#migrant transfers

[mystuffsandso]

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[thoughtlessarse]

The controversial plan will see men from "safe" countries have their Italian asylum applications processed in Albania. Critics warn the move will set a dangerous precedent. An Italian naval ship docked at the Albanian port of Shengjin on Wednesday, marking the beginning of Italy's highly controversial plan to bring some rescued refugees directly to the non-EU country. "It is a new, courageous, unprecedented path, but one that perfectly reflects the European spirit and has everything it takes to be followed also with other non-EU nations," said Italy's far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The Libra was carrying 16 men who had been rescued at sea after departing Libya, Italian officials said. Ten were from Bangladesh, and six were from Egypt. Italy has committed to spending €670 million ($730 million) on two migrant processing centers in Albania over the next five years. Rome said that only men from countries considered safe would be taken to Albania, and that they would have to be classified as "non-vulnerable," that is, healthy and not showing signs of having experienced physical violence. The refugees retain their right to apply for asylum, and anyone granted asylum is to be returned to Italian shores. 

continue reading

[remittancesday]

Focus on the economic impact of Remittances on households, communities, and nations.

“Digital remittances: Towards financial inclusion and cost reduction.” International Day of Remittances 2024. Remittances remain essential for the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. By helping to put food on the table and pay for school, housing and medical expenses, they provide a crucial lifeline for those who receive them. The International Day of Family Remittances draws our attention to the economic impact of this money on households, communities, and nations, and recognises the sacrifice, separation and generosity often involved.

[deadpresidents]

"What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 millions people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women's pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn't carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America's founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn't paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen."

-- "How Far Would He Go", TIME Magazine's interviews with Donald Trump, April 30, 2024.

I know we're saturated in coverage of Trump and it's easy (and probably better for our mental health) to usually ignore most of the articles when we see them, especially since he's so full of shit and infuriating. But it's also important to recognize that he is going to be the Republican nominee for President and he could absolutely be elected in November, and if you thought his first term was scary and dangerous, you need to understand that in a second term he's going to have people around him that are better prepared and VERY willing to do the crazy shit that he wants to do to this country. They aren't even hiding the fact that they are seeking vengeance against political opponents whom they feel have wronged them, and are ready to fundamentally dismantle the democratic foundations that are barely holding this country together after nearly 250 years.

Just look at what Trump says about the people who he incited to attack the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and halt the peaceful transfer of power that has happened every four years since 1789:

"Trump has sought to recast an insurrectionist riot as an act of patriotism. 'I call them the J-6 patriots,' he say. When I ask whether he would consider pardoning every one of them, he says, 'Yes, absolutely.' As Trump faces dozens of felony charges, including for election interference, conspiracy to defraud the United States, willful retention of national-security secrets, and falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments, he has tried to turn legal peril into a badge of honor."

Oh, and please note that Trump -- a former President of the United States and possible future President of the United States -- said on the record in these interviews with TIME: "There is a definite antiwhite feeling in the country and that can't be allowed either." We are at a point where political leaders are outright saying that in this country again, and it's because of Donald Trump.

So, take the time to recognize that Trump is straight-up telling us the country we're going to be living in if he wins again in November. And understand that your vote matters -- and WHO you vote for matters -- because, as I've been saying for years now, ELECTIONS HAVE FUCKING CONSEQUENCES.

[fatehbaz]

The Slavery Abolition Act didn’t apply to India or Ceylon, and though it technically liberated over 800,000 British slaves in the Caribbean and Africa, all of them (excepting only small children) were forced to continue to labor as unpaid “apprentices” for a further six years, on pain of punishment. Under the terms of the act, they were protected against overwork and direct violence from employers, but remained their “transferable property,” subject to punishment for  “indolence,” “insolence,” or “insubordination.” So many black West Indians were jailed for resisting these outrageous terms that full   emancipation was eventually brought forward to August 1, 1838. [...] A century on, the independence of most Caribbean colonies in the 1960s was followed by decades of racist British immigration policies that not only sought to prevent black West Indians from coming to the UK but eventually, under the Conservative governments of the past decade, ended up deliberately destroying the lives of thousands of lifelong legal residents by treating them as “illegal migrants.” In the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. Under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual  budget -- the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). Not until 2015 that debt finally paid off. This unprecedented compensation for injustice went not to those whose lives had been spent in slavery, nor even to those descended from the millions who had died in captivity. It was all given to British slaveowners, as restitution for the loss of their human property. 

Text by: Fara Dabhoiwala. “Speech and Slavery in the West Indies.” The New York Review of Books. 20 August 2020. [Published online at: nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/speech-slavery-west-indies/]

[the-greatest-fool]

I basically only post and read posts in my bubble aside from occasionally scrolling through Real Tumblr, but people’s takes about US politics on this website are fucking unbelievable. They talk about our government as if it didn’t save us from a pandemic-induced financial collapse, pump trillions of dollars into public works, not to mention substantially invest and rein in pharmaceuticals, and is instead some sort of ultra-neoliberal-corporate kitty shooting machine.

Like let’s be for real. Do they…know what the government does? How it works? Do you know what a conservative is? Do you know what an authoritarian is?

Because a system of government whose citizens are all lucky it has had continuous peaceful transfer of power for centuries could very well have its greatest norm violated—that those who reject its legitimacy must be rejected—and we don’t blink an eye.

Because the first major investment against climate change, coupled with life saving investments into healthcare, cancer research, and drug costs could be shredded by indiscriminate fiscal conservatives who don’t care if we die in forest fires, cancer from pollution, lose insurance because we’re jobless, or, apparently, all die in a fricking plague.

Because a foreign policy establishment that had finally reversed two decades of foreign intervention in favor of a normalization strategy aimed at reducing American foot presence, drone strikes, and indiscriminate killings is about to be replaced by the whims of a man who dropped the “mother of all bombs” on the Middle East, gave American soldiers up to Russian bounty hunters, extorted a foreign leader for political favors and arguably indirectedly resulted in that country being BRUTALLY INVADED BY AN IMPERIAL NEIGHBOR, is in the pockets of CCP-funded billionaires, and WANTS TO “FINISH THE JOB” IN GAZA.

Because a President who is against family separations and promotes a path for DREAMERs and more legal immigration and rights for unodcumented people could be replaced by a man who wants to separate families, PUT UNDOCUMENTED PEOPLE IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS, RESTRICT EVEN LEGAL IMMIGRATION, ESPECIALLY THAT OF MUSLIMS, AND SHOOT MIGRANTS.

Because a President who stopped a repeat of the Great Recession and the painful decade that followed it with strong fiscal stimulus which CUT CHILD POVERTY IN HALF BEFORE CONSERVATIVES MADE IT EXPIRE, then managed to cut deficits and presided over a decline in inflation, resulting in record high real wages (aka taking into account inflation) for workers is going to be replaced by a President who wants to TARIFF ALL FOREIGN GOODS by 15%, CUT TAXES FOR THE FILTHY RICH AND THE TAX ENFORCEMENT TO STOP THEM, INCREASE CHILD POVERTY AND UNINSUREDNESS by cutting gov’t programs, and HURT UNIONS which by every measure will lead to lower wages, higher prices, and more poverty and starvation.

Because a President who has pledged to sign a bill codifying Roe v. Wade (which has yet to be possible in recent memory, whatever these kids say), who enshrined the right to marry someone of the same sex or different race, who supports the Equality Act which would enshrine LGBTQ protections into the law, could be replaced by THE MAN WHO REMOVED AMERICA’S RIGHT TO ABORTION, whose Christian nationalist supporters want to END SEXUAL FREEDOM as we know it including TARGETING IVF AND BIRTH CONTROL, who wants to reverse LGBTQ discrimination law in favor of Christian bigots who hate queer and trans people, and who demonizes that community to win political support.

Ask yourself if you really think there’s no difference between the two. Ask yourself if a reasonable person given these facts would choose the latter. Ask yourself why you see so much propagandizing against the reasonable choice. Ask yourself why so many people seem to have opinions on this when they “don’t even go here”.

Maybe I’m just preaching to the choir here. Maybe people who say this inane stuff wouldn’t vote anyways. Maybe somehow we’re screwed anyways. Maybe people will stupidly vote third party and we’re fucked. Maybe this will get me attacked.

I don’t care anymore. If I have to see one more fucking post acting like we live under the fucking Evil Empire while a SELF PROCLAIMED DICTATOR is about to end the best streak of decent governance I’ve ever seen in a while, I just can’t anymore.

[mariacallous]

MADISON, Wis. — A bombshell report this morning from Dan Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed that Banco Azteca, a bank reportedly tied to the Mexican cartel flew $26 million of cash across the U.S.-Mexico Border to Eric Hovde’s bank in California.

As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel detailed, Banco Azteca was cut off by several other U.S. banks over “risk and compliance concerns” after reporting linked it to cartel activity. An executive of the bank was recently implicated in a federal indictment detailing his attempts to bribe a member of the U.S. Congress to get U.S. banks to once again do business with the bank. Despite this, Eric Hovde’s bank flew $26 million of cash from Mexico City to Irvine, California as part of a deal with Banco Azteca last December.

This shocking revelation comes as Hovde has refused to disclose which foreign banks and governments his bank has done millions of dollars of business with. What else is Hovde hiding?

Read more below:

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Bice: Democrats question Eric Hovde over his bank’s $26M deal with a troubled Mexican bank

By: Dan Bice

Banco Azteca, the 10th largest financial institution in Mexico, has had its share of problems in recent years.

Accused in past news stories of having links to the Mexican drug cartel.

Dropped as a financial partner by some U.S. banks because of “risk and compliance concerns.” 

And now caught up in a Texas bribery scheme with an American congressman.

But Sunwest Bank, the Utah-based financial institution run by Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, doesn’t mind doing business with it.

In December, Banco Azteca sent $26.2 million in cash to Sunwest on four airplane flights as part of a massive currency conversion called “repatriation,” records show. Hovde, who is running against Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, is chairman and CEO of Sunwest.

Now Democrats are questioning the deal, saying it gives voters a window into how Hovde runs his businesses by putting personal financial stakes above other issues.

Arik Wolk, spokesman of the Democratic Party, said Sunwest’s transactions with Banco Azteca are “extraordinarily concerning,” especially given the alleged past ties between Azteca and the drug cartel. He added, however, that Democrats were not suggesting Hovde or Sunwest had done anything illegal.

“Hovde is willing to do anything to enrich himself, even flying cash across the border for a bank suspected of working for criminal groups that are pouring deadly fentanyl into our state,” Wolk claimed.

As recently as 2021, Banco Azteca had no correspondent banks in the U.S. with which it could transfer U.S. currency.

Over the past decade, several news accounts, including two by Reuters, have drawn links between Banco Azteca and Mexican gangs, which are the leading suppliers of cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and other illicit narcotics to the U.S.

In 2023, a Reuters reporter wrote that drug cartels are using remittances – money transfers favored by migrant workers – to send illicit earnings back to Mexico. 

The Reuters reporter said he witnessed five individuals on motorcycles collecting cash from people leaving branch offices of three banks, including Banco Azteca. Locals said these were couriers for the Sinaloa Cartel picking up drug money sent as remittances.

In a 2014 story, Reuters quoted a prominent anti-kidnapping activist saying Mexican gangs involved in kidnapping migrants ask for the money to be sent to Banco Azteca. Also, the Yale Journal of International Affairs reported that Banco Azteca was one of four banks that the Mexican cartel was using to process extortion payments.

A little more than a decade ago, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency investigated Banco Azteca’s ties with its then-correspondent bank in the U.S., Lone Star National Bank of Pharr, and turned up money-laundering concerns. Repeatedly cited and fined, Lone Star soon ended its relationship with Banco Azteca.

Other financial institutions, including Fifth Third Cincinnati and CBW Bank, soon followed.

According to a May story in the Wall Street Journal, Banco Azteca has struggled doing business with U.S. banks since regulators began enforcing rules cracking down on money laundering from drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion. Many U.S. banks have cut ties with Banco Azteca because of “risk and compliance concerns.”

For years, that left Banco Azteca holding onto large sums of U.S. currency with no place to offload it.

[lilietsblog]

on ethnostates and reality

in the current real world there are two options for polities

an overt ethnostate, mostly monoethnic*, with some amount of minorities that it treats variously, in large degree based on whether they have their own native ethnic state out there that cares about how they are treated / has a reputation that transfers over to them in a positive or negative manner,

a covert ethnostate, also known as "an empire", polyethnic but one of the ethnicities* is the one that dominates the echelons of power due to pre-existing accumulated wealth. Also treats its minorities differently based on whether they're immigrants from a state it respects, a state it disrespects, or don't have a state of their own (native or migrants)

*"ethnicity" is a word that stretches as far as local politics go. in the us it's 'white people', other places divisions are more gradual, it can change from generation to generation in any given place too :)

I'm sure you have noticed two curious facts about this:

there is no such thing as a non-ethnic state currently,

people's treatment, even in foreign countries & diaspora, depends on whether they have one of their own.

Jews all over the world benefit from the existence of Israel, even if they don't want to emigrate to it, and absolutely regardless of their opinion on its policies. I don't know about US politics, but in Ukraine where I live it's made an IMMENSE difference. Having a Jewish friend or relative means having a friend or relative in a first world country with better healthcare than ours! I don't even know how to explain to people who aren't already aware of this how much of a difference this makes compared to, say, the attitude towards Romani, yeah?

Jews aren't the only ones for whom ethnostate is a burning question, either. You know Ukraine? We're currently in a war that determines whether we get our own ethnostate (where our language is the state language, our culture gets promoted and sponsored, our politics are our own etc) or get eaten by a neighbouring empire - those are our two options! And the neighbouring empire is not ethnically benevolent: they say that "all Slavs are brothers" and what they mean by this is "Ukrainians aren't REALLY distinct, so it's okay to outlaw their language, destroy their culture and kidnap their children for reeducation". Our current alternative is between ETHNOSTATE and GENOCIDE.

There is a reason the current world order (at least / particularly in Europe) is mostly based around ethnostates. It used to be based around empires instead! And then empires broke apart and let their constituent parts self-govern, and this, the creation of ethnostates instead, was A MASSIVE IMPROVEMENT. Take my word for it or read some history.

One day, maybe, the world over will turn over again, and ethnostates will be replaced with another, more benevolent and equitable system. But right now, they literally have no alternative: you have an ethnostate, or you are an oppressed minority.

Let's not focus our ire for this on the political position to not get genocided ever again, yeah?

[tearsofrefugees]

[thomasthetankieengine]

Awww, what a good first step. You're right to recognize that the United States was formed in blood. Now that you've learned that, you've got a lot more reading to do about the history of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism. You can pick any of the following topics

Resettlement policy of the Neo-Assyrian Empire

Asiatic Vespers

Roman destruction of Carthage

Roman expulsion of the Jews from Judaea

Mitma

Edict of Expulsion

Baltic Germans

Conquest of the Canary Islands

Alhambra Decree

Russian conquest of Siberia

Plantations of Ireland

Dzungar genocide

Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and Act of Settlement

Expulsion of the Acadians

Chinese conquests of Xinjiang and Tibet

Circassian genocide

Expulsion of the Albanians, 1830–1876 and 1877–1878

Pale of Settlement

Prussian deportations

Herero and Namaqua genocide

Ethnic cleansings during the Balkan Wars

1914 Greek deportations

Armenian genocide

Greek genocide

Bolshevik deportations of the Don Cossacks

Pacification of Libya

1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey

Simele massacre of 1933

Deportation of Soviet Koreans

Population transfer in the Soviet Union

Independent State of Croatia's massacres of Serbs, Jews, and Roma

The Holocaust

Porajmos

Expulsion of Cham Albanians

Partition of India

Istrian–Dalmatian exodus

Jammu Massacre

Exodus of Turks from Bulgaria

Istanbul pogrom

1962 Rajshahi massacres

1964 East Pakistan riots

Arab Belt program

Cambodian genocide

Revival Process

Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

Halabja massacre

1991 Altun Kupri massacre

Palestinian exodus from Kuwait

South Ossetia War

Ossetian–Ingush conflict

Khojaly massacre

Ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian wars

May 1998 riots of Indonesia

Assyrian exodus from Iraq

2008 attacks on Uttar Pradeshi and Bihari migrants in Maharashtra

2010 South Kyrgyzstan ethnic clashes

2013 Myanmar anti-Muslim riots

Yazidi genocide

Rohinyga genocide

War in Tigray

Russian invasion of Ukraine

Blockade of Nagorno-Karbakh

The sooner you divest yourself of the delusion that ANY nation-state arose naturally and was formed easily or bloodlessly, the smarter you'll be. They ain't nothing natural or peaceful about the way that any part of Europe, Africa, or Asia is today.

[mightyflamethrower]

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.

California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a fifth of the population lives below the property line. Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.

The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly abandoned by businesses—most recently Google—that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.

Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.

The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken healthcare, housing, and welfare entitlements.

Newsome raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour. The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shut-downs and bankruptcies of fast food outlets.

Twenty-seven percent of Californians were born outside of the United States. It is a minority-majority state. Yet California has long dropped unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial reparations.

California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent anti-Semitism.

Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night. They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested—and almost never convicted.

Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to restore penalties for violent crime and theft.

Gas prices are the highest in the continental United States, given green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still raising, gasoline taxes—and are scheduled to go well over $6 a gallon.

Yet its ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail boondoggle.

The state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum, natural gas, timber, and mineral resources.

As California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the irrelevant, if not ludicrous.

It now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes. It is adding new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their power bills—to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians who simply default on their energy bill with impunity.

What happened to the once-beautiful California paradise?

Millions of productive but frustrated, overtaxed, and underserved middle-class residents have fled to low-crime, low-tax, and well-served red states in disgust

In turn, millions of illegal migrants have swarmed the state, given its sanctuary-city policies, refusal to enforce the law, and generous entitlements.

Meanwhile, a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.

California became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized peasants, and a shrinking and fleeing middle class. It is now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments, and unaffordable middle-class houses.

California suffers from poorly ranked public schools—but brags about its prestigious private academies. Its highways are lethal—but it hosts the most private jets in the nation.

The fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the abject nightmares of everyone else.

In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory.

[thecanyon]

🇵🇸 baby activism with Ben 🇵🇸

I want to talk about boycotting and food colonialism. Let’s start with the basics.

Europe and America colonized the global south because they could make loads of money by forcibly seizing land and people. but to create that land for growing crops, they had to destroy pre-existing food sources for indigenous people. they also stole the time that indigenous people used to produce their own food and forced them to produce cash crops for the global north.

because plantation owners and corporations can cheaply produce lots of food, they dominated the global food market. this a) gave the global north cheap access to certain foods and b) ensured that people would be eating this food whether it was their cultural diet or not because it is cheap and everywhere.

this rebounded onto the exploited people producing the food in the first place. because they stole this land and time and labor, they also also destroyed indigenous people’s cultural relationships with food by forcing them to eat cheap, non-nutritious, non-local diets. the increased access to food increased the quality of life for colonizing nations BECAUSE and only because it decreased quality of life for colonized people. planting lots of one crop meant exploited people could often only eat one dominant food instead of a balanced diet; this lead to vitamin deficiencies which led to disease that further worsened their health. the poor nutrition, disease, forced labor, and reduced access to healthcare literally shortens the lives of colonized peoples. that is how we get cheap produce in grocery stores. it is a literal transfer of life force from colonized to colonizing peoples.

so what does this have to do with israel? because israel stole Palestinian farmland to create foreign systems of growing food that is not suited to the land. and they import south Asian migrant workers to farm crops not even to eat, but to SELL to the world. this physically reduces the amount of land Palestinians can use to feed themselves. More money for Israelis equals less food for Palestinians. this is literally just the tip of the iceberg.

the fact that Israel grows food on stolen Palestinian land is more than just unfair. It kills Palestinians so that Israel can make money selling us cheap produce. This is true not just for Palestine but for industrialized agriculture in general. Boycotting is not just intellectually valid, but deeply rooted in the preservation of human life.

boycott Israeli produce. boycott all corporations that use stolen land and stolen labor. the effort it takes for people in colonizer nations to avoid slave labor and stolen land is nothing compared to the human cost of life in the exploited countries that grow this food.

[arctic-hands]

Hey does anyone know what the name of that hotline you call to report ICE in your area so they can warn migrants is? I used to have it in my phone but it's one of a handful of numbers that didn't get automatically transferred when I got a new phone, and now I don't remember what it's called

[fatehbaz]

[A]nti-homeless laws [...] rooted in European anti-vagrancy laws were adapted across parts of the Japanese empire [...] at the turn of the 20th century. [...] [C]riminalising ideas transferred from anti-vagrancy statutes into [contemporary] welfare systems. [...] [W]elfare and border control systems - substantively shaped by imperial aversions to racialised ideas of uncivilised vagrants - mutually served as a transnational legal architecture [...] [leading to] [t]oday's modern divides between homeless persons, migrants, and refugees [...].

---

By the Boer Wars (1880–1902), Euro-American powers and settler-colonial governments professed anxieties about White degeneration and the so-called “Yellow Peril” alongside other existential threats to White supremacy [...]. Japan [...] validated the creation of transnational racial hierarchies as it sought to elevate its own global standing [...]. [O]ne key legal instrument for achieving such racialised orders was the vagrancy concept, rooted in vagrancy laws that originated in Europe and proliferated globally through imperial-colonial conquest [...].

[A]nti-vagrancy regulation [...] shaped public thinking around homelessness [...]. Such laws were applied as a “criminal making device” (Kimber 2013:544) and "catch-all detention rationale" (Agee 2018:1659) targeting persons deemed threats for their supposedly transgressive or "wayward interiority" (Nicolazzo 2014:339) measured against raced, gendered, ableist, and classed norms [...]. Through the mid-20th century, vagrancy laws were aggressively used to control migration [and] encourage labour [...]. As vagrancy laws fell out of favour, [...] a "vagrancy concept" nonetheless thrived in welfare systems that similarly meted out punishment for ostensible vagrant-like qualities [...], [which] helps explain why particular discourses about the mobile poor have persisted to date [...].

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During high imperialism (1870–1914), European, American, and Japanese empires expanded rapidly, aided by technologies like steam and electricity. The Boer Wars and Japan's ascent to Great Power status each profoundly influenced trans-imperial dynamics, hardening Euro-American concerns regarding a perceived deterioration of the White race. [...] Through the 1870s [...] the [Japanese] government introduced modern police forces and a centralised koseki register to monitor spatial movement. The koseki register, which recorded geographic origins, also served as a tool for marking racialised groups including Ainu, Burakumin, Chinese, [...] and Korean subjects across Japan's empire [...]. The 1880 Penal Code contained Japan's first anti-vagrancy statute, based on French models [...]. Tokyo's Governor Matsuda, known for introducing geographic segregation of the rich and poor, expressed concern around 1882 for kichinyado (daily lodgings), which he identified as “den[s] for people without fixed employment or [koseki] registration” [...].

Attention to “vagrant foreigners” (furō-gaikokujin) emerged in Japanese media and politics in the mid-1890s. It stemmed directly from contemporary British debates over immigration restrictions targeting predominantly Jewish “destitute aliens” [...].

The 1896 Landing Regulation for Qing Nationals barred entry of “people without fixed employment” and “Chinese labourers” [...], justified as essential "for maintaining public peace and morals" in legal documents [...]. Notably, prohibitions against Chinese labourers were repeatedly modified at the British consulate's behest through 1899 to ensure more workers for [the British-affiliated plantation] tea industry. [...]

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Simultaneously, new welfaristic measures emerged alongside such punitive anti-vagrancy statutes. [...] Such border control regulations were eventually standardised in Japan's first immigration law, the 1918 Foreigners’ Entry Order. [...] This turn towards instituting racialised territorial boundaries should be understood in light of empire's concurrent welfarist turn [...]. Japanese administration established a quasi-carceral workhouse system in 1906 [in colonized territory of East Asia] [...] which sentenced [...] vagrants to years in workhouses. This law still treated vagrancy as illegal, but touted its remedy of compulsory labour as welfaristic. [...] This welfarist tum led to a proliferation of state-run programmes [...] connecting [lower classes] to employment. Therein, the vagrancy concept became operative in sorting between subjects deemed deserving, or undeserving, of aid. Effectively, surveillance practices in welfare systems mobilised the vagrancy concept to, firstly, justify supportive assistance and labour protections centring able-bodied, and especially married, Japanese men deemed “willing to work” and, secondly, withhold protections from racialised persons for their perceived waywardness [...] as contemporaneous Burakumin, Korean, and Ainu movements frequently protested [...]. [D]uring the American occupation (1945–1952), not only were anti-vagrancy statutes reinstituted in Japan's 1948 Minor Offences Act, but [...] the 1946 Livelihood Protection Act (Article 2) excluded “people unwilling to work or lazy” from social insurance coverage [...].

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Imperial expansion relied on not only claiming new markets and territories, but also using borders as places for negotiating legal powers and personhood [...]. Japan [...] integrated Euro-American ideas and practices attached to extraterritorial governance, like exceptionalism and legal immunity, into its legal systems. [...] (Importantly, because supportive systems [welfare], like punitive ones, were racialised to differentially regulate mobilities according to racial-ethic hierarchies, they were not universally beneficial to all eligible subjects.) [...]

At the turn of the century, imperialism and industrial capitalism had co-produced new transnational mobilities [which induced mass movements of poor and newly displaced people seeking income] [...]. These mobilities - unlike those celebrated in imperial travel writing - conflicted with racist imaginaries of who should possess freedom of movement, thereby triggering racialised concerns over vagrancy [...]. In both Euro-American and Japanese contexts, [...] racialised “lawless” Others (readily associated with vagrancy) were treated as threats to “public order” and “public peace and morals”. [...] Early 20th century discourse about vagrants, undesirable aliens, and “vagrant foreigners” [...] produced [...] "new categories of [illegal] people" [...] that cast particular people outside of systems of state aid and protection. [...] [P]ractices of illegalisation impress upon people, “the constant threat of removal, of being coercively forced out and physically removed [...] … an expulsion from life and living itself”.

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All text above by: Rayna Rusenko. "The Vagrancy Concept, Border Control, and Legal Architectures of Human In/Security". Antipode [A Radical Journal of Geography] Volume 56, Issue 2, pages 628-650. First published 24 October 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for criticism, teaching, commentary purposes.]

[dailyanarchistposts]

Organizing: A Start

So, some activities to get there. If you are in a union, you can make use of the opportunities and basic protections you have in order to create, expand, or redistribute organizing resources and spaces. There are some useful ways of doing so.

Flying squads. Flying squads are rapid response networks that can deploy quickly to take action, whether to assist with workplace pickets or to support community groups in actions like an eviction defense or squat or welfare office occupation supporting unemployed workers or Indigenous land defense. Flying squads require little more than phone lists by which rank-and-file workers can self-mobilize.

Working Groups. Workers can start class-based working groups within their union around community issues like those mentioned above. Examples from ones I have helped organize include anti-poverty working groups to support poor and unhoused working-class people and Indigenous solidarity working groups supporting active land reclamations.

All of these can access union resources to use in broader struggles beyond the workplace or contract. All while building the strength of less secured workers. One influential example is the green bans in Australia, strikes undertaken by the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) and used to protect parkland and low-income housing.

These straightforward examples provide mechanisms to transfer union resources, which are properly understood as working-class resources, on a class-wide basis to community working class, including Indigenous and ecological, struggles. They also provide venues for educating and motivating fellow workers. The absolute joy I have seen among workers following flying squad actions cannot be properly expressed. It is literally transformative. It is a lighting of what could be called real class consciousness.

If you are not in a union—organize one. However, that might look. Reach out to other workers. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) are always a good option for organizing on a class struggle rather than a contract management basis. Active flying squads from unionized workers can help to put pressure on the boss.

Organize an autonomous flying squad bringing together unorganized workers, unemployed workers, migrant workers, and/or environmentalists. I helped organize an autonomous flying squad along these lines in Toronto and we were often the only outside workers presence at pickets of migrant workers who were outside traditional union structures.

One IWW example is that of IWW-Earth First! Local 1 in northern California, which brough together timber workers and environmentalists in a joint organizing effort based on the shared recognition that clearcut logging destroys vital ecosystems at the same time as it wipes out prospects for workers’ livelihoods and communities in the long rune. And in the longer run, threatens planetary survival for all but capital.