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Refugees

If We Want To Support Refugees, We Need To End The Wars That Create Them

The concept of sanctuary, providing refuge and protection to people who are marginalized and oppressed, has a long history in the United States—even when the United States itself is responsible for that repression. An early example of sanctuary in the United States is the Underground Railroad of the 19th century, which helped people escape slavery through routes and houses identified as safe by abolitionists and freedom seekers. In the 1950s and 60s, African-American organizers of the civil rights movement often held meetings in churches. Immigrant justice advocates have pioneered “sanctuary churches” since the 1980s. These days, the concept is most often associated with so-called “sanctuary cities”—state and local jurisdictions that say they refuse to cooperate with federal efforts to deport undocumented residents. These cities have been relentlessly targeted by the Trump administration.

Over Four Million People Displaced as Crisis Deepens in the Congo

The numbers are hard to fathom. Nearly two million people driven from their homes in 2017 alone. The worst cholera epidemic of the past 15 years, with over 55,000 cases and more than 1,000 deaths. Countless others killed, maimed or sexually assaulted. The human costs of the ongoing crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo are borne disproportionately by women and children, whose homes have been pillaged and burned, who are not in school and thus vulnerable to soldier recruitment, and who have now been left with almost nothing. ‘’Farmers who fled due to conflict have missed three consecutive planting seasons. This has left people with almost nothing to eat. Food assistance is failing to fill the gap. Only 400,000 out of the 3.2 million severely food insecure people in Kasai received assistance in December. More than 750,000 are still displaced,” FAO, UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP) warned in a statement.

There Is A Massive Movement Of Refugees Globally

On November 28, Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, went before the UN Security Council. Grandi is an old hand in the UN. He came to the UN’s Refugees Agency (UNHCR) from his work as the head of the UN’s agency for the relief to the Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). At UNRWA, Grandi was known as a man of great integrity and sensitivity. The seven-decade exile of the Palestinians moved him. He does not see these matters through the eyes merely of a bureaucrat. He sees them as a human being. No wonder then that his statement to the UN Security Council was emotional. He mentioned directly the dangerous harm to refugees in northern Africa, particularly in Libya - a country torn to bits by NATO’s war on that country in 2011.

What Christmas Means

In the early 1980s I was in a refugee camp for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. It was a cold, dreary winter afternoon. The peasant farmers and their families, living in filth and mud, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper. That night, they said, they would celebrate the flight of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem ordered by Herod. The celebration is known as the Day of the Holy Innocents. “Why is this such an important day?” I asked. “It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,” a farmer answered.

Education To Deportation; Refugees Face Growing Crisis In Greece

By Maria Paradia for Occupy - At last count, one-third of the 60,000 refugees currently stranded in Greece are school-age children. Trapped in the country due to the E.U.'s inability to address the escalating humanitarian crisis, the children's educational prospects are shrinking by the day. Now, since summer school programs for refugee children failed last summer due to budget constraints and lack of specialized staff, individual teachers have begun taking it upon themselves to teach Syrian children elementary Greek. However, a lack of government-appointed translators has made the volunteers' work all the harder, forcing them to improvise or pantomime their way through classes while relying on older students to help get the message across. Despite their attempts, little progress has been made toward integrating the refugee children with Greek students. If anything, it appears the process is being actively discouraged by a Greek educational system that separates Syrian students' class schedules from locals, exacerbating the rift. According to Aura, a child psychologist working in the Softex refugee camp in Thessaloniki, "Being present at school during totally different hours makes it impossible to make contact and friends with local children. The longer they are excluded, the harder it gets to seek out contact because of the feelings of shame – not knowing the language, living in a camp – which of course has an impact on the self-esteem of the child."

Newsletter – People Act Where US Fails On Climate

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. The climate crisis is upon us. It seems that every report on climate conditions has one thing in common: things are worse than predicted. The World Meteorological Report from the end of October shows that Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) are rising at a rapid rate and have passed 400 parts per million. According to Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, "the changes we’re making today are occurring in 100 years, whereas in nature they occur in 10,000 years." The United States is experiencing a wide range of climate impacts from major hurricanes in the South to unprecedented numbers of wildfires in the West to crop-destroying drought in the Mid-West.

‘Refugees Are Nothing But Commodities’

By Daan Bauwens for InterPress Service. FOLLONICA, Italy - As countless refugees arriving on Italy’s shores report torture, extortion and forced labour in Libyan detention centers, many say they never intended to make the journey to Europe until the chaos in Libya left them no other choice. “We were still working on the construction site when I was taken apart from the others. The guard pulled his gun, aimed it at me and told me he’d shoot if I tried to walk away. After ten minutes of trembling with fear, a truck arrived and I was ordered to get in. We drove to a beach where a crowd was being kept at gunpoint by other guards in uniforms.

New Zealand Considers Creating Climate Change Refugee Visas

By Charles Anderson for The Guardian - New Zealand’s new government is considering creating a visa category to help relocate Pacific peoples displaced by climate change. The new category would make official the Green party’s pre-election policy which promised 100 visas for those affected by climate change. As part of the new Labour-led coalition government, the Green party leader James Shaw was given the role of climate change minister. He told Radio New Zealand on Tuesday that “an experimental humanitarian visa category” could be implemented for people from the Pacific who are displaced by rising seas resulting from climate change. “It is a piece of work that we intend to do in partnership with the Pacific islands,” Shaw said. Before the election, the Greens also proposed increasing New Zealand’s overall refugee quota from 750 each year to 4,000 places over six years. Shaw’s announcement comes after the New Zealand immigration and protection tribunal rejected two families from Tuvalu who applied to become refugees in New Zealand due to the impact of climate change. The families argued rising sea levels, lack of access to clean and sanitary drinking water and Tuvalu’s high unemployment rate as reasons for seeking asylum. The tribunal ruled they did not risk being persecuted by race, religion, nationality or by membership of a political or religious group under the 1951 refugee convention.

The Creative Resistance Of Domestic Workers

By Rose Mahi for Open Democracy. Many conditions play into the exploitation of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Lebanon. Most of the time, MDWs are women, and some of us are illiterate. And at times, this illiteracy furthers existing exploitation, which is already embedded in sexism, classism, and racism. These factors are present in our home countries, and migration renders us even more vulnerable to them. Our employers often believe that people migrate because they had nothing to do, were not qualified, or lacked opportunity in their home countries, and that we therefore owe them for saving us.

By 2100, Refugees Would Be The Most Populous Country On Earth

By Vijay Prashad for AlterNet - The UN Refugee Agency has announced the new figures for the world’s displaced: 65.9 million. That means that 65.9 million human beings live as refugees, asylum seekers or as internally displaced people. If the refugees formed a country, it would be the 21st largest state in the world, just after Thailand (68.2 million) and just ahead of the United Kingdom (65.5 million). But unlike these other states, refugees have few political rights and no real representation in the institutions of the world. The head of the UN Refugee Agency, Filippo Grandi, recently said that most of the displacement comes as a result of war. "The world seems to have become unable to make peace," Grandi said. "So you see old conflicts that continue to linger, and new conflicts erupting, and both produce displacement. Forced displacement is a symbol of wars that never end." Few continents are immune from the harsh reality of war. But the epicenter of war and displacement is along the axis of the Western-driven global war on terror and resource wars. The line of displacement runs from Afghanistan to South Sudan with Syria in between. Eyes are on Syria, where the war remains hot and the tensions over escalation intensify daily.

With Less Crime, Closed Dutch Prisons Are Instead Being Used To House Refugees

By Brianna Acuesta for True Activist - It might be hard to imagine a world where prisons actually close because of a reduction in prisoners if you live in the U.S., but in many countries abroad this is not such a rare occasion. In the United States, the existence of private prisons that churn out a profit means that the prison-industrial complex focuses less on helping inmates stay out of trouble and more on how the inmates can benefit prison owners. In the Netherlands, however, crime has been rapidly decreasing for the last decade and 19 of the nearly 60 prisons have since closed. Some prisons even took in inmates from Belgium and Norway just to keep up their locations. While this may have resulted in a loss of jobs, it means that less people are being incarcerated, which is always a positive in any country. On top of fewer prisoners and less crime, the government in the Netherlands found a way to repurpose the closed prisons: they now house refugees in there.

Three Nations With Most Refugees Were Targets Of US Intervention

By Whitney Webb for Mintpress News. CHILE– A United Nations report has shed light on the world’s burgeoning crisis of displaced peoples, finding that a record 65.6 million were forced to vacate their homes in 2016 alone. More than half of them were minors. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which drafted the report, put the figure into perspective, stating that increasing conflict and persecution worldwide have led to “one person being displaced every three seconds – less than the time it takes to read this sentence.” UN High Commissioner Filippo Grandi called the figure “unacceptable” and called for “solidarity and a common purpose in preventing and resolving the crisis.” However, what the UN report failed to mention was the role of U.S. foreign intervention, indirect or direct, in fomenting the conflicts responsible for producing most of the world’s refugees.

Newsletter: Syrian Missile Attack Is Opportunity To Challenge Militarism

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. The US attack on Syria, in reaction to the unproven allegations that President Assad used chemical weapons on the people of Syria, was not a surprise. It took President Trump a few days of discussions with his military advisers to decide to use the tactic of bombing a military target with 59 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles. The Russians were given advance warning, personnel and some equipment were removed from the site and because a majority of Tomahawks missed their target, very little damage was done to the site. There are reports of Syrian aircraft flying out of the facility after the bombing. But damage was done to cities nearby the site and at least 25 civilians were killed, including 8 children and dozens were injured. This was an illegal act of war under international law.

Death in Yemen; Made In USA! Stop the Saudi-U.S. Assault On Yemen!

By Staff for Voices for Creative Nonviolence and CODE PINK. Media reports indicate that President Donald Trump is planning a US military escalation in Yemen. The time for people in the United States to act to end the war in Yemen is now. KZ Peacemakers are fasting for a week at the Isaiah Wall at the United Nations in New York to raise a cry against the bombing and starving of the children of Yemen. Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence says: "As we fast from all solid foods, we urge others to join us in calling for a humane response to the deadly tragedy facing Yemeni civilians whose country, ravaged by civil war and regularly targeted with Saudi and U.S. airstrikes, is now on the brink of famine."

Faith Communities And Campuses Trying To Give Refuge To Immigrants

By Rebekah Barber For Facing South - Dating back thousands of years, the concept of sanctuary stems from the custom of offering hospitality to the stranger. In ancient Greek cities, slaves and thieves took sanctuary at the shrines of the gods. During biblical times, those who had killed someone accidentally could take asylum in cities designated for refuge. In recent years, dozens of U.S. cities and counties became part of this tradition by adopting so-called "sanctuary policies" that bar local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. The policies aim to build safer communities by strengthening undocumented immigrants' trust in local police.

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Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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