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5 Refugees and asylum seekers Introduction This chapter examines how contemporary responses to refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland have been shaped by a legacy of exclusionary state practices and racism.1 As noted in the last chapter, this legacy included overt anti-Semitism within refugee and immigration practices from the late 1930s prior to Ireland’s ratification in 1956 of the UN Convention on Human Rights (1951). The arrival of increasing numbers of asylum seekers in recent years was met by expressions of racism and intolerance within Irish political
Chapter 4 Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers: predictable arrivals Several works exist that compare British governments’ responses to refugees over time.1 Each traces the arrival and reception of groups of refugees, demonstrating how each was treated differently, offering explanations for governments’ varying levels of ‘generosity’. Yet refugee movements are not appropriate for comparison when divorced from the context of Britain’s colonial identity. The relevance of Britain’s contemporaneous identity as an empire, and the connection between this global
the law of the land rather than persecution. Asylum seekers are required to show that the conscription they sought to avoid was conducted in a discriminatory manner so as to amount to persecution; or that their desertion or evasion was to avoid participating in an illegitimate conflict or (possibly) as the result of a conscientious objection to military service. In Germany, for example, the Federal
, Mohammed Morei, a young eighteen-year-old man was quickly captured and taken into custody. Racist and angry comments were thrown at Mohammed as he was detained at Dundalk court. Public responses to the event were stark. Mohammed was thought to be an asylum seeker. It was reported that he had had his asylum application rejected somewhere in Great Britain; that he took the ferry to Belfast and crossed into the Republic of Ireland – sleeping rough in an abandoned site in Dundalk. Claims were also made that Mohammed travelled to Dublin but then returned to Dundalk, where on
). While first depicted as survivors of genocide entitled to claim protection (Anteby-Yemini 2009 ; Willen 2010 ; Paz 2011 ), African asylum seekers 1 soon entered into a language of insecurity and criminality in the Israeli political discourse. The crossing of the Egyptian-Israeli border and the settling of asylum seekers in Israeli cities (in particular Tel Aviv and Eilat) became a matter of concern
This pioneering study of migrant journeys to Britain begins with Huguenot refugees in the 1680s and continues to asylum seekers and east European workers today. Analysing the history and memory of migrant journeys, covering not only the response of politicians and the public but also literary and artistic representations, then and now, this volume sheds new light on the nature and construction of Britishness from the early modern era onwards. It helps to explain why people come to Britain (or are denied entry) and how migrants have been viewed by state and society alike. The journeys covered vary from the famous (including the Empire Windrush in 1948) to the obscure, such as the Volga German transmigrants passing through Britain in the 1870s. While employing a broadly historical approach, the book incorporates insights from many other disciplines and employs a comparative methodology to highlight the importance of the symbolic as well as the physical nature of such journeys.
Art and migration: revisioning the borders of community is a collective response to current and historic constructs of migration as disruptive of national heritage. This interplay of academic essays and art professionals’ interviews investigates how the visual arts – especially by or about migrants – create points of encounter between individuals, places, and objects. Migration has increasingly taken centre stage in contemporary art, as artists claim migration as a paradigm of artistic creation. The myriad trajectories of transnational artworks and artists’ careers outlined in the volume are reflected in the density and dynamism of fairs and biennales, itinerant museum exhibitions and shifting art centres. It analyses the vested political interests of migration terminology such as the synonymous use of ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ or the politically constructed use of ‘diaspora’. Political and cultural narratives frame globalisation as a recent shift that reverses centuries of cultural homogeneity. Art historians and migration scholars are engaged in revisioning these narratives, with terms and methodologies shared by both fields. Both disciplines are elaborating an histoire croisée of the circulation of art that denounces the structural power of constructed borders and cultural gatekeeping, and this volume reappraises the historic formation of national identities and aesthetics heritage as constructed under transnational visual influences. This resonates with migrant artists’ own demands for self-determination in a display space that too often favours canonicity over hybridity. Centring migration – often silenced by normative archives or by nationalist attribution practices – is part of the workload of revisioning art history and decolonising museums.
Introduction This is the story of a meeting between a humanitarian operation and a conspiracy theory, and what happened next. The operation was a search and rescue mission run on the Mediterranean by many different non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Médecins Sans Frontières, 1 aiming to save the lives of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers lost at sea. The conspiracy theory 2 was that this operation was the opposite of what it
In the last decade Irish society has visibly changed with the emergence of new immigrant communities of black and ethnic minorities. This book draws upon a number of academic disciplines, focusing on the relationship between ideological forms of racism and its consequences upon black and ethnic minorities. Media and political debates on racism in Ireland during this period have tended to depict it as a new phenomenon and even as one imported by asylum seekers. Ireland was never immune from the racist ideologies that governed relationships between the west and the rest despite a history of colonial anti-Irish racism. Citizenship reproduced inequalities between nationals on the basis of gender and race and ethnicity. The book explores how the processes of nation-building which shaped contemporary Irish society and the Irish state were accompanied by a politics of national identity within which claims of social membership of various minority groups were discounted. It examines the exclusionary and assimilationist consequences of Irish nationbuilding for Protestant, Jewish and Traveller minority communities. The book also considers anti-Semitism in Irish society from independence in 1922 until the 1950s. It examines how contemporary responses to refugees and asylum seekers have been shaped by a legacy of exclusionary state practices. Finally, the book talks about anti-Traveller racism, the politics of Traveller exclusion, the work of SPIARSI, and the efforts to contest racism and discrimination faced by minorities in Ireland as expressions of multiculturalism.
shares with the reader the experience of going through the severe security checks at detention centres, facing apprehensive asylum seekers waiting for their legal status to be resolved and meeting optimistic resettled individuals in Australia. In her interviews, Leung explores the emergent dynamic in the user–technology dyad that takes place in restrictive environments, such as detention centres. Having set the conceptual and methodological foundations of her work in the introductory part