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@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle

roadtrip Archives - Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman

But it’s obvious that numbers don’t tell the whole story, which is why it’s worth taking road trips. I’m trying to be conscious that these data points are designed to help me know what to look for, and trying to make sure they don’t blind me to what’s worth seeing.

These blog posts are fun and interesting. The first post is Road trip! Driving by data set whis gets to some of the animating questions Zuckerman is curious about.

As the US election season is heating up,. I'm probably not alone is thinking more about the country in general and the stories we tell. So part of what makes this series of posts so interesting to me is not just the stories Zuckerman tells, but his discussion about how he's framing the travles he's telling about.

#geography #immigration #stories #history #data

These stories come from millions of people who are trying to find a better life in the United States. My parents are from Panama, they left Panama to move to the us so they could find work because in Panama there was no civil rights movement.

Some people don’t recognise but there are black folks throughout all of the Americas and North America, the United States in particular had a Civil Rights movement. But Panama didn’t, Colombia did not, Venezuela did not, Brazil did not, but there are still blacks that are still affected by old mentalities. So it’s very difficult for them to get jobs in Panama.

Aloe Blacc from an excerpt from a 2014 Star Sessions interview at Genius.

The interview video at YouTube.

#music #aloe blacc #immigration #wake me up

protoslacker reblogged

How many Benjamins died today? (It would sting if this were the news: Walter Benjamin died today! But this, indeed, is the news.) How many will die tomorrow? Remember all those who turned away the Jews, the Roma, the homosexuals, and the communists in the 1940s, and consigned them to horrible death. We are certain that we, with our contemporary wisdom, are not so monstrous as to turn away those at death’s door, the inconvenience to us be damned. Of course we aren’t. Of course. But let’s say we were. What would that look like?

Teju Cole at Facebook. Something I wrote sometime ago and had sort of forgotten recently popped up as a “memory”.

Update, July 31, 2023: Here is a link to the essay, Immigration: Our Past And Our Present, at Kino Border Initiative. Cole’s Facebook profile is here.

(via protoslacker)

#migration #immigration #walter benjamin #dehuminization #teju cole

As an exercise, I devoted an afternoon to writing my memories of childhood. I remembered our family’s arrival at a single-wide trailer on an Ozark meadow and my mother’s shock at learning that this would be our new home. I recalled the smell of freshly plowed soil and the way the color of it pleased my father. I remembered the creek where I threw rocks at snakes while my grandmother planted a Korean vegetable that grew without effort. With each memory, I saw my life anew, as though the clouds had shifted over a field I had seen every day. After writing 80 memories, I sketched a narrative arc with themes about family, failure and rebirth. That’s how I got the idea to write “Minari”; it began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.

Lee Isaac Chung in the Los Angeles Times. Some unusual guidance is behind writing ‘Minari.’ Director Lee Isaac Chung explains

#narrative #minari #film #immigration

Your Honor, as a former ICE trial attorney, whenever I had evidence in immigration court that questioned whether or not some of the documentation … was inaccurate, we were required as officers of the court to go back and do our due diligence. What I find surprising here is that we don’t even have some of the basic evidence.

Laura Peña quoted in an article by Melissa del Bosque in ProPublica. The Case That Made an Ex-ICE Attorney Realize the Government Was Relying on False “Evidence” Against Migrants

Years after quitting her job as an attorney for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Laura Peña returned to the fight — defending migrants she’d once prosecuted. Then, a perplexing family separation case forced her to call upon everything she’d learned.

#law #injustice #migration #immigration

"The whole facility's culture is rotted from the core": What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saw inside the El Paso camps

In an interview with Mother Jones, AOC describes the cruelty and impunity she glimpsed at the border.

www.motherjones.com

I thought I’d posted this interview, but I hadn’t, so I’m doing it now.

Feeling really down about Joe Biden’s campaign. It’s frustrating because I want Democratic candidates to do well this election cycle. Jamil Smith gets it right in this tweet:

We know that @JoeBiden’s politics don’t line up with @AOC’s. But he is so obtuse not to recognize that what she’s doing is good for Democrats. One wonders whether he cares. There are ways to signal moderate bonafides without being condescending and wrong.

The 16 member congressional delegation visiting the camps is important news. Every representative made me glad. Ocasio-Cortez has great political instincts. How she responded to the guard taking a selfie is a story worth reading and repeating. Every member of the delegation was empowered by it-- to their credit.

There’s little hope that Joe Biden will come around. That makes it all the more important that we all try to amplify politics that matter.

#immigration #democrats #political will #alexandria ocasio-cortez

It is a fact, rarely stated but generally acknowledged and accepted, that the global poor should not be allowed to travel. That’s most of the world. As such, from the refugee camp in Calais to the rickety vessels on the Mediterranean, from Trump’s wall to the Berlin wall, the border stands as an ultimate point of confrontation in the broader dystopia we have made possible.

Gary Younge in The Guardian. End all immigration controls – they’re a sign we value money more than people

Humans have always travelled, but barriers are lifted for capital while, for the global poor, borders are made ever tougher to cross

#utopian thinking #migration #immigration #nation states #money flows

Refugees are still fleeing from the violent cataclysmic aftermath of America’s secret and not-so-secret wars in their homelands. The rippling waves of violence from American foreign policy decisions and U.S. military maneuvers and CIA operations carried out decades ago are still wreaking havoc and sending people fleeing from their homes, fleeing for safety – across rivers, across mountains, across deserts, they make their journey here. Because somehow, incredibly, despite the ugliest expressions of racism and the most sordid cultivation of overt xenophobia as policy and law that this flawed nation has seen in decades, this country still stands for something for the people who are trying to come here: America stands for the hope of something better for their children.

L.D. Burnett at S-USIH U.S. Intellectual History Blog. Critical Connections: The Hmong People and America’s Promise for Immigrants

Critical Connections

The Making of Hmong America: Forty Years after the Secret War

#migration #immigration #american foreign policy #book

AP Investigation: Deported parents may lose kids to adoption>

As the deportees were led off the plane onto the steamy San Salvador tarmac, an anguished Araceli Ramos Bonilla burst into tears, her face contorted with pain: “They want to steal my daughter!”

#immigration #law #adoption #bethany christian services

Just as slaves had picked cotton more quickly than free farmers, Texas prison labor was undeniably productive. The reason was simple: People work harder when driven by torture. Texas didn’t ban whipping in its prisons until 1941; inmates were primarily flogged for not being productive enough. (Arkansas didn’t ban the lash until 1968.)

Shane Bauer in Mother Jones. Today It Locks Up Immigrants. But CoreCivic’s Roots Lie in the Brutal Past of America’s Prisons.

The renewed fortunes and the hidden history of the for-profit prison industry.

American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment

#private prisons #torture #immigration #slavery #history #book #journalism

When I arrived at Stewart I was faced with an impossible choice – either work for a few cents an hour or live without basic things like soap, shampoo, deodorant and food.

Wilhen Hill Barrientos quoted in an article at Southern Poverty Law Center. SPLC sues private prison company that uses forced labor of detained immigrants in Georgia to boost profits

#immigration #detention #forced labor #government contractors

As Ingrid made plans for a new, safer life in the U.S., she remembered the early morning hours in the emergency room when she sat waiting to find out what was wrong with her gravely ill child. A hospital staffer approached and told her, in Spanish, that Paulina had just been diagnosed with a ruptured appendix. “Tell me the truth,” Ingrid recalled the staffer berating her. “You must have seen for at least three days that she had something wrong, and it was getting worse. So tell me the truth. Why didn’t you take her to the doctor?” “I did take her,” Ingrid answered. “I took her and took her. But we were being held by Immigration. And no one there did anything.”

Debbie Nathan writing in The Intercept. A 5-Year-Old Girl in Immigrant Detention Nearly Died of an Untreated Ruptured Appendix

#immigration #detention #ice #medical neglect #cruelty

They humiliate us. With sticks, they beat the metal bars to wake us up. If the children cry, they go after us. There was a child with a fever. They bathed him in cold water and let him lie naked on the floor except for his underwear. The mother was crying because the child is crying. She wants to cover him, but guards tell her she can’t.

A mother from Honduras quoted by Molly Crabapple in an article in Rolling Stone. Scenes From an American Tragedy: The Texas Border Crisis

Award-winning illustrator Molly Crabapple travels to Texas to document families emerging from the trauma and turmoil of crossing the border

#immigration #torture #cruelty

According to medical experts, all children who were separated from their parents under the “zero tolerance” policy are at increased risk of developing long term health problems from “toxic stress.” But for the children who continue to be confined, the damage is still accumulating. One call I received was from a 10-year-old girl. In a weary voice, she told me, in Spanish, that she is afraid to attend the school that Dilley maintains for child detainees. “I’m afraid to leave my mom and go to class,” she said. “I’m afraid that’s when they’ll separate me again from my mom, like at the dog pound.”

Debbie Nathan in The Intercept. Children Separated Under Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” Policy Say Their Trauma Continues

#immigration #children #zero tolerance #law #donald trump #trauma

But, a former government official told me, the prime movers behind zero tolerance were members of a “cabal of anti-immigration guys” at the White House, the D.H.S., and the Department of Justice. Stephen Miller and a Justice Department adviser named Gene Hamilton led the discussion, the former official said. “They want to have a different America, and they’re succeeding. Now they’re doubling down—they’re making another run at lowering the number of refugees who are admitted to the United States.”

Jonathan Blitzer in The New Yorker. Will Anyone in the Trump Administration Ever Be Held Accountable for the Zero-Tolerance Policy?

#migration #immigration #family separation #donald trump #racism

“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”

Grant Young quoted in an article by by Jessica Huseman and Blake Paterson, ProPublica, and Bryan Lowry and Hunter Woodall, The Kansas City Star. Kris Kobach’s Lucrative Trail of Courtroom Defeats

For years, the candidate for Kansas governor has defended towns that passed anti-immigration ordinances. The towns have lost big — but Kobach has fared considerably better.

#kris kobach #grifter #kansas #prejudice #immigration

The activity of the Tanton network and the support it has received from one of America’s oldest imperial families shows above all how one faction of the ruling class, at least, imagines it can create a permanent underclass from which to extract value: first, by dehumanizing migrants in the minds of the citizens; then, by allowing them to sell their labor to employers across the country; and finally, in the prisons and detention centers where they are housed until deportation, and the cycle begins anew. In turn, this contributes to the continued creation of a massive population of surplus labor, which puts downward pressure on wages for all workers.

Brendan O'Conor at Splinter News. The Eugenicist Doctor and the Vast Fortune Behind Trump’s Immigration Regime

#immigration #white supremacy #plutocracy #capitalism

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