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UK police raids to find undocumented workers: expensive overkill

18 March 2009 in migration by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

Here are excerpts from a report published by the Institute of Race Relations in the UK. You could say it is a catalogue of proper applications of the law in cases where people knowingly infringe it. But are these sorts of draconian raids and labour-intensive, costly efforts to catch small-time infringers really worth it? People are beginning to realise just how much public money they require. Granted that there might be some connexions between illegal migration and state security, is an overall policy to conduct searches for undocumented workers like high-risk terrorist operations justified? I think we all know it is not. Targeting ethnic restaurants  – their owners, workers and clientele – is an easy way for immigration personnel to demonstrate that the government is Taking Things Seriously. When undocumented migrants manage, as in the cases described below, to find a way to work for low wages and begin to integrate marginally into society, why come down on them so bloody hard?

Because the Law is the Law? But what of all the white-collar infringements that are not handled like these operations, which resemble cop- and spook-style raids on terrorists and gangsters? No such stormings are seen on office buildings and other (white)’ sites. Do people imagine there are no undocumented workers there?

For details, more examples and documentary notes, see the report itself.

Crusade against the undocumented
By Frances Webber, 5 February 2009

Every day, somewhere in the UK, immigration officers, often with police, frequently wearing stab-proof vests, surround High Street restaurants, takeaways and convenience stores, seal exits and storm in. . .. . . generally at the busiest time, to demand that workers prove their right to be working there. Sometimes they carry hand-held fingerprint terminals to perform instant identity checks on those they find working there.  .  .

. . . The raids frequently involve large numbers of police and immigration officials and sometimes resemble military operations. 

The article gives examples:

Seventeen UKBA officers and three police officers descended on Makbros, a cash and carry warehouse in Stanmore, Middlesex, and detained and questioned five men, all of whom turned out to be lawfully employed. An eye-witness said that it was ‘quite scary with all these people running up’.[2]

Thirteen immigration officers raided the Unique Spice restaurant in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to arrest two Bangladeshi men.[3]

A convoy of five vehicles descended on the Waverley Hotel, Yarmouth in a raid in which two Mauritian men and a Brazilian woman were arrested.[4]

Shabul Muhth’s two restaurants in Kent were raided by around eighteen uniformed officers and the restaurants closed at around 6.30pm on Friday and Saturday nights, the peak time for his business. No arrests were made. ‘Come in like gentlemen’, he said. ‘We’re not drug dealing, we’re selling curry.’[5]

A full-scale search with dogs and a police helicopter were deployed to hunt for two men who ran out of the kitchen at Thariks Indian restaurant in Paignton during a raid. An immigration officer fell through the roofof a building in the chase, in which the two men got away.[6] Read the rest of this entry »

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Trafficking, smuggling, chaos: Undocumenteds aiming at UK

11 March 2009 in migration, trafficking by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

Below are exceprts from a migration story in the Observer. There’s quite good information here but also note the confusion about the word trafficking: much of what’s described here should be called smuggling, according to UN protocols. Note particularly:

Though many immigrants travel independently, others use organised criminal traffickers for at least some of the journey

If migrants ‘use’ people to help them cross borders illegally, these are meant to be described as smugglers. It’s a hard distinction to maintain consistently, but in this story people are clearly travelling because they chose to and sometimes paying for help. The help can end up being abusive, of course.  The word refugee is also used. Some of the people interviewed might have a case for asylum but many do not. Also the word criminal is peppered around unnecessarily.

Gender note: Everyone mentioned in the story is male, but what’s described applies to women who migrate without documents as well, and illustrates why getting into a ‘protected’ situation can be tempting, why getting into sex work may be a temporary solution, and so on.

I’ve highlighted in bold some common realities known to those who study or hobnob with undocumented migrants, and removed some material you can read on the original site. Note the immensely pragmatic attitude shown by those interviewed: they are going against legal policy, they know it, they will keep trying, they are not crying about it. It’s not a victimising article.

Why do I want to get to Britain? It has to be better than everything else

Jason Burke, Norrent-Fontes, France, 8 March 2009

The three tents are clustered in a ditch, beside a field, in the middle of nowhere. . . .A tractor bumps past, a crow flaps across the grey sky, the traffic on the A26 Paris-Calais motorway 500 yards behind a small wood is barely audible. It is an unlikely place for a refugee transit camp, the last stop before the UK. The nearest town is two miles away: the grubby two cafes and post office of Norrent-Fontes.

But the ditch is a temporary home for 26 young Eritreans and Ethiopians trying to get to Britain by hiding in the lorries that stop in the layby every night. And their situation is far from unique. An investigation by the Observer has revealed scores of such makeshift settlements containing an estimated 1,500 people, including women and children, scattered across a huge swath of northern France.

There are camps as far west as the Normandy port of Cherbourg. . . and as far north as the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend. In Paris, an estimated 200 young immigrants who are on their way to the UK sleep in parks every night. . . Read the rest of this entry »

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Women as people-smugglers and traffickers

25 February 2009 in migration, trafficking by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

The UN recently released yet another report on trafficking which says:

a disproportionate number of women are involved in human trafficking, not only as victims (which we knew), but also as traffickers (first documented here). Female offenders have a more prominent role in present-day slavery than in most other forms of crime.

Sillies . . . if they only had listened to what some of us were saying from the beginning, they wouldn’t find themselves so surprised now. By which I mean that those who help move people around in informal networks are very often friends and relations of the people doing the moving, so why shouldn’t they be women as often as men? If you take away Crime as the framing of this sort of movement, then you don’t have to expect the criminals to be men. The work of smuggling does not require particular physical strength. As an article about coyotes on the Mexico-US border shows, women can be highly adept at people smuggling and trafficking.

Note in the following excerpts that the words trafficking and smuggling are used interchangeably. The original story was published in Spanish, where what English-speakers are calling trafficking is often called la trata and smuggling el tráfico or el contrabando. The article is not about that dread term sex trafficking, and as you’ll see, those trafficked are not seen as victims. I’ve highlighted some suggestive quotations in bold.

Women Are the New Coyotes

La Opinión,  Claudia Núñez, 23 December 2007

Gaviota has six phones that don’t stop ringing. Her booming business produces net profits of more than $50,000 a month. She has dozens of customers lining up for her in a datebook stretching three months ahead.

“The old story of the man who runs the ‘coyotaje’ business is now just a myth. It’s finally coming out that the big business of human trafficking is in female hands. As long as they make it known that they are women, they have lots of business all along the border,” explains Marissa Ugarte, a psychologist, lecturer and founder of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition of San Diego, Calif.

Female coyotes tend to employ other women – most of them single mothers – to line up customers, arrange food and lodging for the undocumented, and participate in cross-border money laundering.

“A real ‘coyote’ organizes everything for you. From who and where to take the ‘goats’ across, and where they will stay on this side of the border, to who will deliver them to the door of the customer (the immigrant’s family). The other ones who just take you across the river or through the desert – those bastards are just sleazebags . . .  says Gaviota, whose smuggling network operates in Laredo, Tex. and transports migrants into the United States at border crossings or across the Rio Grande, depending on the customer’s budget.

“The business is a real money-maker,” says Ramón Rivera, a DHS spokesperson in Washington, D.C. “These women inspire confidence in the immigrants and when the authorities stop them and take them to court, they give them shorter sentences because they are mothers, daughters, because they are women. . . . Read the rest of this entry »

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Smuggled people get help from border police themselves

8 February 2009 in migration, trafficking by laura agustin | No comments | print print

The simplification of complexity is well illustrated by the idea of putting physical obstructions at national borderlines to keep people out. The stereotype of illegal migration imagines three clear roles: the migrant trying to cross, the smuggler or trafficker helping to flout the law and the police officer attempting to stop them. The reality is often much more complicated. The other day a story from Moldova pointed to corruption as a major problem in controlling migration there, and now here is a more tightly focussed account from the Mexico-US border.  I understand corruption to mean, in both cases, that those on the police and government side of the equation – who are paid to prevent people from getting in – take money in exchange for making entry easier. This can happen whether the activities in question are labelled smuggling or trafficking.

The below excerpts are from a news report about Lowell Bergman’s documentary on smuggling; his comments were made during a recent briefing at the University of California.

Corrupt U.S. Agents Aid Human Smuggling at Border

New America Media, Annette Fuentes, 6 Feb 2009

‘Building a fence and wall at the border and putting more border agents down there creates a bigger pool of potential corruption targets.’

The build-up of security agents on the border, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, hasn’t slowed illegal migration . . . Those who would have tried crossing alone are more likely to pay a smuggler to shepherd them across. ‘If people try to get across the border, they eventually get across . . .  Part of the fee to the smuggler is the guarantee that they’ll get you across. If they fail the first time, they’ll try again.’

. . . Proponents of the militarization of the border have used the threat of terrorist attacks in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 to justify the build-up. But Bergman noted that there is no evidence that terrorists have ever entered through the Mexico-U.S. border. Of all those apprehended at border crossings, there is no record of non-Mexicans. . .

. . . there has been no effective internal oversight of border agents since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Multiple agencies, each with some responsibilities for immigration, customs and law enforcement, have meant no coordinated approach to investigations. ‘They completely lost any idea of what was going on . . . Only now are they beginning to find out, and they are overwhelmed by the number of leads and cases to follow up on.’

The FBI . . . now has about 200 open cases of human smuggling involving corrupt border agents. But the agency is swimming against the tide. ‘People coming through checkpoints . . . is still a growth industry.’

Here the whole black and white, law-and-order idea loses ground, and we see instead a multi-national social setting. Placing people at a border to enforce it provides them with opportunities to make money doing exactly what their formal job pays them to prevent. This is, of course, a widespread phenomenon amongst police of all kinds. Many people take law-enforcement jobs not out of an inspired devotion to the State but because they can get those jobs.Maybe they perform many aspects of their jobs correctly, but they don’t believe in ‘the law’ enough to resist opportunities to freelance. 

Here are three more examples of specific cases where those with power were paid to smooth crossing the border: a Dominican diplomat in New York, a filipino in New Jersey and a US customs officer and Chinese smuggler of people via Ecuador.

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False papers and ‘illegal migrants’: Faujis in London

5 January 2009 in migration, trafficking by laura agustin | Permalink | print print

This story comes from Southall, an area of west London often called Little Punjab, but it has a lot in common with a story about mexicanos in the US called Migrant workers wait around for work and another one about algerians in France: The Suffering of the Immigrant.

The migrants are called faujis, Punjabi for unauthorised immigrants. Before coming to the UK in the backs of lorries via Russia and Europe, or overstaying tourist visas, they were mostly poorer farmers from India’s Punjab region.

The following report doesn’t talk about ‘sex trafficking’, but the sense of victimisation is not dissimilar. Although the report shows different ways migrants use false papers and are used by employers, it highlights the latter. Maybe that’s a good thing for readers who think all unauthorised migrants are criminal scroungers. The reporter tells us that most of the migrants knew they were taking risks when they left home, but we need more information about that, particularly what they themselves have to say.

Migrant criminal network exposed 

excerpts from BBC News 2008/07/16 By Richard Bilton

More than 40 houses packed with illegal immigrants were identified in one square mile of Southall, west London. The young, mostly male Punjabis are not here lawfully and, although most know the risks, they have few legal rights. They are surrounded by forgers, criminals and ruthless employers.

Vicki said he could get people into the country on lorries, known as donkeys, organised by what he called his “man in Paris”, and told how he could provide a fake “original” passport that had been “checked” to beat security at a UK airport.

Some try to get by without any documents. Others will have cheap, fake documents, and some will pay good money for original passports, for bank accounts, a Home Office registration card or for stolen identities on driving licences.

One reporter went [to a chip shop] for work. The owner said to “never mind” the fact he had no papers, that he would “handle that issue” and that the reporter should not mention it “otherwise you may be nicked”.

I have often recommended that we find a way to talk about this kind of migration without being forced to choose between two contrasting and simplified traps. In trap one, everyone in the story except for the reporters is flouting multiple laws and should be treated like a criminal, even though their labour is wanted and paid for in the country they’ve travelled to. In trap two, the migrants are complete victims, first of a global economy that has led them to desperate, last-ditch solutions, and then of various bad characters who have misled them about what their life abroad would be, overcharged them for fake documents, forced them to live in lousy, overcrowded conditions and underpaid them for unsafe, illegal jobs.

In Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants, I address the second, victimising trap and I say 

Of course I believe that the world is a place of terrible differences between the poor and the rich, where men almost always have more power and money. It’s not fair. But given the unfairness, I prefer to listen to how people describe their own realities rather than create static, generalised categories like Exploited Victims. I also don’t agree that poor people only leave their countries because they are forced to, with no possibility for their desires and abilities to think and weigh risks. The same goes for people who get into prostitution or sex work – I prefer to give the heaviest weight to what they say they are doing!

I see plenty of possibilities for exploitation in the fauji story the BBC tells, but I also see the kind of opportunities thousands of migrants have told me they want to take advantage of. Even though they didn’t fully comprehend how difficult it would be before they left, now they want to make the best of it. And even though they engaged in something illegal in order to cross the border, many are now eager to become useful, regular residents with both responsibilities and rights. Including some of those who sell sex, which is not mentioned in this BBC article but is not unknown in the fauji world.

There isn’t going to be one legal model for dealing with the many different kinds of quasi-legal, semi-illegal and egregiously illegal migration – of which trafficking and ‘sex trafficking’ are part. Current political rhetoric seems to imagine only two possible ‘solutions’: a hard-line, mean, law-and-order KEEP OUT policy or a soft-line, generous, utopian NO BORDERS policy. Since these reflect deeply contrasting world views, most of the debate about them remains abstract, symbolic and confrontational – as though a fundamental ‘way of life’ were at stake. 

This has a lot in common with debates about the sex industry, in which two sides representing two different world views are opposed. What I’d like to see in both areas is more pragmatism about what workable improvements – not solutions, for now - might look like.

Some related posts on the different sorts of irregular migration include:

  • Not sex trafficking: False papers as a means to migrate
  • The Shadowy World of Sex Across Borders
  • Sex trafficking v prostitution: How do we judge the evidence?
  • The Sex in ‘Sex Trafficking’
  • Working on ships, Travelling by ship
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    Sex Trafficking v Prostitution: Judging the evidence

    10 December 2008 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 18 comments | print print

    Because I question unfounded statistics and uninformed statements about the extent of abusive human trafficking, certain critics say I am a pimp, associate of traffickers or paid by the international sex industry.

    But all I want to do in this post is show how a mainstream news medium’s ‘undercover investigation’, one with live images, fails to prove its point about sex trafficking. In the following video, reporters filmed men and women in a field, sometimes running, sometimes walking, sometimes talking together.

    Since the reporter says sex between the men and women was observed but not shown in the video, I’m willing to believe that we’re looking at prostitution, maybe in an informal outdoor brothel. But what we’re shown cannot be called sex trafficking unless we hear from the women themselves whether they opted into this situation on any level at all. They aren’t in chains and no guns are pointed at them, although they might be coerced, frightened, loaded with debt or wishing they were anywhere else. But we don’t hear from them. I’m not blaming the reporters or police involved for not rushing up to ask them, but the fact is that their voices are absent.

    I want to consider what we think constitutes evidence about trafficking. If we remove the reporter’s dramatic, stylised commentary and the police officer’s opinions, what have we got? Images of people from afar, probably having sex outdoors, in conditions some of us might prefer to avoid – but not all of us.

    Here’s the video from 2003.

    Do you see what I mean?

    These California fields have been the subject of other reports, including one calling them Rape Camps. But HIV-AIDS outreach undertaken with migrant farm workers who live in isolated conditions in the middle of nowhere find that many want to use some of their earnings to pay for sex and that there are people who arrange for women to come to them. The farm workers are paid badly and probably prefer, at least sometimes, to spend less by not going into town or more formally organised sex venues.

    In the fields, it’s likely no one cleans up much, which makes things look sleazy. The location of the encounters shifts, which is the essence of an informal economic arrangement. Research in the US Southeast (the other side of the country, where latinos are also doing farm labour) has documented these phenomena.

    There are lots of things we might find out about the fields near San Diego, and probably there’s more than one story there. But I do know that in this video, we don’t see evidence for the sex-trafficking story. Feeling titillated or disgusted ourselves does not prove anything about what we are looking at or about how the people actually involved felt.

    What about the next example, said to be published 23 November 2008 by Al Jazeera (but I cannot find it on their own site)?

    In this more conventional video, a reporter dressed like a tourist strolls past women lined up on Singapore streets, commenting on their many nationalities and that ‘they seem to be doing it willingly’. But since he sees pimps everywhere he wonders whether the sex workers are victims of trafficking. His investigation consists of interviewing a single woman who testifies to having had a bad time. She articulates clearly how her debt to travel turned out to be too big to pay off without selling sex. Then an embassy official says numbers of trafficked victims have gone up, without explaining what he means by ‘trafficked’, exactly, or how the embassy keeps track of them. Prostitution is legal in Singapore, by the way, so it’s silly to act scandalised at the numbers of women in the street or be surprised that they come from other countries.

    So here again, there could be bad stories, but we are shown no evidence of them. The women themselves, with the exception of one, are left in the background and treated like objects.

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    Growing demand for sex shops, lapdancing, poledancing and escort agencies

    1 December 2008 in sex work by laura agustin | 3 comments | print print

    Those familiar with my work know how resistant I am to participating in arguments about statistics.  In that game, advocates argue, for example, about how many sex-working migrants are trafficked. When people overstay visas and remain in a country they are visiting or use faked documents to get in, they join a category later called ’undocumented migrants’, but per se their numbers are not recorded.

    In the same way, people who work in sex industry businesses not recognised by governments, and thus excluded from formal accounting, cannot be counted. Therefore, when either side claims to know numbers for sex workers, they are only guessing.

    The same claims are heard vis-a-vis numbers of sex workers and prostitutes. In places where prostitution is technically legal for individuals and/or where some kinds of sex businesses can register and thus be counted in formal government accounts,

    So I was interested to see, in a Guardian article of 17 November 2008, a different sort of statistic.  The figures, based on 130 million calls to the UK’s Directory Assistance, compare requests for numbers from January to June 2007 with the same period in 2008. Figures show that requests for the telephone numbers of pole and lap dancing venues went up 469%, of escort agencies 40% and of sex shops 1,312%. 

    The Guardian article predictably ties the increases to sexist culture ‘fuelled by a loophole in the law that enables the clubs to be licensed in the same way as cafes.’ But the article goes on to say that calls requesting the numbers of other leisure activities, such as karaoke bars, also increased.

     These figures only indicate interest in sex businesses, not definite buying of services, but they are better than the fantasies often spouted irresponsibly by all kinds of serious commentators. Since they tally the telephone numbers of businesses with landlines, they will take in both informal and formal businesses and blur the line between them – which I consider a good thing.

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    Migrant workers wait around for work: a description by Ana Castillo

    9 September 2008 in migration by laura agustin | No comments | print print

    The Guardians, by Ana Castillo (2007, Random House), is about the lives of Mexicans living near the border in the US. In this excerpt, two of them make a tour with a photograph of someone who’s disappeared.

    [We went] to Paisano to ask if any of the laborers recognise him. Pero nel. No luck. Young and old men alike shake their tired heads. IT’s six in the morning and they already looked tired out.

    So we go walking around downtown, over by the Stanton bridge, up and down Paisano and down and up Oregon. We go by the Tiradero as the merchants are setting up their puestos and all los hombres are out there already. That flea market’s open all year long. Across the street you got the KFC-Taco Bell combo in one lil building-men are waiting there. They’re waiting in the McDonald’s and Church’s Chicken parking lots, too. Across from my old parish, El Sagrado Corazon, where Lola used to make me go to Mass, you got them waiting. ‘Maestro,’ they call out, ‘take me. I’ll work hard for you. See”‘ They flex a muscle or try to. They flash a smile at us.

    Me and Oso make our way down to all the bus stations with Rafa’s picture that’s falling apart from so much passing around. The one closest to my house is on Santa Fe and Overland. Then over to Los Angeles Limousines. I understand that some women take that one all the way to LA to get clothes deals at the garment district there. Then they come right back on that bus line and take the clothes to Juarez to sell. I go to the Plaza de los Lagartijos where all the women housekeepers wait to be picked up by patrones. The city used to keep live alligators in the fountain but the animals kept getting killed.

    Once I even asked a couple of Migra parked on the street. ‘Let me see your ID, sir,’ one tonto said of answering me about the photograph I was trying to show him. N’hombre. La perrera anda brava. They’ll take anybody in.

    LATimesBlogs 17 April 2008

    Another time, me and Oso asked some puchucos standing around waiting-not for work but to make dope deals. I knew who they were-los Mexika Tres Mil. Pretty bad pachucos, but they still ain’t the worse. The Mexika Tres Mil or the MTM like they call themselves, come straight out of federal prisons. They operate inside the prisons, too. Maybe they’re tied to the big narcos. I ain’t claiming to know nothing. Just like my neighbors never hear nothing, I walk around but I don’t see nothing…The MTM ain’t no lil ganga, neither. They’re spread all the way down to Centroamerica. Matones mostly. I ain’t afraid of them, though….

    All up and down now there are los day laborers who cross over every morning, the skilled and unskilled, good workers and not-so-good ones. The borracho types hiding cuartos in paper bags underneath the muebles they’re leaning against. You gotta look behind the tires to check for a hidden half-pint to make sure you don’t pick up un tipo who’ll be pie-eyed by noon.

    It almost looks like something outta the Depression era, so many men needing work. But back then, they couldn’ve waited all darn day and no one wouldn’ve come for them. Then again, back then they weren’t allowed to cross over precisely ’cause there was no work. Now, during the child harvest season, La Migra turns a blind eye at all the men that come to be picked up.

    p 131-2

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    Ambiguous refugees: Blackbirding in 1943

    5 September 2008 in migration, trafficking by laura agustin | No comments | print print

    Here’s another example of smuggling of migrants in the informal economy, from Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Blackbirder, 1943. The conversation takes place at a bar in New York, between two ‘refugees’, one a Frenchwoman pursued by Nazis in France and the other a German man who was living in France. The woman tried unsuccessfully to avoid him, because she thinks he may be a Nazi and also because she herself travelled via Portugal and Cuba, where she bought a false passport to enter the US. The man takes her to a ‘rathskeller’ in Yorktown, on New York’s Upper East Side. The discussion centres on how to get in and out of the country using ‘informal’ methods.

    ‘You say it is simple. But you are a German.’

    ‘A refugee,’ he said smugly.

    She pressed it. A German would not be admitted. ‘How did you come into this country?’ [...]

    ‘If you can pay for it, it is easy. There are planes every week from Old Mexico into New Mexico. A regular tram line. You pay for your seat, in you go! Or if you like – out you go. So simple.’

    ‘Who runs this? Not – not the Gestapo?’

    ‘Oh no!’ Now he looked over his shoulder as if he sensed a listener. Now he did drop his voice. ‘It is not run for governments – not for any governments, nor by any governments. It is a business venture. In Mexico and New Mexico. I ask no questions. A passenger does not question the carrier which transports him. Certainly not.’ The line of his mouth was greedy. ‘It is a good business, this blackbirding. A big business.’ Again he winked. His thumb and forefinger made a round. ‘I wouldn’t mind having a little slice of it.’ His eyes were slits of obsidian. It is like the American prohibition. No taxes to pay. You pay no tax when there is no business, no registered business. Certainly not! The receipts – some are very large – are all for you.’
    __________

    Later in the book the protagonist is in a position to help US authorities catch the real bad guys but won’t, in case she is deported, since she has no legal entry visa.

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    Manifesto against new EU migration law

    30 August 2008 in migration by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

    Perhaps this is less Border Thinking than calling a spade a spade. Europe made itself through imperialism and now passes a law allowing detention of undocumented migrants, even if employed in European-owned businesses, for up to 18 months. Original Spanish follows.

    ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento

    2008-07-24 – Available in:    English       Español    Portugues    Français

    Manifesto against the European migration law

    Honorable European Governments and Parliamentarians

    Some of our ancestors, a few, or many, or all of them, came from Europe.

    The world received these immigrant workers from Europe with generosity.

    Now, with the new European Directive on Forced Return of Migrants, dictated by the looming economic crisis, Europe is criminalizing the free circulation of people, despite this having been consecrated as a right in international law since many years ago.

    There is nothing strange about this, because foreign workers have always been used as scapegoats for the periodic crises of a system that uses them when necessary, and then discards them in the in the dustbin when no longer needed.

    It is not strange, but it is shameful.

    It seems that a convenient amnesia prevents Europe from remembering what Europe would be like without cheap labor from abroad, and without the services that the entire world has provided her with. Europe would not be Europe without the massacre of indigenous peoples in the Americas and without the enslavement of the sons and daughters of Africa, to mention only a few forgotten examples.

    Europe should apologize to the world, or at the very least give thanks for what the world has given her, instead of legalizing the hunting down and punishment of hard working people who have come to Europe, fleeing the hunger and the wars that the masters of the world have sent them.

    From the Americas,
    Cordially,

    ARGENTINA
    - Adolfo Pérez Esquivel – Premio Nobel de la Paz
    - Atilio Boron, escritor
    - Hebe Bonafini, Madres de Plaza de Mayo
    - Osvaldo Bayer , escritor
    - Hermana Martha Pelloni – Derechos Humanos
    - Diana Maffía., filósofa feminista
    - Rally Barrionuevo, cantautor
    - Claudia Korol, periodista, Clacso
    - Luis E. Sabini Fernández, periodista, editor y docente
    - Bernardo Buonomo – agente pastoral – Pastoral Social Moron
    - Lydia Pallavicini.- DNI 3873951
    - Virginia Sol.- LC 6.239.888
    - María Virginia Parodi.- DNI 25.294.793
    - Ana Barousse.- DNI 10859344
    - Rodolfo Martín Pavesi.- D.N.I. 21.670.512
    - Marta Tomé.- DNI 3604943
    - María del Carmen Pessani.- DNI 6264778
    - Andrea Castaño.- DNI 17108310
    - María Celina De Paula.- DNI31723004
    - Mariela Grisel Battaglia.- DNI 33080296
    - Eduardo Grandin.- LE 64443858
    - Ana Pastor. Coordinadora General, Asociación Civil Madre Tierra
    - Gabriel Nosetto. Presidente, Asociación Civil Madre Tierra

    BOLIVIA
    - Eduardo Paz, profesor universitario Read the rest of this entry »

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