By Harsha Walia, Rabble.ca, December 18, 2010

Nenje nenje, nee engai, naanum angai
(Soul, wherever you are, I am there too.)

– Lyrics from one of the Tamil songs played every week in front of the Burnaby detention centre.

For the last three months, No One Is Illegal Vancouver has organized weekly demonstrations outside the Burnaby Youth Detention Centre where approximately 75 mothers and children who arrived aboard the MV Sun Sea last summer are still being detained. They were amongst the 492 Tamil refugees who made the three-month journey from Sri Lanka to B.C., only upon their arrival to be forced into three detention centres across the Lower Mainland amidst a national hysteria about “illegals” and “criminals.”

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A June 19, 2010 panel with community activists from No One Is Illegal Toronto (Farrah Miranda), Vancouver (Harsha Walia), and Montreal (Jaggi Singh), as well our allies Melissa Elliott (Young Onkwehonwe United, Six Nations) and Adil Charkaoui (held on a Security Certificate). This panel focuses on the realities of Canadian immigration and border patrols in relation to broader global dynamics of corporate free trade, militarization and occupation, and the global rise of racist sentiments against Indigenous and immigrant communities.

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By Jean Shaoul, World Socialist Web Site, Dec. 14 2010

Israel’s government is to build a detention centre to hold up to 10,000 refugees who arrive every year, until their asylum requests have been rejected and they can be expelled. The vast majority of the migrants have fled from war-torn and poverty-stricken countries in the Horn of Africa such as Darfur in the Sudan, and Eritrea, via Egypt. Many have been persecuted, abused or tortured.

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rabble.ca, Farrah Miranda

On this day in 1989, 25-year-old Marc Lepine, screaming “I hate feminists!” shot and killed Anne-Marie Edward, Anne-Marie Lemay, Annie St. Arneault, Annie Turcotte, Barbara Daigneault, Barbara Marie Klucznik, Genevieve Bergeron, Helene Colgan, Maryse LeClaire, Maryse Leganiere, Maud Haviernier, Michele Richard, Nathalie Croteau and Sonia Pelletier. Dozens of vigils, memorials and public events will take place across Canada today remembering these 14 women. We will gather to speak about the ongoing violence perpetuated by men against women and trans people that forms the basis of our rape-culture.

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Al Jazeera 28 Nov 2010

Israel’s cabinet has voted to build a facility to hold the thousands of illegal immigrants who arrive every year mainly from Africa. The move is designed to provide a centre in the country’s southern Negev desert, close to the border with Egypt, where the basic needs of the migrants can be met, but they will not be allowed to work, Israeli officials said. “There is a swelling wave threatening Israeli jobs, a wave of illegal migrants that we must stop because of the harsh implications for Israel’s character,” Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, told the cabinet before the vote on Sunday.

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