As Norwegian Refugee Council research found, 70 percent of Syrian refugees lack basic identification and documents showing ownership of property.
The global passport
Host nations certainly has a share in the damage, as they face problems concerning the accessibility of vital information about the newcomers — dealing with the undocumented refugee, the immigration service can’t gain the information about his/her health status, family ties or criminal record, or verify any other vital data that helps them make a decision. Needless to say, this may lead to the designation of refugee status being exploited by economic migrants, fugitives or even the war criminals that caused the mass displacement to begin with.
Another important issue is data security. Refugees’ personal identities are carefully re-established with the support of clever biometric systems set up by the U.N. Agency for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR registers millions of refugees and maintains those records in a database. But the evidence suggests that centralized systems like this could be prone to attacks. As a report on UNCHR’s site notes, Aadhaar — India’s massive biometric database and the largest national database of people in the world — has suffered serious breaches, and last year, allegations were made that access was for sale on the internet for as little as $8
Finland, a country with a population of 5.5 million, cannot boast huge numbers of refugees. For 2018, it set a quota of 750 people, mainly flying from Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s way less than neighboring Sweden, which promised to take in 3,400. Nevertheless, the country sets a global example of the use of effective technology in immigration policy: It’s using blockchain to help the newcomers get on their feet faster.
The system, developed by the Helsinki-based startup MONI, maintains a full analogue of a bank account for every one of its participants.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018, the billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros revealed that his structures already use a blockchain in immigration policies
In 2017, Accenture and Microsoft Corp. teamed up to build a digital ID network using blockchain technology, as part of a U.N.-supported project to provide legal identification to 1.1 billion people worldwide with no official documents.
a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with blockchain platform IOTA to explore how the technology could increase efficiency.
Libraries supporting social inclusion for refugees and immigrants
UNESCO emphasizes the importance of social inclusion for international
migrants and encourages cities and local governments to “ensure social rights
for migrants to adequate housing, education, health and social care, welfare
and decent standard of living according to basic needs such as food, energy
and water.” Libraries can play an important role in helping new arrivals
acclimate and thrive in a new community.
Do you have a story to share about how your library, on its own or in
collaboration with community organizations, is providing social services and
support for refugees and immigrants? Do you have advice on creating successful
programming to support refugees and immigrants?
Proposal to the SCSU library administration:
Good afternoon,
I will be submitting a proposal about my individual work in that area:
In the fall of 2015, I organized a campus-wide meeting, including St. Cloud community members, on refugees and migrants, by inviting one Syrian and one Somali refugees:
I also reached out across campus (e.g. Dan Wildeson with the Holocaust Center, Geoffrey Tabakin, Stephen Philion).
I organized also the online presence by delivering the personal stories of three refugees:
I also maintain a FB group for the class and in conjunction with the blog (you need to request permission to enter the FB group): https://www.facebook.com/groups/hons221
I am formally proposing / requesting to transition my individual efforts and offering the library to support me in expanding my acitivies on this topic
Here is my rational:
If not on campus, at least in the library, I am the only refugee and for that matter an immigrant. I have the understanding and the compassion of someone, who personally have experienced the hardship of being and immigrant and refugee.
I have amounted information and experience presenting the information and engaging the audience in a discussion regarding a rather controversial (for St. Cloud) issue
I have the experience and skills to conduct such discussions both F2F and online
Based on my rational, here are activities I am proposing:
The library supports a monthly F2F meetings, where I am taking the responsibility to host students with refugee and/or migrant status and facilitate a conversation among those students and other students, faculty, staff, who would like to learn more about the topic and discuss related issues.
Library support constitutes of: e.g. necessary information willingly and actively shared at Reference and Circulation desk. Library faculty and staff willingly and actively promoting the information regarding this opportunity when occasions arise.
The library supports my campus-wide efforts to engage faculty, staff and students. Engagement includes: e.g., proposals to faculty to present in their classes on including refugees and immigrants but related to their classes; assisting students with research and bibliography on their papers related to refugees and immigrants; assisting faculty and students with presentations including refugees and immigrants etc.
Library support constitutes of: e.g. necessary information willingly and actively shared at Reference and Circulation desk. Library faculty and staff willingly and actively promoting the information regarding this opportunity when occasions arise.
REFUGEES AND FORCED IMMIGRATION ’17 / II. International Interdisciplinary Conference on Refugee and Forced Immigration Studies in Social Sciences, Humanities and Art Conference29th to 30th September 2017Istanbul, Turkey Website: http://www.dakamconferences.org/refugeesandforcedimmigration Contact person: Ozgur Ozturk
All papers will be published in proceedings e-book as DVD (with an ISBN number) and then in DAKAM’s online library. A selection will be made in the relevant DAKAM JOURNAL that will be reviewed by Thomson&Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index.
Organized by: DAKAM Deadline for abstracts/proposals: 23rd June 2017
Former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel‘The World Is Changing Dramatically’
Former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel speaks to DER SPIEGEL about his call for the country to take on a new global role and why Germans are underestimating the dangers posed by the current geopolitical situation.
Interview Conducted by Mathieu von Rohr and Britta Sandberg September 24, 2018 04:32 PM
Now Trump is criticizing us for not spending enough money on our military. Part of the truth, however, is that the U.S. wanted exactly that for a very long time. They were worried that too much military power in Germany could provoke the next world war. I once told Tillerson, I don’t know what you are complaining about, you raised us for 70 years to be peaceniks. Now that’s what we are and you’re surprised. He laughed.
Some people want Germany to be something like a large Switzerland, but we are simply too big. We can’t just stand on the sidelines. Because of the Assad regime’s bombs, almost a million refugees were standing in front of our door. It’s not just about military operations, but about crisis prevention, diplomacy, economic development. Germany shouldn’t transform from a geopolitical abstainer to an influential geo-strategist. I wish that we would return to once again having strategic debates — no matter the result. It is important to prepare the public for the fact that the world has changed.
For the most part, twentieth-century politics was defined by economic issues. On the left, politics centered on workers, trade unions, social welfare programs, and redistributive policies. The right, by contrast, was primarily interested in reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector. Politics today, however, is defined less by economic or ideological concerns than by questions of identity. Now, in many democracies, the left focuses less on creating broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and lgbt people. The right, meanwhile, has redefined its core mission as the patriotic protection of traditional national identity, which is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity,
or religion.
Again and again, groups have come to believe that their identities—whether national, religious, ethnic, sexual, gender, or otherwise—are not receiving adequate recognition. Identity politics is no longer a minor phenomenon, playing out only in the rarified confines of university campuses or providing a backdrop to low-stakes skirmishes in “culture wars” promoted by the mass media. Instead, identity politics has become a master concept that explains much of what is going on in global affairs.
Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities,
threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure. Unless such liberal democracies can work their way back to more universal understandings of human dignity,
they will doom themselves—and the world—to continuing conflict.
But in liberal democracies, equality under the law does not result in economic or social equality. Discrimination continues to exist against a wide variety of groups, and market economies produce large inequalities of outcome.
And the proportion of white working-class children growing up in single-parent families rose from 22 percent in 2000 to 36 percent in 2017.
Nationalists tell the disaffected that they have always been core members of a great
nation and that foreigners, immigrants, and elites have been conspiring to hold them down.
Please have a collection of stories regrading the recent events in Chemnitz, Germany.
The articles from different outlets allow to study not only the event and the controversy immigrants / nativism, but also the phenomenon “fake news” in the post-truth era.