#Refugee

[clanslist]

[soracities]

Salem Jubran, "Refugee" (trans. Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye), from A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba [ID'd]

[jonasgoonface]

No going back now. Went back to the green hell of the Belarus/Poland border to support my crew tryna keep refugees alive on their journey w medical needs, food, clothing, phone access, cigarettes, asylum papers, whatever. To avoid detection we navigate in total darkness but sometimes at night we'll risk a red light like a campfire that gives no heat. I'll try to get stories when/how I can around the glow while the medics tend to razor wire injuries or dog bites or whatever wounds these rival states have inflicted. Borders are death, I don't trust myself with a proper description but they are bad. fuck them and fuck the cowards maintaining them.

[reasonsforhope]

“America likes to tell a certain story about itself: It’s a safe haven, a place of refuge for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It’s a story that history shows hasn’t always been true. But thankfully, it just got easier for Americans to take matters into their own hands and turn that aspiration into a reality.

The Biden administration on January 19 launched the Welcome Corps, a new program that will allow groups of Americans to directly sponsor refugees to resettle in their communities.

Whereas recent programs have focused on bringing over people from specific places — Afghanistan, Ukraine, Venezuela — this program makes it possible for private citizens to resettle people from any place in the world, so long as they are refugees as defined by the US Refugee Act.

Under the Welcome Corps program, you and a few of your friends can pool together funds to provide an immigration pathway that allows vulnerable people who may not otherwise be able to immigrate the ability to rebuild their lives in the US. Forming a private sponsor group involves bringing together at least five adults in your area and collectively raising $2,275 for each person you want to resettle in your community. With that money, sponsors commit to helping them through the first three months there, which can include securing and furnishing housing, stocking the pantry with food, supporting job hunts, and registering kids for school.

It’s a powerful way to improve life for the newcomers, granting them protection from persecution or violence in their country of origin, plus the chance to access health care, education, and socioeconomic opportunities. It can also improve life for everyone who’ll be in the newcomers’ orbit, including you and your neighbors. Research suggests welcoming refugees will likely benefit your community as a whole, for example by opening new businesses that revitalize neighborhoods. In Canada, a similar private sponsorship program has proven immensely popular and successful over the past decade.

But you might be thinking: Why should it fall to private citizens to fork over the cash, time, and energy to resettle refugees? Shouldn’t that be the government’s job?

...It’s a fair point: This is the government’s job. That’s why the advocacy groups that pushed for the Welcome Corps program insisted that any refugees who come to the US via private sponsorship should be in addition to the number of traditional, government-assisted resettlement cases.

The State Department has signaled that it agrees. This means that by sponsoring a refugee, you can play a role in allowing the US to take in more refugees overall. It really is additive.

And unlike prior programs for Afghans or Ukrainians, which were temporary, ad hoc responses to crises, the Welcome Corps is intended to be a permanent fixture. The hope is that it’ll complement the traditional resettlement process, which has been struggling for years.”

-via Vox, 1/27/23

[morecatswarriorcats]

Sparkpelt

[drsonnet]

where to?

#Rafah #Gaza #Khanyunis #Palestine

د. علاء اللقطة

[henk-heijmans]

Afghan refugee boys wrapped themselves in blankets to keep warm in the evening, Islamabad, Pakistan, 2012 - by Muhammed Muheisen (1981), Jordanian

[c1nnamunn]

more

[zingaplanet]

Look. Ok. Look. We're not hyping about this enough.

Source: Wimbledon Instagram

[morning-and-good-night]

Reforming the human rights act

The UK is planning on reforming the human rights act.

If it wasn't shitty enough for them to try and go against BASIC human rights to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, they're now planning on making it legal for it to happen.

This is going to affect immigrants, refugees, criminals, disabled people and asylum seekers.

If the human rights act does get reformed, this is going to make it easier to deport people and reduce the government's responsibility to uphold human rights.

It's the government's way of cleaning their hands by pretending nothing has happened

Please please sign the petition so it will at least get debated in Parliament. Only UK residents and British citizens can sign it, but please please please reblog this to protect human rights

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/607712

[animatejournal]

Hey Arnold! | Director: Jamie Mitchell Studio: Nickelodeon | USA, 1996

[bea-lele-carmen]

1968 Draft Dodgers Hitching to Canada

[federer7]

Basque Refugee Children, North Stoneham Camp, Hampshire, England. 1937

Photo: Edith Tudor-Hart

[humusboii2thereturnoftheking]

Talking to Palestinian Refugees as a Diaspora Jew

These are quotes from a discussion I encountered and I believe will bring insight to many, on both sides of the conflict.

It starts as follows:

"There is this one woman who sings for a local band and is from a Palestinian family. She often tells the story of how her family owned a house and a shop in Ashkelon but during the war of independence they had to leave their house and ended up in a refugee tent city in Gaza. Eventually they made there way to Cairo and then to America. She has the key to the family's old Ashkelon house that her grandfather passed down to her father, passed down to her and will show people it to tell about how she lost her homeland. Something she often says is "how come they get to be on the land because their ancestors were there 2000 years ago but I can't even go to the land my grandfather was at 75 years ago?"

how am I supposed respond to that? Am I really supposed to say no you don't have a right to your family's land???"

The answers I found most insightful:

• You can empathize with her families story while still realizing that the Palestinian leadership is failing her people.

• Half of my family were forced out of their home in North Africa and ethnically cleansed from there alongside nearly 1M other Jews. My grandparents did not get to keep the keys to their house or business because that’s not usually what happens when you get kicked out. they came to Israel with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. We didn’t even know grandmother’s birthdate because their citizenships were revoked. They lived in tents for months and a new disease was spreading every week. How come I’m still not legally allowed where my grandparents were born? How come Palestinians are eternal refugees and my grandparents weren’t? The irony here is just insane.

• Not to mention Arab countries encouraged Palestinians to leave and return once the genocide (war) is over: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." - 1st secretary of the Arab league, 1948.

• “The Arab states encouraged Palestinian Arabs to leave” - Jordan’s newspaper, Feb 19, 1949

• “it must not be forgotten that the Arab higher committee encouraged refugees’ flight from Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem” - near East Arabic broadcasting station, April 3, 1949

• “since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon Arab refugees…”- Khaled Al Azm, Syria’s prime minister.

• Refugees all over the world (including Jews!) are forced to leave their homes. They make new lives in new lands. I don't hold onto the key of my great-grandparents' house in Belarus and demand the government give me our house and try to kill random Belorussians because of it.

• A quarter of Baghdad in the 30' was Jewish. My friend's grandparents came from there, they were so rich her grandmother didn't even know how to brush her own hair or dress herself because they had servants. They had to leave everything behind and live in a tin hut in Israel. Wars cause population to move. It's a tragedy but it's been happening everywhere. You think Germans were happy about leaving their homes in what is Poland today? I don't see them trying to go home to Poland.

[humanbyweight]

My close friend Mabel needs help to escape the escalating political prosecution of transgender people in her home state of Florida. 

Mabel is one of the kindest and sweetest people I have ever met. She doesn’t deserve to have to risk harassment and arrest just for existing in public spaces, nor does she deserve to be arbitrarily ripped from her lifesaving medication. No one deserves that.

Please donate and share to support her, and then donate to and share as many other funds for trans refugees as you can. This is a humanitarian crisis. The lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of innocent people hang in the balance. They deserve a chance to live in peace. 😢