Category Archives: Human Rights

We have been in this place before

5 Replies

We have been in this place before.

Read some history to illuminate today’s news.

What became known as the Kerner Commission was appointed to investigate the urban riots of the mid-1960s. The findings would not be much different if it was repeated today.

The president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, addressed the nation on June 27, 1967:

“The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack- mounted at every level-upon the conditions that breed despair and violence. All of us know what those condItions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. We should attack these conditions-not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is sirnply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America….”

Unfortunately, I literally cannot imagine our president expressing a sentiment anything like that today.

The Kerner Commission Report is a available as a free pdf.

According to Wikipedia:

To mark the 30th anniversary of the Kerner Report, the Eisenhower Foundation in 1998 sponsored two complementary reports, The Millennium Breach and Locked in the Poorhouse. The Millennium Breach, co-authored by former senator and commission member Fred R. Harris, found the racial divide had grown in the subsequent years with inner city unemployment at crisis levels. The Millennium Breach found that most of the decade that followed the Kerner Report, America made progress on the principal fronts the report dealt with: race, poverty, and inner cities. Then progress stopped and in some ways reversed by a series of economic shocks and trends and the government’s action and inaction.

Harris reported, “Today, thirty years after the Kerner Report, there is more poverty in America, it is deeper, blacker and browner than before, and it is more concentrated in the cities, which have become America’s poorhouses.”

From a summary published by the Eisenhower Foundation:

Since the Kerner Commission, there have been other important trends:
• From 1977 to 1988, the incomes of the richest 1 percent in America increased by 120 percent and the incomes of the poorest fifth in America decreased by 10 percent during a time of supply-side tax breaks for the rich and against the poor.
• In the words of conservative analyst Kevin Phillips, this meant that “the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.” The working class also got poorer. The middle class stayed about the same in absolute terms, so it, too, lost ground relative to the rich.
• During the 1980s, child poverty increased by over 20 percent, with racial minorities suffering disproportionately. Today, the child poverty rate in the United States is 4 times the average of Western European countries.
• Today, the top 1 percent of Americans has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. In terms of wealth and income, the U.S. is the most unequal industrialized country in the world, and is growing more unequal faster than any other industrialized country.
• Since the Kerner Commission, the U.S. has had the most rapid growth in wage inequality in the Western world, with racial minorities suffering disproportionality.
• America’s neighborhoods and schools are resegregating. Two-thirds of African-American students and three-fourths of Hispanic students now attend predominantly minority schools — one third of each group in intensely segregated schools.
• In urban pubic schools in poor neighborhoods, more than two-thirds of children fail to reach even the “basic” level of national tests.
• America’s housing policy for the poor and minorities has become prison building. Over the 1980s and early 1990s, we tripled the number of prison cells at the same time we reduced housing appropriations for the poor by over 80 percent. Only 1 in 4 eligible poor families now can get housing.
• States now spend more per year on prisons than on higher education, while 10 years ago spending priorities were just the opposite.
• In the early 1990s, 1 of 4 young African-American men was in prison on probation or on parole. By the late 1990s, 1 of 3 young African-American men was in prison, on probation or on parole.
• Today, the rate of incarceration of African-American men in the U.S. is 4 times higher than the rate of incarceration of Black men in South Africa during the pre-Nelson Mandela apartheid government.

The glow before dawn

3 Replies

We were out early this morning, and this was the view that greeted us as we walked across Waialae Beach Park towards the ocean.

I’m guessing that’s Venus high in the sky ahead of us.

Unfortunately, this moment of calm wasn’t enough to overcome the awful feeling in my gut after the president all but gave his blessing to the gruesome murder and dismemberment of an American resident, who was also a columnist for one of the great American newspapers, by agents of a foreign dictatorship.

Just when I thought we couldn’t go any lower as a country, this president has again shocked and stunned me.

More thoughts on immigration

Leave a reply

Still thinking things through.

First, it’s important to remember that the need to respond to the plight of refugees is nothing new.

For example, 66 years ago, on March 21, 1952, the National Council of Churches issued a statement on “United States Immigration and Naturalization Policy.”

The statement began:

The plight of the world’s uprooted peoples creates for the United States, as for other liberty-loving nations, a moral as well as an economic and political problem of vast proportions. Among these peoples are those displaced by war, and its aftermath; the refugees made homeless by reason of Nazi, Fascist, and Communist tyranny and more recently, by military hostilities in Korea, the Middle East, and elsewhere; the expellees forcibly ejected from the lands of their fathers; and the escapees who every day break through the Iron Curtain in search of freedom. These persons long for the day of their deliverance and for the opportunity to reestablish themselves under conditions of peace and promise. A problem of equal urgency is involved in the surplus populations that cannot now be supported by the economies of their respective countries. The pressure exercised by these surplus people is of a kind seriously to threaten the stability and well-being of the entire world.

The National Council of Churches sees in this situation an issue that can be resolved only as nations, collectively and separately, adopt policies dictated by considerations not only of justice and mercy, but also of sound mutual assistance.

The council called for eliminating “discriminatory provisions based upon considerations of color, race, or sex,” and argued that “enlightened immigration and naturalization laws would add immeasurably to the moral stature of the United States and would hearten those nations with which we are associated in a common effort to establish the conditions of a just and durable peace.”

Those principles appear as relevant today as in 1952.

Jumping to the present, the number of refugees of war, famine, violence, and poverty is at record levels, according to the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees.

We are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record.

An unprecedented 68.5 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.

There are also an estimated 10 million stateless people who have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement.

The UN figures include 40 million “internally displaced people.” That means people driven from their homes but not out of their countries. That’s what happened to many during the recent eruption of the volcano on Hawaii Island. The UN also estimated an additional 25.4 million refugees (which includes 5.4 million Palestinian refugees) and 3.1 million asylum-seekers.

Most of those refugees are far from the U.S. The brunt of the refugee crisis has been felt far from our shores.

The countries hosting the most refugees, according to the UNHCR, are Turkey, Uganda, Pakistan, Lebanan, and Iran.

Turkey has taken in 3.5 million refugees from the wars in the region, according to UN figures.

The U.S., on the other hand, will admit less than 30,000 refugees this fiscal year, reportedly the lowest number in four decades.

Is this because we’ve been overrun? Hardly.

An article published by Lawfare Blog reported data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection which shows the number of persons stopped for attempting unauthorized entry into the U.S. has dropped dramatically.

The peak in apprehensions of irregular migrants actually took place some 17 years ago, in FY2000. At that point, U.S. Border Patrol agents caught 1,643,679 migrants attempting to enter the United States without the appropriate papers, compared to 303,916 apprehensions in this past fiscal year.

Smaller numbers, but still an issue.

Time for us to be working harder than ever with our international partners to find workable solutions, right? But the Trump administration has done just the opposite.

In December 2017, the U.S. pulled out of the Global Compact on Migration, and withdrew from a conference about to convene in Mexico where negotiations were set to continue seeking “humane solutions” to the problem of displaced people. It’s just one of many forums for international cooperation that the U.S. has turned its back on.

And the U.S. was “conspicuously absent” this summer when the negotiations ended with an agreement “on improved ways to handle the global flow of migrants.”

“The goal of the agreement is to preserve the basic human rights of all migrants, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general,” according to a story in The New York Times.

“Countries have the right and even the responsibility to determine their own migration policies, and to responsibly manage their borders,” Mr. Guterres said. “But they must do so in full respect for human rights.”

Ms. Arbour called the agreement a necessary mechanism for a world where migration was an undeniable reality.

“It’s not helpful to ask whether migration is a good thing or a bad thing,” she said in an interview with The New York Times editorial board earlier this week. “It’s a thing, it’s happening, it’s always happened. It will always happen.”

See: “GLOBAL COMPACT FOR SAFE, ORDERLY AND REGULAR MIGRATION,” Final Draft, 11 July 2018.

Advice on language and the “Migrant Convoy”

8 Replies

This article by Carly Goodman is being circulated by the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee. I found it very useful, and recommend it as part of your Sunday reading.

How to talk about the migrant caravan
bu Carly Goodman, October 24, 2018

The president continually portrays migrants and migration – including the families traveling here as part of the migrant caravan – as a threat to the United States. Reporters, analysts, and even advocates may be unwittingly reinforcing this framing – and undermining humane treatment for all people. Here’s how you should talk about the migrant caravan to avoid reinforcing this harmful framing:

1. Migrants are people who move – and they have human rights.
Always use inclusive language that doesn’t “other” migrants and that emphasizes our shared humanity and rights. Most of us move from where we were born; movement is a common part of the human experience.

2. Avoid water metaphors – people do not constitute a flood, flow, or wave.
The media commonly uses water metaphors to describe migrants and migrations, but this language is corrosive. Floods and tidal waves are mortal dangers – hard to contain – and using these terms to describe migrants helps reinforce the migration threat narrative. Migrants are people seeking a better life for themselves and their families – not flows of water.

3. Avoid the language of invasion.
In some egregious cases, reporters are describing the migrant caravan as if it is an invading army. The New York Times describes the caravan as “defiant,” for example. The AP tweeted that the caravan was like a “ragtag army of the poor” and has since apologized; likening the families to a military force reinforced Trump’s view that they are a threat to the United States. The president has tweeted that people on the caravan are criminals, and he often frames migrants as emissaries sent by hostile governments (“they’re not sending their best,” for example) – perhaps as a pretext for suggesting a military response rather than a humanitarian one. But people who have joined the migrant caravan are traveling together because there is safety in numbers, and they are looking for safety and peace. They deserve our empathy.

4. Seeking asylum is a right – and our system should treat all people with dignity and humanity.
There are many reasons why people leave home and seek a better life abroad. Rooted in post-World War II domestic and international laws, our system allows refugees to seek asylum in the United States if they are fleeing persecution. Many of the people in the migrant caravan are traveling here to escape violence and to seek asylum, something they have a legal right to do. Ensuring that the United States builds a fair and generous asylum system is critical.

But we must also build a system that treats all people humanely. People’s reasons for migrating are complex, and economic instability and violence are interconnected. We must therefore reject policies that criminalize migration more broadly, militarize our borders, and treat people like those in the migrant caravan with cruelty and brutality.

So when talking about the migrant caravan, focus on humane treatment for all, not the narrow legality of asylum claims.

5. Be careful about the language of crisis. Calling immigration a crisis feeds punitive and exclusionary polices.
The Trump administration often talks about migration as if it’s a crisis. This language makes immigration seem like a serious threat demanding a strong emergency response. But the fact is, border crossings are not surging and are near historic lows. Immigrants and arriving migrants do not constitute an existential threat, even if white nationalists and nativists portray them as such. Don’t repeat the administration’s framing of immigration as a crisis.

That is not to say that nothing serious is happening. For families traveling in the migrant caravan, the situation may feel like a personal crisis. The decision to leave one’s home due to life-threatening violence and poverty can never be undertaken lightly. And how the Trump administration is treating migrants and immigrants – including those in the caravan, those arriving at the border, and people who have made their lives in the United States – is creating a moral and humanitarian crisis. But that’s quite different than migration and migrants themselves being the source of crisis.

All of us can show support for migrants and help build support for a compassionate response through our language and framing.