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#National citizenship is not defined by assimilation

not-your-asian-fantasy · 30 days

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Zainichi, which literally means “residing in Japan”, is the name given to ethnic Koreans who immigrated to Japan post-war.

Although Koreans in Japan prior to World War II suffered racial discrimination and economic exploitation, the Japanese authorities nonetheless counted ethnic Koreans as Japanese nationals and sought to fully assimilate Koreans into Japanese society through Japanese education and the promotion of intermarriage. Following the war, however, the Japanese government defined ethnic Koreans as foreigners, no longer recognizing them as Japanese nationals. The use of the term Zainichi, or "residing in Japan" reflected the overall expectation that Koreans were living in Japan on a temporary basis and would soon return to Korea. By December 1945, Koreans lost their voting rights. In 1947, the Alien Registration Law consigned ethnic Koreans to alien status. The 1950 Nationality Law stripped Zainichi children with Japanese mothers of their Japanese nationality; only children with Japanese fathers would be allowed to keep their Japanese citizenship.

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OPINION: President Joe Biden is turning our country into a ‘sh*t hole of a country. Everything Democrats touch turns our country into the worst possible situation before they (i.e, took office).

Its a shame! However, our country have plenty of documentation over the years when each Democrats has taken office and the picture is not good at all.

Joe Biden, unfortunately is weak and is not a strong leader of the United States of America. (i.e, as we may not recognize it after he leave office). It a dare shame that we are taken back instead of moving forward.

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Gijsbert Oonk, Sport and nationality: towards thick and thin forms of citizenship, National Identities 1 (Epub ahead of print, 2020)

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between national belonging, acquiring citizenship, and migration. Taking high profile examples from international sports events, it seeks to unveil the complexities behind the question: who may represent the nation? The historical models of jus sanguine (blood ties) and jus soli (territorial birthright) are well-known markers and symbols of citizenship and nationality. The study proposes an ideal-type model of thick, thin, and in-between forms of citizenship. This model clarifies and provides direction to the empirical understanding of ‘citizenship as claims-making’, as recently suggested by Bloemraad [(2018). Theorising the power of citizenship as claims-making.

Introduction

In the international sports arena, the legal guidelines and the moral justifications for citizenship and national belonging are stretched. This stretching can be perceived as a global continuum where, on the one hand, there is an ideal type – thick – citizenship, whereby an athlete and their parents, and/or grandparents are born and raised in the country that they represent. In these cases, the athlete holds the citizenship of the country they represent, and their legal status, as well as the moral justifications for representing a country, are not under scrutiny. This seems to be self-evident. On the other hand, the thin description of citizenship defines conditions in which an athlete has no prior relationship with the country they represent. For example, this was the case when Russia offered Korean born-and-raised Viktor Ahn citizenship and a sum of money in return for his willingness to represent Russia in the Olympics (Business Insider, 2014). Between thick and thin descriptions of citizenship, this study outlines an in between perspective where dual or multiple forms of citizenship emerge. This in between perspective provides options for athletes to represent more than one country. The proposed model of thick, thin, and in-between citizenship aims to clarify and provide meaning to the empirical understanding of ‘citizenship as claims-making’, as recently suggested by Bloemraad (2018).

This model helps us to understand three recent developments of acquiring citizenship in the history of global sports: (1) Acknowledge that the current global regimes for acquiring citizenship at birth inevitably create dual, or multiple forms of citizenship. Therefore, countries and national sports federations need to accept that dual citizens are legitimately legal members of more than one country, and they may wish to switch alliances. (2) People of former colonies may acquire citizenship by claiming colonial ties as part of their national identity and may, therefore, switch alliances. (3) Countries such as the U.S. and Canada historically attract migrants, and thus, it is not surprising that they use special scholarships and sports schemes to attract athletes who may eventually represent them though they had no prior attachments. In extreme cases, such as Qatar and Bahrain, most inhabitants are migrants. Here, the use of migrant-athletes in representing these countries is in line with the overall migration strategy of empowering these respective countries. These countries increasingly accept the thin description of citizenship to have their countries represented in international sports arenas. 1

In general, the historical process of acquiring modern citizenship has taken two different paths: territorial birthright and descent. This is best illustrated in the remarkable and ground-breaking study by Brubaker (1998), who points out that the two primary concepts determining French and German national self-understanding are the civic and ethnic approaches to membership of a nation formed in the 18th and 19th centuries. The French understanding of citizenship and nationhood was based on birthright and was inclusive. Everyone born on French territory was French or – in the case of parents with different nationalities – could become French. The French tended to define their country as a political unit. The major question was – who would enjoy political rights? It was not – what makes us French? However, the German understanding of citizenship and nationhood was based on descent, was ethnocultural, and therefore exclusive. Blood, ancestry and Volksgeist created the nation. Similar to the French example, the development of American citizenship was based on territorial birthright. Kettner (1978) shows that the debates in the early nineteenth century established the terms under which immigrants could become American citizens:

Theoretical coherence and logical consistency were not the primary goals here, especially for legislatures and executive officers. Rather, in dealing with problems involving citizenship – problems of naturalisation, expatriation and court jurisdiction – the chief aim was to maintain an acceptable pattern of federal relations. (p. 248).

However, this pragmatic approach also included the right to exclude Native Americans and (former) enslaved people. In short, bloodline and territorial birthright were powerful tools to both include and exclude citizenship, and therefore, citizenship rights.

What German, French and American histories share is that they describe the magnitude of the Westphalian transformation in1848, from non-territorial membership (when people were the subjects of kings) to territorial membership, where people became members of sovereign states. This membership is based on duties and political rights, which have evolved into universal rights for all members of most states, such as freedom of speech, equality, and well-being. Simultaneously, it is assumed that the state fulfils its functions best if its members are not only individuals with their social contracts but also share general values, language, and history. This is perceived as the result of unifying processes such as the shift from primarily agricultural to industrialised societies (Gellner, 1992). Similarly, the emergence of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991) was the result of the successful promotion of national identity, the education of children in national history, promotion of a common language, and the emergence of a ‘national press’ (Anderson, 1991; Hobsbawm, 1992). Associated with these processes are the distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ types of nations and nationalism, and the idea that all nations have dominant ‘ethnic cores’ (Smith, 1991). On the one hand, there is the successful transformation of peasants to Frenchmen as described by Weber (1976), whereas on the other hand, Gans (2017) describes how Britain assimilated the Welsh people, while excluding Jews and Catholics from full citizenship.

New forms of citizenship regimes

New forms of citizenship regimes and belonging emerged in the post-colonial world, especially in the Middle East and Asia. Countries like Singapore, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates realised that bringing in multinationals and foreign direct investment were not sufficient to prosper. Attracting people with skills and knowledge therefore became a key strategy for national development. This included promoting attractive citizenship processes and tax regimes for wealthy and talented foreign individuals, with more sober regimes for labourers. Singapore, for example, introduced a points system where education and professional qualifications are rated so that skilled migrants can easily obtain permanent residency depending on their rating, skills and income (Ong, 1999, p. 186). Attracting skilled and wealthy foreigners is not unique to the East. It also occurs in many Western countries, including the U.S. and Canada. What is different, however, is the scale of migration. In Singapore, around one-fifth of the total population belongs to the highly educated migrant community. In Dubai and Qatar, more than 80% of inhabitants are migrants (Vora, 2013). Some are poor and worked as labourers building the stadiums for the Qatar 2022 World Cup, while others had the sought-after skills to represent Qatar in international sports events.

In short, currently, there are three interrelated ways of obtaining citizenship: (1) citizenship acquired through descent (jus sanguinis). This form is the kind of citizenship prevalent in, for example Germany until 1999. If one, or both of your parents were German, you were eligible for German citizenship. In this way, many Eastern European Germans maintained access to German citizenship status during the Cold War. (2) Citizenship by birth in the territory (jus soli). This form of citizenship was made famous by the U.S. American citizenship is granted automatically to any person born within and subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. (3) The stakeholder principle (jus nexi) is proposed as an alternative (or a supplement) to birthright citizenship. Individuals who have a ‘real and effective link’ (Shachar, 2009, p. 165) to the political community, or a ‘permanent interest in membership’ (Bauböck, 2006) are entitled to claim citizenship. This relatively new criterion aims at securing citizenship for those who are members of the political community, in the sense that their life prospects depend on the country’s laws and policy choices. This often applies to migrants who work and live in a country for a specific number of years (often five to seven). They are regarded as new members of society who have acquired skills (they work and pay taxes), and can become politically active and thus contribute to the state (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Thick and thin forms of citizenship.

However, there are some counter-intuitive results of the distinction between jus sanguinis and jus soli: while a regime of pure jus sanguinis systematically excludes immigrants and their children, though the latter may have been born and raised in their parents’ new homeland, it includes the descendants of expatriates who might never have set foot in the homeland of their forebears. On the other hand, a regime of jus soli might attribute citizenship to children whose birth in the territory is accidental, while denying it to children who arrived in the country at a young age. It is important to understand that the current rules for acquiring citizenship at birth inevitably create multiple citizenships. Dual nationality merges at birth in two cases: first, in the gender-neutral system of jus sanguinis, where children of mixed parentage inherit both parents’ nationalities, and second, from a combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis. Multiple citizenships could only be avoided if all states adopted either pure jus soli or jus sanguinis from one parent’s side. However, gender discrimination in citizenship has been outlawed by norms of international and domestic law, and countries that apply jus soli within their territory mostly attribute citizenship jus sanguinis to children born to their citizens abroad. Given these facts, there is no possible rule that could be adopted by all states to avoid multiple forms of citizenship. In other words, through existing membership regimes, there is always scope for athletes and states to represent two or more states. Dutch national footballer Jonathan de Guzman, for example, could have played for Jamaica (maternal ancestry), the Philippines (paternal ancestry), Canada (where he was born), or the Netherlands (where he started his career and was eligible to play after naturalisation). His brother Julian represents Canada. In other words, as an extremely talented midfielder, he was able to negotiate between the Dutch and Canadian national football federations. His citizenship capital (a form of cultural capital) was such that he could claim to play for four different countries at the international level. By the same token, there were four national football federations that could compete for his talents. In this case, de Guzman chose to play for the Netherlands – most likely because his chances of winning a World Cup medal were highest there as the Dutch national football team was ranked higher than the other three options. In this respect, the agency of citizens and non-citizens takes centre stage rather than state policies (Bloemraad, 2018; Jansen et al., 2018). Thus, this study seeks to discuss ‘citizenship as membership through claims-making’ from an empirical perspective (Bloemraad, 2018). Bloemraad (2018) attempts to understand citizenship from a relational approach within the context of structured agency. She takes a bottom-up approach, emphasising the perspective of migrants in the context of ‘citizenship’s power as practice and status’ to elucidate, ‘how status, rights, participation and identity can at times be interwoven and reinforcing’ (Bloemraad, p. 4).

The matter of civic and ethnic citizenship rights merges here forming the question: who may represent the country in international sports events? International athletes represent a country. They wear the colours of that country. They sing the national anthem, and they watch the national flag being raised if they win a medal. In other words, how do athletes acquire citizenship? The answer might not surprise us. In general, they acquire citizenship the same way most of us do, by birth (territorial or descent). However, as this article shows, for some athletes, the stakes in negotiating the scope for acquiring citizenship for one country or another are high.

Table 1. Levels of rules in nationality applications within the International Olympics Committee.

Thick and thin forms of citizenship

In this model, I define thick citizenship where territorial birthright, descent, and contribution merge. Most athletes and their parents are born in the countries they represent. These athletes have acquired their skills in that country and are more than willing to wear national colours and win medals for national teams. Unsurprisingly, the Sport and Nation group at the Erasmus University in the Netherlands found that more than 90% of all athletes who represented their country in the summer Olympic Games from 1948–2016 fell within this category (Campenhout et al., 2018; Jansen et al., 2018; Jansen & Engbersen, 2017).

Thin citizenship, however, occurs in cases when migrants or athletes do not have any relationship with the country they represented before the citizenship transfer in exchange for money. This is illustrated by the current debates on national belonging and citizenship changes in the Olympics (Shachar, 2011; Spiro, 2011). Some countries (including the U.S., Canada, and most Western European countries) have advanced an entrepreneurial attitude towards elite labour; they have developed specific citizenship tracks for foreigners. However, extreme examples relating to participation in the Olympics have emerged from countries such as Azerbaijan, Qatar, Singapore, Bahrain, and Turkey. These countries have actively attracted foreign athletes to represent them internationally. In the cases of Qatar, Bahrain, and Singapore, this can be perceived as part of a wider strategy to attract foreign talent. For Turkey and Azerbaijan, it is a form of self-promotion. 2Between thick and thin citizenship, this study locates mixed, or in-between forms of citizenship where athletes only share a connection through two of three citizenship qualifications: jus soli, jus sanguins, or jus nexi. Additionally, in some cases, the prior relationship through jus sanguinis and jus soli is distorted by external territorial (colonial) expansion, as well as mixed ancestral backgrounds. Further, this category includes cases where the connection is made through contribution, earned citizenship, and jus nexi, without prior relation through territorial birthright or descent. Overall, the major contribution of this study is to highlight some of the complexities of the ‘in between’ category, an area that has yet to receive sufficient attention.

This ideal model of thick and thin perspective stresses the formal relation – ‘the social contract’, between the individual and the state. Therefore, this model hides some of the complexities of nationality and national belonging. In Britain, for example, citizens may carry a British passport, whether their national identity is Scots, Welsh, Irish, or Cornish. In Spain, people may have a Spanish passport, but they may identify more with Catalonian or Basque nationalities. In these cases, the terms of the social contract of a Welsh and Scottish person are analogous, but the two persons may identify with different nationalities. Thus, the answer to the question: who may represent the country, becomes multifaceted. Scottish football players are unlikely to represent the Welsh national football team in an official match and vice versa. Nevertheless, as the international governing body of association football, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee handle different sets of rules regarding their recognition of citizenship, it may well happen that the same Scottish and Welsh football players represent Team Britain during the Olympic Games against another country (Ewen, 2012).

Sport, migration and identity

Research on sports labour migration began almost three decades ago with the pioneering work of Bale and Maguire (Bale, 1991; Bale & Maguire, 1994). In the development of a political economy of sport, labour migration and nationhood international sports migrants should be considered in the context of the realities of leaving native lands and adapting to foreign environments. Most cases examined came from countries in the Global North and South America. However, these were soon supplemented with cases of football players from Africa who went to Europe, and East African athletes who went to the Middle East (Bale, 2004; Carter, 2011; Darby, 2000, 2002, 2007; Lanfranchi & Taylor, 2001; Poli, 2006, 2010). Most of this research is primarily focused on male athletes. Agergaard and Engh have recently complemented existent literature with female migrant players, focusing on routes between African (Nigerian) and Scandinavian football clubs (Engh et al., 2017) as well as global perspectives (Agergaard & Tiesler, 2014). Recently, Besnier, Brownell, and Carter have taken up the challenge to write an anthropological perspective of sport, including issues of class, race, gender, and migration (2018). While these studies include questions of migration, cultural adaptation, legal process of visa, citizenship, and the political economy of globally skilled (athlete) labour, they scarcely focus on the extraordinary cases of migrant athletes who represent a country at the FIFA World Cup, or at the Olympics (Guschwan, 2014). The study argues that representing a country where you were not born often involves a different set of legal requirements (e.g. the acquisition of citizenship), adaptions (sometimes minimal), and national identification, whether imagined or not. For an excellent overview of the complexities of the nationality requirements of Olympic sports see the recent work of Wollmann (2016). She clearly shows that states, as well as international and national sport federations, may set different rules and regulations of eligibility. This study shows how athletes navigate within those institutions (Table 1).

Overall, most cases and examples studied here come from the Olympics and the Men’s World Cup, which are arguably the most watched global sporting events. The 2016 Olympic Games were broadcast in over 200 participating countries with a worldwide audience of five billion people. Despite the fact that the number of participating countries in the World Cup was limited to 32 in 2018, the final match was watched by 3.5 billion people. The increased mediatisation of those events over the past decades makes nationality switches in these global sport events major national, and sometimes international high-profile matters (Giulianotti, 2015). In these contexts, sport can serve as a ‘prism […] uniquely well suited to an examination of national identity’ (Holmes & Storey, 2011, p. 253). In addition, the historian Eric Hobsbawn is often quoted as saying, ‘The Imagined Community of Millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people. The individual, even the one who only cheers, becomes a symbol of his nation himself’ (Hobsbawm, 1992, p. 143).

In the following sections I describe the three citizenship categories in more detail. This includes the presentation of empirical case studies to determine the scope for negotiating between states and athletes in each of these categories. Not surprisingly, the first category of thick citizenship does not leave much room for negotiating. Athletes, as well as states and sport-institutions, do not find much room for switching alliances because of legal and institutional constraints. The second, ‘in-between’ category is where shifting alliances and making instrumental choices to compete for country A or B has come to the forefront of the debate. Regulations on dual citizenship, colonial heritage, and jus nexi all contribute to the flexibility of athletes, sports institutions, and states. It is here that I propose to merge Bloemraad’s plea (2018) to study citizenship as a form of claims-making with Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, i.e. where a relatively autonomous network of agents is able to use its social citizenship capital (a combination of jus soli, jus sanguinis and jus nexi included in colonial and post-colonial senses of belonging) to navigate belonging and the right to participate in international sports. In the third category of thin citizenship, the room for negotiating is extended to the maximum. No prior-relationship is needed. It is simply citizenship in return for cash.

The thick, or ideal type of citizenship

National pride takes centre stage in international competitions, such as the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. The number of medals won per country is regarded as an indication of the country’s (economic or military) prowess and reputation. Olympic athletes and the players on national football teams often become symbols of national pride and prestige. They sing the national anthem before matches, or after they have won an Olympic medal. These athletes display their medals and trophies with pride upon return from international competitions. More often than not, the success of these athletes is perceived as the success of the nation. The head of state typically invites successful athletes and teams to their official residence and honours them with awards or other decorations. It is not uncommon to see images of athletes or national audiences during the celebrations of great success with tears in their eyes.

Most athletes who represent their country are born and raised in the country they represent. More often than not, their parents and/or grandparents were also born there. Here, the ideal types of jus soli, jus sanguinis, and jus nexi merge. Each state can have its national hero, and this study considers Dirk Kuyt as one typical example. Both he and his parents were born in the Netherlands. He played for the Dutch football team (Feyenoord) before moving to Liverpool and Fenerbache. He played the semi-final match of the World Cup in 2010 and the final match in 2014. Others may opt for Michael Phelps, an American swimmer and the most decorated Olympian of all time. He was born in the U.S., as were both his parents. His American citizenship is not in dispute, nor is his American identity. What these cases have in common is that the citizenship status of the athletes is not disputed, from a legal, cultural, or normative perspective. Their citizenship status is – supposedly – self-evident.

Between thick and thin forms of citizenship

A little below the surface, some counterintuitive examples emerge where the relationship to jus sanguinis and jus soli is distorted. In fact – as already mentioned – the present rules for acquiring citizenship at birth inevitably create the possibility for multiple citizenships. A child born in country Z of a father born in country X and a mother born in country Y may be eligible to represent three countries. This increases the scope for negotiating national identity. This section presents three areas with scope for negotiating citizenship, identity, and belonging. First, there are examples of dual and multiple citizenships. Second, some countries use (and have used) their colonial ties to stretch the idea of territorial citizenship, while various forms of multiple citizenships and the stretching of colonial belonging might also merge. Third, cases where migrants – or their ancestors – claim jus nexi, or citizenship based on permanent interest in membership are discussed.

Dual and multiple citizenships

Julian Green was born in the U.S. His father was American, and his mother was German. As a toddler, he moved with his mother to Germany where she raised him. His American father served in the U.S. military and travelled back and forth. Julian had one brother, Jerry, who was born in Germany. Julian became a talented football player and played for Bayern Munich. At the age of 18, he acquired German citizenship (mother’s descent) and American citizenship (through father’s descent and territorial birthright). He was selected for the American national team and was also eligible to play for the German team. He spoke no English prior to his selection and had rarely visited the U.S. He was just one of the five German-Americans in the 2014 U.S. team. There were also foreign-born players, such as an Icelandic-American and a Norwegian-American, in addition to players of Colombian, Mexican and Haitian descent. All in all, 10 of 23 players, or 48% of the team were foreign-born. Manager Jürgen Klinsmann was said to have made the team his own by aggressively recruiting ‘dual nationals’ (players with dual citizenship). According to Klinsmann, however, this ‘reflects the culture of a country’. Nevertheless, America-born goalkeeper Tim Howard stated in USA Today that, ‘Jürgen Klinsmann had a project to unearth talent around the world that had American roots. But having American roots doesn’t mean you are passionate about playing for that country’. 3Some Americans have questioned the logic behind allowing dual citizens to represent Team USA in Brazil, while domestic players, such as former team captain Landon Donovan, were left off the roster. What is important in this context is that Klinsmann, Howard, and Donovan negotiated stretching dual citizenship and national belonging to a larger national and global audience, from their own instrumental perspectives.

In 2013, the talented football player Adnan Januzaj hit the headlines when journalists revealed that he was eligible to play for six different countries. He was born and raised in Belgium. He qualifies to play for Albania through his Kosovan-Albanian parents. His parents are of Kosovan-Albanian descent, but Kosovo’s national teams are not members of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) or FIFA. As Kosovo’s independence is also not recognised by the United Nations, he could play for Serbia. He also qualifies to play for Turkey through his grandparents. Finally, as he played for Manchester United at an early stage of his career, he could have acquired the right to play for England after five years. 4He ultimately chose to play for Belgium. 5Earlier, the former president of UEFA, Lennart Johansson, emphasised in similar cases that UEFA needed to preserve ‘traditional values such as pride in the jersey, national and regional identity (…) that are not financially related’ (Poli, 2007, p. 650).

Foreign-born: colonial pasts and post-colonial realities

Colonial ties and ideals of citizenship and belonging were negotiated during the colonial era. An interesting figure who complicates the exclusivity of the jus soli and jus sanguis forms of belonging in the colonial context is Norman Pritchard (1875–1929). He was born in Calcutta, the son of English parents and was baptised through the Senior Marriage Registrar in Calcutta in 1883. Historian and journalist Gulu Ezekiel claims that Pritchard was Indian based on the fact that he was born and raised in India and lived there for many years. 6Pritchard became the first Asian-born athlete to win an Olympic medal. Nevertheless, the late British Olympic historian Ian Buchanan argues that as Pritchard was a member of an old colonial family and though born in India, through descent he was indisputably British. In competitions in England his name was entered as a member of both the Bengal Presidency Athletic Club of India, and the London Athletic Club. It should also be noted that of the countries participating in the Paris Olympics, only a handful of countries registered their National Olympic Committees. These did not include either India or Great Britain, and it was not until the 1908 Olympics that athletes were officially registered by their countries. Until then they were free to register as individuals. In the archives and on its website, the International Olympic Committee continues to credit his two medals to India. However, disputes and debates persist, as authentic records were not maintained at the time. 7For the importance of national medal counts and the modern role of citizenship swaps see Horowitz and McDaniel (2015).

One unexpected side effect of the Scramble for Africa was that prospective players who were born and raised in Africa were eventually allowed to compete for their mother countries. An excellent example is the Portuguese football hero Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, born in Portuguese Mozambique in 1942. His parents were an Angolan railroad worker from Malanje, and a black Mozambican woman (Cleveland, 2017).

Mozambique was a colony until 1975. Eusébio was signed by the Portuguese club Benfica in 1961, was naturalised soon afterwards and went on to become a key player on Portugal’s national team. Eusébio was one of the five naturalised players who represented Portugal in the 1966 World Cup. This extraordinarily gifted generation could have made Mozambique a major force in world football, but there was no Mozambican state, or national team in 1966. These forms of colonial inclusion reflected Portuguese dictator Salazar’s attempt to justify continuing colonialism despite decolonisation elsewhere, by proclaiming that its African subjects were also Portuguese. While his fellow Mozambicans remained subject to harsh colonial rule that greatly limited their social and political rights, Eusébio was named by Salazar as a ‘national treasure’ (Darby, 2007; 2005). Nevertheless, even though colonialism played a role in these cases, one might argue that those concerned also earned their citizenship based on birthright and descent. In other words, they might still claim thick citizenship. Nevertheless, it articulates the distinction between legal and cultural and indeed racial associations in the case of colonised peoples in metropolitan centres. In these cases, some would argue that that the claim for citizenship is ‘thinner’, but ‘stretched’ in the direction of colonial territory (Campenhout et al., 2018)

There are many contemporarycases where forms of dual citizenship and colonial pasts are negotiated. The 1998 world champion men’s football, France, was celebrated for its multicultural team. However, most players were born and raised in France, albeit as children of (colonial) migrants (Maquire et al.). An interesting case is that of the Algerian team in the 2014 World Cup. Algeria arrived with 16 out of 23 (almost 70%) of its team who were born and raised in France. They were eligible to play for both Algeria and France (dual citizenship). Overall, there were 25 players born in France who did not represent France in the World Cup. However, those who were eligible and opted for the French team were not always received with patriotic feeling. In the words of the French international Karim Benzema, ‘Basically, if I score, I’m French. And if I don’t score or there are problems, I’m Arab’. 8Again, players themselves and national audiences openly debate the terms of belonging (Skey, 2015).

Jus nexi: socio-economic citizenship

In the third category, socio-economic citizenship, the focus is on cases where migrants or their ancestors claim jus nexi, or citizenship based on permanent interest in membership. Europe has recently experienced a marked increase in migration coming mainly from Morocco and Turkey (Lucassen, 2005; Mol & de Valk, 2016). These migrants, or their ancestors, claim jus nexi citizenship. Their offspring often claim dual citizenship, and the Olympic Committee and FIFA have developed special rules for these situations. For instance, the Germany-born player Mesut Ozil, is the son of Turkish migrant workers. Owing to his background (parents’ descent as well as birthright), he was allowed to play for both the Turkish and German national teams. Under the current FIFA regulations, players who have played for one national team cannot switch teams and play for another. Nevertheless, players are allowed to change their football nationality if they have played for the national youth team of another country. During the 2018 World Cup, it was estimated that more than 60% of the players representing Morocco were born in the Netherlands, France, Germany, or Spain. 9

Thin citizenship

There are three occasionally overlapping categories of thin citizenship. First, some athletes get caught up in the tricky web of wars and international politics. In recent history, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and several others, lead to the replacement by new entities like Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and so on. Athletes in these countries, who lose their original citizenship, subsequently need to renegotiate where they belong based on their birthright and other forms of belonging. Simultaneously, both the International Olympic Committee and FIFA had to construct distinct rulings to deal with these exceptional cases. Second, in some cases, both athletes and states have stretched the rules of belonging, as with Viktor Ahn. Even though these are exceptional cases, it shows that if the time and place are right, regulations and principles can be overextended and become very thin indeed. Third, some athletes have represented three or more countries. Sometimes, this is a consequence of circumstances, which also occurs in the mixed forms of citizenship. Nevertheless, the cases presented here include a combination of ‘citizenship for sale’, lost citizenship, and mixed forms of citizenship. The fact that these athletes can shift citizenship more than once shows the scope for negotiation in exceptional cases where the institutional settings and historical context are favourable.

Lost, emerging and overlapping states and nations

In 1989, the promising Yugoslavian football team became world youth champions in Chile, playing together until 1990 when war broke out and Yugoslavia fell apart. First, the Croatian players left, then the trainer resigned because the Serbians bombed his home town of Sarajevo, and finally the team was banned from the European championships in Sweden under pressure from the international community. This ended the promising Yugoslavian squad. Some of the players in this team later played for Switzerland (Mills, 2009).

In the 2014 World Cup, Switzerland fielded seven migrant players permitted to play for Switzerland for several reasons. The midfielder Tranquillo Barnetta is of Italian descent and holds dual citizenship. Gokhan Inler’s parents were born in Turkey, though he was born in Switzerland. However, the most striking feature of Switzerland’s 2014 team was the number of players from former Yugoslavia. Among them, four had roots in Kosovo, two were from Bosnia, and two from Macedonia. Further, Granit Xhaka had previously played for Albania. Ironically, he faced his elder brother in the match against Albania in the 2016 European championship. Only 38% of the players in the 2014 selection for Switzerland were actually born there. 10

Citizenship for sale?

The most extreme examples of thin citizenship are cases where there is no parental ancestry, nor any birthright claim. Becky Hammon and Victor Ahn are good examples of thin citizenship. The female basketball player Becky Hammon was one of the most talented basketball players in the U.S. She signed a contract for CSKA Moskou in 2007. In 2008 she could sign up for the Russian team in return for a US$2 million-dollar contract. Even though Hammon is not of Russian descent, speaks no Russian and is not a full-time resident, she was fast-tracked for Russian citizenship in February by the highest levels of the Russian government (Schwarz, 2008). Dual citizenship made Hammon a precious commodity in the Russian league because two Russians must be on the floor at all times, and each club is allowed only two American players. As Hammon had never competed in a sanctioned international competition for American Basketball, The International Basketball Federation, more commonly known by the French acronym FIBA, rules allowed her to represent another country in the Olympics. Capitalising on the fact that FIBA rules allow one naturalised citizen to compete for each country, the Russians offered Hammon not only a passport but also an opportunity to play at the Olympics (Schwarz, 2008). In 2006, South Korea’s short-track skater Ahn Hyun-soo won three gold medals for his homeland. Due to injuries, Korea did not need him after 2010. So Ahn went searching for a new Olympic allegiance having fallen out with the South Korean Skating Federation. He and his father investigated naturalisation for top athletes in several countries – with the U.S. and Russia on the final shortlist. In 2011, Ahn Hyun-soo became a Russian citizen, changed his name to Viktor Ahn, and pledged to compete for his adopted homeland at the Sochi Games in 2014 (Business Insider, 2014).

The case of Hammon and Ahn acquiring Russian citizenship in exchange for money, status and the ability to compete at the highest level might be regarded as extreme examples of highly talented athletes’ ‘citizenship swaps’, or ‘talent for citizenship exchange’ (Kostakopoulou & Schrauwen, 2014; Shachar, 2011; Shachar et al., 2017). There were no prior ties between Hammon and Ahn to Russia. They had no Russian ancestors, nor did they speak Russian. 11In short, this example challenges the ritual affirmation of citizenship. This raises the question as to whether the world is heading towards the end of Olympic Nationality (Spiro, 2011). However, in this case, Russia and not the IOC decided the citizenship issue (Schwarz, 2008; Shachar, 2011, pp. 2090–2091; Jansen, 2019).

In the Rio Summer Olympics in 2016, Azerbaijan and Qatar – among others – portrayed themselves as entrepreneurial states willing to buy success. Azerbaijan sent 56 athletes to these Olympic Games. However, foreign athletes who changed their citizenship to compete under the Azerbaijani flag made up more than 60% of the delegation. Transfer of allegiance, ‘leg drain’, or ‘muscle drain’, is a fairly common phenomenon in the international sporting world, but for Azerbaijan, it would appear that it has become a matter of state policy. 12Twenty-three of Qatar’s 39 athletes were not born in Qatar. Its handball team of 14 players includes 11 foreign-born athletes. 13This in itself is not a new phenomenon, but the scale is striking. Media and some academic literature (Shachar, 2011, p. 2017) often suggest that states increasingly trade their most valuable and prestigious asset – citizenship – for medals and national prestige. Nevertheless, empirical evidence suggests a more nuanced perspective (Jansen et al., 2018; Jansen & Engbersen, 2017). These examples portray a very thin citizenship. There is no prior relationship through descent or birthright. More often than not, these athletes do not speak the language of the country they represent, nor is there any other cultural or religious identification. Countries allow these athletes to represent them in return for their ability to earn medals. Individual athletes are willing to swap their national identities (passports) in return for money and the ability to compete at the highest possible level.

Travelling loyalties

Some top athletes have become experts at using existing rules and negotiating an exchange of their skills for citizenships, passports, and money. Lascelles Brown, born in Jamaica in 1974, was a member of the Jamaican national bobsled team from 1999 to 2004, competing at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. He continued training in Calgary, where he met and married his Canadian wife Kara. He applied for Canadian citizenship in 2005; it was awarded to him by special exemption just prior to the 2006 Winter Olympics, letting him compete for Canada at the games in Turin. Brown competed at the 2010 Winter Olympics, winning bronze in the four-man event. Brown then became a competitor for Monaco at the start of the 2010 season and was apparently paid well for his services. 14Brown combined both thick citizenship (born and raised in Jamaica), thin citizenship (representing Monaco for money), and an in-between version of the citizenship rules (representing Canada, as he lived and married there).

Similar cases have occurred in football. The famous footballer Laszlo Kubala (1927–2002) and the striker Alfredo Di Stéfano (1926–2014) played for three different national teams. Kubala played for Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Spain, while Di Stéfano played for Spain, Argentina and Columbia. Nevertheless, their migration history was less opportunistic and money-driven, and more politically motivated. Kubala was born in Budapest, as were his parents who came from mixed backgrounds. His mother had Polish, Slovak and Hungarian roots, while his father, belonged to the Hungary’s Slovak minority. In 1946, he moved to Czechoslovakia, allegedly to avoid military service, and joined ŠK Slovan Bratislava. In 1947, Kubala married the sister of the Czechoslovakian national coach, Ferdinand Daučík. He played for Czechoslovakia six times. In 1948, he returned to Hungary, again allegedly to avoid military service, and joined Vasas SC. In January 1949, as Hungary became a socialist state, Kubala fled the country in the back of a truck. He initially arrived in the U.S. zone of Allied-occupied Austria and then moved on to Italy, where he briefly played for Pro Patria. He was eventually signed to Barcelona in 1950. After adopting Spanish nationality, he played for Spain 19 times between 1953 and 1961.

Alfredo Di Stéfano was born in Buenos Aires, as the son of a first-generation Italian-Argentinian and an Argentinian woman of French and Irish descent. He played with the Argentinian national team six times. In 1949, a footballers’ strike in Argentina prompted him and many other Argentinean players to defect to a breakaway Colombian league outside the remit of FIFA, not obliged to pay transfer fees and able to pay generous wages to some of the world’s best players. In the 1950s, he began playing for Real Madrid in Spain and acquired Spanish citizenship in 1956. He played four World Cup-qualifying matches for Spain in 1957 and helped Spain qualify for the 1962 World Cup, though he was unable to participate himself due to injuries and his age.

In this last category, athletes who represented three or more countries were highlighted. At times, there were some ‘contributing relations’, as in the case of Lascelles Brown, who represented Canada after marrying a Canadian woman. However, his move to represent Monaco was motivated by money, as well as his desire to compete at the highest possible level, to participate in the Olympics one more time.

Afterthought and conclusion

Our proposed three categories – thick, in-between, and thin citizenship – are not mutually exclusive and do occasionally overlap. An exceptional example is Zola Budd, the middle- and long-distance runner born in 1966 in South Africa. Her parents were also born in South Africa. Her case would be defined as thick citizenship if she represented South Africa. Nevertheless, her story brought her to Britain. At the age of 17, Budd broke the women’s 5000 m world record. Since her performance took place in South Africa, then excluded from international athletics competition because of its apartheid policy, the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) refused to ratify her time as an official world record.

The British tabloid, the Daily Mail persuaded Budd’s father to encourage her to apply for British citizenship, on the grounds that her grandfather was British, to circumvent the international cultural (therefore also sporting) boycott of South Africa. The Daily Mail would have exclusive rights to Budd’s story and would put U.K.£40,000 into a fund for her, as well as providing rent-free housing for the family and finding a job for her father. The Daily Mail started an active campaign and began to put pressure on a series of ministers to give Budd a passport. They wished to see her competing for Team Britain during the 1984 Summer Olympics. Thus a fast track citizenship procedure was started. However, the Home Office was reluctant to grant such status stating:

To give exceptional treatment to a South African national to enable her to avoid the sporting restrictions inflicted on her country and compete for Britain in the Olympics will be seen as a cynical move which will undermine that good faith. 15

Groups supporting the abolition of apartheid campaigned to highlight the special treatment she received; other applicants had to wait sometimes years to be granted citizenship, if at all. In short, just ten days after she formally applied for British citizenship, the 17-year-old got her passport. It remains unclear whether the justification was based on her talent, her ancestry, or a combination of both. However, what this example shows, is how cases can shift from thick citizenship to the in-between category of citizenship. This exceptional case is different from the citizenship for sale example in the thin citizenship category. It was not the state, but a newspaper that paid for the citizenship swap for medal chances. Undoubtedly, however, the fact is that money and the citizenship switch were directly related.

What is important here is that there is room to negotiate citizenship and the transfer of citizenship. Depending on territorial birthright, ancestry, political circumstances and financial incentives, the rules for access to citizenship are stretched. Interestingly, Budd competed for South Africa at the 1992 Olympics after the country was re-admitted to international competition following a referendum vote to end the apartheid system.

Historical research has shown that acquiring modern citizenship has taken different paths: territorial birthright and descent. More often than not they were not mutually exclusive, but reinforced each other. Nevertheless, through these paths and the emergence of the jus sanguinis system, access to multiple citizenships became part of the inheritance – or citizenship capital of individuals. In the past decades, some states, particularly in the Middle East and Asia, have attracted foreign labour in return for citizenship rights. A growing number of migrants have also acquired citizenship through a jus-nexi connection. These developments have created space for states, sport-institutions and individual athletes to negotiate their citizenship status.

The study proposed three categories of relationships between migrant athletes and country. These cases resemble Bauböck’s concept of thin and thick conceptions of citizenship (1999). Further, the cases discussed within this model give room for Bloemraad’s suggestion to discuss ‘citizenship from below’, and ‘citizenship as claims-making’ (2018). These models also apply to non-sporting contexts. However, the context of international sports is distinctive for two major reasons. First, athletes represent the country on a widely publicised international stage. Second, because of associated prestige, athletes’ connections with the homeland, motherland, or ‘genuine links’ with the country they represent are often part of public debate. (Campenhout et al., 2018; Jansen et al., 2018) Thin citizenship describes examples of citizenship changes where the athlete has no prior relationship with the country that they represent, as in the cases of Viktor Ahn and Becky Hammon. Moreover, this category includes migrants from states that dissolved, like Yugoslavia and the USSR. The national players of these countries became part of new countries or migrated. At the other extreme, I defined the thick citizenship, which refers to the merger of territorial birthright (jus soli), descent (jus sanguis), and ‘contribution’ (jus nexi). The in-between categories are the most interesting, but they are also difficult to define. Here, the concept of colonial citizenship is included, where migrant athletes are, or were part of the larger jus soli of the country, or colonial enterprise. Nevertheless, this category also includes recent migrant, where athletes are part of the jus nexi of their new homes. The three categories are not mutually exclusive, as has become clear in the case of Zola Budd.

In short, the primary question: who may represent the country? cannot be easily answered. Categories of belonging are blurred, and athletes, sports federations, institutions, states, and audiences constantly negotiate them. The question is, therefore, not whether athletes and/or states strategically use citizenship regulations for their own purpose, they probably are. The ear when scholars could convincingly argue that national sporting stars are unifying representatives (Duke & Liz, 1996) are now under scrutiny. This study argued that citizenship rules and justifications for national belonging are stretched. This stretching can be seen as a global continuum between thick and thin citizenship. The answer to the moral question: who may represent the country? might be found in the history of the Olympics. Until 1908 it was possible to compete with mixed teams and to enter as an individual, not necessarily representing a country. This, then, might come close to the suggestion of Iowerth et al. (2014) that sporting bodies should be more pragmatic in their criteria of national belonging.

Notes

Please note that the model loosely refers to Bauböck’s (1999) notions of thick and thin citizenship. For Bauböck, the thin concept of citizenship refers to legal membership status with negative liberties and passive citizenship. This may be referred to as a libertarian perspective of citizenship, where citizenship is a minimal contract between the state and its members. However, here, the study refers to thin citizenship if there are no prior relations between the state/nation before representing that country. At the other extreme, Bauböck describes the thick concept of citizenship, which includes cultural identity, moral duties and heroic virtues. This may be regarded as a communitarian perspective of citizenship. See also Kostakopoulou (2006 ).

Note that in doing so, this refers to a different model of citizenship studies than that put forward by Bryan Turner (1997) in the first issue of Citizenship Studies. He argued that in the era of global capitalism a revised model of citizenship should include human rights. However, from the perspective of states, national identity rather than universal citizenship rights has become a dominant factor. The paradox is that, ‘campaigns for unity and integrations have to be conducted in a universalistic idiom’ (Joppke, 2007, p. 46; Blatter, 2011).

See http://www.goal.com/en-us/news/howard-criticizes-klinsmann-over-foreign-born-players/mb24pzqzewqt1aez6nonmgz6j.

There was widespread press coverage and debate. According to others, Januzaj would not meet the requirements to play for England under the unique rules set out in the Home Nations agreement, requiring a five-year period of education prior to the age of 18.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/oct/09/adnan-januzaj-international-england-belgium.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080807/jsp/opinion/story_9654464.jsp.

During early Olympics, Irish-born athletes won numerous medals for the U.S. and U.K. See, http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/JOH/JOHv6n2/JOHv6n2f.pdf.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-06-30/frances-cosmopolitan-society-shines-world-cup-other-countries-too.

https://www.statista.com/chart/12033/the-most-international-teams-at-the-world-cup/.

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/euro-2016_switzerland--12-nations--one-team/42215610.

He stated, ‘First of all, the name Viktor is associated with the word ‘victory’. It is symbolic, as I want this name to bring me luck. Secondly, I know of another Korean named Viktor, who is very popular in Russia and is well known in Korea–Viktor Tsoy. I want to be as famous in Russia as he was. And third, I was told that Viktor is a name which is easy to remember for Russian-speakers’. http://www.businessinsider.com/viktor-ahn-russia-2014-2?IR=T.

https://www.meydan.tv/en/site/culture/16889.

https://www.thestar.com/sports/olympics/2016/08/16/at-the-rio-olympics-some-athletes-find-success-in-swapping-passports.html.

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Lascelles_Brown.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3755199/Secret-papers-reveal-rift-Mail-s-campaign-Zola-Budd.html.

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#citizenship #migration #sport #nationality #identity #belonging #jus sanguine #jus soli #jus nexi #colonialism #post-colonialism #society #models of citizenship #olympic games #birthright citizenship #national identity #diaspora

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Introduction to Family Immigration

Both U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents (also known as LPRs or green card holders) can petition for family members to immigrate.

The Immigration and Nationality Act aims to reunite and preserve nuclear families, as well as to facilitate quick assimilation.

Citizens can petition for the following categories of relatives:

Immediate relativesSpouse or Unmarried child under age 21 Parent1st preferenceUnmarried son or daughter over age 21 (and their children)3rd preferenceMarried son or daughter (and their spouse and children)4th preferenceSibling (and their spouse and children)

Citizens can also petition for their fiancé(e)s, and certain widow(er)s of citizens are eligible to immigrate.

LPRs can petition for the following categories of relatives:

2A preferenceSpouse Unmarried child under age 212B preferenceUnmarried son or daughter over age 21

Spouses

In order to obtain immigration benefits available to a “spouse”, there must be a valid and subsisting marriage between the parties.

Generally, marriage is valid for immigration purposes if it is recognized by the law of the place where it occurs. This includes same-sex marriages. Marriages that are against public policy, such as polygamous or incestuous marriages, are not valid for immigration purposes even if valid in the place where it occurred. Proxy marriages are not recognized under the Immigration and Nationality Act, unless the marriage has been consummated. A marriage that is legally valid may still be disregarded if it is found to be a sham marriage, entered into by the parties to obtain immigration benefits and without any intention to live together as husband and wife. Religious ceremonies alone may not create a binding marriage in some jurisdictions. However, if a religious ceremony alone is in fact sufficient in the jurisdiction where it occurs, the marriage is valid. A marriage ceremony might also be valid for immigration purposes, if the parties entered into it in good faith, believed themselves to be married and lived together as husband and wife.

Moreover, the marriage must be legally subsisting at the time that the immigration benefit is sought. The only exception to this requirement applies to certain widow(er)s of deceased U.S. citizens (discussed below). A marriage can be treated as legally subsisting even though the parties are separated, so long as they are still legally married. The courts have generally rejected the view must be “viable” to support entitlement to immigration benefits. It is now the administrative view that immigration benefits based on marriage may be sought even if the parties are separated, although the separation may be considered in determining whether the marriage was bona fide.

Widow(er)s of U.S. Citizens

A widow(er) of a U.S. citizen may file an immigrant petition under the following circumstances:

The widow(er) was married for at least two years to a U.S. citizen. (The deceased spouse need not have been a U.S. citizen for the entire two-year period, so long as he or she was a citizen at the time of death).

The petition is filed within two years of the death of the U.S. citizen.

The parties were not legally separated at the time of the U.S. citizen’s death.

The widow(er) has not remarried.

The widow(er) may include an unmarried, minor child in the petition, or a separate petition may be used.

Children

For the purposes of family-based immigration, a “child” is defined as follows:

a child born in wedlock;

a stepchild whether or not born out of wedlock, provided the child had not reached the age of eighteen years at the time the marriage creating the status of stepchild occurred;

a child legitimated under the law of the child’s residence or domicile, or under the law of father’s residence or domicile, whether in or outside the United States, if such legitimation takes place before the child reaches the age of eighteen years and the child is in the legal custody of the legitimating parent or parents at the time of such legitimation;

a child born out of wedlock, by, through whom, or on whose behalf a status, privilege, or benefit is sought by virtue of the relationship of the child to its natural mother or to its natural father if the father has or had a bona fide parent-child relationship with the person;

a child adopted while under the age of sixteen years if the child has been in the legal custody of, and has resided with, the adopting parent or parents for at least two years: provided that no natural parent of any such adopted child shall thereafter, by virtue of such parentage, be accorded any right, privilege, or status under this Act; or

certain orphans: a child, under the age of sixteen at the time an immediate relative petition is filed on his or her behalf, who is an orphan because of the death or disappearance of, abandonment or desertion by, or separation or loss from, both parents, or for whom the sole or surviving parent is incapable of providing the proper care and has in writing irrevocably released the child for emigration and adoption; who has been adopted abroad by a U.S. citizen and spouse jointly, or by an unmarried U.S. citizen at least twenty-five years of age, who personally saw and observed the child prior to or during the adoption proceedings; or who is coming to the United States for adoption by a citizen and spouse jointly, or by an unmarried citizen at least twenty-five years of age, who have or has complied with the pre-adoption requirements, if any, of the child’s proposed residence: provided that the Attorney General is satisfied that proper care will be furnished the child if admitted to the United States: Provided further, that no natural parent or prior adoptive parent of any such child shall thereafter, by virtue of such parentage, be accorded any right, privilege, or status under this Act.

The parent-child relationship must continue to exist at the time that immigration process is completed. Accordingly, the child must be unmarried when granted permanent resident status, and the child must be under 21 years of age at that time, with the exceptions described in the Child Status Protection Act.

Parents

In order to petition a parent under the immediate relative category, the U.S. citizen petitioner must be at least 21 years old. “Parent” means a parent who is such by reason of his or her relationship to a “child” within the statutory definition of the term as described above. However, the “child” must have met the statutory definition at the time their relationship was established and the parent-child relationship must continue to exist at the time that the immigration benefit is sought.

Procedures

The immigration process typically starts with the U.S. citizen or LPR filing with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) a Form I-130, Petition for Alien Relative. (Battered spouses and children seeking classification as immediate relatives or in the 2A/2B preference categories can file the I-130 without the citizen or LPR’s assistance.) The Form I-130 must be accompanied by proof of the relationship.

There is no quota for immediate relatives to immigrate. But for other preference categories there are quotas, which have led to waiting lists reported in the State Department Visa Bulletin.

For an immediate relative, or for a relative immigrating in another category who is at the front of the waiting list, the next step is to apply for an immigrant visa at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate abroad. In the alternative, a relative physically present in the United States may be eligible to file with USCIS a Form I-485, Application to Adjust Status.

At the immigrant visa or Form I-485 stage, a key issue is whether the relative is ineligible (“inadmissible“) for crimes, immigration violations, health reasons, public charge grounds, etc. Exceptions (“waivers“) are granted in certain cases.

Article Source

#family immigration #reunite families

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southeastasianists · 5 years

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In 1954, the war was waging in the Indochina Region. Vietnam and Laos were at war for independence against the French, while in Cambodia, an uprising against the Royals was imminent. Eventually, these countries would fall under communism in 1975. Threatened by the ‘domino effect’ whereby if one country fell under communist influence or control, its neighboring countries would soon follow, Thailand joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) on September 8, 1954 along with the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, and Pakistan.

The first batch of American Forces was sent from Clark Airfield in the Philippines arrived in Thailand on April 20, 1961. It was called Operation Bell Tone, a code name for the first F-100 deployment to Thailand.

The US installations were in Don Muang Royal Thai Air Force Base; Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base, Nakhon Ratchasima; Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Navy; Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base; U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy Airfield ;Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, Ubonratchatani and at the Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base at Udornthani. Except for Takhli, U-Tapao, and Don Muang, all were located in the Northeast Region (Isaan) of Thailand.

More than 50,000 US servicemen were stationed in Thailand. American soldiers or GIs on R&R (Rest and Recreation) leave from Vietnam also traveled in and out of Thailand regularly. It brought an economic boom to the hotel and entertainment industry, adding $111 million to the economy during that period.

When the Vietnam War ended in April 1975, the government ordered the US military personnel out of Thailand, not later than 1976. The GIs left behind women; their companions and wives during their stay. But they also left a legacy that has become the ‘forgotten secret’ – the luuk khreung or Thai-Amerasians. Fifty-seven years later, this secret is coming out in the open, hoping to find recognition from the United States.

Luuk Khreung

Luuk khreung means children with Thai elite lineage, usually a paternal connection. But Thailand’s involvement in the Vietnam War gave birth to a negative connotation – children of ‘prostitutes’. The term Amerasian is used for mixed-race children born out of the US military presence in Asian nations which started after World War 2. 1

In 2004, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation estimated around 5,000-8,000 Thai-Amerasians. Some of them were able to immigrate to the United States under the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act. An undetermined numbers are still left in Thailand; invisible and discriminated. 2

Tanong Pirunproi was born on November 27, 1962. His father was probably among the first batch of Operation Bell Tone. He knows nothing about his father, except that his mother and GI father met in Sattahip, Chonburi. His mother eventually married a Swiss national.

Kalwin Anne Pungprasert 3 may have been Thai all her life, but not her features. She has a fair skin, blonde hair, and an aquiline nose. She would have been registered as Kalwin Anne Lipford, daughter of Staff Sergeant Wayne E. Lipford of Company L Rangers 75TH Infantry 101st Airborne Division stationed in Vietnam, and Kamnuan Pungprasert of Thailand, a maid at U-tapao Air Force Base, Rayong Province. Born in Sattahip, Chonburi, her Thai identity card shows her birth date as May 21, 1971. Based on the exchange of letters between her parents and a photo, she could have been born in late 1969 or early 1970.

Thappani Singkhamol was born on September 9, 1970 to an African-American father who left when she was born. Her mother was from Chiang Mai. She found work around the Royal Airbase in Nakhon Ratchasima. When she was young, her mother called her Andy Whait.

Born on October 28, 1975, in Ubon Ratchatani, Meaghan Ura Butsringh Leshana was given up for adoption. She was adopted by an Australian couple and was taken to Australia. Since she has a Thai name, her biological mother, Janta Butsringh was located after 43 years. Janta mentioned Max(w)ell I. Jonson, an airman that could be Meaghan’s father.

To assimilate in the Thai society, the Amerasians were given Thai names. The fathers were either a grandfather, an uncle or a foster father. Their birthdays were also changed. With Thai names they were able to have access to government benefits and services like education and citizenship.

Thai Woman Identity

In the 1960s, Sayan Sanya, a famous country music singer popularized the song Mae Pla Ra (Pickled Fish girl) deriding an Isaan woman who wants to have a GI boyfriend. A Thai man who loves her, warns that the GI will dump her.

Phla ra is a fermented fish sauce associated with the northeastern food culture. Almost everything is seasoned with this. Saowanee Alexander, 4 a Thai professor of Sociolinguistics at Ubon Ratchatani University, claimed the song reinforces the negative stereotype of Isaan women during the war.

In Thai culture, a woman is defined as virtuous, graceful, and conservative in her sexuality and morality, and responsible for household duties. Despite using their sexuality and lowering their morality, the women were duty-bound to provide for their families. Women who could not find work in their provinces look for any jobs that could elsewhere. They found jobs around the bases.

In some cases, GIs, like Kalwin’s father wanted to take them to the United States. However, the family refused to give details about Kalwin and her mother. The relatives claimed that she died along with her mother.

The United States is another world where culture is beyond the understanding of the family living in the villages. Although Thai society accepts aspects of foreign culture, it is only to some extent, as long as this does not compromise their own culture and religion.

DNA – The Only Hope?

For the Amerasians left behind, a DNA test is their only hope of finding their GI fathers. DNA kits are available online, and samples are sent back to the United States and the results are uploaded on sites such as Ancestry.com. Immediate relatives can be found based on the same DNA. GEDCOM is also a genealogical software developed by the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, allows all DNA companies to have their DNA results uploaded. This will increase the possibilities of finding more family members.

Kalwin found her family through the DNA. Although her father died, her half-sibling is processing her documents towards obtaining US citizenship. Meanwhile, many others are still waiting for the results of their DNA testings. It will take time before many Amerasians find the identities of their fathers. The results will not automatically make them US citizens, nor provide them with their biological fathers, but the knowledge could underline their lineage and perhaps offer the cornerstone that might have been absent for much of their lives.

Eunice Barbara C Novio Eunice Barbara C Novio is from the Philippines and presently resides in Thailand where she teaches English at Vongchavalitkul University in Nakhon Ratchasima and is adjunct lecturer at Philippine Christian University-St. Robert’s Group of Companies. She is a graduate of the University of the Philippines Diliman, with an MA in Women and Development through a Women Leadership Scholarship given by the Channel Foundation (Seattle). She has written various research and scholarly articles about women, EFL and migration. She is also a correspondent of the Inquirer.net US Bureau, a stringer for Bangkok Post and contributing columnist at the Asia Times.

Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, 26, Trendsetters, January 2020

Also from Eunice Barbara C Novio: “English Skills Pave Ways for Filipinos in Thailand“

Notes:

heng, E. (2014). Pearl S. Buck’s “American Children”: US Democracy, Adoption of the Amerasian Child, and the Occupation of Japan in The Hidden Flower. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies,35(1), 181-210. doi:10.5250/fronjwomestud.35.1.0181 ↩

Kutschera, P.C. (2013). Military Pan Amerasians and 21st century implications for diasporic and global studies. Asia Journal of Global Studies. 6(1). Retrieved March 12, 2019, from http://www.aags.org/journal/ajgs-2014-volume-6-issue-1-issn-1884-0264 ↩

Novio, E. B. (3 July 2019). Ex-GI uses DNA tests to help Amerasians find their fathers.Inquirer.Net. Retrieved from https://usa.inquirer.net/33547/ex-gi-uses-dna-tests-to-help-amerasians-find-their-fathers ↩

#Southeast Asia #Thailand #Viet Nam #Vietnam War #Luuk khreung #Resources

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jewish-privilege · 6 years

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...It’s this baggage that often complicates American Jews’ attempts to reflect on their relative privilege. In the current environment, many Ashkenazi Jews—i.e. those tracing their heritage through the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe—struggle to acknowledge their whiteness and role in broader systems of racism because anti-Semitism from the Left and Right distracts them, clouding their judgment, creating little space for them to exercise the vulnerability necessary for reflection.

Two recent examples illuminate the ways Jews are being squeezed by anti-Semitism from both sides of the political spectrum, complicating efforts at introspection. When Emily Bazelon wrote in The New York Times Magazine in June about the ways whites are finally noticing their whiteness and associated privilege, she was inundated with responses from right-wing Twitter trolls insisting that she was not white, but Jewish. The very same day, leftist activist Shaun King tweeted an article from the Israeli daily, Haaretz, about a Jewish group in Israel protesting an Arab family that had moved into a Jewish neighborhood. Rather than pointing out Jewish racism, he called the protesters “white supremacists” who only wanted “white Jews” in their neighborhood, ignoring the racial diversity within the accompanying picture as well as the Mizrahi (North African and the Middle Eastern Jewish) names of the Jewish organizers. In both of these cases, critics defined Jews for their own purposes.

Right-wing anti-Semites see Jews only as insidious ethnic people whose Ashkenazi members try to assimilate, muddling the purity of the white race. ...For some right-wing Americans, the existence of Israel is not just okay, but good, both because this is where the Jews “belong”—an anti-Semitic version of certain Zionist tropes—and also because Israel’s strident nationalism represents a type of ethnic purity white nationalists would like to see in Europe and the United States. Others are just straight-up Jew-haters who would be happy for Jews to go to the gas chambers.

Besides the obvious problem this brand of anti-Semitism presents for Jews, it also inspires a backlash of Jewish victimhood that undermines any attempt to reckon in a thoughtful and rigorous way with simultaneous Jewish privilege: Jews can’t be racist, the thinking goes, because they aren’t allowed to be white. Any time an Ashkenazi Jew begins to sort through their role in American white supremacy, the flurry of anti-Semitic noise in response causes many Jews to revert to victim mentality—a mentality which makes it very hard to think clearly about the full range of social justice. As the late Rabbi David Hartman wrote in his seminal 1982 essay, “Auschwitz or Sinai,” the person who sees the Holocaust in every anti-Semitic barb begins to think that “We need not take the moral criticism of the world seriously, because the uniqueness of our suffering places us above the moral judgment of an immoral world.”

Meanwhile, on the Left, Jews are seen as a religious minority within the superstructure of European Christian colonialism that has dominated the globe since Columbus. Yes, Jews have faced oppression, this narrative acknowledges, but they are ultimately a European byproduct: They are white people with a little flair—a belief system draped over the same racial material. When King tweeted about the “White Jews” who protested against the sale of a home in Afula (inside the Green line) to Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, he was following in this tradition, and in so doing erasing Jewish peoplehood. This was not Jewish racism against Arabs, in his view: It was white colonialist racism.

Jewish history, in fact, profoundly complicates the idea that all conflicts can be boiled down to modern Western European “white” Christian imperialism. But this trend on the left is increasingly strong. The term supersessionism has traditionally referred to the primacy of the New Testament for Christians, its teachings taking precedence over the Old Covenant between God and the Jews featured in the Old Testament. Recently, Bryan Cheyette, an English professor specializing in textual representations of Jewish identity, suggested that the insistence on a specifically postcolonial lens for evaluating oppression is a new kind of supersessionism: Kicked off by venerable postcolonial studies founder Edward Said, who believed Palestinians were the new Jews, it is now carried forward by progressives such as King, or Women’s March founders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, the latter of whom recently said Jews who feel unwelcome among today’s progressives “are going to have to come to terms with being uncomfortable,” because the Palestinian cause is too important—akin to South African apartheid. Implicitly, the story of the Palestinians and the story of African Americans are part of the same story of injustice, and the injustice against them has superseded Europe’s Holocaust. Cheyette instead suggested we move away from seeing these histories as exceptional: supersessionism “makes it impossible to find connections in the past and our most urgent present between different forms of dehumanization—Orientalism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia—and between shared forms of suffering (not least as refugees) alongside an often-violent agency.”

The 20th century demonstrated the tremendous capacity humans have to disregard and extinguish others’ lives, and the 21st century has yet to break that pattern. It is possible to recognize the persecution and violence, in modern memory, of Jews while recognizing the racism that exists within Jewish communities. It is also possible to recognize the deep and violent history of marginalization, oppression, and enslavement faced by African Americans and other people of color in America; and to see that both Israelis and Palestinians have been traumatized by wars, military occupation, and terrorist campaigns. The existence of each of these traumas does not delegitimize the others. In her intellectual history of intersectionality, gender studies professor Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro argued that in making an intersectional shift, one begins to take subaltern communities as seriously as the mainstream. But doing so also means recognizing that “one is neither purely an oppressor nor purely oppressed”—a lesson both Jews and their critics have yet to internalize...

Read Joshua Ladon’s full piece at The New Republic.

(h/t @pointmerose)

#jewish identity #white supremacy #levanim yehudim #vayse yidden

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epistoleorg · 2 years

Text

Freedom

What is freedom? Simply put: Freedom is slavery in Christ.

There’s no other possibility for freedom that does not turn into debauchery, immorality, chaos and eventually death, often in the form of total destruction and annihilation.

Being a slave to Christ is being a slave to perfection, justice, righteousness, liberty, wisdom, and life, in eternity.

Freedom is a Western idea, in fact, a Christian idea, especially after the Reformation in Germany, enabled by Martin Luther and Johannes Gutenberg (printing). The freedom to worship God freely and to pursue a life of righteousness defined by God’s Holy Writ (Bible) without government inference and persecution was the very drive for true Christians in Europe who sought to reform the corrupt cult of Roman Catholicism, oftentimes in great disappointments of a national church (Church of England) and the menial labors available in the Netherlands, sailed across vast oceans - the brave souls of the English separatists who endured tremendous hardships came ashore to the New World called America. Since then, freedom, for the first time in human history, became fully attainable, and man’s history was forever changed.

Why did they seek that freedom? Because they wanted to be Christ’s good slaves.

Flabbergasted? Confounded? I understand. But think about it.

The Amish and the Mennonites (Anabaptists) also endured extreme difficulties, many lost their lives and loved ones, seeking that very same freedom.

In contrast, that freedom was never wanted in the minds of the Eastern peoples (Orientals. Slavery to the State, culture, ancestor) but it’s forced upon them as Japan lost the war and Taiwan has to depend on America for its very survival. It took generations for these peoples to understand and embrace freedom, but none seeks the freedom the European Christians did in the 16th and 17th centuries.

That is a fundamental difference between the West and the East. To an extent, it is also the difference between Christian America and Humanistic Europe now, and not without a profound sorrow, America 1.0 and the 2.0 in which we live today. How the difference plays out in the future remains to be observed.

(What about China? Ah! What do you expect from that cesspool!)

True slaves of Christ understand freedom and seek it which the world cannot comprehend or offer. We are blessed to live in Pax Americana (American Peace) which historically speaking is not the norm. America is indeed special and exceptional. May God keep her that way. Please do understand that once this peace is destabilized, persecution returns and gone is your Christian freedom in this fallen world.

Two warnings though:

1. Constantine wanted all conquered peoples to assimilate and a Christendom for all. Roman citizenship was given to anyone who wanted to enlist for Rome. The empire could not absorb the impact of massive influxes of immigrants. Constantine’s cause was noble but in a sin ridden world, it’s suicidal. Seventy years after his death, Rome was ransacked by the Barbarians (Germanic) of whom many were the recipients of Roman citizenship. Unfettered immigration in America will spell her doom.

2. Only a very small percentage of Christians wanted that freedom. They are often called the nonconformists, separatists, rebels and criminals. They changed the world.

#freedom #liberty

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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Let’s be blunt. The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.

I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country, and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture, are—politically as well as legally—aliens. I’m really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.

What about those who do consider themselves Americans? By and large, I am referring to the 75 million people who voted in the last election against the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism. Regardless of Trump’s obvious flaws, preferring his re-election was not a difficult choice for these voters. In fact—leaving aside the Republican never-Trumpers and some squeamish centrists—it was not a difficult choice for either side. Both Right and Left know where they stand today… and it is not together. Not anymore.

Those who wanted to Make America Great Again may refer to themselves as Republicans, though many realize that, apart from Trump, the party does not really care about them. Many may also, in some loose way, consider themselves conservatives. But among these plumbers, insurance salesmen, gym owners, and factory workers there’s one question you can pretty much guarantee they never discuss with their family and friends: “What kind of conservative are you?” This question has virtually no bearing on the problems that overshadow their lives.

It is still a question, however, that occupies intellectuals, journalists, and the world of think tanks. And this matters, unfortunately, because however sensible and down to earth the voters may be, an effective political movement needs intellectual leadership to organize and explain the movement’s purposes and goals. This leadership is still divided into—to name a few—neocons, paleocons (not to be confused with paleo-libertarians!) rad-trads, the dissident right, reformicons, etc. A lot of these labels are a distraction. But before I reject these disputes as mostly irrelevant, let me make a couple of points about why we can’t immediately leave this debate behind—and so why an essay like this is necessary.

…

Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.

This recognition that the original America is more or less gone sets the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy apart from almost everyone else on the Right. Paradoxically, the organization that has been uniquely devoted to understanding and teaching the principles of the American founding now sees with special clarity why “conserving” that legacy is a dead end. Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.

…

Conservatism, Inc. is worse than useless in this regard because it does not understand through perpetual study what Trump grasped by instinct. As if coming upon a man convulsing from an obvious poison, Trump at least attempted in his own inelegant way to expel the toxin. By contrast, the conservative establishment, or much of it, has been unwilling to recognize that our body politic is dying from these noxious “norms.” Keep taking the poison! it advises. A cynic might suppose that many elements on the right have made their peace with (and found a way to profit from) the progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves.

What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure. But no such figure has emerged, and it is unreasonable to pin our hopes on such a savior simply turning up.

What, then, are Americans to do?

…

If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman. Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.

Authentic Americans still want to have decent lives. They want to work, worship, raise a family, and participate in public affairs without being treated as insolent upstarts in their own country. Therefore, we need a conception of a stable political regime that allows for the good life.

The U.S. Constitution no longer works. But that fact raises more questions than answers. Can some parts of the system—especially at the local and state level—be preserved and strengthened? How would that work? How do we distinguish the parts that are salvageable from the parts that are hopeless? How did all this happen, anyway? The answers to these questions are not obvious. Having a coherent plan—thinking through what American citizenship used to mean, what made it noble and made the country worthy of patriotic love, and how to rebuild its best elements—requires input from people, and institutions, who have given these matters a lot of thought.

#claremont institute #glenn ellmers

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memecucker · 7 years

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thanks for the submission anon! not sure why the entire article was pasted but i’ll put it under a cut. i dont endorse everything said here but i think its a worthwhile read

The question remains as to whether Canadian polemicists know what they are talking about when they denounce “cultural appropriation”. I don’t think they do. I think they are misrepresenting the phenomenon and bloating it to useless dimensions, sloppily borrowing American terminology, and bending the reality of Canadian history out of shape. I also detect a familiar narrowing of the dominant vocabulary that is authorized for use by the media in public discourse, so that one term or phrase is used to do the work that previously several different concepts handled. Confusion is the inevitable result—and that is by design. It is intended that we should be confused, since that spawns endless circular debates, irresolvable conflict, parties speaking past each other—all of which works against sharing, against acculturation, and against building a stronger national society. It also works against the indigenization of Canadian society, the cultural side of the economic citizenship that I defended here. Instead we are turned into mutually hostile bands of litigants, constantly parsing each other’s statements for even the smallest sign of something which we might find offensive. We are constantly feigning fainting spells, our delicate selves being so overwhelmed by the daily outrages against our reputation (brand).

Some well-placed Canadians do not know the difference between cultural appropriation and assimilation, and the errors that ensue lead to a falsification of Canadian history. To begin with, assimilation in its most basic historical sense involves a dominant group (typically colonizers) absorbing or incorporating the dominated group (the colonized) into the social and cultural norms of the dominant group. The indigenous culture is thus meant to be extinguished, and those who once belonged to that culture now acquire a new culture—they are converted to the culture of the dominant group. The indigenous culture is in no sense “valued” by the colonizer—it has no value, it can be held in contempt, and was usually targeted for erasure. Not to be mistaken with the unidirectional process that is assimilation, acculturation involves “those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups” (Redfield, Linton, & Herskovits, 1936, pp.149–150; see also Herskovits, 1937, p. 259). Both assimilation and acculturation are examples of culture contact, culture change, and more broadly, “diffusion”. Cultural appropriation, which is not as well defined as the previous terms and does not enjoy as long a history in North American anthropology, is muddled because it could mean taking over or taking from or simply borrowing. The corollary is that when a culture has been subjected to appropriation, that culture continues to exist intact: I can claim that your culture is now mine, but that does not mean you cease to have your culture; I can acquire select values, practices, and motifs, and make them my own, and again that does not mean you lose those elements; I can borrow an item, inspired by you, and you lose nothing as a result. Where cultural appropriation seems to rise to a condition of conflict, is when commerce and formal ownership are involved—but then that takes us to cultural exploitation, which is far removed from simple acts of sharing and borrowing.

Focusing just on the pair—assimilation vs. appropriation—recent evidence in Canada shows the monumental errors that are made when appropriation is used to handle the meanings of several very different concepts, all at once. Here, for example, is Jesse Wente, a Canadian Aboriginal, not a chief of a nation but a self-described “Ojibwe dude” who, not to be falsely modest, is a figure in the Canadian mass media, a self-appointed gatekeeper and culture broker, and a purported specialist on “diversity” and “inclusion”. Wente recently vented the following:

“It’s easy to say you don’t believe in cultural appropriation when it’s your culture that has been forced on many, while erasing there’s [sic]”.

He is right: it would be easy to say that, because it’s wrong. What Wente describes in that quote has nothing at all to do with “cultural appropriation” (it’s the opposite), and everything to do with assimilation. At no point does he describe the dominant culture taking from the dominated culture. This shows that Wente does not even know the meaning of appropriation. However, by accident, especially in making us correct his mistake, he points to the actual reality of Canadian history, which has been one of assimilation, rooted in utter disdain for Aboriginal cultures, expressed in a desire to beat the living crap out of those cultures and turning Aboriginals into clones of white people. Aboriginals did not “appropriate” modern, Western, Christian, individualist and capitalist lifeways: these were forced on them. There is no such thing as an involuntary appropriation. It’s the same history of assimilation that made it possible for Wente to write in English. Canadian policy was never about making Canadian settlers more like Aboriginals, to encourage appropriation—to even suggest that is a terrible perversion of Canadian history.

The history of residential schools in Canada is not a history of “cultural appropriation”: it is a history of assimilation. In 1883, Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, explained the residential schools policy to the House of Commons:

“Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men”.

(That will take us to the next section and how genocide has been conceptually mangled by deliberately and confusingly rephrasing it as “cultural genocide”). The policy of residential schooling was explicitly an assimilationist one—as expressed in the famous words of Duncan Campbell Scott, the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932:

“I want to get rid of the Indian problem….Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”

It was a policy of “taking the Indian out of the child,” and abolishing the Indian altogether. The idea was not to create a tabula rasa as an end in itself, but to erase and replace, by forcibly converting the child to the dominant, British Canadian culture. It is closer to being cultural imperialism than it is to cultural appropriation. However, since the authorized discourse in the elite-controlled media has successfully narrowed the vocabulary of Canadians, no such mention of imperialism ever surfaces, in any context.

We can conclude that the problem with the “cultural appropriation” idea, as deployed by gatekeepers, is that it either does not actually describe and explain the phenomenon to which it is assigned (and thus does not exist), or it does exist in other contexts but we are not told why that is anything other than the normal course of cultural diffusion. We also know that cultural appropriation is not a prominent part of Canadian history, which instead emphasized assimilation of indigenous peoples. Finally, in some cases, what is being marked as cultural appropriation is instead actually cultural exploitation, which is more than just borrowing. Do you get the sense then we are being told there is a cultural appropriation “problem,” when none actually exists?

As for cultural exploitation, that is not an easy issue to settle. Numerous Aboriginal hip-hop musicians in Canada borrow from US sources without apology, just as in central Australia there are Aboriginal reggae bands, playing their music without sending shiploads of tribute over to Jamaica. This is not to mention the many dozens of zombie films made over the past century, all done without paying royalties to Haiti. (Perhaps the producers of The Walking Dead were very clever in avoiding use of the Z-word.) The problem lies with the intentional spread of rules of “intellectual property” by governments and international bodies working in the service of a neoliberal political economy. An expert class of managers arrogates to itself the right to instruct and aribitrate over how we can learn from and be inspired by other cultures. So much for “market freedoms” then, and so much for “globalization,” when the very upholders of both of these are revealed to be little more than rent-seeking racketeers.

Enter the lawyer: Olufunmilayo Arewa is a professor of Law, at the University of California, Irvine, writing in The Conversation US, an online publication made possible by many of the usual giant capitalist US foundations and expeditionary philanthropists such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and so forth. The “funders” vary by country, but are usually an assemblage of banks and foundations. The Conversation is part of a growing trend that Pierre Bourdieu warned about decades ago in Homo Academicus (pp. 112, 119, 120, 267, 268, 297): the blurring of the lines between academia and journalism which reduces the autonomy of universities, makes them answerable to market audiences, and introduces journalistic standards of renown into a field previously dominated by standards of scholarship.

Thus it is not surprising to see Arewa’s piece in The Conversation—it is not so much predictable as it is almost mandatory that it would appear there. A lawyer, writing as a journalist, based in a major US university, backed by powerful foundations, all of which gives us a glimpse into the dense cluster of special interests that have been vested in the manufactured debates around cultural appropriation. This is a field dominated by elites—academics, journalists, bankers, lawyers—not an organic outgrowth of some popular outcry existing at the “grass roots” of indigenous communities.

Not to keep the phenomenon safely out of the reach of such special interests, Arewa (in loose language uncharacteristic of careful lawyers) blurs the lines between cultural appropriation and cultural exploitation. The accent is on exploitation, an arena fraught with danger, with loud claims for compensation, restitution, reparations, profit sharing, royalties, etc. An example of this deliberate slippage is where she writes, “borrowing may become appropriation when it reinforces historically exploitative relationships” which she quickly follows with a mention of opportunities to “control or benefit” from cultural “material”. I do not mean to suggest that Arewa is careless, sloppy, or lazy—I think that the language that bleeds from one concept to another is deliberate, intentional, and vested with special interests. The aim is to produce a “problem,” a problem that can only be solved in the legal arena and the marketplace. It is a neoliberal problem of diversity management, that demands neoliberal technologies of control and capital accumulation. Culture is turned into “material” that can be “controlled” by someone. (Who? You can guess.)

There is nothing ambiguous about this: if you read Arewa’s piece you will see the words above immediately followed by a section devoted to artifacts, museums, and a bunch of dollar figures—translation: culture as property, held by institutions, sold in the marketplace. It is the finale of her piece that gives away the motive in writing it:

“An understanding of both borrowing and appropriation should be incorporated into legal, business and other institutional frameworks. In fields such as intellectual property law, greater recognition of the power structures underlying borrowing in different contexts is important. This can be an important starting point for blocking future exploitative cultural flows. And it can help prevent extraction of more cultural booty”.

This squarely places the discussion of cultural appropriation in the neoliberal zone, where everything is commodified and then privatized and thus subject to the “rule of law”. Culture—whatever that was—becomes a matter of “intellectual property law”. Luckily, being a lawyer herself, Arewa is one of those who presumably stands to benefit. And that is the trick behind all of these attempts to regulate our speech and social interactions: subject them to regulations, censure and censor violators, and create capital for specialists who appear, as if by magic, to expertly mediate the whole problem…a problem they conceptually manufactured in the first place. The final gift is that the rules and norms of capitalism can be used to heal the rifts caused by capitalism—this really is magic.

There is one more area, a critically important one, where the conceptual wizardry produces benefits for elites, and losses for those who are supposedly meant to be protected, and that is the Canadian invention of “cultural genocide”.

It was shocking to see Canadians accepting the notion that the history of residential schooling—where children were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal parents, to school them out of their Aboriginal heritage—has been officially defined in Canada as “cultural genocide”. Conveniently, there is no such concept under international law, and it thus whitewashes Canada’s reputation for what it really is: a state guilty of genocide.

Of course, no state guilty of genocide has the political capital needed to lecture and threaten target states of the periphery. “Cultural genocide” avoids that problem, and is useful for evading any talk of UN sanctions and Security Council resolutions.

There was no conceptual need to speak in terms of “cultural” genocide—everything that is essential to the history of residential schooling is already covered by the existing UN charter on the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” and has been since 1948. The key text comes under Article II, particularly point (e):

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; © Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

A lawyer quoted by the CBC, reportedly made the following points: “Schabas compares the use of the term genocide to a very hot spice that ‘transforms something from being rather old news into something that gets the headlines’. Sometimes, he says, it also makes it harder for victims to reconcile with the perpetrator groups”. That is one remarkable statement. Not only is the history of residential schooling in Canada not “old news” (it only ended in 1996), the nature of the term being like “hot spice” never stops Canada or other Western nations from liberally applying it whenever convenient, against target nations abroad. Wholesale fictions of “genocide” were invented about Libya in 2011, to justify NATO’s intervention—few, let alone in the CBC, were ever heard to say, “Hold on now, that’s a hot spice term, and if we use it then that might prevent the victims from reconciling with the Gaddafi government”. Instead, much of this CBC article, in the ample tradition of liberal hypocrisy, casts about for the appropriate legal scholar to lament about how, aw shucks, it’s too bad we do not have “cultural genocide” in international law…when the current convention against genocide already covers exactly what happened with Canadian residential schools. Such blindness is not incompetence, it is wilful. It was sad to see indigenous leaders abide by all this, as if they had won something significant, instead of acknowledging the political fraud for which their experience was hijacked. How ironic then that this indigenous “leader” should declare: “If you can’t identify what the issue is, then you really don’t know what you’re working with”.

In my book, Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs, the central concept and argument focused on the “reengineering of indigeneity,” where indigenous identity became vested with the interests of specialists emanating from several arenas surrounding the Caribs in Trinidad & Tobago: the national state, the Catholic church, the mass media, local businesses enterprises, local government, academia, tourism, NGOs, and international governmental organizations. We see a similar vesting of special interests in the fabrication of the “cultural appropriation crisis” and the story is not one of mendacious leftists (there are those too), but should instead be seen as reflecting neoliberal capitalist patterns.

Lawyers, professors, journalists, and other self-appointed gatekeepers: these are some of the specialists, sanctioned by the media and governments, who litigate and adjudicate the neoliberal commerce in culture, that is, culture turned into property and removed far beyond sharing, parody, mutual insults, and all the interactions that make up everyday social life. To be clear, never once have we heard any sort of popular indigenous outcry over “appropriation”—what we are made to hear instead are the voices of lawyers, academics, media pundits, and diversity consultants who show up with business cards, courtesy of the new cultural policing. We are therefore dealing with interests vested in reengineering culture into a series of specialist turfs, accompanied by calls for recognition, rewards, and fees. Regulation of culture by the rule of the marketplace generates bureaucracies, and these bureaucracies create capital for the culture brokers that arise to take advantage of the opportunity. Even better, the manufacture of conflict over “appropriation” produces the space for appointed experts to intervene, and to inevitably acquire capital. This is the path of culture that is instrumentalized, or even weaponized.

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nliu18ahsgov-blog · 6 years

Text

The 3 P Assessment: Parties, Political Interest Groups, and PACs

The Republican Party believes the US should secure the border, prevent illegal immigration, and prevent the creation of sanctuary cities and states. I agree with their position because I believe the US government should protect the safety of US citizens and not let illegal immigrant cross the border. The Democrat Party believes in reforms of the immigration system, stand up to Trump’s hatred to defend their immigrant neighbors, and support sanctuary cities and states. Personally, I do not agree with the Democratic position because I believe the most important thing is to keep the American citizens safe and control of the US border. The Libertarian Party supports sanctuary cities and states and believe people should be able to travel freely as long as they are peaceful. I do not agree with the Libertarian position because I think people should follow orders and procedures to come to a country instead of crossing it illegally. The Green Party supports sanctuary cities and states and believes illegal immigrants that already have a family and a job in the US should be granted US citizenship. I disagree with the Green Party position because illegal immigrants should not be in the US border in the first place. The Peace and Freedom party want to open the US border and supports sanctuary cities and states. I disagree with this position because I believe this would make the US citizen safety at risk and would add to the chaos of the US government. I agree with the Republican Party the most. This is not a surprising outcome and I will vote for the presidential candidate. The Interest Group name is Americans for Immigration Control (AIC). The AIC is about control of the Mexico border and illegal aliens from coming into our nation. The AIC demand that the federal government should “immediately use maximum manpower and support equipment to secure our nation from terrorists, drug smugglers, and illegals”. The AIC supports “deporting illegal aliens already in the US, opposing all amnesties, enforcing the current immigration law and increasing penalties for those who knowingly transport, recruit, solicit, or hire illegal aliens, reducing annual legal immigration to numbers which can be readily assimilated, and educating motivating and activating citizens with our newsletter Immigration Watch” The AIC is about encouraging the protection of US borders. AIC is based in Monterey, Virginia. There are no current local meetings or volunteer opportunities. The AIC strongly opposes President Obama decision on the Dream Act which give “Dreamers” legal status and work permits. One interests group under California is the California Immigrant Policy Center. The Policy Center “seeks to inform public debate and policy decisions on issues affecting the states immigrants and their families in order to improve the quality of life for all Californians". The Policy Center fund immigration services, support advocates that work on Ab 60 driver’s license, improve economic mobility and quality of life in California, fight mass deportation, and fight detention, profiteering, and criminalization. This interest group is trying to work on affordable care act and medi-cal expansion. The California Immigrant Policy Center is located in Sacramento, California. There is no current local meetings or conference. There is no current volunteer opportunity. The Policy center wants to fight back to President Trump’s deportation plan and they supports the California Values Act-SB 54. Comparing the two interest groups, the Policy center looks more organized and have a professional website that tells people what their purpose is. The Policy center is more successful in defining their purpose and raise actions. The targeted audience for AIC is American citizens. The targeted audience for the policy center is people that live in California. The PAC name is Defenders of Freedom and Security. Defenders of Freedom and Security is “a political action committee dedicated to supporting our troops and veterans and electing leaders that have served our country”. The Total Receipts is $124,585. The Total spent is $120,751. They have $23,820 cash on hand and all of their budget is spent on Republican. One of the donor is Park Wheelerm Freedie who is an attorney, Another donor is Flynn James who is a real restate broker. This reflects the interests of the PAC is towards middle working class people that is a part of the Republican party.

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