Red Light Politics

Welcome to my short form Tumblr blog. My name is Flavia Tamara Dzodan, I am a business developer, writer, public speaker, ideas instigator, content creator, media facilitator and trend watcher living in Amsterdam.

This Tumblr is about the spaces and intersections between politics, culture, race and gender matters with some humor and pop culture thrown in the mix.

My long reads blog is Red Light Politics.

I also blog at Tiger Beatdown.

If you would like to know more about me, visit this page .

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30 posts tagged immigration

Gender Across Borders: “The immigrant body is a gendered body” – An interview with Flavia Dzodan

I was interviewed at Gender Across Borders as part of the series of Women and immigration running today throughout the day.

The Netherlands: father of two commits suicide on the eve of his deportation

I haven’t been able to find a source for this in English so you’ll have to bear with my translation of the article in Dutch. As I always say, anyone curious about the original source can parse it through Google Translate. The resulting grammar tends to be a bit mangled but the text is well readable.  

The father apparently committed suicide to prevent his children from being deported as now they have no adult relative to take care of them and the Dutch State would need to step up and fulfill that obligation.  His 14-year-old son now believes that the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) killed his father.

The son and 12-year-old daughter have been placed in a foster home. The mother, according to sources, was killed in the war in Burundi where there are still tensions between Hutus and Tutsis.

The father had been depressed for some time because of his pending deportation. He would tell friends that his life really would be destroyed if he had to return to Burundi.

It is not yet clear whether the children can stay in the Netherlands. Their father’s funeral will take place on Thursday in Utrecht.

I don’t have much to add to the above because rage tends to get the best of me in these cases.

“A damning new report into the death of dozens of African migrants who were left drifting in the Mediterranean last year has concluded that Nato contributed to the 63 fatalities, and raises for the first time the possibility of British military forces being connected with the tragedy.”

Migrant boat tragedy: Nato condemned over 63 migrants left to die at sea | World news | guardian.co.uk

More about the boat tragedy and NATO’s responsibility, today at The Guardian. See my previous posts about this here and here.

From the article at The Guardian:

The report reveals that the survivors’ description of a military helicopter that twice hovered over and communicated with their boat, only to then fly and off and abandon them without attempting a rescue, corresponds almost exactly to the British army’s Westland Lynx helicopter. Units of Lynxes are known to have been operating in the Mediterranean at the time of the Libyan conflict.

How to physically abuse refugees, manual leaked

Remember when in October last year when I wrote extensively about the corporations that run immigrant detention camps? Back then, I mentioned the conditions that immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees in detention camps run by Serco, in Australia, were exposed to:

Naomi Leong, a shy 9-year-old, was born in the detention camp. For more than three years, at a cost of about $380,000, she and her mother were held behind its barbed wire. Psychiatrists said Naomi was growing up mute, banging her head against the walls while her mother, Virginia Leong, a Malaysian citizen accused of trying to use a false passport, sank into depression.

Turns out Serco’s training manual for the treatment of these detained persons was leaked to the press yesterday. via Serco training manual: how to “hit” and “strike” asylum seekers:

The “control and restraint” techniques included in the 2009 training course manual recommends the use of “pain” to defend, subdue and control asylum seekers through straight punches, palm heel strikes, side angle kicks, front thrust kicks and knee strikes.

“Subdue the subject using reasonable force so that he/she is no longer in the assailant category,” it explains.

“If justified, necessary force is to be used to bring the subject to cooperative subjective status whereupon they respond favourably to verbalisation.”

Under a section headed “principles in controlling Resistive Behaviour”, guards are told to cause pain, stun, distract, unbalance and use “striking technique” to cause “motor dysfunction”. […]

“They enhance your ability, to compel compliance from unco-operative subjects,” it explains. The “expected effect” is “medium to high level pain”.

I cannot write about this without exploding in a ball of rage. More at the link above, including the text of the whole manual, though I must warn for potentially triggering content.

H/T @jonanamary

Tiger Beatdown: Those who die to keep us safe: European Union’s Frontex and the administration of immigrants

And then I went down the rabbit hole of the European Union’s policies on the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers. This is not the first time it happens. Last year I wrote quite extensively about the corporate profits behind the detention of undocumented immigrants. This time, however, I was interested in the policies and enforcement that lead to the abuses. People die. We forget. More often than not, we are not even aware of these deaths. Each of these immigrants, a person, a human being killed by State policies and the arm that executes them. I desperately wanted to understand why.

I don’t usually tell people to “go and read” something I wrote because really, people who are interested will click and those who are not will pass on. However, I believe this matters and it rarely gets a mention in European press. Especially not in the context of the magnitude of the human rights violations involved.

Report about the treatment of immigrants in Spanish detention center

Pueblos Unidos, a Spanish NGO devoted to the rights of migrants and ethnic minorities released a report about the detention center for undocumented immigrants in Madrid. It’s in Spanish but since I know many of the people who follow this Tumblr speak the language, I thought I’d share a link.

Though I must warn you, the whole thing was an extremely difficult and disturbing read. The report is based on research carried out through more than 1,000 visits to the detention center, each to follow up on the conditions in which detainees where kept. The report is a scathing collection of incidents of racism and dehumanization in an unsanitary environment. As the researchers point out, these immigrants live in much worse conditions than convicted criminals kept in Spain’s prison system.

End of the year balance

I was thinking earlier today, of the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote this year, which would be the one piece I am proud of. And sure enough, that wasn’t difficult, it’d be this one at Tiger Beatdown “In the name of safety: the multi-national anti immigration industry and their billionaire profits”.

It is not the one piece that got the most media attention (many others fared a lot better in that regard). However, it is the one I am proud of not just because I spent days researching the topic but also because it best represents everything I want to go against. What finally made the post is just the tip of the iceberg of everything I came across in regards to the billionaire profits around the “industry of undocumented immigration”. So, as an end of the year balance, this is the one piece I’d pick.

Dutch bus company tips police about “African women who look like illegal immigrants”; twelve are deported

Just came across these news, Connexxion Helps detain illegal immigrants (sic). The link is in Dutch and, as usual, it can be parsed through Google Translate. However, here’s the gist of it:

Last year, Dutch transportation company Connexxion helped police detain around thirty undocumented immigrants. Every day, the drivers noticed a bunch of “African women” (sic from the article) take the bus in Amsterdam to the nearby town of Bloemendaal. Since Bloemendaal is a rich suburb with many stand alone villas, the bus drivers noticed that these women entered the private residences and inferred that they must be working illegally as cleaners and maids. They alerted the police to the presence of “illegal immigrants” (again, sic from the article) and helped mount a vigilante operation to follow them around and request their ID at their supposed place of work. As a result of this snitch collaboration 30 women from countries like Ghana, Uganda, Brazil and the Philippines were detained. Twelve of them have already been deported.

The Council of State has now called an inquest and halted the deportation procedures of the remaining women. However, a spokesperson for the bus company has stated that they were “helping do the right thing because illegal work should not be tolerated”.

Immigrants referred to as a “burden” in EU financed report

The German Marshal Fund is a think tank financed by both local governments of the EU and the European Union as a whole (and a bunch of corporate and private donations). This week they released their annual report about “Transatlatic Trends on immigration” across the US and the EU (link to PDF). The report polls public opinion about the perception of immigrants and immigration. In a relatively short 30 page report, the words “burden” and “burden sharing” are used no less than 26 times to refer to immigrants, specifically those from countries that are currently experiencing the Arab Spring.

Additionally, the report repeatedly seeks to highlight the need to “share the burden” of these immigrants. Which leads me to obvious observation: these people are not being referred to as “human beings” but as a taxing load that States should endure in solidarity with each other. And of course, my immediate realization that this stance has been supported with public funds, of the kind that these “burdens” also contribute to.

“These children, many of whom should never have been separated from their parents in the first place, face often insurmountable obstacles to reunifying with their mothers and fathers. Though child welfare departments are required by federal law to reunify children with any parents who are able to provide for the basic safety of their children, detention makes this all but impossible. Then, once parents are deported, families are often separated for long periods. Ultimately, child welfare departments and juvenile courts too often move to terminate the parental rights of deportees and put children up for adoption, rather than attempt to unify the family as they would in other circumstances.”

Thousands of Kids Taken From Parents In U.S. Deportation System - Colorlines

More at the link, including some heartbreaking accounts of this system in action.

Why I am not behind OccupyAmsterdam

As I mentioned when I posted some photos, I was there on Saturday when it started (that is, when they set up the camp and the opening speeches were made). And then I left. And quite possibly, I am not coming back to take part in any way (of course, I reserve the right to change my mind if any of my actual criticisms become obsolete).

Here are a few things I did like:

There were many, many Latin Americans. I suspect it is because we are, effectively invisible in this society. To put it bluntly, for media, unless there is some “exotic” event depicting our cultures (Brazil Festival! Tango exhibition!), we pretty much do not exist. The immigrants, of course, are “someone else”, mainly “bad, bad Muslims”. And we live here by the hundreds of thousands, but media, as a whole, will barely register our political and/ or social engagement. This is not unique to The Netherlands, though, this is pretty much across the board all over Northern Europe.

However, many of us, come from a very politicized environment. Our home countries have already seen many similar social struggles and we know how to participate in them. So, just like I did, we will go and check it out, see if there is a place for us in this movement. I don’t know how representative of other Latin Americans my friends are, but a whole bunch of them left even before I did.

And here’s where all positives pretty much end. Because, the opening speech was by a guy who took the stage and declared “We are not leftists! We are just normal people!”. Right then, I side eyed the stage and realized there was no way I would be able to remain much longer. But that is not all, the gist of my political engagement in this country has to do with the rights of immigrants and minorities. There is no concerted effort in the left, or in “progressive” movements to decolonize the deeply troubling language behind this phenomenon. There is absolutely no attempt to tackle not just media representations of immigrants, but the legal framework behind the treatment of immigrants and minorities. None. And sincerely, I am not going to fight that fight in this OccupyAmsterdam environment. I already do so, every day, in my city council, in my meetings with Members of Parliament (in both local and European Parliament), in my engagements with Party politics that sometimes leave me exhausted. I do that every week. In addition to these meetings and engagements, I write about it. I attempt to produce a body of work that documents the situation. 

And then there is the slogan. “We are the 99%”. No, we are not. Just like I struggle to try and decolonize the language behind immigration, just like I fight to make minorities visible (documented AND undocumented), just like I need to break the dichotomy that pervades discourse, which states that “immigrant = Muslim” (effectively obliterating hundreds of thousands of people from the public eye), I cannot stand behind a facile slogan that is simply not true. Wealth distribution is radically different in The Netherlands. It is slowly being eroded because well, people vote for Geert Wilders! And that is an omen of very bad things, but how could I devote myself to decolonizing language while I mindlessly stand behind a lazy slogan that absolutely does not represent our lived experiences? And moreover, how could I, in good conscious, devote myself to fight against cultural hegemony while we lazily copy catchy phrases that have no base in truth?

ETA: The above is applicable only to OccupyAmsterdam. I cannot speak for any Occupation I haven’t seen first hand, so I hope this is not read as an indictment of the movement as a whole. It is not. Just the one popping up in my neck of the woods.

Tiger Beatdown: In the name of safety: the multi-national anti immigration industry and billionaire profits

I am a Non Western, South American immigrant in a society that is increasingly determined to get rid of those like me. Media constantly reminds me that we are practically non human. That our rights should be eroded further in the name of safety. Politicians build careers using the rhetoric of hatred against those like me. I was punched in the face, I was elbowed in the stomach on two different occasions by two White Supremacists who objected to my looks and my speaking another language with a friend. Racial slurs were hurled. And still, I know I don’t have it as bad as others. In the grand scheme of things, my life is privileged. I am a documented resident. At least, I am not one of the thousands currently in detention camps awaiting deportation. Then my life would be under the control of a corporation that actually makes a profit out off the lives of those who are dehumanized the most.

Out of everything I’ve written in the past year, this one piece is probably the one I am the proudest. Not because it is particularly well written (I wouldn’t make such claim), but because I have spent days researching the subject. I have come across so, so many documented abuses across different continents, different countries, seemingly disparate environments. However, all of them had one thing in common: they were perpetrated by the one corporation who profits from the business of undocumented immigrants. In fact, I found so many that I was forced to edit most of them out. What ended up in this piece is just the tip of one dehumanizing, terrifying iceberg.

And this, all of this, is supposedly done in the name of our safety.

Half of Latinos in U.S. Live in Country’s Most Polluted Cities

The growing U.S. Latino population, which includes millions who are uninsured, faces serious health and financial burdens brought on by air pollution,” Dr. Elena Rios, president of the National Hispanic Medical Association, said in a statement.

Latinos are less likely to have health insurance than any other racial or ethnic group; nearly one in every three (32.4 percent) Latinos lacks health insurance.

More at the link.

Please help keep Matias home!

beastlybeesay:

One of the hardest working activist out there is in risk of deportation!

Please help keep him home and sign the petition.

http://wfc2.wiredforchange.com/o/8496/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=8164

A truly great leader; and part of our UWD family!

Oh look, I didn’t have enough misery today that I find out one of my fellow country people is about to be deported.

Sudacas unidos! If you are in the US and can take a look at this and sign the petition, please do so. Everything I write about being a sudaca here in Europe pretty much applies to this case as well.

(via strugglingtobeheard)

Source beastlybeesay

Trafficking in people’s desperation

via BBC News, Dutch gameshow for failed asylum seekers

A Dutch gameshow is giving failed asylum seekers the chance to win 4,000 euros (£3,525) to help them start a new life back in their country of origin.

The winner is the one who can best demonstrate just how well they know their adopted country.

In an interview with Radio Nederland (in Dutch), the producers expressed that they are doing this to “raise awareness”. Well of course, click at the link above and check out the video to see the moment when one of the participants is eliminated and made to board a faux airport gate. Because nothing says “awareness” like a crowd clapping at a failed asylum seeker or an immigrant forced to leave the country.

The public can also participate from home, answering the quiz questions. The winner, who will be decided on a draw between everyone that got all the answers right will get a trip to Curacao, a current Dutch colony in South America.

For those in The Netherlands, the show will air tonight at VPRO. Do not expect me to see it, though, I find it not only tasteless but awfully sad.

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