, the UK and China made an agreement to introduce “one country, two systems”, which meant, among other things, rights such as freedom of assembly, free speech and freedom of the press would be protected.

The agreement signed in 1984 was set to last until 2047.

But the UK has said this agreement – known as the Joint Declaration – is under threat because the territory passed a new law in June that gives China sweeping new controls over the people of Hong Kong.

China has said the law is necessary to prevent the type of protests seen in Hong Kong during much of 2019. However, the law has caused alarm both in Hong Kong and abroad, with opponents saying it erodes the territory’s freedoms as a semi-autonomous region of China.

Read More

[go-redgirl]

Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065

Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065

Chapter 1: The Nation’s Immigration Laws, 1920 to Today

Fifty years ago, the U.S. enacted a sweeping immigration law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced longstanding national origin quotas that favored Northern Europe with a new system allocating more visas to people from other countries around the world and giving increased priority to close relatives of U.S. residents.

Just prior to passage of the 1965 law, residents of only three countries—Ireland, Germany and the United Kingdom—were entitled to nearly 70% of the quota visas available to enter the U.S. (U.S. Department of Justice, 1965).4 Today, immigration to the U.S. is dominated by people born in Asia and Latin America, with immigrants from all of Europe accounting for only 10% of recent arrivals.

The 1965 law undid national origin quotas enacted in the 1920s, which were written into laws that imposed the first numerical limits on immigration. Those laws were the culmination of steadily tightening federal restrictions on immigration that began in the late 1800s with prohibitions or restrictions on certain types of immigrants, such as convicts, in addition to a ban on Chinese migrants and later virtually all Asian migrants.

This chapter explores the history of immigration law in the U.S., focusing on provisions of major legislation from the 20th century onward. Accompanying this chapter is an interactive timeline (below) of U.S. immigration legislation since the 1790s.

New Restrictions in the 1920s

The visa arrangement in place when the 1965 law was passed was a legacy from half a century earlier. At that earlier time, a giant wave of immigration that began in the late 1800s had raised the nation’s population of foreign-born residents to a then-record high of 13.9 million in 1920, making up a near-record 13% of the U.S. population (Gibson and Jung, 2006; Passel and Cohn, 2008).5 The first arrivals in this wave were mainly Northern Europeans, but by the early 1900s most new arrivals came from Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Southern and Eastern Europe (Martin, 2011).

Reacting to the change in immigrant origins, laws enacted in the 1920s sought to return U.S. immigration patterns to those that prevailed decades earlier, when Northern Europeans were the largest group of immigrants. A 1921 law imposed the first overall numerical quota on immigration to the U.S.—about 350,000, reduced to 165,000 in 1924 (Martin, 2011). The 1924 law set annual quotas for each European country based on the foreign-born population from that nation living in the U.S. in 1890.

6

The 1921 and 1924 laws exempted from the new quota highly skilled immigrants, domestic servants, specialized workers such as actors and wives or unmarried minor children of U.S. citizens, and the 1924 law also created preferences for quota visas for certain family members and agricultural workers (Martin, 2011).

Nationality quotas were imposed only on Europe, not on countries in the Western Hemisphere. There were no quotas for Asia, because immigration from most countries there already was prohibited through other restrictions imposed in 1875 and expanded in later decades.

These laws were passed against a backdrop of growing federal regulation of immigration, which was mainly controlled by states until a series of Supreme Court rulings in the late 1800s declared that it was a federal responsibility. Aside from country limits, federal laws already in place barred immigration by criminals, those deemed “lunatics” or “idiots,” and people unable to support themselves, among others (U.S. Department of Homeland Security). These laws also required that immigrants older than 16 prove they could read English or some other language. The federal immigration bureaucracy, created in 1891, grew in the 1920s with creation of the Border Patrol and an appeals board for people excluded from the country (U.S. Department of Homeland Security).

Immigration slowed sharply after the 1920s. But there were some exceptions to U.S. immigration restrictions. For example, because of labor shortages during World War II, the U.S. and Mexico signed an agreement in 1942 creating the Bracero program to allow Mexican agricultural workers to enter the U.S. temporarily. The program lasted until 1964.

Longstanding bans on immigration from Asia were lifted in the 1940s and 1950s. A prohibition on Chinese immigration enacted in 1882 was repealed in 1943. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act included the first quotas, though small, allowing immigrants from Asian nations, and created a preference system among quota visas that included highly skilled workers for the first time.

President Harry S. Truman, who opposed national origin quotas, appointed a commission to review the nation’s immigration policy after Congress passed the 1952 law over his veto. The commission’s report criticized the national origin quotas for perpetuating racial and national discrimination. The commission recommended that national origin quotas be replaced by higher limits with priority status based on granting asylum, reunifying families and meeting the nation’s labor needs (President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, 1953). Congress did not act on those recommendations, but in 1953 it did approve a commission proposal for separate quotas for refugees (Martin, 2011).

The 1965 Law Brings Major Change

It was not until 1965, when amendments were passed to the Immigration and Naturalization Act, that the old national origins system was abolished.

Instead, the new law emphasized visas for family and employment categories, but exempted spouses, parents and minor children of U.S. citizens from those visa limits. That exemption, and other priority given to family members of U.S. residents, meant that about three-quarters of visas were set aside for relatives of those already in the U.S.—putting the emphasis in U.S. immigration policy on family reunification.

Most remaining visas were for employment purposes, given to people with certain job skills and their family members. The Labor Department was required to certify that an American worker was not available to fill the job of the visa seeker and that U.S. workers would not be harmed if the visa were issued (Martin, 2011).

The 1965 law also included a quota for refugees, who were granted 6% of annual visas, compared with 74% for families; 10% for professionals, scientists and artists; and 10% for workers in short supply in the country (Kritz and Gurak, 2005). Later, the Refugee Act of 1980 separated refugee admissions from the overall quota system, expanded the definition of a refugee and set up comprehensive procedures for handling refugees.

Although the 1920s-era national origins quotas were abolished, the new 1965 law did include total hemisphere and country quotas. Though the hemisphere quotas were dropped in the following decade (Martin, 2011). Importantly, the law imposed the first limits on immigration from Western Hemisphere countries, including Mexico. Those limits, combined with the end of the Bracero program in 1964, are associated with a rise in unauthorized immigration, mostly from Mexico.7

Scholars attribute passage of the 1965 law in part to the era’s civil rights movement, which created a climate for changing laws that allowed racial or ethnic discrimination, as well as to the growing clout of groups whose immigration had been restricted (Martin, 2011). The economy was healthy, allaying concerns that immigrants would compete with U.S.-born workers (Reimers, 1992). Some, however, say that geopolitical factors were more important, especially the image of the U.S. abroad in an era of Cold War competition with Russia (FitzGerald and Cook-Martin, 2015). Labor unions, which had opposed higher immigration levels in the past, supported the 1965 law, though they pushed for changes to tighten employment visas. And political players changed: President Lyndon B. Johnson lobbied hard for the bill, and a new generation of congressional leaders created a friendlier environment for it (Martin, 2011).

Its sponsors praised the law for its fairness but downplayed its potential impact on immigration flows. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” Johnson said in remarks at the signing ceremony. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

Laws Since 1965

In the 1970s and early 1980s, new laws mainly focused on the growing flow of refugees from Southeast Asia. Since then, concerns about unauthorized immigration have guided the nation’s immigration policy agenda. In 1986, Congress addressed the growing issue of unauthorized immigration with the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which offered temporary protection from deportation and legal permanent resident status to millions of people who had lived in the country since the 1980s. Roughly 2.7 million people were given legal status under the law’s general legalization or its special program for farmworkers.

The Immigration Act of 1990 increased the number of visas for legal immigrants coming for family and employment reasons and created a new category of visas for “diversity immigrants.” Among other provisions, it also created a new type of relief from deportation for nationals of countries undergoing armed conflicts, environmental or health disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions,” known as “temporary protected status,” which has been used mainly by Central American immigrants.

The primary emphasis of more recent immigration legislation has been to reduce government benefits to immigrants, increase border security and provide broader reasoning for excluding immigrants on terrorism grounds (Migration Policy Institute, 2013).

Notable exceptions to that pattern were President Barack Obama’s two recent executive actions on unauthorized immigration—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012 and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) in 2014. DACA allowed young adults, ages 15 to 30, who had been brought illegally to the U.S. as children to apply for deportation relief and a temporary work permit. In 2014, the president eliminated the age limits for DACA eligibility. Under DAPA, some unauthorized immigrants with U.S.-born children were allowed to apply for deportation relief and a work permit. The 2014 actions are on hold because of a legal challenge filed by 26 states (Lopez and Krogstad, 2015).

OPINION:  Obama did not have the authorization to sign (DACA) it was never approved by Congress.  That's who started this problem in the USA.  It's was Obama himself. 

Here is what Obama could not do without approval from Congress: He couldn't generally give large groups of immigrants permission to remain permanently in the United States, and he couldn't grant them American citizenship. And he couldn't generally make them eligible for federal or state social benefit programs, such as welfare payments, food stamps or the administration's health care plans.

[ericfruits]

America’s immigration system is broken

LESS than ten miles separate two rooms in McAllen, a modest, low-slung city on the Mexican border. The first is Ursula, an immense warehouse which squats behind a high brick wall, almost invisible from the street. It is the largest immigration-processing facility in America, and holds children taken from their parents under a policy that President Donald Trump’s administration initiated in April and then ordered stopped last week. Inside the facility, children lie on mats beneath bright lights that never go out, wrapped in Mylar blankets, caged behind chain-link fences.

Nine miles north, clad in a modest stucco, is the second building—the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Centre, where migrants who have been released from detention can rest, shower, change clothes and have a hot meal before their onward journey further into the United States. Most have travelled for weeks from Central America, though some journeys are more arduous than others. Brenda Riojas, a cheery and tireless spokeswoman for the Diocese of Brownsville, which runs the centre, says that a woman arrived recently with a ten-day-old baby: she had given birth in the Mexican mountains during her northward trek. On one recent Wednesday afternoon, young men huddled around a television watching the World Cup, while parents tended to their children and filled out forms. A smattering of Texans arrived with boxes of clothes to donate.

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If you are a liberal, you probably view what is happening in the first building as unbearably cruel and what is happening in the second as decent and just. If you support the president, you probably view what is happening in the first building as regrettable but necessary and what is happening in the second as naive and perhaps dangerous: after all, if you treat them kindly then more will come.

More than any other single issue, attitudes towards immigration define Mr Trump’s base. Some immigration restrictionists use clinical language, arguing that reducing levels of immigration would be better for American workers and immigrants already in America. Not Mr Trump. To him, Mexico is sending “rapists” and members of MS-13, a hyper-violent gang, across the border. (Stephanie Leutert, who directs the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas, points out that his own government’s data show that MS-13, members made up 0.075% of the total number of migrants crossing the southern border in the 2017 fiscal year.) The president discusses immigration in the vocabulary of a pest-controller. Everything suggests that he intends to make the “infestation” of immigrants a central issue in the mid-terms, despite the revulsion at his policy of sundering families to deter future migrants.

The traverse in reverse

America’s immigration system offers something to displease everyone. People such as Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller—the attorney-general and his funereal former aide, now a policy adviser to Mr Trump—think it far too permissive. Employers find it rigid and unresponsive to their needs. The asylum process is, in the words of a case-manager in Houston, “set up so people fail.” This is what happens when decades of congressional kludges are piled on top of each other.

The Supreme Court did not deem regulating immigration to be a federal responsibility until 1875. That year, awash in concerns over the prevalence of Chinese workers, especially in California, Congress passed the Page Act, which banned virtually all Asian women from entering America. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants, followed seven years later. In 1882 Congress passed the Immigration Act, which put the treasury secretary in charge of immigration control, levied a tax on every non-citizen who arrived at American ports and barred all foreign convicts—“except those convicted of political offences”. Naturalisation and citizenship were tightly restricted, often racially; but immigration, by and large, was not. Of the immigrants who arrived in the great wave between 1890 and 1930, more than one-quarter were never naturalised.

By 1910 13.5m immigrants lived in America (nearly 15% of the total population), resulting in a restrictionist backlash. The Immigration Act of 1917 prohibited immigration from Asia, with an exception for the Philippines, which America then ruled, and Japan. It also required that immigrants pass a literacy test, and barred “undesirables”, a category that included “idiots, imbeciles, epileptics…polygamists and anarchists”.

America did not set permanent numerical limits on immigration until the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which used a quota system to govern entry. This system provided visas to up to 2% of the number of foreign-born people of each nationality present at the time of the 1890 census. In effect, this restricted immigration to Europeans, and was especially favourable to Britons and other western Europeans and unfavourable to southern and eastern Europeans, who at the time the act was signed comprised the bulk of newly arrived immigrants.

Congress abolished the national-origins quota system in 1965, with legislation that favoured skilled workers and immediate family members of immigrants already in America. In the civil-rights era, having an immigration system that used national origins—in effect, race—as its determining factor was seen as discriminatory.

Ted Kennedy, who championed the bill after the assassination of his brother John, promised that “it will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.” Yet the new measure made America vastly more diverse. Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney with the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank, argues that the bill’s backers assumed it would increase immigration from southern Europe—particularly Greeks, Portuguese and Italians. In fact, immigration soared from newly independent countries in Asia, and nearby ones in Latin America.

In 1960, America was home to 9.7m immigrants, 75% of whom were European. By 2016 that number had soared to 43.7m—13.5% of the total population—89% of whom were non-European. In recent years immigrant populations have spread beyond the traditional hubs, such as California and New York. In 1990, for instance, 173,100 immigrants lived in Georgia, accounting for 3% of its population; by 2016 those numbers had risen to 1m and 10%. Many of the states that saw the steepest rises in share of immigrant population voted for Mr Trump in 2016.

A repeated failure to legislate, which gave the impression that immigration was out of control, helped pave the way for his victory. The last significant legislative attempt to address illegal immigration came in 1986. The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalised 2.7m undocumented immigrants, tightened border security and punished employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. It was supposed to halt illegal immigration. However, thanks to ineffective employer sanctions (“knowingly” hides many sins), continued demand for labour and the simple fact of a long, unsecurable border with what was then a poor and dysfunctional country, the opposite happened. That gave hardliners a potent answer to every subsequent fix: offer undocumented immigrants “amnesty”—a crude term for a tortuous and selectively granted path out of the shadows—and more will come.

Three similar subsequent attempts failed, for similar reasons. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 included provisions to enhance border security, establish a new temporary guest-worker programme and provide a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. Co-sponsored by five Republicans and one Democrat, it passed the Senate, but the House preferred a different bill—one that enhanced border security, limited judicial review for undocumented immigrants, increased criminal penalties related to border crossings, strengthened employer verification requirements and neither expanded guest-worker visas nor legalised any undocumented immigrants.

Congress, with the support of George W. Bush, then the (Republican) president, made another run at immigration reform in 2007, introducing a bill that would have enhanced border security, provided a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants and ended family reunification, leaving only the spouse and children of a green-card holder eligible to legally immigrate to America. It failed in the Senate.

A similar measure in 2013 passed the Senate, with the votes of all 52 Democratic senators, but died in the Republican-dominated House, which appeared interested only in enforcement. Shortly before that bill died, President Barack Obama enacted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) with an executive order. This allowed undocumented immigrants brought to America as children who enrolled in or graduated from school, university or the armed forces and had no criminal record temporary, renewable legal working papers. Mr Trump tried to end DACA last September.

If there were ever a perfect moment for immigration reform, this is it. The border now has more fencing and police than it did in 2000, when crossings were at their peak. Then virtually all migrants were Mexicans. Today, with Mexico’s economy and birth rate both stable, nearly half come from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador—weak states wracked by gang violence—enduring a costly and treacherous journey north. As of early 2017, America was experiencing a net outflow of undocumented Mexican migrants and a decline in its Mexican-born population.

Yet Mr Trump appears uninterested, preferring the political gains he makes from fulminating over the system’s failings than doing the hard work of trying to fix them. Mr Trump has remade his party, whose presidential candidates once competed to outdo each other in compassion towards poor migrants, in his own image. Republicans have no compelling electoral interest in fixing the nation’s immigration laws. More than 60% of those who voted for the president in 2016 thought it was either “very” or “fairly” important to be born in America in order to be considered truly American. Good luck persuading them to grant legal status to 11m people born outside the land of the free.

The political backlash against immigration is therefore peaking at a time when the number of migrants is receding. In the 2017 fiscal year, apprehensions along the southern border hit their lowest level since 1971.

As the tide goes out, a big population of undocumented migrants is being left behind. After peaking in 2007 at around 12.2m people, the undocumented population in 2016 stood at 11.3m, comprising just over 25% of all the country’s immigrants, and about 5% of the American workforce.

A large number of current border-crossers claim asylum in America: about 300,000 central Americans did so in 2017. Many northern European countries put asylum-seekers in reception centres, where they are fed, sheltered and are free to come and go. Life outside these centres would be harder for migrants there than it is inside. America’s newest facility for migrant children, by contrast, is a tent city in Tornillo, Texas, where temperatures can exceed 40°c (104°f).

Once someone seeking asylum is released in Texas, they can melt away into the grey labour market or move to a sanctuary city (where local police limit co-operation with federal immigration authorities) and, many fear, skip their hearings at an immigration court. The federal government has tried to prevent this by turning police officers across the country into immigration officials, under a programme called Secure Communities, but it does not have the power to compel local police chiefs to comply. The Trump administration’s policy of ending what it calls “catch and release” will probably require a vast increase in the number of border-crossers who are locked up in facilities that look an awful lot like prisons.

There are alternatives to this. A pilot programme that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ran from 2015 until the administration killed it in 2017 placed immigrant families under the supervision of social workers, who helped them find housing and navigate the immigration bureaucracy. More than 90% of participants reportedly showed up to all of their check-ins and court hearings. Another programme used ankle monitors to keep tabs on immigrants; this too showed a high compliance rate. Both methods are cheaper than detention centres; neither fits the mood of today’s Republican Party.

Duck and cover

Over the past weeks Republicans in the House have engaged in a pointless political theatre, voting on a pair of immigration bills: a hardline measure and a “compromise” bill (the compromise being between moderate and hardline Republicans, not between the two parties) backed by Paul Ryan, the outgoing House speaker. Both failed, though more Republicans backed the hardline bill than Mr Ryan’s. The Senate would not have taken up whatever measure passed, and Mr Trump has repeatedly undermined negotiations by, for instance, tweeting that Republicans should “stop wasting their time” on immigration bills before the mid-terms.

And in a narrow sense, he may be right. His approval ratings among Republicans remain high, while Democrats have struggled to muster an effective response beyond (admittedly justified) outrage at Mr Trump’s actions. That approach failed in 2016 and it risks failing again in 2018 and beyond. Part of that is circumstance. Enforcement is an essential part of any comprehensive fix to immigration, but as one Democratic strategist says, “in moments when right-wing populism is ascendant, nuance gets lost…it’s hard to talk about toughness when children are being ripped from their parents’ arms.” Some on the party’s left flank talk as though any enforcement of immigration law is inherently racist. It is not, of course, but two years of Mr Trump’s racially tinged comments about immigrants have left nerves raw.

The window for comprehensive immigration reform may now have shut. One thing that slowed the flow of refugees from Central America over the past few years was co-operation from Mexico. But Mr Trump has torpedoed America’s relationship with its southern neighbour, which now appears poised to elect its own populist firebrand, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Perhaps the two will get along famously. Or perhaps Mr López Obrador will decide he sees no reason to make things easier for a president who treats his country and countrymen disrespectfully, and allow Central Americans free passage to Mexico’s northern border.

The current administration’s policy is built on a fantasy: that 11m people can be deported against their will. It is that, not the people arriving at the southern border, that makes America’s immigration system unique in the rich world. People will die of old age in America before they ever acquire the legal right to live in America. This is an extraordinary failure to govern.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "When good men do nothing"

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#IFTTT #Feedly

[viewfromthetrenches-blog]

The Shit Storm is Upon Us

We are eleven days away from the shit storm. 

There were several colorful descriptions of the Trump campaign, but I was always partial to “dumpster fire.” It perfectly captured the spirit and spectacle of Trump’s traveling circus of rage, ignorance and bigotry. It was filled with all the hateful things we thought had been tossed out years ago, only now they were in flames – exploding – leading a trail of stink from sea to shining sea. 

Even if you wanted to look away, the media wouldn’t let you. If they weren’t covering the latest tweet, they were discussing the tweet. They polled the tweet. They focus-grouped the tweet. They invited surrogates to wring their hands about the tweet and other surrogates to assure us that there was nothing to get all tweeted-up about. 

As much as the dumpster fire spewed and stank, it was contained. We were assured that the grown-ups had everything under control and this thing had no chance of spreading. It was a spectacle we could safely watch from a distance, knowing that it would eventually burn itself out. 

This is no longer a dumpster fire.

Donald Trump will enter the White House with all levers of government at his disposal. The House of Representatives is still packed to the gills with raging nut balls from the Tea Party insurgence of 2010, all of them protected by district boundaries that are so gerrymandered they look like an unfurled small intestine. The Senate is lining up every appointment so fast that the ethics panels don’t even have time to check the nominees on Wikipedia. This is the same Senate that has brazenly hijacked a Supreme Court seat, thus ensuring that the last possible check and balance is firmly within their control.

The shit is about to start flying fast and furious. We are about to see the power of all branches of government under the direct control of a man who has transformed the dog whistle of race into a megaphone, earning endorsements (and victory parades!) from the KKK and Neo-Nazi organizations. He has called for a ban on muslim immigrants. He has bragged about his planned use of torture, going so far as to call for the torture and killing of innocent family members of terrorists. He has heaped praise upon dictators. He has called for a new nuclear arms race. He has railed against environmental protections and called global warming a conspiracy cooked up by the Chinese. He has called for a reversal of Roe vs Wade and pledged to eliminate all funding for Planned Parenthood. He has called for massive tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, alongside staggering increases in federal spending.

Trump’s army of angry reactionaries have voted for change – and on that count, they will not be disappointed. Never mind the inconvenient fact that Hillary actually got 2.8 million more votes; that much of the tide against her was orchestrated by Russian spies; that the FBI director broke with decades of precedent to deliver a smoking stink bomb on the eve of the election that turned out to be a dud – none of that matters to a GOP that is eager to show off its shiny, new “mandate” to anyone gullible enough to believe them. Our one-party government is going to deliver one “accomplishment” after another. 

Our only official line of defense will be the minority in the Senate that is large enough to filibuster certain nominations or pieces of legislation (many cannot be filibustered thanks to the enactment of the “nuclear option” during six years of unprecedented obstruction by the GOP). The unofficial line of defense is people like me. I have been organizing meetings, attending protests, calling my Senators, tweeting, Instagramming, Facebooking, Meetupping and now Tumblring. I’ve attended just about every meeting that will have me and shared what I’m hearing at every other meeting that will have me.

I’m not elected to anything. I’m not a chair of a county party or caucus. I’m just a guy who has decided to stand up and fight for what I believe in. I’ve been learning a lot of things that it seemed like other people should know, so I am starting this Tumblr as a place to share what I’m learning. I hope it will inspire other people to do what I’m doing and join the unofficial line of defense.

The shit storm is upon us, but there are a lot of us here in the trenches. We’re not all on the same page – some of us may even be reading completely different books – but we’ve got one thing in common: we’re ready to fight.

#grassroots #politics #democrats

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Nations ease some virus restrictions yet public still wary (AP) Small shops reopened Wednesday in Berlin as a few nations began easing coronavirus restrictions to restart their economies, but trepidation expressed by some workers and customers indicated a return to normality is still a long way off. Restrictions were also being eased in Denmark and Austria. In France, long lines built up outside the few McDonald’s drive-thrus that started serving customers again. In the U.S., some states were relaxing restrictions amid vocal protests by those demanding to return to work. Serbia reopened open-air food markets Wednesday, with vendors wearing masks and gloves, along with shops selling technical goods and bookstores. Authorities also shortened a daily curfew by one hour and allowed people over 65 to go for a walk three times a week.

As people stay home, Earth turns wilder and cleaner (AP) An unplanned grand experiment is changing Earth. As people across the globe stay home to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, the air has cleaned up, albeit temporarily. Smog stopped choking New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in the world, and India’s getting views of sights not visible in decades. Nitrogen dioxide pollution in the northeastern United States is down 30%. Rome air pollution levels from mid-March to mid-April were down 49% from a year ago. Stars seem more visible at night. People are also noticing animals in places and at times they don’t usually. Coyotes have meandered along downtown Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. A puma roamed the streets of Santiago, Chile. Goats took over a town in Wales. In India, already daring wildlife has become bolder with hungry monkeys entering homes and opening refrigerators to look for food. When people stay home, Earth becomes cleaner and wilder.

World Food Programme warns of “biblical” famines (Foreign Policy) The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned of “multiple famines of biblical proportions” in the coming year, with food insecurity only increasing with the economic shocks caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Yemen, South Sudan, and Afghanistan have the highest proportion of acutely food-insecure people according to the 2020 Global Report on Food Crises report. David Beasley, head of the WFP, urged global action at the report’s launch, “I do believe that with our expertise and our partnerships, we can bring together the teams and the programs necessary to make certain the COVID-19 pandemic does not become a human and food crisis catastrophe,” he said.

Financial shock for lower-income adults (Pew Research Center)​ As the economic toll from the coronavirus outbreak continues to mount, a new Pew Research Center survey finds the impact is falling more heavily on lower-income adults—a group that was feeling significant financial pressure well before the current crisis. Overall, 43% of U.S. adults now say that they or someone in their household has lost a job or taken a cut in pay due to the outbreak, up from 33% in the latter half of March. Among lower-income adults, an even higher share (52%) say they or someone in their household has experienced this type of job upheaval. In addition to being among the hardest hit by the economic fallout from COVID-19, lower-income adults are less prepared to withstand a financial shock than those with higher incomes.​

Senate Approves Aid for Small-Business Loan Program, Hospitals and Testing (NYT) The Senate approved a $484 billion coronavirus relief package on Tuesday that would revive a depleted loan program for distressed small businesses and provide funds for hospitals and coronavirus testing, breaking a partisan impasse over the latest infusion of federal money to address the public health and economic crisis brought on by the pandemic. The measure was the product of an intense round of negotiations between Democrats and the Trump administration that unfolded as the small-business loan program created by the $2.2 trillion stimulus law quickly ran out of funding, collapsing under a glut of applications from desperate companies struggling to stay afloat. But it was only a fraction of the amount of money that Congress will most likely consider in the weeks to come, as lawmakers contemplate spending another $1 trillion or more on yet another sweeping government response to the pandemic.

Oil Industry Braces for Devastation (NYT) Workers at Marathon Petroleum’s refinery in Gallup, N.M., are turning off the valves. Oil companies in West Texas are paying early termination fees to contract employees rather than drill new wells. And in Montana, producers are shutting down wells and slashing salaries and benefits. Just a few months ago, the American oil industry was triumphant in its quest for energy independence, having turned the United States into the world’s biggest petroleum producer for the first time in decades. But that exhilaration has given way to despair as the coronavirus has kneecapped the economy, destroying demand for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel as cars sit parked in driveways and planes are consigned to remote fields and runways. The oil industry has lived through many booms and busts, but never before have prices collapsed as they have this week.

Trump Halts New Green Cards, but Backs Off Broader Immigration Ban (NYT) President Trump said on Tuesday that he would order a temporary halt in issuing green cards to prevent people from immigrating to the United States, but he backed away from plans to suspend guest worker programs after business groups exploded in anger at the threat of losing access to foreign labor. (Foreign Policy) Obtaining U.S. permanent residency, or a green card, is a notoriously drawn-out process, taking many years in some cases, so the executive order is more likely to frustrate than halt that avenue of immigration. The executive order seems to be based on an anti-immigrant ideology rather than any public health concern: In 2019, the United States issued approximately 1,031,000 green cards; 55 percent of those recipients were living in the United States already.

Trump tweets he’s ordered Navy to destroy Iranian gunboats (AP) President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he has ordered the Navy to “shoot down and destroy” any Iranian gunboats that harass U.S. ships, a directive that comes a week after the Navy reported a group of Iranian boats made “dangerous and harassing approaches” to American vessels in the Persian Gulf. Trump did not cite a specific event in his tweet or provide details. The White House had no immediate comment. The U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet referred questions about the tweet to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon referred questions to the White House. U.S. Navy ships and Iranian Guard naval vessels occasionally have encounters in the Gulf that the U.S. calls unprofessional, but they rarely escalate or include an exchange of gunfire. Tehran views the heavy presence of American forces there as a security threat.

Americans are increasingly negative on China (Foreign Policy) A new survey published by the Pew Research Center reports that American attitudes toward China have stiffened over the past year: 66 percent of Americans say they hold an unfavorable view of China, up 6 points on the previous year. Only 26 percent have a favorable view. Republicans are more likely to have an unfavorable view than Democrats, although the difference is slim: 72 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable opinion on China, and 62 percent of Democrats do. The numbers suggest that attacks on China will become a prominent fixture in the 2020 presidential race: On Sunday the Biden campaign released an ad alleging President Trump “rolled over for the Chinese” on its coronavirus response and a pro-Trump super PAC has attempted to tar the former vice president as “Beijing Biden.”

Red Alert Hunger (Worldcrunch) In Colombia, where strict lockdown has been extended until May 11, food shortage is adding up to the health crisis. Residents of the big cities’ poorest neighbourhoods are literally raising the red flag, El Tiempo reports, hanging a red shirt, tablecloth or sheet outside their window to signal they are out of food—as a public plea for help. To prevent hunger, President Ivan Duque announced an emergency food supply but the promised aid has never arrived in some parts of the country. COVID-19 has been alarmingly widening the poverty gap.

Zoom arrests in China (Foreign Policy) Xi’s war on religion continues, with the latest victims being Chinese churchgoers arrested for watching sermons on the Zoom videoconferencing platform. Zoom has sometimes routed even outside data through China, raising concerns about information security. Meanwhile, in other religion news, the authorities in Shanghai have strongly denied that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was given permission to build a new temple there—calling it “wishful thinking.”

Singapore, the coronavirus, and migrant workers (Washington Post) Singapore thought it had its coronavirus outbreak under control. But then country the country started to see a surge in cases. And thousands of those cases,—almost 70 percent of Singapore’s total—are concentrated in dormitories that house migrant workers, who have been locked down in their quarters as authorities seek a solution. “The situation highlights the vulnerability of migrant workers, who in Singapore make up one-third of the labor force. Their risks of infection are exacerbated by overcrowded living quarters, poor nutrition, limited access to health care and personal protective equipment, low wages and, in some cases, discrimination,” The Post’s Shibani Mahtani writes.

#headlines #news

[itsfinancethings]

At the farthest edge of Hong Kong, where suburban foothills descend into a riverine border with China, a lone sentry shoos away traffic. The checkpoint, his gestures and the line of U-turning vehicles indicate, is closed.

Behind him towers the glass and concrete skyline of Shenzhen—the nearest Chinese city to Hong Kong. Without the usual throng of travelers, buses and hawkers here at Lo Wu station, the only noise comes from water buffalo grunting across the tracks.

This and nine other border crossings were recently shut in a bid to contain the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus, COVID-19, that emerged in the central Chinese metropolis of Wuhan, wreaking havoc on the mainland and spreading far beyond.

In Hong Kong, the symbolically charged boundary with the mainland has become yet another font of militant unrest after months of anti-government protest. Residents in this semi-autonomous enclave—which the British handed back to China in 1997—insist the whole thing must be sealed. A suspected bombing campaign appeared to be an attempt to pressure the government into doing just that. Nobody was injured, but the spate of homemade explosives, planted at a hospital, a public toilet and Lo Wu station, took “one big step closer to terrorism,” police said earlier this month.

Beyond the looming health scare, this latest fight to control the people, pathogens and ideas that cross the border reflects the same deep distrust of the Chinese Communist Party that exploded during the recent protests. It also exposes a dirty secret that many protesters and their supporters try to downplay: how easily antipathy toward the party translates into resentment of ordinary mainland Chinese.

Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in recent years has fueled outrage against perceived encroachment. It has also helped catalyze a distinct Hong Kong identity—one rooted in defending the territory’s unique freedoms against an influx of mainland money, people and power. “Hong Kong is not China” has become a rallying cry throughout the city, sprayed onto walls and chanted at protests. Anger extends to anything identified with China: emblems, businesses and even people.

Long distrusted as agents of demographic, socioeconomic and even political occupation, mainlanders are now feared as vectors of disease, emboldening a bigotry that increasingly spills into violence.

“As long as the epidemic keeps worsening, people will at the back of their minds blame the mainlanders and think, ‘After all, it’s the mainlanders who started all this,’” says Willy Lam, an expert in Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images This photo taken in Hong Kong on Feb. 6, 2020, shows the border fence with Shenzhen, China (background), near Lo Wu station.

Read more: The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Derail Xi Jinping’s Dreams of a Chinese Century

A nightmare relived

In Asia’s financial center, where more than 60 cases have been recorded compared to the mainland’s 75,000, anxiety is compounded by memories of another nightmare. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) traumatized the city in 2003, claiming 299 lives. Then, Hong Kong was in the middle of the outbreak. Now, the epicenter lies about 600 miles away.

Yet the cosmopolitan hub of 7.5 million resembles a city in lockdown. Restaurants, shopping malls and public transportation are largely deserted as people work from home and schools are closed. Medical masks are in such short supply that lines hundreds long form beside pharmacies rumored to have stock. Runs on toilet paper, bleach and rice have denuded grocery store shelves.

After months of bitter protests, lack of confidence in the government runs deep. Panic is “spreading faster than the virus because the government is not acting in an efficient manner,” says Dr. Ho Pak Leung, a microbiologist and director of the Centre for Infection at the University of Hong Kong.

Union members, democracy activists and even pro-establishment politicians have joined together in calling for the border’s closure. Striking medical workers have threatened to quit en masse. Hong Kong’s embattled leader, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, rejected sealing the border as impractical and discriminatory but eventually agreed to shut all but three checkpoints and impose a mandatory, 14-day quarantine for anyone entering from the mainland. The measures are unprecedented but not enough to the many who fear that contagion will overtake Hong Kong and mainland patients will sap its medical reserves.

“We have to protect our own people first,” says Ng, a patient care assistant who joined the recent strike. “If our medical system goes down, then there will be no one to help Hongkongers.”

With the border still partially open, some have taken it upon themselves to enforce their own restrictions. Several restaurants refuse to serve speakers of Mandarin (the official language of the mainland, unlike Hong Kong where Cantonese dominates). Some hotels require certificates of health from mainland guests, and a student from Hubei told local media that mainlanders quarantined at a university were doxxed.

Read more: The Pandemic of Xenophobia and Scapegoating

Yet experts have warned that the draconian travel bans adopted by much of the world may only divert vital resources from public health tasks and inflame Sinophobia.

“I don’t see any public health reason to justify sealing of borders at this point in the outbreak,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images Medical workers wearing protective masks gather during a protest outside the Hospital Authority’s head office in Hong Kong, China, on Feb. 4, 2020.

A fraught boundary

Beyond the public health debate, the push to seal the border brims with political subtext.

With its riverbanks, barbed wire fences, passport checks and a compact no-man’s land, the 25-mile perimeter sets Hong Kong apart from the rest of China, designating it as a place where the laws of the mainland do not apply.

A colonial relic, the boundary follows the same line as it did under the British. Their efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to reinforce the border and maintain a stable population—after the influx of refugees in previous decades—transformed the territory. Once a temporary sanctuary for those fleeing famine and political instability, it became a settled homebase with a specific local identity, anthropologist Ip Iam-chong writes in “Politics of Belonging: a study of the campaign against mainland visitors in Hong Kong.”

After Hong Kong retroceded to China in 1997, the border served as a “firewall” protecting the city’s autonomy, says Jeffrey Twu, who researches border conflicts and nationalist movements at Columbia University.

“This call to shut down the border is not so much about asking the government to literally close all the immigration booths. It’s really this urgent call for the government to rethink its relation vis-à-vis the central government in Beijing,” he says.

But the increasing permeability of the border in recent years has exacerbated the fears of local activists that Hong Kong, with the British gone, will become just another Chinese city. After Beijing loosened restrictions on travel in 2003, mainland visitors provided an economic lifeline for Hong Kong’s SARS-bruised economy, filling hotel rooms, restaurants, malls and boutiques. But as visitor numbers swelled from 7 million in 2002 to 51 million in 2018—nearly seven times the city’s population—resentment grew.

Increasingly, the economy catered to the needs of deep-pocketed Chinese day-trippers, who were accused of everything from congesting the streets to allowing their children to defecate in public. “Many of them are very rude,” Isaac Au, a 30-year-old Hongkonger, says of mainlanders in what are fairly common sentiments. “When they are rich they think that they can just spend money and they are the kings of the world.”

Birth tourism, competition for college spots and the growing use of Mandarin has also irritated locals. Conspicuous consumption by mainland shoppers—some estimates say the city accounts for up to 10% of the $285 billion annual global sales of luxury goods—has exacerbated the sense that many Hongkongers are being priced out of their own city. So has the influx of mainland money into the local property market, already one of the world’s most expensive.

Beijing has attempted to boost territorial integration through massive infrastructure projects. A high-speed railway that directly connected Hong Kong to 58 mainland cities, and brought the Chinese capital Beijing within nine hours’ reach, opened in 2018. So did a $18.8 billion bridge linking Hong Kong to the former Portuguese colony of Macau and the mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai.

Attempts were made to foster cultural assimilation too—like a 2012 campaign to introduce “patriotic education” in Hong Kong schools. But that initiative fueled bitter protests and China’s growing has proximity left Hongkongers cold. According to an annual survey by the Hong Kong University Public Opinion Program, Hongkongers’ sense of being Chinese hit an all-time low in 2019. Among 18 to 29 year olds, 75 percent identified as “Hong Kong” rather than Chinese, while 49 percent of those 30 or older felt the same.

Kyle Lam/Bloomberg via Getty Images Graffiti reading “Hong Kong Is Not China” is displayed on the wall of a highway during a protest in the Central district of Hong Kong, China, on July 21, 2019.

Escalating violence

This simmering angst has regularly burst into xenophobia. In 2012, a local newspaper ad infamously depicted mainland Chinese as locusts draining the city of its resources and “locusts” has since stuck as a derogatory name for mainlanders. Nativist groups sprang up, pledging to defend their home. One, Hong Kong Indigenous, staged “reclaim” campaigns in 2015, targeting mainland shoppers.

The initially fringe cause found far wider support during the recent pro-democracy protests, which morphed into a broad, ideological battle to both win greater political freedoms and preserve Hong Kong’s special identity. “Reclaim Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Time,” the movement’s defining credo, was coined by jailed activist Edward Leung, a former member of Hong Kong Indigenous. (Ironically, Leung, who argued for tighter borders and even full independence, was born in Wuhan.)

After adopting Leung’s clarion call, some protesters also embraced his advocacy of more militant tactics. Violence, once dismissed as extreme, has become largely accepted as the only way to pressure a sclerotic regime because of the lack of other viable outlets.

Samson Yuen, an expert on social movements at Lingnan University says that, in Hong Kong, people cannot directly elect their leader or legislature, yet are deeply fearful of falling under authoritarian Beijing’s control. “It’s really a symptom of how ill the whole political situation is,” he says. “If there was democracy, people wouldn’t be throwing petrol bombs on the street.”

Coronavirus is just the latest trigger. At a protest-aligned restaurant in the buzzing shopping and entertainment district of Tsim Sha Tsui, diners say they feel more comfortable now that Mandarin-speakers are barred from the establishment. The entrance is covered with pastel-colored Post-It notes expressing support for Hong Kong’s autonomy and exhorting fellow customers to “stay healthy.” People wait in line for a table, even as neighboring eateries sit empty.

“Hongkongers don’t have a choice about our government, about our freedom. But for eating at least, we do,” says Keith, a 33-year-old patron.

And while coronavirus paranoia is certainly not unique to the city, the outbreak provides yet another vehicle for Hongkongers to distinguish themselves from mainland Chinese.

“I blame China for it,” says 23-year-old Karmen, echoing old prejudices. “They eat everything there. We don’t do that.”

This “racialization” says Andrew Junker, a sociologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, could prove dangerous amid the violent protest tactics that have become normalized in recent months.

“The dehumanization of the mainland Chinese makes it easier to engage in violence and to believe in an IRA-style separatist ideology and militantism,” he says, referring to the Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary organization that waged a terrorist campaign to drive the British out of Northern Ireland until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended most of the conflict.

It seems like a long way from the once troubled streets of Belfast to Lo Wu station. But two homemade explosive devices were found there on Feb. 2; shortly afterward, an anonymous message on social media threatened mainland Chinese arrivals.

“You come to our city to spread germs, but have you considered clearly if you would be able to continue living if you cross the border?” it said.

“I protect my city, [you are] welcome to personally experience the force of a bombing.”

— Additional reporting by Hillary Leung / Hong Kong

#IFTTT #Blogger

[herringbookshelf]

Homeless should be added, but much overlap as well. . .

Nearly 10 percent of California’s residents are prisoners, parolees, felons,1 or undocumented immigrants.  Although differently constituted, these groups form a caste of persons living in the Golden State for whom neither democracy nor freedom is guaranteed. 

Immigration Control

Immigration Control Perhaps most Americans believe their ancestors arrived legally in the United States but few today are aware that Congress left immigration almost unregulated for almost a century after the Revolution. During that time, practically any person who reached American shores of their own volition could enter the United States to work. Immigration control began nearly 150 years ago, during the US Civil War, long before our current struggles at the US-Mexico border. About one year into that brutal war, Northern congressmen learned of a devious plot by slaveowners in Louisiana. Ever more anxious about the specter of emancipation, plantation owners had quietly begun to import Chinese contract workers. Popularly known and derided as “coolies,” these workers were regarded as a racially inferior and unfree political caste that, in the case of emancipation, could be used to replace black slave labor across the South. Learning of the plan, Congress passed the Anti-Coolie Act of 1862, which prohibited US citizens from importing these workers into the United States. Passed to prevent the reinvention of slavery in the American South, the Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 functioned as the nation’s “last slave-trade act and its first immigration law.”6

 Keeping Chinese workers out of the country, Congress reasoned, would prevent the creation of a new form of “unfree” labor in the United States. And yet, even as they considered additional “protective” measures, Frederick Douglass, the brilliant abolitionist orator and former slave, offered a stinging critique. Douglass firmly supported unrestricted immigration from the world over and challenged claims that Chinese immigrants would reintroduce “the slave problem” to the United States. “It was not the Ethiopian as a man, but the Ethiopian as a slave and a coveted article of merchandise, that gave us trouble,” argued Douglass.7 The problem of slavery, in other words, was not rooted in the bodies of enslaved persons but rather in the laws that organize inequitable social relations and protect the marginalization of humans. This was the radical abolitionist critique that Douglass had cut during the movement, and then war, to end slavery.

When he applied his wisdom to the congressional effort to halt Chinese immigration, he hinted that the quest for immigration control was at its core an anti-abolitionist project. It degraded human rights, fueled forms of racial thinking, and encompassed strategies of exclusion that African Americans were battling against in the years after the Civil War in their struggle to achieve full emancipation. In this, the black freedom struggle was directly tied to immigration politics and Douglass recognized the critical importance of opposing the rise of immigration control. But Douglass’s abolitionist critique went unheeded. Congress continued to pass legislation restricting immigration into the United States. In time, the rise of a US immigration control regime would write a new chapter in the story of unfreedom. In particular, increasingly restrictive immigration legislation created the “illegal alien” as a substantively marginalized political category in American life.

Creation of the Illegal Alien

Creation of the Illegal Alien The creation of the illegal alien unfolded in the decades following the Anti-Coolie Act. . . In 1882, Congress banned Chinese workers and all “lunatics, idiots, convicts, those liable to become public charges, and those suffering from contagious diseases.” In 1885, all contract workers were prohibited from entering the United States. In 1891, polygamists were added to the list of banned persons and, in 1903, anarchists, beggars, and epileptics joined the growing list. In 1907, Congress also excluded imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, unaccompanied minors, those with tuberculosis, and women of immoral purposes. That same year, the President signed a Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan that strictly regulated and limited Japanese immigration to the United States. By 1924, Congress had categorically prohibited all persons of Asian origin from entering and introduced a national origins system, which limited how many immigrants could enter the United States each year; it favored Western European immigrants. In effect, Congress had prohibited much of the world from legally entering the United States.

In a series of decisions made during the late-nineteenth century, often referred to as the Chinese Exclusion cases, the court established a framework for shaping the rights and status of unauthorized persons living in the United States. In Chae Chan Ping vs United States (1889), the Supreme Court established that immigration control was, as a matter of foreign affairs, a realm of unmediated congressional and executive authority.9 According to the decision, “The power of exclusion of foreigners being an incident of sovereignty belonging to the government of the United States . . . cannot be granted away or restrained on behalf of anyone . . . The political department of our government . . . is alone competent to act upon the subject.” Thus, the US Supreme Court limited the “reach of the Constitution and the scope of judicial review” over the development of immigration law by defining it as a matter of sovereignty and thereby a zone of unmediated federal power.10 In the 1893 Fong Yue Ting decision, the court held that the federal government’s right to expel foreigners was “absolute” and “unqualified“; therefore, immigrants, even lawful permanent residents, could be deported from the country at any time for any reason. This decision also established that “deportation is not a punishment for crime” but rather an administrative process of returning immigrants to the place where they belonged. Defining deportation as “an administrative process” was highly significant because much of the Bill of Rights applies only to criminal punishment. Accordingly, the court held in Fong Yue Ting, “the provisions of the Constitution, securing the right of trial by jury, and prohibiting unreasonable search and seizures, and cruel and unusual punishment, have no application.”11

The Border Patrol Congress established the US Border Patrol in 1924 to enforce the enormous web of immigration restrictions that had developed since the passage of the Anti-Coolie Act of 1862. Their jurisdiction stretched along the Canadian border, spanned the US-Mexico border and, in time, extended to include the Florida Gulf Coast region and various coastlines. In addition to preventing persons from crossing into the United States without official sanction, the Border Patrol’s job included policing borderland regions to detect and arrest persons defined as illegal immigrants. At first, Border Patrol officers in the US-Mexico border region were confused about how to translate their broad mandate and jurisdiction into a practical course of law enforcement. Thousands of excluded persons—Asians, unaccompanied minors, persons with trachoma—regularly violated US immigration law. Even US citizens routinely violated immigration restrictions by refusing to cross through official ports of entry. Working in farflung offices in border communities, Border Patrol officers were given no guidance from national immigration officials regarding how to prioritize the enforcement of US immigration restrictions. The officers, for example, could have raided brothels or policed the primary racial targets of US immigration restrictions, namely Asians. But the early officers of the US Border Patrol took an unexpected approach. Hired from local border communities, Border Patrol officers along the US-Mexico border focused almost exclusively on apprehending and deporting undocumented Mexican workers. Ironically, Mexico’s migrant workers were not categorically prohibited from entering the United States, but they often evaded the administrative requirements for legal entry, such as paying entrance fees and passing a literacy test and health exam. For the working-class white men, hired from local border communities, who worked as Border Patrol officers during the 1920s and 1930s, directing US immigration law enforcement toward Mexican border crossers—the primary labor force for the region’s dominant agribusiness industry—functioned as a means of wrestling respect from agribusinessmen, demanding deference from Mexicans in general, achieving upward social mobility for their families, and/or concealing racial violence within the framework of police work. Although they were satisfying more personal and local interests in immigration control, by targeting unsanctioned Mexican immigrants instead of the many other possible targets of immigration control, Border Patrol officers effectively Mexicanized the set of inherently and lawfully unequal social relations that emerged from the regime of US immigration control in the Mexican border region. Mexicanizing the caste of illegals remained a regional story until concerns regarding national security during World War II forced the Border Patrol to become a more centrally operated institution. 

During World War II, Congress transferred the Border Patrol’s parent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. Located within the Department of Justice, immigration control entered into the growing bureaucracy of federal law enforcement under the US Attorney General and alongside the FBI, US Marshals, and the Bureau of Prisons. 

With new resources, tighter supervision, more personnel, and improved training, these were the years when the Border Patrol’s national focus turned toward policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration. This turn was primarily influenced by the establishment of the Bracero Program, a US/Mexico contract labor program launched in 1942. Between 1942 and 1964, over four million Mexicans legally worked in the United States through the Bracero Program. Still, a large number of Mexican nationals crossed the border without sanction in search of work. To protect a binational program designed to import legal Mexican workers in the United States,

 A few weeks later, in the now infamous Operation Wetback campaign of 1954, Border Patrol task forces swept across the Southwest and declared to have solved the so-called “wetback problem” by deporting over one million Mexican nationals. After the campaign and into the mid-1960s, Border Patrol apprehensions along the US-Mexico border dropped dramatically. Operation Wetback is often cited today as evidence that immigration law enforcement, if aggressively pursued, can successfully end unsanctioned migration. But aggressive enforcement is not how the Border Patrol scored its successes during the summer of 1954. The Border Patrol significantly overreported the number of persons apprehended during Operation Wetback and achieved a declining number of apprehensions after the campaign by demobilizing the task forces

Today, over 60 percent of all deportations from the United States are triggered by criminal convictions, mostly traffic offenses, nonviolent drug crimes, and immigrationrelated violations.22 After serving their criminal sentence, most immigrants who are identified for deportation will spend over one month in a detention facility, most likely a rented-out jail bed in one of several hundred jail facilities throughout the country that contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In this era of mass incarceration, it is in jails and prisons across the United States where the paths of criminalized immigrants awaiting deportation have crossed with those of alienated citizens.

African Americans makes clear, citizenship can be gained and lost (time and again). Today it is the criminal justice system that renders the substance of citizenship, itself, unpredictable. In other words, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in an era of mass incarceration may not be as valuable as it seems if pursued without a challenge to the inequities of mass incarceration; however, understanding the long history that brought us here carries within it alternatives to consider. At the beginning of it all, there was an abolitionist’s critique. “It was not the Ethiopian as a man, but the Ethiopian as a slave and a coveted article of merchandise, that gave us trouble,” explained Frederick Douglass in 1869. Like the slave, the caste of felons and illegal immigrants is a construct. We will need an abolitionist critique to imagine and build a world without it.

#homelessness #immigration #criminal justice #abolition #2011 #boom california #california #citizenship

[learningrendezvous]

Women's Studies

ALL WE'VE GOT

By Alexis Clements

ALL WE'VE GOT is a personal exploration of LGBTQI women's communities, cultures, and social justice work through the lens of the physical spaces they create, from bars to bookstores to arts and political hubs.

Social groups rely on physical spaces to meet and build connections, step outside oppressive social structures, avoid policing and violence, share information, provide support, and organize politically. Yet, in the past decade, more than 100 bars, bookstores, art and community spaces where LGBTQI women gather have closed. In ALL WE'VE GOT, filmmaker Alexis Clements travels the country to explore the factors driving the loss of these spaces, understand why some are able to endure, and to search for community among the ones that remain. From a lesbian bar in Oklahoma; to the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center in San Antonio run by queer Latinas; to the WOW Cafe Theatre in New York; to the public gatherings organized by the Trans Ladies Picnics around the US and beyond; to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, the film takes us into diverse LGBTQI spaces and shines a light on why having a place to gather matters. Ultimately, ALL WE'VE GOT is a celebration of the history and resilience of the LGBTQI community and the inclusive spaces they make, as well as a call to action to continue building stronger futures for all communities.

DVD (Color) / 2019 / 67 minutes

I AM THE REVOLUTION

By Benedetta Argentieri

I AM THE REVOLUTION is an empowering portrait of three determined women in the Middle East who are leading the fight for gender equality and freedom. Politician Selay Ghaffar is one of the most wanted people in the world by the Taliban and yet she still travels through Afghanistan to educate other women about their rights. Rojda Felat is a commander of the Syrian Democratic Army, leading 60,000 troops to defeat ISIS, including freeing their hold on Raqqa and rescuing its people. And Yanar Mohammed, named by the BBC as one of 100 most influential women in the world in 2018, pushes for parliamentary reform in Iraq while running shelters for abused women. Despite battling seemingly overwhelming obstacles, all three women display resilience, bravery and compassion. I AM THE REVOLUTION challenges the images of veiled, silent women in the Middle East and instead reveals the extraordinary strength of women rising up on the front lines to claim their voice and their rights.

DVD (English, Arabic, Kurdish, Pashtun, Color) / 2019 / 72 minutes

93QUEEN

By Paula Eiselt

93QUEEN follows Rachel "Ruchie" Freier, a no-nonsense Hasidic lawyer and mother of six who is determined to shake up the boys club in her Hasidic community by creating Ezras Nashim, the first all-female ambulance corps in NYC.

In the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, EMS corps have long been the province of men. Though the neighborhood is home to the largest volunteer ambulance corps in the world known as Hatzolah, that organization has steadfastly banned women from its ranks. Now Ruchie and an engaging cast of dogged Hasidic women are risking their reputations, and the futures of their children, by taking matters into their own hands to provide dignified emergency medical care to the Hasidic women and girls of Borough Park. In a society where most women don't drive-and a few minutes can mean the difference between life and death-how do female EMTs transport themselves to the scene of an emergency? And how does Ezras Nashim combat a behemoth like Hatzolah, which possesses political clout throughout New York City?

With unprecedented and exclusive access, 93QUEEN follows the formation and launch of Ezras Nashim through the organization's first year on the ground. We witness the highs and lows of creating an organization against incredible odds, as well as the women's struggles to "have it all" as wives and mothers. And in the midst of this already ground-breaking endeavor, Ruchie announces that she had decided to take her burgeoning feminism even further when she enters the race for civil court judge in Brooklyn's 5th Municipal Court District. Through it all, we see Ruchie and the other women grappling to balance their faith with their nascent feminism, even as they are confronted by the patriarchal attitudes that so dominate Hasidic society. As Ruchie observes, while making dinner at 3 a.m., "I sometimes wonder why God created me a woman. If I'd have been born a Hasidic man, I don't think I would have half the problems I have."

DVD (Color) / 2018 / 90 minutes

COUNCILWOMAN

By Margo Guernsey

COUNCILWOMAN is the inspiring story of Carmen Castillo, an immigrant Dominican housekeeper in a Providence hotel who wins a seat in City Council, taking her advocacy for low-income workers from the margins to city politics.

The film follows Castillo's first term as she balances her full-time day job as a housekeeper with her family life and the demands of public office. She faces skeptics who say she doesn't have the education to govern, the power of corporate interests who take a stand against her fight for a $15 hourly wage, and a tough re-election against two contenders. As Castillo battles personal setbacks and deep-rooted notions of who is qualified to run for political office, she fiercely defends her vision of a society in which all people can earn enough to support themselves and their families.

An eye-opening look at entrenched power in American democracy, COUNCILWOMAN is essential viewing for Latinx, Immigrant, Political Science and Labor Studies courses.

DVD (English, Spanish, Color) / 2018 / 57 minutes

HOME TRUTH

By April Hayes and Katia Maguire

Filmed over the course of nine years, HOME TRUTH chronicles one family's pursuit of justice, shedding light on how our society responds to domestic violence and how the trauma from domestic violence tragedies can linger throughout generations.

In 1999, Colorado mother Jessica Gonzales experienced every parent's worst nightmare when her three young daughters were killed after being abducted by their father in violation of a domestic violence restraining order. Devastated, Jessica sued her local police department for failing to adequately enforce her restraining order despite her repeated calls for help that night. Determined to make sure her daughters did not die in vain, Jessica pursued her case to the US Supreme Court and an international human rights tribunal, seeking to strengthen legal rights for domestic violence victims. When her legal journey finally achieved widespread national change and she became an acclaimed activist, Jessica struggled to put her life and relationships back together.

DVD (Color) / 2018 / 72 minutes

LOVESICK

By Ann S. Kim & Priya Giri Desai

In India, where marriage is a must but AIDS carries a stigma, what are HIV-positive people to do?

After discovering India's first case of HIV in 1986, Dr. Suniti Solomon left a prestigious academic post to found India's premier HIV/AIDS clinic. Twenty-five years later, India now produces its own anti-retroviral medications, enabling Dr. Solomon's to patients live longer - and face the pressure to marry. At the age if seventy-two, and in the twilight of her bold and unconventional career, Dr. Solomon has taken on a new role: marriage matchmaker. Like other Indian matchmakers, Dr. Solomon matches by religion, education, and income; but she also matches by white blood cell counts and viral loads. For her, this isn't just about romance - it is a way to stem the spread of HIV and fight stigma.

LOVESICK interweaves Dr. Solomon's personal and professional journeys with the lives of two patients: Karthik, a reticent bachelor, and Manu who, like many women in India, was infected by her first husband. As Karthik and Manu search for love, they learn how to survive under the shadow of HIV. Shot over eight years and told with humor and compassion, LOVESICK is a surprising and hopeful story about the universal desire for love.

DVD (English, Tamil, Hindi, Color) / 2018 / 74 minutes

MARCELINE. A WOMAN. A CENTURY

By Cordelia Dvorak

MARCELINE. A WOMAN. A CENTURY is a fascinating portrait of the persevering French filmmaker, writer, and Holocaust survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens (1928-2018).

Marceline was only 15 when both she and her father, a Polish Jew from Lodz, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She survived but her father didn't, and Marceline had to find radical and unconventional ways to heal after the tragedies of the war. In 1961, she appeared in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's landmark film Chronicle of a Summer, which gave birth to the term cinema verite. Later she married the legendary Dutch documentary director Joris Ivens, traveled with him to Vietnam, and co-directed films such as 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War (1968) and How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976).

Filmed as she was nearing 90 years old and living in Paris, MARCELINE. A WOMAN. A CENTURY spans the broad arc of her life from Holocaust survivor to political activist to combatively critical filmmaker. Looking back on the momentous events she experienced and filmed such as the Algerian and Vietnam Wars and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, MARCELINE is a thought-provoking chronicle of a remarkable witness of the 20th century.

DVD (French, Color, Closed Captioned) / 2018 / 58 minutes

PRIMAS

By Laura Bari

PRIMAS is an evocative and poetic portrait of two Argentine teenage cousins who come of age together as they overcome the heinous acts of violence that interrupted their childhoods.

When Rocio was 10 years old, she was dragged from her bike by a stranger, raped, set on fire and left for dead. Now a teenager, she still grapples with memories of the nightmarish assault that left her body scarred. Together with her cousin Aldana, who was sexually abused for years by her own father, she lives, laughs and shares her story. Traveling through Argentina and Montreal, the two cousins embark upon a program of theater, dance, and circus that helps them process complex emotions. Little by little, they manage to rebuild the lives that were so brutally stolen from them and free themselves from the shadows of their past.

A humanistic exploration of familial love, creativity, and courage in the wake of sexual violence, PRIMAS is a moving tribute to the deep strength of resilient women.

DVD (Color, Spanish) / 2018 / 95 minutes

REST I MAKE UP, THE

By Michelle Memran

The visionary Cuban-American dramatist and educator Maria Irene Fornes spent her career constructing astonishing worlds onstage and teaching countless students how to connect with their imaginations. When she gradually stops writing due to dementia, an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran reignites her spontaneous creative spirit and triggers a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off.

The duo travels from New York to Havana, Miami to Seattle, exploring the playwright's remembered past and their shared present. Theater luminaries such as Edward Albee, Ellen Stewart, Lanford Wilson, and others weigh in on Fornes's important contributions. What began as an accidental collaboration becomes a story of love, creativity, and connection that persists even in the face of forgetting.

DVD (Color) / 2018 / 79 minutes

THOUSAND GIRLS LIKE ME, A

By Sahra Mani

A THOUSAND GIRLS LIKE ME is an awe-inspiring verite documentary that tells the story of a young Afghan woman's fight for justice after experiencing years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father.

Khatera Golzad was brutally raped by her father for thirteen years, resulting in numerous pregnancies, most of which ended in forced abortions. But two reached full term. Despite her many attempts to file charges, neither the Afghan police nor the legal system helped her. In 2014, she appeared on national television to publicly accuse her father, finally succeeding in bringing her case to court despite threats from male relatives and judges who labelled her a liar.

A THOUSAND GIRLS LIKE ME sheds light on the broken Afghan judicial system and the women it seldom protects. In a country where the systematic abuse of girls is rarely discussed, Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani presents a story of one woman's battle against cultural, familial, and legal pressures as she embarks on a mission to set a positive example for her daughter and other girls like her.

DVD (Color) / 2018 / 52 minutes

YOURS IN SISTERHOOD

By Irene Lusztig

YOURS IN SISTERHOOD is a performative, participatory documentary inspired by the breadth and complexity of letters that were sent in the 1970s to the editor of Ms.- America's first mainstream feminist magazine. The film documents hundreds of strangers from around the U.S. who were invited to read aloud and respond to these letters written by women, men and children from diverse backgrounds. Collectively, the letters feel like an encyclopedia of both the 70s and the women's movement- an almost literal invocation of the second-wave feminist slogan "the personal is political." The intimate, provocative, and sometimes heartbreaking conversations that emerge from these performances invite viewers to think about the past, present, and future of feminism.

DVD (Color) / 2018 / 101 minutes

BREAST ARCHIVES, THE

Director: Meagan Murphy

Real women reveal their breasts and uncover personal truths in this gently provocative documentary exploring embodiment, womanhood, and the power of being seen.

The Breast Archives features nine women's personal stories of empowerment. Baring their breasts and their hearts, the women share the unique journeys they've made with their bodies, from their formative years of hiding, shame, and disconnection to adulthood and the discovery of what it means to be a powerful woman. As the women slowly reconnect with their body-based stories they find a reservoir of strength and wisdom that lies within their breasts.

DVD / 2017 / 57 minutes

FEMINISTA: A JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF FEMINISM IN EUROPE

By Myriam Fougere

FEMINISTA is a lively and inspiring feminist road movie that explores the largely unrecognized yet hugely vibrant pan European feminist movement. Filmmaker Myriam Fougere joined an international group of young feminists who were traveling across twenty countries - from Turkey to Portugal, by the way of the Balkans, to Italy, Spain and Portugal - to make connections and unite forces with other women. She witnessed these determined activists participating in political gatherings, supporting homegrown local feminist struggles, exchanging strategies, and inventing new ways to resist and fight for change. Revealing how feminism is transmitted from one generation to another, FEMINISTA provides a rare glimpse into a widespread feminist groundswell movement, possibly one of the largest and unrecognized mass political movements that is very much alive and well throughout Europe today.

DVD (Color) / 2017 / 60 minutes

TRACKING EDITH

Director: Peter Stephan Jungk

When she wasn't working as a Soviet agent, she was taking photos of workers and street children in Vienna and London, documenting poverty and social deprivation. Being a secret agent doesn't seem to have come naturally to the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart. But she did manage to recruit Kim Philby, and act as one of the architects of the Cambridge Five, the Soviet Union's most successful spy ring in Great Britain.

Edith was director Peter Stephan Jungk's great aunt, his mother's cousin; in Tracking Edith he tries to unravel the truth about his great aunt's life - a spy with a conscience and hidden family secrets.

DVD / 2017 / 92 minutes

SPEED SISTERS

Director: Amber Fares

The Speed Sisters are the first all-woman race car driving team in the Middle East. Grabbing headlines and turning heads at improvised tracks across the West Bank, these five women have sped their way into the heart of the gritty, male-dominated Palestinian street car-racing scene. Weaving together their lives on and off the track, Speed Sisters takes you on a surprising journey into the drive to go further and faster than anyone thought you could.

DVD (Arabic and English with English subtitles) / 2016 / 80 minutes

HARPER LEE: FROM MOCKINGBIRD TO WATCHMAN

Director: Mary McDonagh Murphy

To everyone's surprise, fifty-five years after the publication of "To Kill a Mockingbird" Harper Lee is publishing another novel. "Go Set a Watchman" was written before Lee's beloved masterpiece, as director Mary McDonagh Murphy explains in this update of her 2011 documentary Hey Boo: Harper Lee and "To Kill a Mockingbird". Murphy's Harper Lee: From Mockingbird to Watchman brings the story up-to-date as it sifts through the facts and speculation surrounding Lee and both her novels, and includes interviews with Lee's older sister, close friends, and literary admirers, from Oprah Winfrey to Wally Lamb.

DVD / 2015 / 82 minutes

ALTINA

Director: Peter Sanders

Altina is the provocative portrait of an American trendsetter whose free spirit defied convention. A woman ahead of her time, Altina Schinasi was born in 1907 in New York City; the daughter of a tobacco tycoon and decedent of Sephardic Jews, she upended the expectations that accompanied her position. Altina was a paradox: simultaneously seductive and reserved, her genteel upbringing was in sharp contrast to the bold sexuality of her art and her life.

In addition to creating whimsical works of art and sculpture, Altina invented the glamorous Harlequin 'cat's-eye' eyeglasses, worn by the likes of Lucille Ball and Peggy Guggenheim, and as well directed an Oscar-nominated documentary about Nazi brutality told through the drawings of German expressionist artist George Grosz. Altina's life was anchored in the social and political issues of the time: helping Jewish refugees escape the Holocaust; providing aid and shelter to friends who were targeted by Joseph McCarthy's Un-American Activities campaign; and being involved early on in the struggles of Martin Luther King Jr.

Directed by her grandson Peter Sanders, the film captures this unpredictable woman whose bold, uninhibited passion for life is an inspiration for all.

DVD / 2014 / 80 minutes

I AM FEMEN

Director: Alain Margot

They are known around the world as the topless female activists who fight corrupt and patriarchal political systems. Their weapon of choice is their bodies- which they place front and center in protests around the streets of Kiev, where the group began, and all across Europe.

Oksana Shachko is FEMEN's creative backbone. As a teenager, her fascination with religious painting led her to consider entering a convent, but in the end she used her many talents to create FEMEN and devoted herself to a life of activism.

With I am FEMEN, director Alain Margot paints a portrait of the bewitching and many-faceted Oksana, while also revealing the stories of the brave young women around her who put their bodies on the front line in the fight for justice and equality.

DVD (Russian and French with English Subtitles) / 2014 / 94 minutes

ANITA: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

Director: Freida Mock

An entire country watched transfixed as a poised, beautiful African-American woman in a blue dress sat before a Senate committee of 14 white men and with a clear, unwavering voice recounted the repeated acts of sexual harassment she had endured while working with U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. That October day in 1991 Anita Hill, a bookish law professor from Oklahoma, was thrust onto the world stage and instantly became a celebrated, hated, venerated, and divisive figure. She has become an American icon, empowering millions of women and men around the world to stand up for equality and justice.

Against a backdrop of sex, politics, and race, ANITA reveals the intimate story of a woman who spoke truth to power. Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Freida Mock, the film is both a celebration of Anita Hill's legacy and a rare glimpse into her private life with friends and family, many of whom were by her side that fateful day 22 years ago. Anita Hill courageously speaks openly and intimately for the first time about her experiences that led her to testify before the Senate and the obstacles she faced in simply telling the truth. Anita Hill's graphic testimony was a turning point for gender equality in the U.S. and ignited a political firestorm about sexual misconduct and power in the workplace that resonates still today.

DVD / 2013 / 77 minutes

HALF THE ROAD

Director: Kathryn Bertine

Half the Road is a documentary film that explores the world of women's professional cycling, focusing on both the love of the sport and the pressing issues of inequality that modern-day female riders face in a male dominated sport. With footage from some of the world's top UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) races to interviews with Olympians, World Champions, coaches, and managers, Half the Road offers a unique insight into the drive, dedication and passion it takes for a female cyclist to thrive.

The documentary highlights significant inequalities that separate men's and women's professional cycling including: shorter race's than men's events, lower prize money granted to female winners, a lack of union or standardized salary to support female pros, factors which limit the length and success of professional female cyclist's careers. These institutionalized pitfalls demonstrate the shortcomings of Title IX and similar legislation and explores how women can achieve equality, support, and equal pay with their male cycling counterparts.

DVD / 2013 / 106 minutes

MERCEDES SOSA: THE VOICE OF LATIN AMERICA

Director: Rodrigo H. Vila

In 1960s, prior to her fame and international acclaim, Mercedes Sosa defied expectations by drafting, together with four other young musicians, the "Manifesto del Nuevo Cancionero" ("The New Songbook Manifesto"). How did this manifesto make an impact on youth culture in Argentina and future generations of Latin Americans? How much did the "Nuevo Cancionero" influence the development of the "Nueva Trova Cubana," the folk-music revolution driven by its message of social and political change? How did Sosa's ideology affect the politics of both emerging and developed countries? Apart from the millions of records she sold, the thousands of international concerts, her countless fans and detractors, Mercedes Sosa left behind an indelible legacy, an ideal that has not become a reality yet but which keeps pushing forward. Mercedes Sosa, The Voice of Latin America is an intimate and informative journey into the world of a ground-breaking artist and activist.

DVD (English, Spanish, Portuguese and French with English Subtitles) / 2013 / 93 minutes

PINK RIBBONS, INC.

Director: Lea Pool

The ubiquitous pink ribbons of breast cancer philanthropy - and the hand-in-hand marketing of brands and products associated with that philanthropy - permeates our culture, providing assurance that we are engaged in a successful battle against this insidious disease. But the campaign obscures the reality and facts of breast cancer - more and more women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year, and face the same treatment options they did 40 years ago. Yet women are also the most influential market group, buying 80 percent of consumer products and making most major household purchasing decisions. So then who really benefits from the pink ribbon campaigns - the cause or the company? And what if the very companies and products that profit from their association have actually contributed to the problem?

In showing the real story of breast cancer and the lives of those who fight it, Pink Ribbons, Inc. reveals the co-opting of what marketing experts have labeled a "dream cause."

DVD-R / 2012 / 98 minutes

GIRL MODEL

Directors: David Redmon & Ashley Sabin

Despite a lack of obvious similarities between Siberia and Tokyo, a thriving model industry connects these distant regions. Girl Model follows two protagonists involved in this industry: Ashley, a deeply ambivalent model scout who scours the Siberian countryside looking for fresh faces to send to the Japanese market, and one of her discoveries, Nadya, a 13-year-old plucked from her rustic home in Russia and dropped into the center of bustling Tokyo with promises of a profitable career. After Ashley's initial discovery of Nadya, they rarely meet again, but their stories are inextricably bound. As Nadya's optimism about rescuing her family from financial hardship grows, her dreams contrast against Ashley's more jaded outlook about the industry's corrosive influence.

DVD-R (English, Japanese and Russian with English Subtitles) / 2011 / 77 minutes

OUR CITY DREAMS

Director: Chiara Clemente

Chiara Clemente's affecting documentary strings together the self-told narrative of five women artists of all ages, each of whom has a passion for making art inseparable from her devotion to New York. Swoon, the youngest, exhibits cut-outs directly on city walls and subways, and exudes idealism and energy while carrying a two by four the way some women would a briefcase. Cairo-born Ghada Amer mixes media - embroidering with painting - to confront sexual taboos that cross cultural boundaries. After experiencing The New York Dolls in San Francisco, Kiki Smith realized she needed the energy of the city to create her paintings and sculptures. Marina Abramovic, originally of Belgrade, is a performance art pioneer who often uses her own body as a canvas. And Nancy Spero returned from Paris with artist-husband Leon Golub in 1964, to meld art and activism during the Vietnam War and become, in her own words, "a woman warrior."

DVD / 2008 / 87 minutes

http://www.learningemall.com/News/Women_1908.html

[aabany-group]

NAPABA Leads 43 APA Bar Associations in Ninth Circuit Amicus Brief to Continue Fight in First Legal Challenge to President’s Revised Muslim and Refugee Ban

News Release

For Immediate Release April 21, 2017

For More Information, Contact: Brett Schuster, Communications Manager [email protected], 202-775-9555

WASHINGTON — The National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) led 43 of its national associate and affiliate bar associations in filing an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to support the preliminary injunction of President Trump’s March 6, 2017, revised executive order barring refugees and individuals from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

The Trump Administration’s appeal in this case, State of Hawaii v. Trump, arises from the first legal challenge to the revised executive order, which was brought on March 7, 2017, on behalf of the State and Ismail Elshikh, Imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii. NAPABA filed an amicus brief on March 12 supporting the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order. On March 15, Judge Derrick K. Watson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii granted the temporary restraining order, which he converted into a preliminary injunction on March 29 to extend the block on the travel and refugee restrictions. The U.S. district court in Maryland has also enjoined the six-country visa ban, and the Administration’s appeal in that case is pending in the Fourth Circuit, where NAPABA filed an amicus brief on April 19.

“Having challenged the revised executive order from this initial lawsuit, NAPABA is proud of the growing momentum across our national network as we continue our advocacy in the courts,” said NAPABA President Cyndie M. Chang. “As leaders in the legal profession and as Asian Pacific Americans whose communities have experienced the harms of exclusionary laws, NAPABA has an imperative to stand against this unlawful anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant order.” 

NAPABA’s amicus brief describes decades of statutory exclusion of citizens of Asian and Pacific Island countries under early U.S. immigration law, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — the first federal law to ban a group of people on the basis of their race. The Civil Rights Era marked a dramatic turning point that saw Congress dismantle nationality-based discrimination with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The brief explains that presidential discretion in the area of immigration and refugee admission, while broad, is limited by statute. NAPABA argues that President Trump’s revised order, with its anti-Muslim underpinnings, violates the unambiguous prohibition on discrimination established by Congress.

NAPABA recognizes lead pro bono counsel, James W. Kim, a NAPABA member and partner at McDermott Will & Emery LLP, in Washington, D.C., Mr. Kim’s team (including Andrew Genz, Philip Levine, Joshua Rogaczewski, Matthew Girgenti, and Michael Stanek), and NAPABA Amicus Committee co-chairs, Professor Radha Pathak of Whittier Law School and Albert Giang, a partner at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP in Los Angeles, for their leadership drafting the brief, which also involved the efforts of NAPABA staffers.

The Ninth Circuit will hear the case on May 15, 2017, in Seattle.

NAPABA’s brief was endorsed by:

Arizona Asian American Bar Association              

Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area              

Asian American Bar Association of Greater Chicago              

Asian American Bar Association of New York              

Asian American Bar Association of Ohio              

Asian American Criminal Trial Lawyers Association              

Asian American Lawyers Association of Massachusetts              

Asian Bar Association of Washington              

Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Central Ohio              

Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Los Angeles County              

Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Pennsylvania              

Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Silicon Valley              

Asian Pacific American Bar Association of South Florida              

Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Tampa Bay              

Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Virginia              

Asian Pacific American Lawyers Association of New Jersey              

Asian Pacific American Women Lawyers Alliance              

Asian/Pacific Bar Association of Sacramento              

Austin Asian American Bar Association              

Chinese American Bar Association of Greater Chicago              

Connecticut Asian Pacific American Bar Association              

Filipino American Lawyers Association of Chicago              

Filipino American Lawyers of San Diego              

Filipino Bar Association of Northern California              

Japanese American Bar Association              

Korean American Bar Association of Chicago              

Korean American Bar Association of Northern California              

Korean American Bar Association of Southern California              

Korean-American Bar Association for the Washington, DC Area              

Korean American Lawyers Association of Greater New York              

Michigan Asian Pacific American Bar Association              

Minnesota Asian Pacific American Bar Association              

Missouri Asian American Bar Association              

National Asian Pacific American Bar Association – Hawaii Chapter   

National Filipino American Lawyers Association              

Orange County Asian American Bar Association              

South Asian Bar Association of Chicago              

South Asian Bar Association of Northern California              

South Asian Bar Association of Southern California              

South Asian Bar Association of Washington              

Southern California Chinese Lawyers Association              

Tennessee Asian Pacific American Bar Association              

Thai American Bar Association          ----

Read the amicus brief here.

Read NAPABA’s amicus brief in the district court in State of Hawai‘i v. Trump.

Read NAPABA’s amicus brief the parallel Fourth Circuit case, International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump.

Read the March 6, 2017, statement of NAPABA and the South Asian Bar Association – North America, joined by 14 affiliates, against the revised executive order.

For more information, the media may contact Brett Schuster, NAPABA communications manager, at 202-775-9555 or [email protected].

The National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) is the national association of Asian Pacific American attorneys, judges, law professors, and law students. NAPABA represents the interests of almost 50,000 attorneys and approximately 75 national, state, and local Asian Pacific American bar associations. Its members include solo practitioners, large firm lawyers, corporate counsel, legal services and non-profit attorneys, and lawyers serving at all levels of government.

NAPABA continues to be a leader in addressing civil rights issues confronting Asian Pacific American communities. Through its national network of committees and affiliates, NAPABA provides a strong voice for increased diversity of the federal and state judiciaries, advocates for equal opportunity in the workplace, works to eliminate hate crimes and anti-immigrant sentiment, and promotes the professional development of people of color in the legal profession.

To learn more about NAPABA, visit www.napaba.org, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter (@NAPABA).

National Asian Pacific American Bar Association | 1612 K St. NW, Suite 510 | Washington, D.C. 20006 | www.napaba.org

#napaba #press release #ninth circuit #muslim ban #refugee ban #amicus brief

[vincentvelour]

Global Glance: March 6, 2017

Global Glance: March 6, 2017

3/6/2017

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        A quick look at intriguing international stories

By John Bostwick, Managing Editor, Radius

Is Donald Trump Damaging the US Higher Ed Cash Cow?

Less than a week after US voters elected Donald Trump president, the Institute of International Education (IIE) published its annual Open Doors report, which collects information on international students in the United States. The report’s statistics show a growing international-student presence in the US higher-education system. Some professors, administrators and students worry, however, that a Trump White House is already reversing this trend.

Much of Trump’s rhetoric during and after his campaign has emphasized the importance tightening US immigration restrictions and, more generally, placing Americans’ interests above those of other citizens. The following passage from his inaugural address neatly captures his program: “Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

The tone of that speech was bleak, with Trump citing (among other elements of what he called ongoing “American carnage”) that the US has “an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge.”

The IIE Open Doors report speaks, perhaps, to a different reality as regards the US education system. US higher education is in fact a highly successful, attractive and significant element of the country’s economy. The IIE study indicates that last year the number of international students enrolled in US higher ed institutions exceeded one million for the first time ever, and represented a 7 percent rise over the previous academic year.

Last year’s numbers aren’t aberrations. The IIE report says that the 2015/16 academic year is the tenth consecutive year of growth for international students in the US and that “there are now 85 percent more international students studying at US colleges and universities than were reported a decade ago.”

While those numbers are significant, it’s worth noting that even at over one million people, international students make up only about 5 percent of the total number of students enrolled in US colleges and universities. In other words, international students don’t take up a major portion of slots that might otherwise go to US citizens.

Institutions are of course aware of the need to achieve geographically and culturally balanced student bodies. I happened to take a tour of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst last month, and the guide there noted without prompting that although UMass has a large, growing and valued population of international students, the university has not decreased the number of domestic students it lets in. (Obviously, total enrollment has increased to allow for this.) For its part, the IIE report notes that in previous years there has been only “a small decline in the number of American students enrolled in US higher education.”

International students here generally pay full freight, helping subsidize the educations of many US students.Tweet this

Recruiting prospects from other countries for their varied intellectual talents and cultural perspectives is all good, but there’s another significant reason US higher-ed institutions are welcoming more and more international students: their money. The IIE report explains that “international students contributed more than $35 billion to the US economy in 2015, according to the US Department of Commerce — a large increase over the previous year’s total of $31 billion.” It adds that “about 75 percent of all international students receive the majority of their funds from sources outside of the United States.” In other words, international students generally pay full freight, in effect helping subsidize the educations of many US students who receive scholarships and financial aid.

Numerous articles in the run-up to last November’s election noted that Trump’s campaign rhetoric troubled international students inside the US and prospective students abroad. A US News article, for example, cited a survey of 7,000 prospective international students who were asked about studying in the US after a (then-hypothetical) Trump victory. While about a third of the respondents from China and Russia said they’d be “more likely to consider studying in the US after the election,” three times as many respondents from the Middle East “said they were less likely to study in the US than more likely to.”

President Trump took swift action on immigration once in office, issuing an executive order in January banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. Less than a week after the order, USA Today reported that some international students had “already been detained from re-entering the US.” That article notes that, based on Department of Homeland Security stats related to F1 and M1 student visas, “there are 23,763 international students studying in the US affected by the travel ban.” Over half of that total — nearly 15,000 students — come from Iran. Based on the Homeland Security numbers, lost revenue (i.e., lost tuition, fees and other expenses) from the ban could top $700 million dollars.

Those lost revenues only represent the possible direct costs to US institutions that could result from Trump’s travel ban. The ban, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and other measures (such as the proposed wall along the Mexico-US border) could dissuade international students from non-banned countries from staying in or enrolling in US institutions.

Such a scenario would not just affect the bottom lines of higher-education institutions. A Bloomberg article explains that university presidents fear a significant loss of international students could “disrupt the talent pipeline” in the US workforce and “curb economic growth.” A Seton Hall professor of higher education is quoted in the article as saying, “These are very financially desirable students. … These tend to be people who earn quite a bit of money, come up with new innovations, and they tend to pay a lot of taxes.”

Last Wednesday, the White House revised the January 27 executive order, lifting the travel ban on citizens from one of the countries (Iraq). The dropping of one country — which happens to be a US ally in the fight against global terrorism — is presumably a step in the right direction as far as international students are concerned. But The Washington Post reports that “when it is signed … the order is still expected to include a host of significant changes,” further muddling the situation and presumably causing unease among the international-student community. Moreover, according to statistics from the USA Today article, students from Iraq make up less than 5 percent of the total students from the seven nations that appeared on the original executive order.

It would be a mistake to assume that prospective students outside the US are not paying attention to Trump’s policies and how they might affect their lives, not only as students but (perhaps more importantly) as potential US-based workers who will need visas. The Chicago Tribune interviewed Dayna Crabb, an international recruiter at a US junior college who visited Vietnam prior to the US election. Prospective students in the Asian nation grilled Crabb on which US candidate she supported. Crabb later told the Tribune: “That was alarming for us as recruitment professionals to see that it's impacting their decisions that much. ... These girls said they would race home after school to put on the news or watch what happened at the debates. I felt like these high school students in other countries probably were more in tune with what was going on than even our own local students.”

A Northwestern University student from China quoted by the Tribune confirms that “even the perception of being inhospitable to immigrants could make foreign applicants jittery.” According to IIE, China has over 300,000 citizens studying in US higher-ed institutions, by far the highest from any one nation, nearly twice as many as India, the next country on the list.

An article published in PRI.org last month quotes a former US Treasury official as saying, “There’s no question that higher education is one of the most important US exports to China.” Another expert quoted observes that, “If a real trade war did erupt, and things became very, very contentious, Chinese students could become a target of the Chinese government.” That article goes on to say that economists are predicting that “Trump’s trade rhetoric could convince foreign students to seek degrees in other English-speaking countries like Canada and Australia.”

Some experts quoted in the articles cited here are optimistic that the US higher education system will emerge more or less unscathed after Trump’s presidency. But there’s little doubt that the current White House has already started to diminish the global appeal of a highly profitable and respected sector of the US economy.

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[itsfinancethings]

At the farthest edge of Hong Kong, where suburban foothills descend into a riverine border with China, a lone sentry shoos away traffic. The checkpoint, his gestures and the line of U-turning vehicles indicate, is closed.

Behind him towers the glass and concrete skyline of Shenzhen—the nearest Chinese city to Hong Kong. Without the usual throng of travelers, buses and hawkers here at Lo Wu station, the only noise comes from water buffalo grunting across the tracks.

This and nine other border crossings were recently shut in a bid to contain the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus, COVID-19, that emerged in the central Chinese metropolis of Wuhan, wreaking havoc on the mainland and spreading far beyond.

In Hong Kong, the symbolically charged boundary with the mainland has become yet another font of militant unrest after months of anti-government protest. Residents in this semi-autonomous enclave—which the British handed back to China in 1997—insist the whole thing must be sealed. A suspected bombing campaign appeared to be an attempt to pressure the government into doing just that. Nobody was injured, but the spate of homemade explosives, planted at a hospital, a public toilet and Lo Wu station, took “one big step closer to terrorism,” police said earlier this month.

Beyond the looming health scare, this latest fight to control the people, pathogens and ideas that cross the border reflects the same deep distrust of the Chinese Communist Party that exploded during the recent protests. It also exposes a dirty secret that many protesters and their supporters try to downplay: how easily antipathy toward the party translates into resentment of ordinary mainland Chinese.

Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in recent years has fueled outrage against perceived encroachment. It has also helped catalyze a distinct Hong Kong identity—one rooted in defending the territory’s unique freedoms against an influx of mainland money, people and power. “Hong Kong is not China” has become a rallying cry throughout the city, sprayed onto walls and chanted at protests. Anger extends to anything identified with China: emblems, businesses and even people.

Long distrusted as agents of demographic, socioeconomic and even political occupation, mainlanders are now feared as vectors of disease, emboldening a bigotry that increasingly spills into violence.

“As long as the epidemic keeps worsening, people will at the back of their minds blame the mainlanders and think, ‘After all, it’s the mainlanders who started all this,’” says Willy Lam, an expert in Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images This photo taken in Hong Kong on Feb. 6, 2020, shows the border fence with Shenzhen, China (background), near Lo Wu station.

Read more: The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Derail Xi Jinping’s Dreams of a Chinese Century

A nightmare relived

In Asia’s financial center, where more than 60 cases have been recorded compared to the mainland’s 75,000, anxiety is compounded by memories of another nightmare. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) traumatized the city in 2003, claiming 299 lives. Then, Hong Kong was in the middle of the outbreak. Now, the epicenter lies about 600 miles away.

Yet the cosmopolitan hub of 7.5 million resembles a city in lockdown. Restaurants, shopping malls and public transportation are largely deserted as people work from home and schools are closed. Medical masks are in such short supply that lines hundreds long form beside pharmacies rumored to have stock. Runs on toilet paper, bleach and rice have denuded grocery store shelves.

After months of bitter protests, lack of confidence in the government runs deep. Panic is “spreading faster than the virus because the government is not acting in an efficient manner,” says Dr. Ho Pak Leung, a microbiologist and director of the Centre for Infection at the University of Hong Kong.

Union members, democracy activists and even pro-establishment politicians have joined together in calling for the border’s closure. Striking medical workers have threatened to quit en masse. Hong Kong’s embattled leader, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, rejected sealing the border as impractical and discriminatory but eventually agreed to shut all but three checkpoints and impose a mandatory, 14-day quarantine for anyone entering from the mainland. The measures are unprecedented but not enough to the many who fear that contagion will overtake Hong Kong and mainland patients will sap its medical reserves.

“We have to protect our own people first,” says Ng, a patient care assistant who joined the recent strike. “If our medical system goes down, then there will be no one to help Hongkongers.”

With the border still partially open, some have taken it upon themselves to enforce their own restrictions. Several restaurants refuse to serve speakers of Mandarin (the official language of the mainland, unlike Hong Kong where Cantonese dominates). Some hotels require certificates of health from mainland guests, and a student from Hubei told local media that mainlanders quarantined at a university were doxxed.

Read more: The Pandemic of Xenophobia and Scapegoating

Yet experts have warned that the draconian travel bans adopted by much of the world may only divert vital resources from public health tasks and inflame Sinophobia.

“I don’t see any public health reason to justify sealing of borders at this point in the outbreak,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images Medical workers wearing protective masks gather during a protest outside the Hospital Authority’s head office in Hong Kong, China, on Feb. 4, 2020. P

A fraught boundary

Beyond the public health debate, the push to seal the border brims with political subtext.

With its riverbanks, barbed wire fences, passport checks and a compact no-man’s land, the 25-mile perimeter sets Hong Kong apart from the rest of China, designating it as a place where the laws of the mainland do not apply.

A colonial relic, the boundary follows the same line as it did under the British. Their efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to reinforce the border and maintain a stable population—after the influx of refugees in previous decades—transformed the territory. Once a temporary sanctuary for those fleeing famine and political instability, it became a settled homebase with a specific local identity, anthropologist Ip Iam-chong writes in “Politics of Belonging: a study of the campaign against mainland visitors in Hong Kong.”

After Hong Kong retroceded to China in 1997, the border served as a “firewall” protecting the city’s autonomy, says Jeffrey Twu, who researches border conflicts and nationalist movements at Columbia University.

“This call to shut down the border is not so much about asking the government to literally close all the immigration booths. It’s really this urgent call for the government to rethink its relation vis-à-vis the central government in Beijing,” he says.

But the increasing permeability of the border in recent years has exacerbated the fears of local activists that Hong Kong, with the British gone, will become just another Chinese city. After Beijing loosened restrictions on travel in 2003, mainland visitors provided an economic lifeline for Hong Kong’s SARS-bruised economy, filling hotel rooms, restaurants, malls and boutiques. But as visitor numbers swelled from 7 million in 2002 to 51 million in 2018—nearly seven times the city’s population—resentment grew.

Increasingly, the economy catered to the needs of deep-pocketed Chinese day-trippers, who were accused of everything from congesting the streets to allowing their children to defecate in public. “Many of them are very rude,” Isaac Au, a 30-year-old Hongkonger, says of mainlanders in what are fairly common sentiments. “When they are rich they think that they can just spend money and they are the kings of the world.”

Birth tourism, competition for college spots and the growing use of Mandarin has also irritated locals. Conspicuous consumption by mainland shoppers—some estimates say the city accounts for up to 10% of the $285 billion annual global sales of luxury goods—has exacerbated the sense that many Hongkongers are being priced out of their own city. So has the influx of mainland money into the local property market, already one of the world’s most expensive.

Beijing has attempted to boost territorial integration through massive infrastructure projects. A high-speed railway that directly connected Hong Kong to 58 mainland cities, and brought the Chinese capital Beijing within nine hours’ reach, opened in 2018. So did a $18.8 billion bridge linking Hong Kong to the former Portuguese colony of Macau and the mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai.

Attempts were made to foster cultural assimilation too—like a 2012 campaign to introduce “patriotic education” in Hong Kong schools. But that initiative fueled bitter protests and China’s growing has proximity left Hongkongers cold. According to an annual survey by the Hong Kong University Public Opinion Program, Hongkongers’ sense of being Chinese hit an all-time low in 2019. Among 18 to 29 year olds, 75 percent identified as “Hong Kong” rather than Chinese, while 49 percent of those 30 or older felt the same.

Kyle Lam/Bloomberg via Getty Images Graffiti reading “Hong Kong Is Not China” is displayed on the wall of a highway during a protest in the Central district of Hong Kong, China, on July 21, 2019.

Escalating violence

This simmering angst has regularly burst into xenophobia. In 2012, a local newspaper ad infamously depicted mainland Chinese as locusts draining the city of its resources and “locusts” has since stuck as a derogatory name for mainlanders. Nativist groups sprang up, pledging to defend their home. One, Hong Kong Indigenous, staged “reclaim” campaigns in 2015, targeting mainland shoppers.

The initially fringe cause found far wider support during the recent pro-democracy protests, which morphed into a broad, ideological battle to both win greater political freedoms and preserve Hong Kong’s special identity. “Reclaim Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Time,” the movement’s defining credo, was coined by jailed activist Edward Leung, a former member of Hong Kong Indigenous. (Ironically, Leung, who argued for tighter borders and even full independence, was born in Wuhan.)

After adopting Leung’s clarion call, some protesters also embraced his advocacy of more militant tactics. Violence, once dismissed as extreme, has become largely accepted as the only way to pressure a sclerotic regime because of the lack of other viable outlets.

Samson Yuen, an expert on social movements at Lingnan University says that, in Hong Kong, people cannot directly elect their leader or legislature, yet are deeply fearful of falling under authoritarian Beijing’s control. “It’s really a symptom of how ill the whole political situation is,” he says. “If there was democracy, people wouldn’t be throwing petrol bombs on the street.”

Coronavirus is just the latest trigger. At a protest-aligned restaurant in the buzzing shopping and entertainment district of Tsim Sha Tsui, diners say they feel more comfortable now that Mandarin-speakers are barred from the establishment. The entrance is covered with pastel-colored Post-It notes expressing support for Hong Kong’s autonomy and exhorting fellow customers to “stay healthy.” People wait in line for a table, even as neighboring eateries sit empty.

“Hongkongers don’t have a choice about our government, about our freedom. But for eating at least, we do,” says Keith, a 33-year-old patron.

And while coronavirus paranoia is certainly not unique to the city, the outbreak provides yet another vehicle for Hongkongers to distinguish themselves from mainland Chinese.

“I blame China for it,” says 23-year-old Karmen, echoing old prejudices. “They eat everything there. We don’t do that.”

This “racialization” says Andrew Junker, a sociologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, could prove dangerous amid the violent protest tactics that have become normalized in recent months.

“The dehumanization of the mainland Chinese makes it easier to engage in violence and to believe in an IRA-style separatist ideology and militantism,” he says, referring to the Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary organization that waged a terrorist campaign to drive the British out of Northern Ireland until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended most of the conflict.

It seems like a long way from the once troubled streets of Belfast to Lo Wu station. But two homemade explosive devices were found there on Feb. 2; shortly afterward, an anonymous message on social media threatened mainland Chinese arrivals.

“You come to our city to spread germs, but have you considered clearly if you would be able to continue living if you cross the border?” it said.

“I protect my city, [you are] welcome to personally experience the force of a bombing.”

— Additional reporting by Hillary Leung / Hong Kong

#IFTTT #Blogger

[itsfinancethings]

February 19, 2020 at 02:27AM

At the farthest edge of Hong Kong, where suburban foothills descend into a riverine border with China, a lone sentry shoos away traffic. The checkpoint, his gestures and the line of U-turning vehicles indicate, is closed.

Behind him towers the glass and concrete skyline of Shenzhen—the nearest Chinese city to Hong Kong. Without the usual throng of travelers, buses and hawkers here at Lo Wu station, the only noise comes from water buffalo grunting across the tracks.

This and nine other border crossings were recently shut in a bid to contain the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus, COVID-19, that emerged in the central Chinese metropolis of Wuhan, wreaking havoc on the mainland and spreading far beyond.

In Hong Kong, the symbolically charged boundary with the mainland has become yet another font of militant unrest after months of anti-government protest. Residents in this semi-autonomous enclave—which the British handed back to China in 1997—insist the whole thing must be sealed. A suspected bombing campaign appeared to be an attempt to pressure the government into doing just that. Nobody was injured, but the spate of homemade explosives, planted at a hospital, a public toilet and Lo Wu station, took “one big step closer to terrorism,” police said earlier this month.

Beyond the looming health scare, this latest fight to control the people, pathogens and ideas that cross the border reflects the same deep distrust of the Chinese Communist Party that exploded during the recent protests. It also exposes a dirty secret that many protesters and their supporters try to downplay: how easily antipathy toward the party translates into resentment of ordinary mainland Chinese.

Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in recent years has fueled outrage against perceived encroachment. It has also helped catalyze a distinct Hong Kong identity—one rooted in defending the territory’s unique freedoms against an influx of mainland money, people and power. “Hong Kong is not China” has become a rallying cry throughout the city, sprayed onto walls and chanted at protests. Anger extends to anything identified with China: emblems, businesses and even people.

Long distrusted as agents of demographic, socioeconomic and even political occupation, mainlanders are now feared as vectors of disease, emboldening a bigotry that increasingly spills into violence.

“As long as the epidemic keeps worsening, people will at the back of their minds blame the mainlanders and think, ‘After all, it’s the mainlanders who started all this,’” says Willy Lam, an expert in Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images This photo taken in Hong Kong on Feb. 6, 2020, shows the border fence with Shenzhen, China (background), near Lo Wu station.

Read more: The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Derail Xi Jinping’s Dreams of a Chinese Century

A nightmare relived

In Asia’s financial center, where more than 60 cases have been recorded compared to the mainland’s 75,000, anxiety is compounded by memories of another nightmare. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) traumatized the city in 2003, claiming 299 lives. Then, Hong Kong was in the middle of the outbreak. Now, the epicenter lies about 600 miles away.

Yet the cosmopolitan hub of 7.5 million resembles a city in lockdown. Restaurants, shopping malls and public transportation are largely deserted as people work from home and schools are closed. Medical masks are in such short supply that lines hundreds long form beside pharmacies rumored to have stock. Runs on toilet paper, bleach and rice have denuded grocery store shelves.

After months of bitter protests, lack of confidence in the government runs deep. Panic is “spreading faster than the virus because the government is not acting in an efficient manner,” says Dr. Ho Pak Leung, a microbiologist and director of the Centre for Infection at the University of Hong Kong.

Union members, democracy activists and even pro-establishment politicians have joined together in calling for the border’s closure. Striking medical workers have threatened to quit en masse. Hong Kong’s embattled leader, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, rejected sealing the border as impractical and discriminatory but eventually agreed to shut all but three checkpoints and impose a mandatory, 14-day quarantine for anyone entering from the mainland. The measures are unprecedented but not enough to the many who fear that contagion will overtake Hong Kong and mainland patients will sap its medical reserves.

“We have to protect our own people first,” says Ng, a patient care assistant who joined the recent strike. “If our medical system goes down, then there will be no one to help Hongkongers.”

With the border still partially open, some have taken it upon themselves to enforce their own restrictions. Several restaurants refuse to serve speakers of Mandarin (the official language of the mainland, unlike Hong Kong where Cantonese dominates). Some hotels require certificates of health from mainland guests, and a student from Hubei told local media that mainlanders quarantined at a university were doxxed.

Read more: The Pandemic of Xenophobia and Scapegoating

Yet experts have warned that the draconian travel bans adopted by much of the world may only divert vital resources from public health tasks and inflame Sinophobia.

“I don’t see any public health reason to justify sealing of borders at this point in the outbreak,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images Medical workers wearing protective masks gather during a protest outside the Hospital Authority’s head office in Hong Kong, China, on Feb. 4, 2020. P

A fraught boundary

Beyond the public health debate, the push to seal the border brims with political subtext.

With its riverbanks, barbed wire fences, passport checks and a compact no-man’s land, the 25-mile perimeter sets Hong Kong apart from the rest of China, designating it as a place where the laws of the mainland do not apply.

A colonial relic, the boundary follows the same line as it did under the British. Their efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to reinforce the border and maintain a stable population—after the influx of refugees in previous decades—transformed the territory. Once a temporary sanctuary for those fleeing famine and political instability, it became a settled homebase with a specific local identity, anthropologist Ip Iam-chong writes in “Politics of Belonging: a study of the campaign against mainland visitors in Hong Kong.”

After Hong Kong retroceded to China in 1997, the border served as a “firewall” protecting the city’s autonomy, says Jeffrey Twu, who researches border conflicts and nationalist movements at Columbia University.

“This call to shut down the border is not so much about asking the government to literally close all the immigration booths. It’s really this urgent call for the government to rethink its relation vis-à-vis the central government in Beijing,” he says.

But the increasing permeability of the border in recent years has exacerbated the fears of local activists that Hong Kong, with the British gone, will become just another Chinese city. After Beijing loosened restrictions on travel in 2003, mainland visitors provided an economic lifeline for Hong Kong’s SARS-bruised economy, filling hotel rooms, restaurants, malls and boutiques. But as visitor numbers swelled from 7 million in 2002 to 51 million in 2018—nearly seven times the city’s population—resentment grew.

Increasingly, the economy catered to the needs of deep-pocketed Chinese day-trippers, who were accused of everything from congesting the streets to allowing their children to defecate in public. “Many of them are very rude,” Isaac Au, a 30-year-old Hongkonger, says of mainlanders in what are fairly common sentiments. “When they are rich they think that they can just spend money and they are the kings of the world.”

Birth tourism, competition for college spots and the growing use of Mandarin has also irritated locals. Conspicuous consumption by mainland shoppers—some estimates say the city accounts for up to 10% of the $285 billion annual global sales of luxury goods—has exacerbated the sense that many Hongkongers are being priced out of their own city. So has the influx of mainland money into the local property market, already one of the world’s most expensive.

Beijing has attempted to boost territorial integration through massive infrastructure projects. A high-speed railway that directly connected Hong Kong to 58 mainland cities, and brought the Chinese capital Beijing within nine hours’ reach, opened in 2018. So did a $18.8 billion bridge linking Hong Kong to the former Portuguese colony of Macau and the mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai.

Attempts were made to foster cultural assimilation too—like a 2012 campaign to introduce “patriotic education” in Hong Kong schools. But that initiative fueled bitter protests and China’s growing has proximity left Hongkongers cold. According to an annual survey by the Hong Kong University Public Opinion Program, Hongkongers’ sense of being Chinese hit an all-time low in 2019. Among 18 to 29 year olds, 75 percent identified as “Hong Kong” rather than Chinese, while 49 percent of those 30 or older felt the same.

Kyle Lam/Bloomberg via Getty Images Graffiti reading “Hong Kong Is Not China” is displayed on the wall of a highway during a protest in the Central district of Hong Kong, China, on July 21, 2019.

Escalating violence

This simmering angst has regularly burst into xenophobia. In 2012, a local newspaper ad infamously depicted mainland Chinese as locusts draining the city of its resources and “locusts” has since stuck as a derogatory name for mainlanders. Nativist groups sprang up, pledging to defend their home. One, Hong Kong Indigenous, staged “reclaim” campaigns in 2015, targeting mainland shoppers.

The initially fringe cause found far wider support during the recent pro-democracy protests, which morphed into a broad, ideological battle to both win greater political freedoms and preserve Hong Kong’s special identity. “Reclaim Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Time,” the movement’s defining credo, was coined by jailed activist Edward Leung, a former member of Hong Kong Indigenous. (Ironically, Leung, who argued for tighter borders and even full independence, was born in Wuhan.)

After adopting Leung’s clarion call, some protesters also embraced his advocacy of more militant tactics. Violence, once dismissed as extreme, has become largely accepted as the only way to pressure a sclerotic regime because of the lack of other viable outlets.

Samson Yuen, an expert on social movements at Lingnan University says that, in Hong Kong, people cannot directly elect their leader or legislature, yet are deeply fearful of falling under authoritarian Beijing’s control. “It’s really a symptom of how ill the whole political situation is,” he says. “If there was democracy, people wouldn’t be throwing petrol bombs on the street.”

Coronavirus is just the latest trigger. At a protest-aligned restaurant in the buzzing shopping and entertainment district of Tsim Sha Tsui, diners say they feel more comfortable now that Mandarin-speakers are barred from the establishment. The entrance is covered with pastel-colored Post-It notes expressing support for Hong Kong’s autonomy and exhorting fellow customers to “stay healthy.” People wait in line for a table, even as neighboring eateries sit empty.

“Hongkongers don’t have a choice about our government, about our freedom. But for eating at least, we do,” says Keith, a 33-year-old patron.

And while coronavirus paranoia is certainly not unique to the city, the outbreak provides yet another vehicle for Hongkongers to distinguish themselves from mainland Chinese.

“I blame China for it,” says 23-year-old Karmen, echoing old prejudices. “They eat everything there. We don’t do that.”

This “racialization” says Andrew Junker, a sociologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, could prove dangerous amid the violent protest tactics that have become normalized in recent months.

“The dehumanization of the mainland Chinese makes it easier to engage in violence and to believe in an IRA-style separatist ideology and militantism,” he says, referring to the Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary organization that waged a terrorist campaign to drive the British out of Northern Ireland until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended most of the conflict.

It seems like a long way from the once troubled streets of Belfast to Lo Wu station. But two homemade explosive devices were found there on Feb. 2; shortly afterward, an anonymous message on social media threatened mainland Chinese arrivals.

“You come to our city to spread germs, but have you considered clearly if you would be able to continue living if you cross the border?” it said.

“I protect my city, [you are] welcome to personally experience the force of a bombing.”

— Additional reporting by Hillary Leung / Hong Kong

#IFTTT #Blogger

[newstfionline]

Here Lies a Graveyard Where ‘East and West Came Together’

By Ian Johnson, NY Times, April 4, 2017

SINGAPORE--In the middle of this island nation of highways and high-rises lies a wrinkle in time: Bukit Brown, one of the world’s largest Chinese cemeteries.

Now neglected and overgrown, it offers an incredible array of tombstones, statues and shrines just four miles north of the downtown’s banks, malls and regional headquarters.

For years, the 213-acre site was a destination for Halloween thrill seekers and bird watchers, a haven of green in an overcrowded land. But in recent years it has become something much more powerful: a pilgrimage site for Singaporeans trying to reconnect with their country’s vanishing past.

That has put Bukit Brown at the center of an important social movement in a country that has rarely tolerated community activism--a battle between the state, which plans to level part of the cemetery, and a group of citizens dedicated to its preservation.

Surprisingly in a culture of relentless modernization, its advocates are scoring some successes in limiting damage to the cemetery and raising consciousness about the island’s colorful history.

Built in 1922, Bukit Brown was the final resting place for about 100,000 Singapore families until it was closed in 1972. Its importance is greater than its relatively recent 50-year history implies because many historic graves were relocated there from other cemeteries that were paved over.

Add in an abandoned cemetery next door for a prominent Chinese clan, and experts estimate that up to 200,000 graves are sprinkled amid the surrounding rain forests, including those of many of Singapore’s most famous citizens.

“You have to think of the cemetery as an amazing historical archive,” said Kenneth Dean, head of the Chinese studies department at the National University of Singapore. “But given how things have developed recently, I have deep concerns about how long it will survive.”

Those worries have to do with this city-state’s insatiable appetite for land. Singapore’s 5.7 million residents live on 277 square miles, a bit less than the area of New York City, but the land has to accommodate more than a municipality’s needs. It must hold the infrastructure of a country, including military bases, landfills, reservoirs, national parks, and one of the world’s busiest airports and harbors.

More than 20 percent of the country is built on reclaimed land, leading its two immediate neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia, to ban the export of sand to Singapore in order to protect their own land. And with plans calling for Singapore’s population to increase to 6.9 million by 2030, land is at a premium.

Part of the solution has been to look inward. In 2011, the government decided to smooth out a bend in the island’s north-south highway by cutting through Bukit Brown. Soon after, the government announced that within 40 years the rest would be paved over, too.

After watching many of their best-known monuments and neighborhoods leveled over the past decades, Singaporeans began to take action. At their center is an informal group of two dozen volunteers who call themselves “Brownies.” They offer free tours and run a website that details the cemetery’s history and includes testimonials by locals and visitors.

One of the first Brownies was Raymond Goh, 54, a pharmacist who used to lead Halloween tours around the cemetery. (As in many parts of the Chinese cultural world, Singapore is obsessed with ghost stories and ghoulish legends.) After a while, Mr. Goh began to read the inscriptions on the tombstones carefully and was surprised at the antiquity of the graves.

“I noticed a lot of graves looked very old and, in fact, that some were from the time of Raffles,” Mr. Goh said, referring to Singapore’s British colonial founder, Sir Stamford Raffles. “I wondered how come nobody told me this was here?”

When the government’s plans were announced in 2011, Mr. Goh and his brother Charles wondered how to save Bukit Brown. They began training other volunteers, including university professors familiar with the world of academic research, former journalists who help with public relations, and business people who provide community outreach and funding. In other words, it was a cross section of middle-class Singaporeans who felt nostalgic about the lost city of their youth and were eager to better understand their cultural roots.

Brownies have guided me through the site several times over the past few months, and I thought it was indeed a marvel. The lush vegetation made us feel cut off from the thriving modern city, while the tombstones were beautiful in their own right, even without explanations.

Some are like mini-fortresses, guarded by stone Chinese or British lions, or even Sikh soldiers. Others were decorated with Taoist and Confucian images and symbols. Some told of the dead person’s loyalty to a political party or a lost dynasty.

Thanks to the explanations by guides, I began to understand how this city-state was crucial to the British Empire’s Asian holdings.

We surveyed the enormous mausoleum of Ong Sam Leong, a supplier of labor to the Christmas Islands, who died in 1917 and whose grave was relocated here. I also saw the grave of Tan Kim Cheng, who married Anna to the King of Siam, and those of revolutionaries who supported Sun Yat-sen when he was plotting the ultimately successful downfall of China’s last dynasty.

Many of the tombs were decorated with the distinctive tiles used by longtime Chinese immigrants to these regions, while others showed the strong influence of Malayan culture.

In terms of trees and wildlife, Bukit Brown evoked London’s Highgate Cemetery; as a retreat from daily life it felt like Green-Wood in Brooklyn; and as record of one country’s famous people it recalled Père Lachaise in Paris or Buenos Aires’s Cementerio de la Recoleta.

For Professor Dean, these tombstones show the rich links between Southeast Asia and specific regions of China. Under his direction, a team of researchers is entering data from the gravestones into databases, allowing the development of maps showing how clans and villages migrated from coastal China to these faraway shores.

Recently, one of Professor Dean’s projects received government financing. Although officials refused numerous telephone and fax requests for interviews about the cemetery, they seem to be coming around to understanding its importance.

Already, the government has yielded to some of the Brownies’ demands. Originally, 5,000 graves were to be moved, but that number has been reduced to 3,700. And instead of pulverizing the tombstones, they are being cataloged and stored in a warehouse. In addition, the government has set up a heritage-assessment board to review future projects.

This willingness to compromise seems to reflect a broader sentiment in a society that has moved so quickly that people feel rootless and without deep ties to their country. During one walk through the cemetery, I met a Ministry of Defense official who asked that only his first name, Pete, be used because of the sensitivity of his position.

“Our nation is a young one, and we’ve been so focused on the future that we sometimes forget the past,” he said. “Bukit Brown is a huge trove of stories.”

#Singapore #Singapore cemetary #Bukit Brown #Chinese cemetary