Racist/xenophobic migration policies? Or just exercise of sovereign power?

Quote:

It is my position that 'developed' nations stick together on this issue, and do not overly criticise one another on their migration policies, because to do so would open them up to criticism when it comes to their own migration policies.  These policies, which deny rights to non-citizens, restrict citizenship, yet encourage temporary migration, are all about exploiting labour.

Um, maybe because of the formatting issues, I can't tell who wrote that. Is that Yiwah?

I also cannot connect sentence 1 to sentence 2 logically. In answer to sentence 1, I would say "fork that." "Overly criticize"? How would that be possible?

I think I mostly agree with sentence 2, but I don't see how it connects to the smarminess of sentence 1.

Very difficult to read who wrote what here, perhaps a rewrite of the original piece would be in order?

But in case you do not want  to, in the interest of clarity, I will ask who wrote this below you, or another and you are attempting to quote it?

Yiwah wrote:

It is my position that 'developed' nations stick together on this issue, and do not overly criticise one another on their migration policies, because to do so would open them up to criticism when it comes to their own migration policies. 

skdadl wrote:

Quote:

It is my position that 'developed' nations stick together on this issue, and do not overly criticise one another on their migration policies, because to do so would open them up to criticism when it comes to their own migration policies.  These policies, which deny rights to non-citizens, restrict citizenship, yet encourage temporary migration, are all about exploiting labour.

Um, maybe because of the formatting issues, I can't tell who wrote that. Is that Yiwah?

I also cannot connect sentence 1 to sentence 2 logically. In answer to sentence 1, I would say "fork that." "Overly criticize"? How would that be possible?

I think I mostly agree with sentence 2, but I don't see how it connects to the smarminess of sentence 1.

I believe that Yiwah wrote everything that is not bolded in the OP.

What Yiwah seems to be saying is that all developed nations, even more progressive ones like Canada and the Scandinavian nations, have legislation and policies that directly marginalise some or all immigrants.

Yiwah goes on to suggest (correctly, in my opinion) that this is at least one reason why developed nations rarely criticise the immigration policies of other developed nations.

You see, all developed nations use these laws and policies to marginalise these people so that they can exploit their labour.

I hope that clarifies things.

Any nation has the right to control who lives in it. That includes First Nations, like the Mohawks. They have passed laws banning settlers from living on their land, and that's a good thing IMHO. So it's not racist in any way for nations to control immigration. Period!

http://rabble.ca/babble/aboriginal-issues-and-culture/dont-let-door-hit-...

I will wait for yiwah to clarify what she wrote and what was other's words.

Don't really think anyone else has a right to state categorically who said what besides her.

@ skdadl

... well never mind that Rousseau didn't actually live up to Rousseau.

Quote:

Any nation has the right to control who lives in it.

Sieg Heil.

al-Qa'bong wrote:

Quote:

Any nation has the right to control who lives in it.

 

Sieg Heil.

Mods notified. Making Nazi reference to First Nation's rights is disgusting. More racism on rabble tho is just more of the same.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

... I imagine all the idealistic new ideas of that era must have been very much like the 60s - some of it found solid ground and led to revolutionary change, but some of it was simply too unrealistic or did not have critical mass and just collapsed

6079_Smith, it's too late for me to respond sensibly tonight, but I shall return demain. For the time being: no. It wasn't like that mid-century, and Diderot and Rousseau were not responsible for the tragedy of the revolution, necessary as that was, messed up though it became.

I wouldn't overdiagnose Rousseau. He was cranky and increasingly kind of agoraphobic, with considerable reason -- as I say, I think his personal inclination to living as a hermit gave him some insight into the interplay between society and liberty. I think that both he and Diderot, in their different ways, are brilliant on the subject, as few have been since. It's worth remembering that they both always lived in some danger.

Yes, he did not do well by the children. He was a hunk; he had affairs and children resulted; he was usually poor and politically hounded; he didn't support his children as he ran away from just about everything. We are so glad that men don't do that any more, aren't we.

Srsly, I am glad that young men now (two and a half centuries later, and living in democracies) recognize that such behaviour should not continue. You're probably the first or second generation of men like that! Congratulations! I'm a feminist, but I tells ya, whenever I read people trying to get at Rousseau because of his children, I just guffaw. I grew up with men who would have behaved very much as Rousseau did, and they didn't even face his circs. Let's stay real.

skdadl wrote:

Thanks, Pants-of-dog. I think I misread Yiwah's sentence 1 -- I thought she was saying that she advocated that position when she said "It is my position," but I think she may have meant to say what you say, simply that she perceives that Western nations all exploit racist/bigoted/paranoiac/xenophobic tendencies in their own ways and then more or less collude with one another to hush criticism of such policies up. I also see that she has edited the OP so much that my original post doesn't make a lot of sense any more. Och: fuddle duddle. Anyway, thank you for your help.

I thought it was impossible to edit the first post of a thread.

Quote:

I don't actually see the difficulty in cursing Sarkozy or any other European leader all to hell for what they are doing to the Roma. Anyone opposed to that? I don't know what good it will do for me to curse Sarkozy one more time, but I'm happy to cast nasturtiums in his general direction. (I'm a student of the French Enlightenment, and it really pains me when the French can't live up to Diderot and Rousseau. It just seems like a bigger disappointment than all the others, but maybe that's personal to me.)

Apart from the things we can all agree on, what are we discussing here?

It's not about why you, skdadl, do not criticise Sarkozy enough for two reasons: first of all, I am sure that you and other progressive people definitely do criticise him enough, and secondly, you have no economic incentive in marginalising anyone.

Governments and the corporations who pay for lobbyists do, on the other hand.

E. Tamaran wrote:

Any nation has the right to control who lives in it. That includes First Nations, like the Mohawks. They have passed laws banning settlers from living on their land, and that's a good thing IMHO. So it's not racist in any way for nations to control immigration. Period!

E. Tamaran, I get the impression that you know exactly what is wrong with this post, and that you are writing it because you are trying to provoke a response and pick a fight. You are too smart to not see the difference between the inclusion poliicies of a small FN community enmeshed in settler politics,  and the broad immigration policies of imperialist and occupier nation-states. I also know that you are aware that the kind of statement you lobbed out here, and again in this thread, are against babble policy. If you continue this behaviour, you will be taking a break from babble.

This isn't the first time you have been given a warning. I want to be an ally, ET, as do all the mods; but you don't make it easy--I suspect by choice. You're under no oblgation to make friends here, of course, but I think everyone, you and me included, would be happier if we could find some common ground.

Nationhood far exceeds the dimensions of its borders and its governments' immigration policy.

Caissa wrote:

Okay- but an interesting question was alluded to upthread. Who decides immigration policy other than an a sovereign country? Would a supranational body be ultimately the solution? Probably reading too much Science Fiction lately but the way we divide the world into more than 200 sovereign jurisdictions is just irrational.

Well, there are a couple of strands at play in that question. Firstly, it begs the question that immigration policy is a need in the first place--in the past, immigration policy and racial purity acts were synonymous. Now they are mostly synonymous, with an eye on capitalist states' appetite for cheap and exploitable labour. As I said in another thread, all immigration policy presumes the right to judge human value: who is worth our badge of citizenship and bears the arbitrary qualities we ascribe to it? How dare one nation declare that a group of human beings, inarguably part of a community and culture, are "illegal"? We can only conclude that the only just immigration policy is no immigration policy: no one is illegal.

Of course, this leads to a larger question, which is that we cannot divorce immigration policy from foreign and economic policy. The reason that we "can't" let everyone in to "our" country is the very consequence of capitalism: it immiserates one people for the excess benefit of another. Such inequality leads not only to envy and desire for wealth, but also to entitlement on the part of the wealthy nations. This dynamic inevitably leads to incidents like the Tamil boat, or the expelled Israeli children: two classes of people, determined by economic realities but distinguished through racist, arbitrary designations.

Snert wrote:

Should non-State groups be permitted to judge other humans' worth for the purposes of membership?  For example, if I want to be a member of a Union, or a volunteer organization, should they have the right to reject me?

Those are obviously different. Nationality and citizenship are not memberships, and they do not come down to a set of criteria (which is not a judge of worth). They are rooted in  a commonwealth of culture, community, ethics, beliefs and shared history. There is some nerve in telling a family who has worked, loved, played, lived and fought within a state's borders for a decade that they are not, in fact, part of this nation and must leave immediately. By whose right, by whose authority, can one make such a statement?

Cueball wrote:

Good point. However, absolute exclusion is the ultimate marginalization.

If a country entirely excludes all the people in the mraginalised popualtion, there would be no pool of cheap labour. Therefore, most (all?) countries that do this will exclude a small percentage of the marginalised population as a sort of example to the others, to keep them in line.

It is not a simple issue of choice.

For one thing need may drive the desire for inclusion. It is not simply a matter of choice, necessarily, in that case we see that they are forced to do the bidding of the forces that exclude, even if there is no hope of inclusion -- in such cases the marginalization is absolute and we are entering into a zone beyond mere marginalization: exclusion.

By definition exclusion is a grade upon the same scale upon which marginalization is just one part; inclusion, marginalization, exclusion.

In the Israeli case, even when there is absolutely no hope for inclusion, the cheap labour pool still exists. If not the Palestinians, who have been locked out of Israeli labour market for 10 years, are easily replaced by workers from Asia, who will come anyway, because they need to work to live.

The USA used to have a policy which was expressed as follows...

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Because we really know how to exploit the hell out of them.

Except for the last part, which you know, we could consider leaving out, it's a position with some merit.

Ideally, that would be our policy--why afford capital more rights than people? But, come to think of it, if we adopted that policy now, ideality notwithstanding, I bet Canada would be much quicker to address economic inequality in the poorer nations of this world.

Snert wrote:

But to use the Tamil ship as an example, what specifically are the deep cultural bonds connecting those passengers with Canada? As I understand it, they came to Canada only after being turned away by their first choice, Australia, so whatever those cultural bonds, they don't seem all that strong.

The Tamils are an interesting specific case, which was discussed at length in the other thread. First of all, Canada actually bears direct responsibility for the collapse of the Tamil civil war. Secondly, Canada is home to the largest diasporic Tamil community in the world--and indeed, recent reports allege that many Canadians have family members aboard that ship. So you could say that there were actual cultural bonds linking the ship to Canada.

I was actually speaking of situations more like the expulsion of the Israeli children, who grew up in Israel, whose parents lived and worked in Israel, but were nonetheless told that they were not Israeli "enough." I suppose it is different when it comes to refugees, but richer countries nevertheless disavow their role in creating the conditions necessitating flight from an impoverished country (or violent country, and so on). So there are cultural bonds there nonetheless--immigration policies as they exist currently in Western nations, simply prefer not to see them, basicaly out of survival.

Cueball wrote:

The question is only interesting in the abstract. An abstraction is an idealization. One can always confuse the purpose of ideals. Ideals by their nature can always be attacked because they are unrealistic abstractions. This is usually done in order to undermine them without attempting to understand them or how they function in the real world.

Ideals are never achievable, but they are expressions of a standard upon which we can critique reality.

This is a bit off topic, but, while I agree with the last sentence, I disagree that idealizations are always abstractions. I think the kind of idealizations which serve the valuable last sentence, which act as horizons towards which we aim our boats, can only be conrete idealizations, rooted in historical realities. To call them abstract is to aid in the ideological forces which seek to deny the possibility of change: "oh, that's just utopian thinking." No, what is utopian thinking in the way such a phrase means is the idea that we can continue with the status quo indefinitely. My utopia is a concrete utopia; no less real than it is necessary.

LOL (slapping my knee, too)

Yes, by all means lets jump on Sven. Imagine the nerve... asking questions!

Quick you distract him while I go empty his mailbox to see who is paying him.

And the absolute question about immigration policy - about as absolute as whether we need cops or not - and if you have ever been to a place where there are no cops you might have your answer.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

LOL (slapping my knee, too)

Yes, by all means lets jump on Sven. Imagine the nerve... asking questions!

Quick you distract him while I go empty his mailbox to see who is paying him.

And the absolute question about immigration policy - about as absolute as whether we need cops or not - and if you have ever been to a place where there are no cops you might have your answer.

Please stop making personal attacks which require that I reveal biographical information about myself in order to defend myself.  You can sit out the real world in Saskatoon for as long as you want. You have absolutely no idea who I am or where I have been. Nor do I intend to tell you.

Do you have anything to add to the discussion of value?

@ Cueball

Who's making a personal attack? Just because I call you on something?

I think he summed up the question just fine. Every sovereign nation has the power to determine who is and who is not a citizen. The question is what are the fair grounds, and seems pretty reasonable. It doesn't threaten me, anyway.

Now am I allowed to say that or is that somehow derailing the process?

And I have been a few places other than Saskatoon (came here by choice, actually). But even if I was born here and never left that slur would still be out of line. Sorry I have only visited down east and don't know how things are in the real world.