Links I like

• As the post-Khmer Rouge generation of Cambodians grows up, they’re producing a flurry of films that mimic the vintage style of the 1960s – widely considered the country’s golden era. Much of the revival is owed to educated filmmaker refugees who are repatriating to Cambodia from France and the United States and opening the country’s first film institutes at local universities.
• Hundreds of Somali refugees are being forced at gunpoint to join rebels fighting in northern Yemen
• Paddington Bear is launching a campaign to to highlight the British Government's continued arrest and detention of hundreds of child asylum-seekers in prison-like conditions.
• A disabled athlete who has won five gold medals for Britain was set to be deported to Nigeria after losing his legal battle to live in the UK.
• British Muslims feel a greater sense of patriotism than their counterparts living in mainland Europe, according to a study by the Open Society Institute
• Rather than living in rows of neatly pegged white canvas UN tents set up in fields as the public might imagine it, aid officials have revealed that more than 50 per cent of the planet's 10.5 million refugees are now battling to get by in urban areas.
• The proportion of the population that is foreign-born has almost doubled in the past two decades to 11 per cent, or 6.7 million people.

Women's Shelter for Muslim Women in Baltimore

I liked this story on NPR:

As families come together over the holidays, the victims of domestic abuse are often sequestered in shelters — a situation that's especially difficult for Muslim women, because few facilities meet their cultural and religious needs.

The women are here for many reasons. It's a sanctuary and an escape. It's also a place where they can live and pray without having their faith questioned.

"My biggest problem was that if you send a Muslim woman to be counseled in a shelter that's run by Christians, then what the people say is the reason why you're being beat is because of that religion. We do not want Islam to be the focal point of domestic violence," Hanif said.

Indeed, domestic violence knows no religion, but not all shelters are sensitive to Muslims, Hanif said.

"There may be situations — such as, there would be men that were there, or there wasn't any place for them to pray, or maybe there was an issue with the food," Hanif explained.

At Muslima Anisah, people take their shoes off at the door. There's no pork in the kitchen. A section at the front of the house is reserved for prayers.

"This is the prayer area; we pray five times a day," Hanif said, showing off the area.

Hanif is a nurse by trade, not a social worker. Running a battered women's shelter wasn't part of her plan. But over the years, she treated dozens of abused Muslim women at a health clinic.

One memory stayed with her: a woman who came in with a broken jaw.

"One of the Muslim women, her jaw was wired, and I remember her saying that now she could lose some weight because she had to suck her food through a straw," Hanif recalled. "We didn't inquire about it. We laughed with her. I remember we didn't do anything about it."

Now, it has been 12 years since Hanif set up this home in a residential neighborhood in Baltimore. She lives there even though she has three grown children.

Hanif is African-American, but most of the women she takes care of are immigrants.

"They have nowhere to go. Society doesn't want them. Their family doesn't want them, and the man who beat them doesn't want them," Hanif said.

Hanif said American women can turn to their community for help; they know the legal system better, and they know their rights. Most of the immigrants, including the Kurdish woman, speak little English and have even fewer resources.

Swiss Vote Bans Minarets on Mosques

This is truly a step backwards towards integration in Europe. And we thought the Swiss were neutral.

Via Anthony Clark Arend:

This is truly disturbing. The New York Times is reporting:

In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.

The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.

The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum.

The Swiss government said it would respect the vote and sought to reassure the Muslim population — mostly immigrants from other parts of Europe, like Kosovo and Turkey — that the minaret ban was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.”

Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the justice minister, said the result “reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies.”

While such concerns “have to be taken seriously,” she said in a statement, “The Federal Council takes the view that a ban on the construction of new minarets is not a feasible means of countering extremist tendencies.”

The government must now draft a supporting law on the ban, a process that could take at least a year and could put Switzerland in breach of international conventions on human rights.

For the record, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides:

Article 18

1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.

3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

Paragraph 3 is what is know as a “clawback clause.” Note how much discretion it seems to allow to the state to limit the exercise of the right. It is an unfortunate provision of the Convention, but one that the Swiss would likely use as a justification for the ban.

More from the BBC:
Soul Searching
Leaders Condemn
Swiss Voters

NPR

The Huffington Post

Immigrant Children and Integration

Via ImmigrationProf Blog:

There are 16 million children in immigrant families in the United States, one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. It’s an old American story made new in the age of globalization, when waves of human displacement in recent decades have led to immigration on a scale not seen since Ellis Island. But a country that has been so good for so long at integrating new Americans is stumbling under the challenge.

That is the conclusion of Professors Marcelo and Carola Suárez-Orozco, fellows at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and co-directors of immigration studies at New York University. They have done basic research in immigration for more than 20 years, five of them studying 400 children from China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Central America and Mexico.a country that has been so good for so long at integrating new Americans is stumbling under the challenge. The results of their research, released this month, show the stark effects of what Marcelo Suárez-Orozco calls “the age of global vertigo.” Dislocation breeds a host of difficulties, starting with family separation. Nearly half of the children in their sample had at some point lost contact with one or both parents, either through migration directly or through divorce or death. The absent parent was most often the father for long stretches or permanently. For 49 percent of the Central American children, separations lasted more than five years. Click here for the rest of the piece.

From Farm Fields to Outer Space

Via the Californian.com:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — He toiled in California's farm fields alongside his Mexican migrant worker parents and didn't learn English until he was 12. Now Jose Hernandez, NASA astronaut, is about to rocket into orbit.

His parents will be in Florida next week for space shuttle Discovery's launch, as will his two older brothers and sister, who also worked the cucumber, sugar beet and tomato fields back in the 1960s and 1970s.

In a recent interview, Hernandez reflected:

A lot of kids loved summer vacation. We dreaded it because we knew what that meant. That meant we were going to be working seven days a week in the fields.

The Californian continues, "Hernandez, 47, vividly recalls being dusty, sweaty and tired in the back seat of the family's car after a hard day of labor. Before starting the engine, his father would look back at his children and tell them, 'Remember this feeling because if you guys don't do well in school, this is your future.' All four took it to heart. Each graduated from high school, "a moral victory" for third-grade educated Salvador and Julia Hernandez, now 71 and 67 years old, respectively. Each went to college, "the icing on the cake," according to their youngest child."

The newly-launching astronaut, Jose Hernandez, said this of his parents' pride:

And of course now being an astronaut, to them that's just unbelievable. I think they're higher in orbit than we're going to be in.

(HT: America's Voice)

Popular Destination for Refugees: North Dakota

It’s always difficult to be an immigrant or refugee coming to a new country. It can be even tougher during times of recession. But what’s it like to be in the refugee placement business these days? In some states, businesses here lean heavily on refugee workers. The World’s Jason Margolis reports from North Dakota.

New Book by Monica Ali

For those that have read Brick Lane, Monica Ali is out with another book about immigrant integration. The New York Times book review:

In “Brick Lane” she explored, with comic gusto and pathos, the Bangladeshi immigrants and British no-hopers living in Tower Hamlets, an East London housing project. This time around, she ties her story to two self-contained social structures that allow her to trace Britain’s fault lines: the busy kitchen of a hotel restaurant in central London, where Gabriel Lightfoot, her main character, is executive chef, and an old mill town in the north of England, where Gabriel’s dying father has worked all his life.

Gabriel’s kitchen is immigrant Britain on display. “Every corner of the earth was represented here,” he reflects at one point. “Hispanic, Asian, African, Baltic and most places in between.” These are the drones who toil unseen in glittering London, desperate strivers, many with horrible stories to tell, or forget. As the novel begins, a Ukrainian kitchen worker turns up dead in one of the hotel’s subterranean passageways. His former lover, a sullen, waiflike pot-scrubber named Lena, becomes Gabriel’s personal reclamation project and his entryway to the underground economy, a shadowy world of illegal immigration schemes, slave labor and forced prostitution. This is the new Britain.

Toronto's Diversity

As Will Wilkinson in the 'This Week' explains Toronto defies the assumption that diverse cities are the cause of much mayhem and crime:

Toronto is the fifth biggest city in North America and also the most diverse city in North America. Nearly half the residents of Canada's most populous metropolis were born outside Canada's borders—47 percent according to the 2006 census, and the number is rising.

Theory by Sam Huntington and conservative writer John O'Sullivan suggest "the United States of America will suffer the fate of Sparta and Rome," should its founding Anglo-Protestant culture continue to wane and that if traditional patterns of national life are "removed or destroyed, then anomie, despair, and disintegration tend to be among the consequences." So we must take care to protect our precious cultural patrimony from the acid of "denationalizing" economic and cultural globalization. We must keep outsiders out.

But looking closely at Toronto suggests something very different from these theories! Toronto is the fifth most livable city in the world. So said the Economist Intelligence Unit in a report last year drawing on indicators of stability, health care, culture, environment, education, and infrastructure. (The Economist's world champion of livability, Vancouver, harbors a treacherous 40 percent foreign-born population.) Toronto is wealthy, healthy, well-educated, and much safer than any sizable American city.In 2006, its murder rate was 2.6 per 100,000 residents, which makes it less than half as deadly as Des Moines. The most culturally mixed city on the continent truly is one of Earth's closest approximations of urban paradise.

Targeting Muslim Immigrants

Muslims in Detroit were being targeted by the FBI to out their friends and family. The Detroit New reports:

The FBI has come under fire from Muslim leaders in Metro Detroit who say the agency is threatening or coercing local residents into informing on people in their communities and mosques.

The prospective informants, their lawyers and community leaders said the federal agents identify themselves and tell them their immigration status could be blocked or revoked if they turn down FBI requests to report on activities of people who attend mosques.

Moreover, the Washington Post reports on calls for a change in the border screening tactics used by the U.S. government. With personal, political and religious questions as an institutionalized part of these screenings, it is not suprising that the government’s “Terrorism Watch List” has topped 1,000,000 people. Yes, you read those zeroes correctly - our government currently has one million people flagged as potential terrorists.

Over the years, watch-list mismatches have entangled countless individuals whose names are similar to those on the government’s master database of terrorism suspects, which includes more than 1 million names and aliases used by 400,000 people.

Questions that are often included in these screenings are:

“What is your religion?” “What mosque do you attend?” “How often do you pray?” “What do you think of the war in Iraq?” “What charities do you contribute to?”

In response, Muslim Advocates have released a groundbreaking report on the targeting of Americans - because they are Muslim or perceived to be Muslim - by Customs & Border Protection agents for deeply invasive searches and interrogations. The report is entitled Unreasonable Intrusions: Investigating the Politics, Faith & Finances of Americans Returning Home.

The report contains dozens of stories of individuals who have shared with Muslim Advocates their experiences when returning home from overseas travel. These experiences have taken place at land crossings and international airports – from San Francisco to New York, Detroit to Houston. These Americans are young, old, male, female, a firefighter, military veterans, students, lawyers, doctors, senior executives with major high tech companies, and academic researchers at Ivy League institutions.

The report also lays out a comprehensive set of solutions for the President and Congress. These solutions strike the right balance in upholding our nation’s founding values and keeping our nation safe and secure.

As the Washington Post reports:

The DHS has received more than 54,500 requests for redress since February 2007 and closed 31,000 of them, according to the Transportation Security Administration. Critics say the program does not inform travelers whether their names are listed, whether any change has been made or how to get off the watch list and avoid being relisted

(HT: Standing FIRM)

Second Generation 'Troubled' Immigrant Youth

Another part of the New York Time's 'Remade in America' looks at a small number of children of immigrants who are falling behind:

About one in four youths in the United States are immigrants or children of one, and most appear to be elevating fine: working, studying and advancing at rates comparable to nonimmigrant peers. But a troubled minority offers cause for alarm.

Raised in blighted neighborhoods, alienated from parents and school, disheartened by the prospect of dead-end jobs, these youths risk joining what some scholars have warned could be a “rainbow underclass.”

While poor immigrant families have found economic success in the past, many analysts say today’s generation faces steeper hurdles, especially because good jobs now require more education. The children of those with the least education — most notably Mexicans and Central Americans — are considered especially at risk

Some call this a problem of integration, but perhaps it is integration, but towards aspects of American life that is are generally looked down upon. As Jesselyn from the article says, “If you’re Hispanic, people already expect you to steal, to fight, to be rude, to be ghetto.” “If everyone thinks wrong of you, eventually you’re going to start thinking wrong about yourself.”

That is why there is a good sign that some see the positive:

But other scholars, mining the same stacks of data, find reason for optimism. Even among the immigrant groups considered at risk, most children surpass their immigrant parents in income and education. And on some measures, including employment, they outperform native minorities.

A debate that began with warnings of “second generation decline” now includes scholars who see a “second generation advantage.”