By: The Canadian Press. Date: Thursday Sep. 9, 2010 2:45 PM PT

The federal government is dispatching a former spy chief to Asia as a special envoy on human smuggling to help prevent more migrant ships from arriving on Canadian shores. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says former Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Ward Elcock will visit Sri Lanka, Thailand and other countries to improve co-operation and information sharing. Kenney, in the middle of an Asian tour of his own, plans to tack an Australian stop onto his trip to meet officials in Canberra and see an asylum processing centre. The Conservatives are putting together a package for this fall that would aim at putting a stop to — or at least seriously deter — ships full of migrants heading to Canada’s shores.

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Todd Heisler. The New York Times. August 29, 2010

ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers. A couple waits in Chicago to board the train to Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The man, from Mexico, had been detained in Buffalo and was out on bond. “Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?” When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

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People move across borders from necessity or desperation, providing the citizens of the territory they enter with an unfree workforce that is often used to undermine the rights of more established workers. More than race, more than class, more than gender – but interacting powerfully with all three – the colour of oneÂ’s passport, or the misfortune of having been displaced from oneÂ’s country of origin, can do more to limit a personÂ’s opportunities than almost any other single factor. Declaring war on walls of all kinds, Briarpatch explores the politics of migration in our “freedom of movement” issue.

http://briarpatchmagazine.com/migration-and-freedom-of-movement/

by Julianne Hing, Colorlines. Wednesday, August 25 2010

A record number of migrants are dying as they try to cross through the treacherous border regions to get into the United States. The Los Angeles Times reports that at least 170 people have died along the border in 2010, far surpassing previous years’ death tolls. Fifty-nine people’s remains were found along the border in just the month of July—and those are just the official numbers. The LA Times reports that the most common cause of death is heat-related illness.

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