Link to read the policy directive

The Greater Toronto Enforcement Centre (GTEC) of the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), GTA Region, has issued a directive to all its officers, stating:
1. When conducting a road investigation, officers will not enter shelters or other spaces designated as resources for women fleeing/experiencing violence.
2. Officers are not to wait outside or approach the above-noted spaces and will maintain a reasonable distance.
3. Officers are not to approach the above-noted spaces to make any inquiries into the identity of women who may be the subject of an immigration investigation. This includes inquiries made to the staff, volunteers and other residents.

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Karen Wirsig, Socialist Project Oct 19

At the end of the afternoon of May 27, a mass demonstration marched into the Place de la Bastille in Paris. The march itself represented what can now be viewed as a low point in the national union mobilizations to challenge the proposed weakening of France’s public pension regime and other reactionary responses of Nicholas Sarkozy’s government to the world economic crisis. But despite the rain, despite the niggling worry that fatigue was overtaking the movement and apathy the French public, a group of marchers went to work making sure it was a day the French labour movement won’t soon forget.

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Link to articles here

(Swans – October 4, 2010) A predictable consequence of the dire economic crisis has been a spectacular rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in North America and Western Europe, which, combined with religious xenophobia against Muslim residents, has led to a significant growth of right-wing populism. In the U.S., former pro-immigration Republican leaders openly advocate reconsidering the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to strip it of its provision that provides automatic citizenship to any child born in the country whether or not the parents are citizens. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is quietly presiding over a much higher rate of deportations than the preceding Bush administration oversaw. Anti-immigrant rhetoric is particularly virulent among Tea Partiers and the candidates they support for the coming mid-term elections. In Europe, populist right-wing parties have been scoring substantial electoral gains by scapegoating immigrants of Muslim background. In Italy, Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord (“Northern League”), a xenophobic party, is a member of the Berlusconi governmental coalition. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, the leader of the Party of Freedom (and a favorite of the American Tea Party), openly advocates banning new mosques — as the Swiss did in a recent referendum — and the Koran, stopping all immigration from Muslim countries, and deporting immigrants. In Germany, a controversial book written by Thilo Sarrazin, a forced-to-resign member of the board at the Bundesbank and former finance minister of the Berlin city-state government, and often called a mini German Wilders, has fanned a harsh debate on immigration. In France, the Sarkozy government is emulating the policies long advocated by the far-right National Front, shamelessly deporting Romas and targeting immigrants from Northern Africa. The beast is raising its ugly head (Brecht) once again — and the phenomenon repeats itself in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Hungary, etc. Even tiny Sweden, a model of social democracy, has just elected to its parliament 20 members of the anti-immigration, far-right Sweden Democrats led by Jimmie Ã…kesson.

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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 Mya Guarnieri, Al Jazeera, Saturday, July 17, 2010

For most children summer is a carefree time. But for the children of Israel’s undocumented migrant workers, deportation looms on the horizon. It has been a hotly contested issue since last July, when the Oz Unit, a strong arm of the interior ministry’s population and immigration authority, first hit the streets. As the state took aim at Israel’s 250,000 illegal labourers, 1,200 children were marked for expulsion along with their parents. The move, a sudden reversal of Israel’s long-standing policy against deporting minors, sparked public outrage. Protests and media scrutiny delayed the deportations but only temporarily.

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