Mediaboss Marketing

C.E.O.s urge Washington to help with asylum seekers

As New York Citys migrant crisis continues to escalate, with more than 100,000 arrivals from the southern U.S. border straining shelters, some of the citys top business leaders are intervening in a fight over whos responsible.

More than 120 executives including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Larry Fink of BlackRock and Jane Fraser of Citigroup sent a letter to President Biden and congressional leaders on Monday, urging Washington to fulfill New York States request for federal assistance. But recent communications by the Biden administration suggest that such calls wont be heeded.

The letter underscores the increasing urgency of the crisis, which has pitted Mayor Eric Adams against Gov. Kathy Hochul and both Democrats against Biden. Adams has said the crisis could cost the city $12 billion over three years, while Hochul has spent $1.5 billion and deployed nearly 2,000 National Guard members so far.

The migrant crisis is a business issue. Of immediate concern is the financial strain that the wave of asylum seekers is putting on local governments: The situation is overwhelming the resources not only of the border region but of city and state governments across the nation, the letter reads.

The migrants are affecting New York-based companies in another way: New arrivals are increasingly being forced to sleep outdoors in the city despite the opening of 200 emergency sites. And long lines have snaked around the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, now an intake center just blocks away from JPMorgans offices.

The C.E.O.s also said that immigration control was clearly a federal issue, siding with Hochul in calling for federal funding for educational, housing, security and health care services for migrants.

They also supported Hochuls and Adamss requests for faster processing of asylum applications and work permits, since newly arrived migrants must otherwise wait 180 days before they can work legally.

But the Biden administration has pushed back against New Yorks requests. In letters to city and state officials, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, questioned New Yorks handling of the crisis. Mayorkas identified structural and operational issues and said that the administration had offered access to hangars at Kennedy Airport and at Floyd Bennett Field in Queens, as well as 11 other federal sites that could be repurposed to house migrants.

That response led to pushback from New York officials: A Hochul representative said that many of those locations were far from the city, and a spokeswoman for Adams said bluntly, Our requests from the federal government remain the same, and quite frankly, unaddressed.

Its unclear whether the voices from top business leaders, many of whom are Democratic donors, will break that impasse.

Donald Trump has yet another court date. His trial on federal charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election is set to begin March 4, two years earlier than what his lawyers had requested. It could bring the proceedings into conflict with other Trump trials, including ones in Manhattan and Georgia, and is a day before Super Tuesday in the Republican presidential primary.

OpenAI unveils an enterprise version of ChatGPT. The business-focused edition of the chatbot will allow customers to customize it, and offers faster performance and unlimited data use. Corporate adoption of tools like chatbots has been considered key for A.I. companies, especially as consumer use of ChatGPT has started to wane.

Hawaiian Electric rebuffs blame for the deadly Maui wildfire. The embattled utility said in a court filing that while its power lines set off a fire the morning of Aug. 8, Maui County fire officials declared it contained and that the company wasnt responsible for what it called a later blaze that devastated a town. The filing sets up a court clash between Hawaiian Electric and Maui County.

Goldman Sachs sells another business as it revamps its strategy. The Wall Street bank agreed to sell an investment advisory division to Creative Planning, a wealth management firm, just four years after acquiring it. The sale is part of Goldmans effort to refocus on its core base of highly wealthy clients. Meanwhile, the company is reportedly in the final stages of selling its GreenSky consumer lending unit.

Nearly 50 years ago, Terry Gou founded a tiny manufacturing shop that eventually became Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant that produces many of the worlds best-known electronic devices most importantly the iPhone.

Gous run for Taiwans presidency, announced on Monday, could be a long shot, but it could also have big ramifications for geopolitics, especially given the billionaires desire for closer ties between Taipei and Beijing.

Gou favors talks with China to preserve peace in the Taiwan Strait. Thats as the ruling Democratic Progressive Party continues to assert Taiwanese sovereignty in the face of ongoing Chinese claims to the island. By contrast, Gou prioritizes an interpretation of the so-called one-China framework that favors a closer relationship between Beijing and Taipei over support for Taiwans independence.

The Foxconn founder, who stepped down from the company in 2019 to pursue an unsuccessful presidential run, has blamed the D.P.P. for unnecessary saber-rattling: If we dont pull back now, it will be too late to save Taiwan from falling, he said on Monday.

Gou could upend Americas approach to China. The White House has taken a hard-line stance with Beijing on multiple fronts and President Biden has pledged to defend Taiwan against a Chinese incursion.

A Gou victory could put Taiwan whose vast electronics manufacturing plants are vitally important to American businesses more firmly in Beijings orbit. Tech investors have long grasped the importance of Taiwan, an important hub for chip makers like Nvidia.

Gou denies feeling any pressure from Beijing. Critics note that his roughly $7 billion fortune was built on cross-strait ties: Foxconn shot to success via its main manufacturing hub in central China. (Hes still a shareholder in the company.) But the mogul has insisted that he will not bow to Chinas threats and that any effort by Beijing to seize Foxconn assets would backfire, given the manufacturers importance to global clients like Apple, Tesla and Amazon.

But his run might actually help the D.P.P., since it could end up splitting support among opposition candidates. Gou is currently polling at about 15 percent, behind the nominees of the Taiwan Peoples Party and the Kuomintang and well behind the D.P.P.s candidate, Vice President Lai Ching-te.

If Gou runs, the rest of us are done for, Ko Wen-je, the Taiwan Peoples Party candidate, said in July.

In other China news:

Following a meeting on Tuesday morning with Vice Premier He Lifeng, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo again struck a conciliatory note on trade: While we will never of course compromise in protecting our national security, I want to be clear that we do not seek to decouple or to hold Chinas economy back.

Raimondo also discussed U.S. concerns over Beijings trade restrictions on the chip makers Intel and Micron and components like gallium and germanium with her Beijing counterpart, Wang Wentao.

The fate of TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app that has been under pressure in Washington, remains in limbo; Ms. Raimondo isnt expected to discuss it during her trip.

Andy Jassy, Amazons C.E.O., in a meeting with employees, a recording of which was obtained by Insider. Jassy reportedly defended making workers come back to the office three days a week, even though, unlike many of the companys decisions, it was not based on reams of data.

Wall Street appears poised to clash again with the S.E.C., this time over new rules the agency says will bring transparency to the fast-growing private funds sector.

Last week, the S.E.C. adopted rules to introduce more stringent reporting guidelines for hedge funds and private equity firms such as Blackstone, Apollo and Citadel. Gary Gensler, the agencys chair, said the measure would bring down fees and remove opacity.

The industry, which has fought rule changes for the past year, has ridden a decade-long investing boom that brought its assets under management to roughly $20 trillion.

The new requirements were approved by the three Democratic commissioners, but opposed by both Republicans. They will require funds to provide reports on quarterly performance, fees and expenses, and submit to additional audits. The new disclosures would benefit the millions of Americans with retirement savings in pension plans, Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, a financial sector watchdog group, told DealBook.

But Hester Peirce, a Republican S.E.C. commissioner, said they would unnecessarily add government red tape to contracts between investors and the funds.

Industry players were initially relieved to have won some concessions. The final rules seemed less strict than the S.E.C.s first shot, which would have opened up the funds to more legal liability. Still, some industry representatives told DealBook they believe the rules will raise compliance costs for private fund advisers, which could chill investment opportunities.

Brace for litigation. Trade groups like the Managed Funds Association say they are contemplating a lawsuit to block the measure. (Opponents have 60 days from its publication date to sue.)

One to watch is the previously unknown National Association of Private Fund Managers, which is registered to the address of a Texas law firm and has raised its objections to the rules. Those closely following the matter say it appears to have been strategically created to ensure at least one legal challenge would be heard in the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The association did not respond to a request for comment.

Deals

Chamath Palihapitiyas Social Capital reportedly sought to sell off its stakes in over 250 tech start-ups that the firm valued collectively at more than $300 million. (The Information)

Danaher agreed to buy Abcam, a top maker of supplies for the life sciences industry that is known as the Amazon of antibodies, for $5.7 billion. (Bloomberg)

The supermodel Karlie Kloss is said to be in talks to buy i-D magazine from Vice Media. (Puck)

Policy

Tech executives including Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai of Google and Sam Altman of OpenAI will meet with Washington lawmakers next month to discuss potential A.I. regulations. (NYT)

The rapper Eminem asked Vivek Ramaswamy, the anti-woke activist running for the Republican presidential nomination, to stop using his music in his campaign. (NYT)

The S.E.C. took its first enforcement action against an N.F.T. issuer, calling the tokens released by Impact Theory unregistered securities. (The Verge)

Best of the rest

Wed like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.

See the original post:
CEOs Back New York's Call for Help With Migrant Crisis - The New York Times

In 2021, New Yorks shelter system was under strain, with 61,000 residents. Officials said it was at capacity or over.

In 2023, the system is on track to house twice as many people.

The population reached an eye-popping record 100,000 this week, thanks to familiar factors the pandemic, skyrocketing rents and acute ones: economic turmoil abroad and politicians in America seeking to thrust New York into a border crisis thousands of miles away.

The rush of arrivals from the south has had people living not just in traditional shelters, but in temporary accommodations in hotels, tents and even gymnasiums. The Roosevelt Hotel, which opened in Midtown in 1924 to fanfare and where annual New Years Eve radio broadcasts popularized Auld Lang Syne, will in coming months turn over all 1,000 of its rooms to migrants.

Officials described this week as a tipping point for the first time, migrants composed the majority of those in shelters. The startling new number of shelter residents is further troubling because of the numbers it isnt reflecting.

Its scary that we are at this benchmark and we dont even know how accurate it is, how many are unaccounted for, said Adolfo Abreu, the housing campaigns director at Vocal-NY, a social services agency.

Such an explosion of migrants, which is estimated to cost $4.3 billion by July 2024, would test any American city. In New York, the arrivals were met by a system that had already been under pressure because of factors of the citys own making.

New Yorkers spend more on rent than ever. And when they stop being able to pay, lose their homes and avail themselves of the citys unique right to shelter, they find it harder than ever to get affordable permanent housing. So they linger longer in the facilities than past generations did the average stay for families with children is more than 530 days, according to the most recent figures, double 15 years ago.

More homeless people compete for homes, until the shelter becomes the home.

In 2022, the floodgates opened when a bus arrived from Texas carrying a mere 40-some people. It was met by aid workers with blankets and the handshakes and cheers of a city that prided itself on stepping up.

The applause stopped, and the cameras turned elsewhere, but the buses and airplanes kept coming. Shelters opened faster than pop-up restaurants, more than 170 since last spring, sometimes overnight.

Theres not a day I go to bed and where Im not like Do we have enough for tonight? said Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services.

Where are those 100,000 people living? What does that life look like?

Renee Culp, 50, has stayed in shelters for a decade. Its been hell, she said. You have no resources. Try finding a job with no computer to look for one, she said.

A more recent arrival is Elliot Ramirez, 36, a Colombian carpenter who left his family and traveled through Nicaragua and Mexico to swim the Rio Grande to Texas. He said a foundation gave him a free plane ticket and for two months he has stayed at the Bedford-Atlantic Armory shelter in Brooklyn.

Its been a whirlwind. The food is OK. The place is uncomfortably crowded, though so many inside speak Spanish that it reminds him of home. Jobs are hard to find without a work visa, so he cant use the skills he brought with him.

Its more complicated in New York, he said.

Roger Davis, 65, entered a shelter in the Bronx after an outreach worker found him sleeping in a subway car. He lived indoors for a year until it got too crowded. Nobody seemed to follow the rules anymore, smoking anywhere they pleased. The bathrooms became filthy, and staff members, exhausted, scolded anyone in front of them.

Mr. Davis returned to the streets. Sometimes he sleeps in the subways, sometimes on the sidewalks, in shanties made from shipping pallets.

Its easier that way, he said.

Ezekiel Lee, 57, at a shelter on 12th Street in Brooklyn, said there is more waste in the system razors used once and thrown away, leading to a shortage.

He said the arrival of migrants in such numbers and dont get me wrong, Im sympathetic is straining the system. Its not one thing, he said. Its many different things.

Put another way: This is a humanitarian crisis, said Christine Quinn, the former speaker of the New York City Council, who now heads the shelter agency Women In Need. If theres a goddamn roadblock, get over it.

Mr. Abreu, with Vocal-NY, said the population of 100,000 is unlikely to shrink soon.

A lot of us are one income shock away from being homeless, he said. Thats a very precarious situation that, if we dont dig in, the 100,000 could double or triple.

Nate Schweber and Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.

Original post:
NYCs Homeless Shelters Are Straining to Adapt to the Migrant Crisis - The New York Times

CITY HALL In an unusual meeting Wednesday, officials from Mayor Brandon Johnsons administration told alderpeople they have a coordinated strategy to move migrants out of police stations and into shelters and permanent housing.

But in addition to the discussion of those plans, the meeting of the City Councils Immigration and Refugee Rights was notable for the fact that it happened at all, as the committee hadnt taken action in more than a year and a half.

It was only the second time the committee met since September 2021 even as the arrival of thousands of asylum seekers and other migrants since last summer built into a humanitarian crisis, leaving families sleeping on police station floors.

And the committee held its first vote since 2021: under the leadership of its new chair, Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), committee members Wednesday approved a resolution calling on themselves to meet once a month to discuss the citys response to the migrant crisis.

The resolution is nonbinding and doesnt carry the weight of law. That means it was a symbolic but public declaration that the committee will actually do something other than spend taxpayer money in the months ahead.

The resolution might be laughable except that the council has a long history of committees that spend money but accomplish nothing. While council committees are supposed to provide oversight and shape policies, four of the current 20 committees havent even met in five months or more.

RELATED: As Chicago Struggled With Migrant Crisis, City Councils Immigration Committee Didnt Meet For More Than A Year

Vasquez, who introduced the resolution, opened the Wednesday meeting by declaring the immigration and refugee rights committee had to do better.

The city, he said, needs to live up to its own welcoming city ordinance by being prepared to help everyone who moves here as well as people who are homeless and those who are born in Chicago.

We have much work to do, he said.

The stakes are clear, as city officials reinforced during a presentation in the two-hour meeting.

As of this week, nearly 11,000 asylum seekers and other migrants have come to Chicago from border states since last August, said Cristina Pacione-Zayas, Johnsons first deputy chief of staff. While many have found housing or moved on to other cities, almost 5,000 are staying in shelters, and nearly 700 are awaiting placement while sleeping in police stations or OHare airport.

And people keep coming. The city is now planning to open at least five more shelters while building more infrastructure to help people find permanent housing, Pacione-Zayas said. To do that, officials are working on improved communication and partnerships with the county and state, philanthropic organizations and community groups.

The goal is to decompress police stations, she said.. I think all of us are painfully aware that police stations are not designed for this type of service.

Pacione-Zayas detailed how the city has spent more than $101 million on the new migrants since January. She told the committee that the Johnson administration was also focused on helping longtime Chicagoans struggling with homelessness. And she promised city officials would keep alderpeople in the loop.

We heard loud and clear that many folks felt that they had not been briefed or had not been brought into the conversations and felt blindsided by some of the decisions that had been made, Pacione-Zayas said.

Without saying so outright, Pacione-Zayas was referring to anger and frustration from alderpeople who complained that city officials under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot never developed clear plans for coping with the migrant crisis and did a lousy job of communicating what steps they did take.

But the escalating crisis has also reflected the councils own failures, exposing a committee system that has often been used to reward allies with patronage jobs rather than provide oversight of city policies and taxpayer dollars.

As Block Club reported this spring, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot engineered the creation of the immigration committee in 2021 and put Ald. Ariel Reboyras (31st), a mayoral loyalist, in charge of it. Over the next two years, Reboyras used $196,000 in taxpayer funds to pay three employees.

Yet the committee took no action to pass laws or provide oversight of the citys immigration policies, even as thousands of asylum seekers and migrants arrived on buses, trains and planes needing shelter and food. Reboyras retired when the previous council term ended last month.

After winning the mayoral election in April, Johnson installed his own picks to lead the councils 20 committees. That included naming Vasquez to take over leadership of the immigration committee. Johnson also got the council to increase the budgets for a number of committees, including immigration. Its funding was boosted from $120,465 to $200,000 a year.

Like Vasquez, many of the other new chairs along with rookie alderpeople have vowed to increase oversight and get more involved in shaping city policies than their predecessors did.

But some of the council committees have still not met for months. The Committee on Aviation hasnt met since last September. Neither has the Committee on Contracting Oversight and Equity. The Committee on Education and Child Development last met in November, while the Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy hasnt convened since January.

The contracting, education and environment committees all have new chairs who have only been in those positions since mid-May. But the aviation committee has been led under three mayors by Ald. Matt OShea (19th).

Ive never been a fan of having a meeting just to have a meeting, OShea previously told Block Club.

The immigration committee meeting Wednesday was the first under Vasquez and included several new members, including four council rookies. A number of alderpeople expressed gratitude and even amazement that the committee was holding city officials accountable for providing figures and plans about helping the migrants, even though thats the committees job.

First, let me say thank you, second-term Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), the committees vice chair, said to the city officials. These are meetings that we have been asking for since last year.

Its really refreshing to get a lot of details, said Ald. Maria Hadden (49th). A lot of us have felt really in the dark.

Thank you for being here this morning, added Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd). This is actually a great start.

Ald. Mike Rodriguez (22nd), expressed his appreciation to Vasquez. Congratulations on having a committee meeting in the first days of your chairmanship.

Ald. Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth (48th) echoed that. Congratulations to the chair and the vice chair of the committee, she said, noting it stood in stark contrast to what had happened in the previous term.

Vasquez closed the meeting by thanking everyone who attended. I know it seems like its been forever since this committee met.

Subscribe to Block Club Chicago,an independent, 501(c)(3), journalist-run newsroom. Every dime we make fundsreportingfrom Chicagos neighborhoods.

Clickhereto support BlockClub with atax-deductible donation.

Thanks for subscribing to Block Club Chicago, an independent, 501(c)(3), journalist-run newsroom. Every dime we make fundsreportingfrom Chicagos neighborhoods. Clickhereto support Block Clubwith atax-deductible donation.

Listen to Its All Good: A Block Club Chicago Podcast:

Read more:
After Failing To Respond To Migrant Crisis, City Council's Immigration Committee Calls On Itself To Meet More Often - Block Club Chicago

The Greece boat disaster, which took the lives of over 400 people, including nearly 300 Pakistanis, has brought out contradicting versions of the event from the Greek authorities and the survivors. While authorities say they saved hundreds of lives, survivors claim that not only did the Greek Coastguard do nothing for hours, but they also deliberately destabilized the vessel until it capsized. Though the incident is under scrutiny and we might (or not) witness some kind of accountability, we should not lose sight of what many call fortress Europea policy of actively humiliating, detaining, and fencing out immigrants and refugees. On an even broader level, we should not lose sight of what continues to define much of the Global North current politics: xenophobia.

The August 2017 leaked phone call between Malcolm Turnbull and Donald Trump comes to mind. During the call, Turnbull remarked that Australia had a policy of not letting anyonenot even a Noble Prize-winning genius come into the country by boat. Lauding the harsh policy, Trump replied: That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.1

While the likes of Trump and Turnbull have been making headlines for their explicitly racist anti-immigrant policies, the situation was not too different in the preceding years and decades. In 2016, the Barack Obama administration spent $75 million to contain immigrants coming from Mexico.2 Long before that, in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine warned European powers to respect the Western Hemisphere as the United States sphere of interest. Over eighty years later, in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt sent U.S. Marines into Santo Domingo to contain European colonialism in Latin America, followed by similar military incursions in Nicaragua and Haiti. A bizarre clash of colonialisms, the fight was actually about designating regions for colonization, about agreeing to colonize regions in an interest-sensitive and mutually beneficial manner.

In fact, in many ways, the ongoing xenophobic policies are representative of the settler-colonial principles on which the United States and Australia were founded. Both the United States and Australia came into existence at the barbaric extermination of non-white Indigenous people. No wonder the founding principles retain their essence in the attitude and policy measures toward non-white immigrating people.

In Greece, the media outcry around these tragedies, unfortunately, continues to be embedded in the here and now alone. The previous decade saw a number of similar tragedies, bringing no substantial change to the fortress mindset. In April 2011, more than 220 Africans lost their lives as their boat capsized a few miles away from Lampedusa. The year saw 1,500 people perish in the Mediterranean.3 In summer 2015, horrifying footage emerged of over 10,000 migrants plucked from the Libya-Italy route.4 April 18 alone witnessed 900 migrants drowning in the Mediterranean in their desperate attempt to reach European shores, while September 2 caused widespread uproar against European apathy when a 3-year-old Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, was found washed ashore in Turkey.

The coast of Malta, the Italian coast of Lampedusa, and the coast of Spain became sites of imagined futures distanced infinitely by the Mediterranean. The list of these stories is quite exhaustive, involving death, discrimination, and misery. A quick look at the migration and development section of a leading European newspaper would reveal stories of the following ilk: Greek Police Coerce Asylum Seekers into Pushing Fellow Migrants Back to Turkey; Migrant Workers Exploited and Beaten on UK Fishing Boat; EU Border Agency Involved in Hundreds of Refugee Pushbacks.5

What makes people from the Global South set out on such dangerous journeys? Even if they make it to a European coast safely, they could be subjected to brutal treatment, years-long hostile detention, and deportation. The obvious answer is war, perpetual poverty, and repression. Together, they produce a state of affairs in which risking life is the most rational choice. And yet, correct as this statement is, it fails to capture the historical conditions embedded so intrinsically in socioeconomic structures. These conditions have roots in colonial pasts and the subsequent ill-found decolonization and state formation processes.

It is hard to disagree with the proposition that the ambitions driving colonization were founded along three axes: colonial expansion, economic exploitation, and political repression. Take the Indian subcontinent, for instance, where the British East India Company first entered as a trading entity and gradually took on a political character, becoming the chief agent of British imperialism by the eighteenth century. British colonialism in India expanded from a trading company to a developing political outlook to, eventually, taking control of and ruling most parts of India for over two hundred years.

In their 2018 collection of essays, Agrarian and Other Histories Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, economists Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik revealed that Britain siphoned out a startling $44.6 trillion from India between 1765 and 1938. They offer a rigorous account of the systematic extraction and transfer of wealth and resources from India, to the point that, despite making the second-largest export surplus earnings in the world in the first three decades of the twentieth century, India continued to suffer from a trade deficit.6 This fictitious trade deficit is only one of the many facades of colonial theft, the accounts of which are also offered by Tirthankar Roy, Shashi Tharoor, and Pallavi Das, among others.

As for political repression, the list of atrocities is countless, of which some of the most documented include the 1857 massacres across North India, the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, and over a dozen more that took place in the run-up to 1947each killing thousands of people, and displacing and dispossessing even more. And yet, massacres were only one, although the deadliest, of the many ways of repressing political opposition. Lasting, systematic repression of dissenting voices has persisted through the mobilization of the civil and military bureaucracies against people resisting. The local beneficiaries of the Raj were the cardinal sources providing numerical and non-numerical input to this three-axis schema.

Tragically, the unfolding of the colonial calculusthe interplay of expansion, exploitation, and repressionwas not confined to a specific epoch. In practice, the legacy of colonialism remains embedded in political, legal, economic, and social institutions, the essence of which continues to haunt post-colonial nations even today. It continues to manifest itself in the multiplicity of modern-day repressions, whether that be colonial-era sedition and blasphemy laws or the blasphemy laws in India and Pakistan, Article 4 of the African Union Constitutive Act binding African countries to abide by the borders inherited from colonialism, or the gender-binary laws prevalent in erstwhile-British colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and East Asia.7 The colonial enterprise also created property rights institutions, land tenure systems, tax collection arrangements, and a host of other sociopolitical institutions instrumentalizing the cleavages of class, caste, religion, ethnicity, and gender across the colonized world.8 Equally important, the military arrangements created during the colonial period as part of armed machinery (engaged with colonial wars abroad and brutal repression of dissent within colonies) are structures that to this day dominate the political and the economic in most parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.

In other words, the colonial epoch refuses to be a bygone epoch. It asserts itself as a permanence refusing to fade into the past. It is the permanence of colonial statecraft disguising itself in the todays state structures. Indeed, the post in post-colonial is just as much post as the post in post-fascism, post-authoritarianism, or post-fundamentalism. It should, therefore, not come as a surprise that the systemic exodus of the peripheralized in the post-colonial nations is largely due to the perpetuity of colonial statecraft. Those at the receiving end of this continuation today include the economically plundered, religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, and gender minorities. In many cases, the intersectionality of peripheralization produces even more gruesome conditions for the victims to seek nothing but survival in a space away from a tyrannical homeland.

Even the obvious answer, as mentioned above, to the question of todays migration and refugee crisis (that is, war, economic poverty, repression) has more to do with modern-day Euro-American imperialism than local reasons. Of course, this is not to exempt the local elite from their complicity, but to take a systematic view of international power relations producing conflicts, wars, and dispossession in much of the Global South. However, some question the role of Euro-American imperialism in escalating the refugee crisis. Some may find it debatable that the wars and dispossessions are a result of the clash of imperialisms, a consequence of tensions between imperialist blocs. Some may also point toward the global arms industry that benefits primarily from the growing violence. Some may identify the historical sectarian tensions in Muslim-majority places as well as the continuation of Cold War undercurrents as major driving forces in chaos and eventually migration.

What is not debatable, however, is that the vast majority of the Global South has been subjected to wars and conflicts for which they are not responsible. Whether it is Euro-American imperialism single handedly, a clash of imperialism, or the coming together of capital and hegemony, what is not debatable is that communities in the Global South have been at the mercy of international imperial relations playing themselves out in different epochs. From the decades-long Iraq War to the 2015 Syrian War to the 2021 Afghanistan debacle to the slow genocide of Palestinians to the countless low-intensity conflicts in Africa, the conditions for the outburst of mass migration have always been shaped by imperialist forces.

Another crucial driver of escape that we have started to pay attention to, albeit slowly, is the ecological crisis. Today, when we talk about the climate crisis engendering conditions for human flight, we are talking about droughts, floods, rising sea levels, heat waves, more and more extreme weather conditions, forest fires, and air and water pollution all depriving humans (particularly those in the Global South) of food, shelter, livelihood, and basic living conditions. We are also talking about diminishing agricultural lands, soil infertility, dilapidating housing structures, evaporating rivers, and shrinking forests. But we hardly pay serious attention to the inevitable relationship between the ecological crisis and mass migration. Even when we do, as the international NGOs and a host of environmental organizations sometimes do, we only urge humankind to make donations to rescue the poor who are being affected by climate change. Why do we not have a rigorous discussion on economic and political processes destroying ecology and, thus, causing misery and migration for the global poor? Why do we not establish a direct relationship between reckless industrial practices and the consequent abandonment of homelands by those in the Global South? Why do we not look at the fossil fuel industry, the automobile industry, and the global agribusiness as the chief producers of conditions forcing the marginalized to seek refuge in the Global North? Finally, why do we not view globalized, financialized neoliberalism as the direct source of todays migration crisis?

One apparently welcoming change is that many of the states in the North have started to shift to renewable energy, with countries in Scandinavia aiming to be carbon neutral by 2050. The question, however, remains: Will this shift to so-called sustainable futures overcome the climate crisis and subsequently address the migration crisis? In other words, are we developing these renewable energy technologies to let business-as-usual thrive? Or are we making radical transformations in the economic systems and using these technologies to help us in that process?

Clearly, the fascination with privatized, large-scale sustainable energy, and technological messianism is, at best, an innovative distraction purported to evade the foundational questions: the Global North-led hyper-consumerism and total apathy to the health of the biosphere. The result of such sustained anti-ecology dominion is the oppressive pillaging of nature, bringing the planet to a point where there have never been more carbon emissions and much of the damage done is already irreversible. One glaring consequencein addition to the accelerated extinction of non-human and plant lifehas been the large-scale South-North migration.

Todays immigrant policies and political discourses across most parts of the Global North are reminiscent of a colonial Othering, a colonial Othering that reveals itself, in its glory, at the behest of right-wing populism.

In her Empires Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italys Crisis of Migration and Detention, Stephanie Malia Hom explores the colonial roots of Italys contemporary migration crisis, arguing that the control of the mobility of nomadic Bedouin tribes was central to the longevity of the Italian empire. So much so that the empire declared a state of emergency against their movement in 1930, dispossessing and displacing more than one hundred thousand Bedouins from their homeland in Libya. This was followed by imprisoning them in the Cyrenaican concentration camps, characterizing conditions made for deathly living, eventually causing at least forty thousand Bedouins to perish by 1933.9 The colonial control of mobility and the ruthless treatment of nomadic tribes, she argues, is the template of discriminatory, anti-mobility tactics that todays Italy exercises against migrants on an even wider scale.

These tactics, rehearsed and mastered for centuries in their respective colonies, are, by and large, common to most West European countries today. Although their exercise has been prevalent for centuries, with decolonization bringing no significant break, these tactics manifest themselves much more vigorously during periods of right-wing populist governments. Here, the ostracization is, ironically, inclusive enough to bring both the inflowing migrants and the already existing Black and brown communities into the Otherizing calculus. Margaret Thatchers populism in late-1970s Britain, for example, effectively constructed Caribbean men as muggers as part of a strategy of mobilizing racism to divert attention from the planned dissolution of the welfare state.10 Today, whether it is Trump calling for building walls and banning immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Viktor Orbn normalizing xenophobia, Marine Le Pen yearning to get France back from immigrants, or dozens of mainstream politicians tightening border control, these policies and discourses are reminiscent of the colonial construction of the inferior, racialized Other. Right-wing populists only bring this colonial legacy out in its most unfiltered, unapologetic form. Is the notion of todays fundamentalist, uncivilized immigrant contaminating European culture not, after all, a continuation of the colonial duality of Occidental civility versus Orientalist barbarity?

In their unconscious attempt to keep alive the colonial legacy of controlling the Other, Western Europe, the United States, and Australia currently view neighboring countries or islands as fences to contain migrants and refugees. For Western Europe, these fences include Libya and Morocco (but also Turkey); for the United States and Australia, it is Mexico and the islands of Papua New Guinea, respectively. These countries, it appears, are considered entities whose policy toward the mobility of inflowing migrants can be held hostage to the whims of the North in exchange for money. Consequently, these fences, these transit countries, today host detention camps, information centers, and a many other similar misnomers, with the result that they themselves have become sites of immigration. In other words, in their pursuit to keep themselves insulated from the previously colonized, most countries in the Global North, at least partially, outsource the job of containing the incoming Other and, therefore, also overburden economically struggling nations.

Are such concerted efforts to keep immigrants out an attempt to erase reminders of a colonial past, on the grounds of which much of modern-day European wealth and social structures were created? Is it a psychological evasion from historical guilt, a defense mechanism seeking refuge in amnesia? The defining moment of the contemporary migration and refugee crisis is the normalization of dying in a truck trailer, at the back of a lorry, or in a drowning boat. Those who survive have a high chance of being subjected to inhumane treatment at detention centers and possibly experiencing some kind of permanent psychological damage.

To most countries in the Global North, however, the migrants act of seeking life outside of their homeland is perceived as the result of immediate, local circumstances, detached from colonial pasts, imperialist wars, the ecological crisis, and the systemic underdevelopment of the Global South. In this framework, migration is perceived as an act of choice, an aspiration to experience social mobility, with no account of the historical and contemporary conditions dictating such a choice. Contemporary right-wing populists further conceal these historical conditions, despite aggressively employing colonial racial vocabulary. As long as the roots remain concealed, as long as the conditions driving mass mobility keep thriving, neither the Greece boat disaster nor even the most meaningful of efforts will bring substantial change.

1. Greg Miller, Julie Vitkovskaya and Reuben Fischer-Baum, This Deal Will Make Me Look Terrible: Full transcripts of Trumps Calls with Mexico and Australia, Washington Post, August 3, 2017. 2. Kim LaCapria, President Obama Is Giving Mexico $75 Million to Build a Southern Border Wall, Snopes, September 22, 2016. 3. Mediterranean Takes Record as Most Deadly Stretch of Water for Refugees and Migrants in 2011, UNHCR, January 31, 2012. 4. Achankeng Fonkem, The Refugee and Migrant Crisis: Human Tragedies as an Extension of Colonialism, The Round Table 109, no. 1 (2020): 60. 5. Katy Fallon, Revealed: Greek Police Coerce Asylum Seekers into Pushing Fellow Migrants Back to Turkey, Guardian, June 28, 2022; Karen McVeigh, Migrant Workers Exploited and Beaten on UK Fishing Boats, Guardian, May 17, 2022; Katy Fallon, Revealed: EU Border Agency Involved in Hundreds of Refugee Pushbacks, Guardian, April 28, 2022. 6. Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik, eds., Agrarian and Other Histories Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 7. Ammar Ali Jan, It Is Time for India and Pakistan to Repeal Their Sedition Laws, Al Jazeera, February 20, 2020; Asad Ali Ahmed, Specters of Macaulay Blasphemy, the Indian Penal Code, and Pakistans Postcolonial Predicament, in Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 172205; Fonkem, The Refugee and Migrant Crisis, 56. 8. Fonkem, The Refugee and Migrant Crisis, 57. 9. Stephanie Malia Hom, Empires Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italys Crisis of Migration and Detention (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 3. 10. Encarnacin Gutirrez Rodrguez, The Coloniality of Migration and the Refugee Crisis: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism, Refuge: Canadas Journal on Refugees/Refuge 34, no. 1 (2018): 17.

Excerpt from:
Beyond the Greece Boat Disaster: Tracing the Roots of the Migration ... - MRonline.org

Our goal is to cross what is probably the most wicked jungle in the world. This could be said by the thousands of migrants who pass through the Darien Gap daily, which separates Colombia from Panama. But, instead, the phrase is an offer from a German luxury adventure tourism company.

Two weeks through this dense jungle with tremendously diverse and severe challenges entail the adventure of a lifetime, offers Wandermut, a German company that offers experiences in Darien for 3,643 euros (almost 4,000 dollars).

Their adventure takes place in that large jungle, without crossing borders and on the Pacific side, some 90 kilometers from where migrants mainly Venezuelans and Haitians pass daily, risking their lives to reach the United States, which has sparked controversy recently. Many thousands of Cubans have also shared that horrible experience.

Just this Friday, the Panama Tourism Authority also came out in defense of the company and the tourism it offers in Darien, rich in diversity and open for more than a decade to excursions, natural expeditions and other types of tourism.

For them, the migration crisis, as a relatively new phenomenon, has nothing to do with the tourism activities that have been taking place for decades in Darien and the rest of our territory.

Although the number of migrants has skyrocketed in the last two years, with more than 184,000 people who have already crossed from Colombia to Panama through Darien this year (five times as many as in the same period of 2022), the humanitarian crisis in this natural border is not new and people from all over the world including Africa and Asia swhave been trying to cross the mountains and rivers of the Darien for more than a decade, not exactly to enjoy an adventure.

This organization carries out almost all medical consultations at the migrant-receiving stations in Meteti, on the Panamanian side, at the jungle exit.

It is an authentic humanitarian crisisWe are talking about more than 500 people a day who are exposed to this situation: children, adolescents, pregnant women, people with disabilities who are exposed to this route, denounces the head of the MSF mission.

We avoid the direct border area to Colombia and eastern Darien. Anything else would be reckless, warns the German tour company. Migrants, however, cannot avoid this pathway and are in fact exposed to paying money for a route that is in the hands of armed and criminal groups.

Those brave enough to pay the 3,643 euros are offered security, state of the art equipment to avoid getting lost and, in extreme emergencies, a signal is sent via satellite phone.

Ninety kilometers away, migrants crossing cannot pay for security, cannot pay for the easiest routes, so they expose themselves to most difficult routes, recalls Eguiluz. In the Darien zone through which the migrants pass, it is unknown how many have fallen by the wayside.

In our medical and mental health consultations, we see the suffering that exposure to this jungle has caused them. Therefore, any trivialization of this humanitarian crisis does not exactly help to show the tragedy of these people, Eguiluz regrets.

This article was originally publishedin Spanish in Confidencialandtranslated by Havana Times.

Here is the original post:
Darien Gap Tourism, the trivialization of the migrant crisis - Confidencial