STORY posted on May 2, 2012 by Tim Groves, Media Co-op
In the early days of the Arab Spring the Canada Border Service Agency(CBSA) created a series of Intelligence Bulletins on popular unrest in the Middle East and the Maghreb focused on the potential for refugee claims that might ensue. The reports came after uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011 and assessed “the short term potential for unrest in selected countries, and provides a threat rating in relation to potential impact on CBSA activities should situations become critical.” They were based on information from a variety of sources including public documents and information provided by both the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre(ITAC) and foreign agencies.
Waving placards denouncing Ottawa’s plan to eliminate a lengthy immigration backlog, protesters in four foreign cities urged Canada not to repeat its discriminatory immigration past. In Hong Kong, organizers said about 80 affected immigration applicants — many travelling from inner Mainland China — staged a demonstration against the federal government’s plan to return the applications of 280,000 people in the queue. Similar protests were held Monday in Leeds, England, and Karachi, Pakistan. In India’s Chandigarh, 200 people attended a rally and candle-light vigil, according to the Canadian Backloggers Pre-2008 Association.
AJE Fault Lines investigates the business of immigrant detention in the US.
Immigration is a key issue in the US presidential election, with the Republican candidates trying to demonstrate their tough stance on undocumented immigrants. But under the Obama administration, the detention and deportation of immigrants has reached an all-time high. Every day, the US government detains more than 33,000 non-citizens at the cost of $5.5mn a day. That is a lot of money for the powerful private prison industry, which spends millions of dollars on lobbying and now operates nearly half of the country’s immigration detention centres. Fault Lines travels to Texas and Florida to investigate the business of immigrant detention in the US and to find out how a handful of companies have managed to shape US immigration laws.
Housemaid Alem Dechasa killed herself after street attack that sparked outrage over treatment of migrant workers in Lebanon Alem Dechasa was found dead in hospital, apparently hanged using strips from her bed sheets. Warning: video contains violence Link to this video Ethiopia is lobbying Lebanon to investigate fully the death of an Ethiopian housemaid who killed herself after being beaten on the street in Beirut. Video footage of Alem Dechasa being attacked outside the Ethiopian consulate in Beirut was broadcast on Lebanese television two weeks ago, causing outrage in the country about the mistreatment of the thousands of migrant workers in the country. In the video, Dechasa is seen being violently dragged along the street by a man and forced into a car. One man screams at her, “Get into the car” while another is seen helping to force Dechasa into the back of the vehicle.
Israel is to begin construction soon on a vast detention facility in the Negev desert to house the thousands of immigrants that cross illegally into Israel from Egypt every year. Human rights groups fear that the detention centre, the largest of its kind in the world, with a capacity to hold 8,000 migrants, will turn into a festering refugee camp, and deprive those escaping persecution at home of their rights to seek asylum in Israel. The project was approved by Israel’s right-wing government 18 months ago, but many Israelis are uncomfortable about spurning asylum seekers from war-torn African countries given their own history as a nation of refugees.
