Mea culpa: Goodbye migration studies

Last week I attended ‘On migrations: Images, subjects, objects’, an event co-organised by the Dublin City Council Arts Office in association with PhotoIreland Festival 2012 and GradCam. Listening to papers on ‘diaspora space’ among indigenous Irish people in the north inner city and on ‘collaborative’ photography projects with residents of direct provision hostels, a line from the Israeli poet Nathan Alterman rang in my head: ‘Here are the trees with their murmuring leaves / Here is the air dizzy with height. / I do not want to write about them / I want to touch their heart’.

But the poet, like us academics, did continue to write. Indeed, writing was his stock in trade, as it is ours. And writing ‘about them’ is just as invasive as the poet’s wish to ‘touch their heart’. So I reflected aloud about the permission we give ourselves to turn others, in this specific case migrants, into the objects of our ‘desire to know’, as Alice Feldman of UCD expressed it. And – although I was a founder member of the Trinity Immigration Initiative, for which I managed a project on migrant networks assisting in their own integration, and although I am deeply committed to supporting migrants in Ireland and elsewhere – I made a decision there and then that I will never again research and write about migrants. Continue reading “Mea culpa: Goodbye migration studies”

And now – Israel goes for African asylum seekers

africans-attacked-in-tel-avivLast night right wing demonstrators, including Israeli membersof Knesset attacked African asylum seekers in the south of Tel Aviv

Africans attacked in Tel Aviv protest; MKs: ‘infiltrators’ are cancer

The statement by Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last week regarding the ‘infiltration’ of African asylum seekers via the Israel-Egypt border, is indicative not only of Israeli state racism, but also of the West’s approach to asylum seekers in general.

If Israel does not stem the flow of African refugees and illegal immigrants, Netanyahu said in last week’s cabinet meeting, ‘the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000’, threatening ‘our existence as a Jewish and democratic state, the social fabric of society, national security and national identity.’ Continue reading “And now – Israel goes for African asylum seekers”

Short plays about (racist) Ireland, 2

micheal-martinMet Micheal Martin (Fianna Fail leader and former minister) at a do in Cork.
I: we did meet before in  2005, on a Questions and Anwers programme after the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, when you told me you knew a Nigerian woman who had quintuplets, had one in Nigeria and hopped on a plane to have the other four in Ireland (see After Optimism, Lentin and McVeigh, 2006, p. 101)

Martin: Oh, yes, I remember. I actually got a letter from an obstetrician about it…

I: But Micheal, how logical can this be?

Martin: No, really… He wrote to me that something had to be done about all these women coming to have babies in Ireland…

I: But…

Martin: Believe me, I can show you the letter

I raise my eyebrows, but Martin is not embarrased at all…