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ilanaprincilus06

U.S. Refugee Program Faces Challenges To Rebuild : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-support-facing-big-challenges

Delaware refugees

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Among the more daunting challenges President Biden faces in the coming year will be to make good on his goal of admitting 10 times as many refugees — 125,000 — as former President Donald Trump allowed to enter the United States last year.
  • "One hundred and twenty-five thousand refugees being resettled this [next] year is unrealistic," says Krish O'Mara Vignarajah,
  • "Our refugee resettlement has been on life support for the past few years," Vignarajah says. Seventeen of her agency's 48 resettlement sites have closed due to budgetary cutbacks in the U.S. government's refugee program.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • "It involves reopening offices that were closed, rehiring staff we lost, and regaining crucial institutional knowledge," Vignarajah says. The staff members who were let go, she says, represented decades of experience.
  • "No back home again," Pathy says. "From the hospital, we leave and run away." At that point, they had no idea whether their daughters were alive or dead.
  • With other refugees, the Mulemas made their way to Ghana. The refugee camp there was administered by the United Nations. They spent five years living in miserable conditions, with little or no shelter.
  • In a sign of the interfaith character of refugee resettlement work, Jewish Family Services of Delaware partnered with a local Christian church, Calvary Baptist, to accommodate the Mulema family. Over the next three years, about a dozen volunteers from the church helped the Mulemas deal with the new challenges they faced.
  • Given how much work is necessary to resettle a single refugee family, however, the prospect of vastly and suddenly increased refugee admissions is barely feasible, in large part because the refugee resettlement infrastructure has been eroded over the past four years.
  • Trump allowed fewer than 12,000 refugees to enter the country last year, the lowest number in the history of the U.S. refugee program.
  • Across the United States, about one out of three resettlement sites have closed. Jewish Family Services of Delaware was informed it would not be assigned any more refugee families.
  • "The Trump Administration really did some serious damage to the infrastructure of the refugee program," Hetfield says. "Also, obviously, the pandemic put some really serious restrictions on."
  • A renewed government commitment to refugee admissions is not enough on its own to bring the program back to full strength.
  • The United States was founded as a nation of ideals, with almost a religious obligation to welcome the tired and homeless. The country has met the commitment before. It's now challenged to do so again, hard though it may be.
cvanderloo

The U.S. wants Costa Rica to host refugees before they cross the border. Here's why - 0 views

theconversation.com/oss-the-border-heres-why-63989

Costa Rica refugee immigration border

shared by cvanderloo on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In July, the U.S. government announced a plan for Costa Rica to temporarily host up to 200 refugees from Central America while they are processed for placement in the U.S. or elsewhere.
  • The new scale and diversity of refugees is challenging tiny Costa Rica’s capacity to manage these populations and ensure protection of their human rights. The U.S. plan to send more refugees their way will only add to this challenge.
  • The plan for Costa Rica to temporarily house refugees is in addition to an existing program that helps Central American minors gain refugee status in the U.S.
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  • While the plan offers a short-term solution for protecting those most vulnerable to violence, it does not address the magnitude of the migration. In the first six months of the current fiscal year, the U.S. border patrol apprehended 120,700 people from the Northern Triangle countries attempting to enter the U.S. Some of those who cross the border will apply for asylum, but the majority will be sent back to their countries of origin and the violence they were fleeing.
  • Costa Rica is a major destination for migrants and refugees in the region, and immigrants account for 9 percent of the country’s population of 4.8 million. Like the United States, Costa Rica has seen a dramatic increase in arrivals of refugees from Northern Triangle countries, particularly El Salvador, since 2012
  • Central Americans moving to Costa Rica today often already have established social networks in Costa Rica –
  • Immigration officials expect to continue to see around 500 Colombian refugees arriving each year, despite the newly signed peace accord. Costa Rica has also seen a large increase in Venezuelans fleeing economic crisis.
  • Costa Rica has become a popular destination and transit country because of its relatively open borders and policies, its reputation as a champion of human rights and its relatively low levels of crime, violence and poverty. I
  • Over the past 10 years, the country has increased restrictions on immigration, hoping to discourage low-income economic migrants from Nicaragua from entering. These restrictions echo the national security logic of U.S. policies.
  • It neither addresses the underlying conditions of violence that refugees seek to escape nor strengthens regional governments’ abilities to deal with the arrival of these vulnerable populations.
tongoscar

Three quarters of refugees feel welcome in Germany | News | DW | 18.02.2020 - 0 views

www.dw.com/...a-52423585

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Around three-quarters of refugees in Germany feel welcome in the country, according to a recent survey conducted by Germany's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). The survey, which was published on Tuesday, claimed that key factors determining overall life satisfaction for refugees in Germany depended on their family situation and health, residence status and housing, employment status, and the extent of social interaction with local Germans.
  • "All in all, the refugees assessed their living conditions in Germany rather positively," project manager Nina Rother said. "The feeling of being welcomed in Germany also plays an important role."
  • The joint study was conducted in collaboration with Germany's Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The report interviewed a total of 7,950 refugees who came to Germany between 2013 and 2016. According to the researchers, a good level of German is a central prerequisite for professional and social integration.
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  • The survey stated that 44% of the refugees now rate their German language skills as "good" or "very good." In 2017, the figure stood at 35% and in the first survey in 2016, at only 22%. The proportion of respondents without any knowledge of German has fallen to 5%.
proudsa

UN: World's Refugees And Displaced To Exceed 60 Million This Year - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...risis_5673c581e4b0b958f6562ecd

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The number of people forcibly displaced worldwide is likely to have "far surpassed" a record 60 million this year, mainly driven by the Syrian war and other protracted conflicts, the United Nations said on Friday.
  • Nearly 2.5 million asylum seekers have requests pending, with Germany, Russia and the United States receiving the highest numbers of the nearly one million new claims lodged in the first half of the year, it said.
  • Developing countries bordering conflict zones still host the lion's share of the refugees, the report said, warning about growing "resentment" and "politicization of refugees."
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  • Syria's civil war that began in 2011 has been the main driver of mass displacement, with more than 4.2 million Syrian refugees having fled abroad and 7.6 million uprooted within their shattered homeland as of mid-year, UNHCR said.
  • Many refugees will live in exile for years to come, it said. "In effect, if you become a refugee today your chances of going home are lower than at any time in more than 30 years."
kushnerha

The Trump Effect, and How It Spreads - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...effect-and-how-it-spreads.html

new york times racism Trump politics refugees fear

shared by kushnerha on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • do not make the mistake of treating him as a solitary phenomenon, a singular celebrity narcissist who has somehow, all alone, brought his party and its politics to the brink of fascism
  • The things he says are outrageous, by design, but they were not spawned, nor have they flourished, in isolation.
  • They have been harshening their campaign speeches and immigration proposals in response to the Trump effect. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush want to allow only Christian refugees from Syria to enter the country, and Mr. Cruz has introduced legislation to allow states to opt out of refugee resettlement.
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  • In 31 states, governors — most but not all Republicans — have formed an axis of ignorance, declaring their borders closed to refugees fleeing the Islamic State in Syria.
  • defending the displaced against blatant discrimination. That it is even necessary to protect the victims of Islamic extremism from being victimized again, in the United States, is a national disgrace.
  • the danger right now is allowing him to legitimize the hatred that he so skillfully exploits, and to revive the old American tendency, in frightening times, toward vicious treatment of the weak and outsiders.
  • The internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, as some Republicans have either forgotten or never understood, was a dark episode in American history. It is remembered today with regret, as something the nation struggled with, learned from, and moved beyond. But there are millions of Muslims who have good reason to fear that the darkness is falling again.
  • The time to renounce Mr. Trump’s views was the day he entered the race, calling Mexico an exporter of criminals and rapists.
  • He played to the politics of nativism and fear that was evident last year
  • The racism behind the agenda of the right wing on immigrants and foreigners has long been plain as day. Mr. Trump makes it even plainer.
tongoscar

Canada: At "WAR" With the US? (=Water, Arctic and Refugees) - The Globalist - 0 views

www.theglobalist.com/rctic-refugees-water-resources

shared by tongoscar on 10 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Every Canadian government faces two existential challenges that, to make matters more complicated yet, are often intertwined.
  • The first is to keep a loose and fractious federation together. The second is to keep Canada and the United States close but separate.
  • These challenges have been made more complex with climate change and changes in U.S. politics. The regionally divisive nature of Justin Trudeau’s minority government, with no representation from Alberta and the rebirth of the “nationalist” Bloc Québécois,
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  • As with the Trump administration’s demand for a revised North American trading system, Canada will have to find a response to each that is positive enough to appease, but also robust enough to maintain the core of national sovereignty.
  • The first issue on the new U.S.-Canada agenda is America’s need for water.
  • New and more strident demands for U.S. access to Canada’s “surplus” of this vital resource is certain to be presented.
  • The Canadian position remains that water is not a tradable commodity. So far, the U.S. government has neither agreed nor contested that view.
  • The Arctic climate is changing faster than anywhere else. Waters previously unnavigable are now becoming sea lanes
  • U.S. policy is slated to become far more restrictive. Two shifts in particular will have dramatic implications for Canadian refugee policy.
  • In effect this means that any Central American refugee in the United States will feel entitled to claim asylum in Canada.
  • the United States simply cannot ever be expected to remain at arms’ length in our national life.
tongoscar

Germany: Half of refugees find jobs within five years | News | DW | 04.02.2020 - 0 views

www.dw.com/...a-52251414

shared by tongoscar on 19 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A new study published on Tuesday found that 49% of refugees who have come to Germany since 2013 were able to find steady employment within five years of arriving.
  • "This means that labor market integration is somewhat faster than for refugees from previous years," said the Insitute for Labor Market and Vocational Research (IAB), who carried out the study.
  • While 68 percent reported having a job, this included both full and part-time. Moreover, 17% of this group are involved in a paid training scheme and 3% have a paid internship, a form of employment that often does not pay enough to live off.
rachelramirez

Experts: Yes, Anti-Refugee Rhetoric Helps ISIS - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...fugee-rhetoric-helps-isis.html

Syria Isis

shared by rachelramirez on 30 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Experts: Yes, Anti-Refugee Rhetoric Helps ISIS
  • “There is no place for bigotry in effective counterterrorism,” Professor James Forest, the director of the graduate program in security studies and interim director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at UMass Lowell
  • Arie W. Kruglanski, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, has written about how ISIS recruitment strategy is based on psychology, not theology. 
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  • “Counterterrorism tries to do two things,” explained Professor Max Abrahms, a political scientist at Northeastern University who studies terrorism. “You try to neutralize existing terrorists and you try to not breed new ones. The surest way to breed new ones is if you’re indiscriminate—for instance, punishing non-violent, moderate Muslims.” 
maxwellokolo

Preparing refugee children for school in US - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 28 Feb 17
     
    But that welcoming tradition only partially eases the refugees' transition. Many of them arrive in Clarkston unable to speak English and not ready to navigate their new lives. Mothers, in particular, struggle to acclimate to their new surroundings while their spouses are at work and older children are in school.
kushnerha

The Rise of Hate Search - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-rise-of-hate-search.html

new york times islamophobia terrorism language

shared by kushnerha on 13 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • after the media first reported that at least one of the shooters had a Muslim-sounding name, a disturbing number of Californians had decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them.
  • the rest of America searched for the phrase “kill Muslims” with about the same frequency that they searched for “martini recipe,” “migraine symptoms” and “Cowboys roster.”
  • People often have vicious thoughts. Sometimes they share them on Google. Do these thoughts matter?Yes. Using weekly data from 2004 to 2013, we found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.
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  • In 2014, according to the F.B.I., anti-Muslim hate crimes represented 16.3 percent of the total of 1,092 reported offenses. Anti-Semitism still led the way as a motive for hate crimes, at 58.2 percent.
  • Hate crimes may seem chaotic and unpredictable, a consequence of random neurons that happen to fire in the brains of a few angry young men. But we can explain some of the rise and fall of anti-Muslim hate crimes just based on what people are Googling about Muslims.
  • If our model is right, Islamophobia and thus anti-Muslim hate crimes are currently higher than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
  • How can these Google searches track Islamophobia so well? Who searches for “I hate Muslims” anyway?We often think of Google as a source from which we seek information directly, on topics like the weather, who won last night’s game or how to make apple pie. But sometimes we type our uncensored thoughts into Google, without much hope that Google will be able to help us. The search window can serve as a kind of confessional.
  • It is not just that hatred against Muslims is extremely high today. It’s that it’s exceptional compared with prejudice against every other group in the United States.
  • “If someone is willing to say ‘I hate them’ or ‘they disgust me,’ we know that those emotions are as good a predictor of behavior as actual intent,” said Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton
  • Google searches seem to suffer from selection bias: Instead of asking a random sample of Americans how they feel, you just get information from those who are motivated to search. But this restriction may actually help search data predict hate crimes.
  • “Google searches answer a different question: What do people excited enough by an issue to comment on it think and believe about it? The answer to this question, just because it is unrepresentative of the public as a whole, may be a better bet to predict hate crimes.”
  • While the vast majority of Muslim Americans won’t be victims of hate crimes, few escape the “constant sense of fear and paranoia” that they or their loved ones might be next, said Rana Ibrahem
  • What about the other side of the coin — compassion and understanding? Do they stand a chance against hate?Searches for information about Islam and Muslims did rise after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Yet they rose far less than searches for hate did. “Who is Muhammad?” “what do Muslims believe?” and “what does the Quran say?” for instance, were no match for intolerance.
  • Google searches expressing moods, rather than looking for information, represent a tiny sample of everyone who is actually thinking those thoughts.
  • The search data also tells us that changes in Americans’ policy concerns have been dramatic. They happened, quite literally, within minutes of the terror attacks.Before the Paris attacks, 60 percent of Americans’ searches that took an obvious view of Syrian refugees saw them positively, asking how they could “help,” “volunteer” or “aid.” The other 40 percent were negative and mostly expressed skepticism about security. After Paris, however, the share of people opposed to refugees rose to 80 percent.
  • One idea might be to increase cultural integration. This is based on the “contact hypothesis”: If more Americans have Muslim neighbors, they will learn not to harbor irrational hate. We did not find support for this in the data — in fact, we found evidence for the opposite.
  • That’s evidence for the dominance of the “racial threat” hypothesis, which predicts that proximity breeds tension, not trust.
  • Another solution might be for leaders to talk about the importance of tolerance and the irrationality of hatred, as President Obama did in his Oval Office speech last Sunday night. He asked Americans to reject discrimination and religious tests for immigration. The reactions to his speech offer an excellent opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t work.
  • There was one line, however, that did trigger the type of response Mr. Obama might have wanted. He said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country.”After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists,” “extremists” or “refugees.” It was “athletes,” followed by “soldiers.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterward.
  • On the whole, though, the response to the president’s speech shows that appealing to the better angels of an angry mob will most likely just backfire.
maxwellokolo

Woman busted smuggling refugee in suitcase - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 03 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 03 Jan 17
     
    Authorities stopped the 22-year-old woman last week at a border crossing into Ceuta, one of two Spanish enclaves in North Africa, from neighboring Morocco. A 19-year-old migrant from Gabon was found concealed inside. The man was immediately offered medical attention due to the lack of oxygen inside the compact travel bag, Spain's Civil Guard said in a statement.
Javier E

The Amazing Trump-Wingnut Policy Conveyor Belt - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...p-wingnut-policy-conveyor-belt

legitimacy discourse politics extremism radical candidate 2016

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Over the course of just a few days Donald Trump has gone from saying that we might have to close down mosques and create a Muslim registry to saying that not only will we do this but we have to do it and anything less is an utter capitulation.
  • In other words, rapidly evolving from refusing to rule out a draconian policy to affirmatively endorsing it to being its leading advocate.
  • With his Muslim ID card and database, Wednesday he said he wouldn't rule out creating such a system. By the end of the day he was telling NBC News he would "absolutely" create such a system.
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  • just as we saw in the summer with immigration writ large, the progression doesn't end with Trump. We've had three presidential elections since the 9/11 terror attacks and no presidential candidate has ever proposed shutting down mosques in the United States or creating a special registry and identification cards for Muslims living in the United States.
  • So yesterday Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio whether he'd shut down radical mosques like Trump. He tried to deflect the question by saying that it wasn't about mosques but closing down any facility that was promoting radicalism. In other words, Rubio, while clearly not eager to answer the question, pointedly refused to rule out following Trump's lead.
  • It is a very good example of how Trump is not only shaping the debate on the right but rapidly mainstreaming ideas that were as recently as a week ago considered entirely outside the realm of mainstream political discourse.
  • It's particularly effective with the less sophisticated and principled candidates like Rubio. Jeb Bush said flatly this morning that Trump's database proposal is "just wrong." But Ben Carson quickly took Trump's lead comparing Syrian refugees to "mad dogs." The difference is that Marco Rubio could very well be president in 18 months. Jeb Bush won't be.
  • this is no longer a matter of Trump yakking on about building a gilded 100-foot wall along the southern border and having Mexico agree to pay for it. Trump is now proposing things that sound like they put millions of American citizens and resident aliens on a road to something like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
kushnerha

The Arithmetic of Compassion - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-arithmetic-of-compassion.html

new york times psychology compassion innumeracy abstraction

shared by kushnerha on 21 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • WE all can relate to the saying “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Our sympathy for suffering and loss declines precipitously when we are presented with increasing numbers of victims.
  • studied survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and discovered that a condition he labeled “psychic numbing” enabled them to withstand the psychological trauma of this experience.
  • concept of psychic numbing has implications in many other situations, such as our response to information about refugee crises, mass extinctions and climate change. This information can be deadening in its abstractness. We struggle to care when the numbers get big. The poet Zbigniew Herbert called this “the arithmetic of compassion.”
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  • How big do the numbers have to be for insensitivity to begin? Not very, it turns out.
  • The image of Aylan lying face down on the beach captivated the world’s attention and even, in short order, resulted in refugee policy changes in countries as far away as the United States. But 14 Syrian children drowned in the Aegean Sea the next day. Did you notice? Did you care?
  • demonstrated that “compassion fade” can occur when an incident involving a single person expands to as few as two people
  • In addition to psychic numbing, there is another psychological disposition at work, called “pseudoinefficacy.”
  • We found that people might be inclined to send money to an individual person in need, but that if they heard that a second person also required aid but could not be helped, they were less inclined to donate to the first person. Meeting that need no longer felt as satisfying. Similarly, when the need for assistance was described as part of a large-scale relief effort, potential donors would experience a demotivating sense of inefficacy arising from the thought that the help they could provide was but “a drop in the bucket.”
  • It seems that we are psychologically wired to help only one person at a time. And we don’t even care to do that if we sense that there are others we cannot help.
  • In addition, we believe that yet another psychological tendency, the “prominence effect,” explains why genuinely well-meaning people (and their governments) so often fail to intervene to prevent genocides and other large-scale abuses. “Prominent” actions or objectives are those that are easily justified, though they may not match our stated social values.
  • Decisions that protect national security or satisfy our attachment to near-term comforts and conveniences are easily justified. Such choices, as Paul Slovic explains in a recent University of Illinois Law Review article, are likely to trump decisions to protect people or the environment, especially when the humans in need or the environmental phenomena in jeopardy (species, habitats, the planet’s climate) are so vast in scale as to seem distant and abstract.
  • argued decades ago, in their book “New World New Mind,” that our minds had failed to keep up with the times — that we were, in a sense, cave men and cave women, struggling to deal with modern problems, like nuclear annihilation, to which our minds were not suited. They called for a “conscious evolution” in how we processed information about the modern world, meaning an intentional change in our cognitive habits.
  • We need to be alert to how psychic numbing, pseudoinefficacy and the prominence effect lead us to act in ways contrary to our values. Doing so can help us to improve our reactions to information about a complex and often upsetting world
colemorris

Supermodel Halima Aden: 'Why I quit' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...stories-55653029

world discrimination industry

shared by colemorris on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • the first hijab-wearing supermodel, quit the fashion industry in November saying it was incompatible with her Muslim religion.
  • "I'm Halima from Kakuma," she says, referring to the refugee camp in Kenya,
  • However she was dressed, keeping her hijab on for every shoot was non-negotiable
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      good for her for standing up for herself in an industry that is so manipulative
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • "There are girls who wanted to die for a modelling contract," she says, "but I was ready to walk away if it wasn't accepted."
  • But as time went on she had less control over the clothes she wore, and agreed to head coverings she would have ruled out at the start.
  • In the last year of her career her hijab got smaller and smaller, sometimes accentuating her neck and chest.
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      edge of being true to herself and being manipulated by the industry
  • "I eventually drifted away and got into the confusing grey area of letting the team on-set style my hijab."
    • colemorris
      colemorris on 17 Jan 21
       
      grey area TOK lesson
  • IMG supported her in this and in 2018 Halima became a Unicef ambassador. As she had spent her childhood in a refugee camp, her work focused on children's rights.
  • "I could spell 'Unicef' when I couldn't spell my own name. I was marking X,"
  • "The style and makeup were horrendous. I looked like a white man's fetishised version of me," she says.
  • "Why would the magazine think it was acceptable to have a hijab-wearing Muslim woman when a naked man is on the next page?" she asks. It went against everything she believed in.
  • I'm putting my mental health and my family at the top. I'm thriving, not just surviving. I'm getting my mental health checked, I'm getting therapy time."
Javier E

Break All the Rules - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...edman-break-all-the-rules.html

israel palestine us policy

shared by Javier E on 24 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • On Israel-Palestine, the secretary of state should publicly offer President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority the following: the U.S. would recognize the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as the independent State of Palestine on the provisional basis of the June 4, 1967, lines, support its full U.N. membership and send an ambassador to Ramallah, on the condition that Palestinians accept the principle of “two states for two peoples” — an Arab state and a Jewish state in line with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 — and agree that permanent borders, security and land swaps would be negotiated directly with Israel. The status of the refugees would be negotiated between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
mcginnisca

Donald Trump Just Called for Ending All Muslim Immigration to the US | VICE | United St... - 0 views

www.vice.com/...muslim-immigration-to-us-vgtrn

donald trump muslim immigration united states language anchoring heuristics bias logic probability

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign issued a press release that, amid an increasingly Islamophobic climate in the US and abroad, called for a blanket ban on any Muslim immigration—a position so starkly bigoted that the two-paragraph statement went viral on Twitter in a matter of moments. (Some users even questioned whether it was real, but it's as real as everything in this universe.)
  • "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the release begins, leaving it unclear what exactly Trump thinks could possibly be "going on." An infiltration of the country by ISIS that the candidate has alluded to? A hostile population of American-born Muslims?
  • Trump goes on to discuss the "hatred" Muslims apparently have for Americans, or America, or something. "Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump says in the statement. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." How the government could "determine" the source of this alleged hatred isn't explained, nor does Trump address how he or anyone else might put a stop to it.
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  • The release cites a poll from something called the Center for Security Policy that claims 25 percent of Muslims surveyed said they were OK with violence against Americans and 51 percent "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Those numbers sound too awful to be true, and there's evidence that they aren't—Georgetown's Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia in America, has called the poll into question and noted that the CSP's founder Frank Gaffney once accused General David Petraeus, of all people, of "submission" to Islamic law.
  • the latest CNN poll had put The Donald in the lead in Iowa, a key early voting state, though another poll that used different sampling techniques showed Cruz ahead of Trump.
proudsa

More Than 3,700 Migrants Rescued In Mediterranean - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...igrants-rescued_n_7648488.html

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Italy's coastguard
  • 3,700 migrants from overcrowded and unsafe boats in the last two days
  • 18 different boats
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • six rescue operations
  • traveling in a fishing boat and five rubber dinghies
  • Authorities also brought ashore a corpse in a metal coffin
  • shot dead
  • Sicilian court is investigating the death
  • waves of migrants arriving in overcrowded boats from North Africa
  • Italy
  • trying to convince the EU to help
  • EU this year agreed to triple funding for sea rescues off the coasts of Italy and Greece
  • deeply divided
  • manage the migrants once they come ashore
  • distribute 40,000 Syrian and Eritrean asylum seekers
  • Commission pla
  • "hot spots"
  • identify migrants and refugees
  • calls for those
  • France is increasingly turning back migrants
  • thousands of new boat arrivals each week
  • Italy's train stations
  • Rome and Milan
  • 100 migrants have been sleeping rough along the Italy-France border for almost two weeks
Javier E

The right has its own version of political correctness. It's just as stifling. - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rrectness-its-just-as-stifling

patriotic correctness PC conservative language

shared by Javier E on 08 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”
  • But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.
  • Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Complaining about political correctness is patriotically correct. The patriotically correct must use the non-word “illegals,” or “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” to describe foreigners who broke our immigration laws. Dissenters support “open borders” or “shamnesty” for 30 million illegal alien invaders. The punishment is deportation because “we’re a nation of laws” and they didn’t “get in line,” even though no such line actually exists. Just remember that they are never anti-immigration, only anti-illegal immigration, even when they want to cut legal immigration.
  • Black Lives Matter is racist because it implies that black lives are more important than other lives, but Blue Lives Matter doesn’t imply that cops’ lives are more important than the rest of ours. Banning Islam or Muslim immigration is a necessary security measure, but homosexuals should not be allowed to get married because it infringes on religious liberty. Transgender people could access women’s restrooms for perverted purposes, but Donald Trump walking in on nude underage girls in dressing rooms before a beauty pageant is just “media bias.”
  • Terrorism is an “existential threat,” even though the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.2 million a year. Saying the words “radical Islam” when describing terrorism is an important incantation necessary to defeat that threat. When Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya decides to employ refugees in his factories, it’s because of his ties to “globalist corporate figures.” Waving a Mexican flag on U.S. soil means you hate America, but waving a Confederate flag just means you’re proud of your heritage.
  • Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.
  • Poor white Americans are the victims of economic dislocation and globalization beyond their control, while poor blacks and Hispanics are poor because of their failed cultures. The patriotically correct are triggered when they hear strangers speaking in a language other than English. Does that remind you of the PC duty to publicly shame those who use unacceptable language to describe race, gender or whatever other identity is the victim du jour?
  • The patriotically correct rightly ridicule PC “safe spaces” but promptly retreat to Breitbart or talk radio, where they can have mutually reinforcing homogeneous temper tantrums while complaining about the lack of intellectual diversity on the left.
  • There is no such thing as too much national security, but it’s liberals who want to coddle Americans with a “nanny state.”
  • Those who disagree with the patriotically correct are animated by anti-Americanism, are post-American, or deserve any other of a long list of clunky and vague labels that signal virtue to other members of the patriotic in-group.
  • Every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. But they are different because they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose.
  • The modern form of political correctness on college campuses and the media is social tyranny with manners, while patriotic correctness is tyranny without the manners, and its adherents do not hesitate to use the law to advance their goals.
maxwellokolo

Split by Trump's travel ban, a family races to reunite - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 23 Feb 17
     
    He's thinking of his daughter, Batulo. She's the one who soaks her feet in cold water to keep from dozing off while she studies. She's the one who taught him the basics of speaking and writing in English. She's the one who makes her brothers and sisters do their homework.
haubertbr

Trump's Immigration Order Is 'Not A Ban On Muslims,' Homeland Security Chief Says - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-homeland-security-chief-says

politics

shared by haubertbr on 02 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • haubertbr on 02 Feb 17
     
    Homeland Security officials are defending the Trump administration's executive order on immigration and refugees, along with its implementation. At a news conference Tuesday, DHS Secretary John Kelly said the order creates a "temporary pause" as officials "assess the strengths and the weaknesses of our current system."
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