Immigration in the MENA PDF

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documented essay about immigration in the MENA...

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Immigration in the MENA: Exploitation, Racism and Xenophobia

Document A: "White Skin, Black Mask": An Interview with Kamel Riahi. http://beirut39.blogspot.fr/2010/03/white-skin-black-mask-interview-with.html There is a character in your novel, The Scalpel, who the narrator simply refers to as “the negro”. At one point the narrator describes “the negro” as “simple and miserable”, one who reminds him of Mersault from The Stranger. Albert Camus characterized Mersault as being apathetic and alienated. These types of “racial” social characterizations are similar to Ibn Khaldun's writings. Would you say this is a deliberately placed connnection?

Since I started writing fiction, I focused on the marginalized groups in Tunisia, whether socially or racially. My stories reflected the lives of the poor, the homeless, the shoe polishers, felines, young criminals, prostitutes, crushed employees, sailors and street peddlers. I cared for the blacks in Tunisia so I tried to overcome the ideological arguments regarding them towards a psychological approach, and to show their daily suffering. The Negro in The Scalpel is a secondary character, yet he pleased my readers and nearly became the protagonist. A black man who hailed from the Tunisian countryside to became a guard at the “Jillaz” cemetery, the largest in Tunis. He is rebuked for being black. He lives a miserable life with his friend. […] My forthcoming novel will be titled The Gorilla, already one chapter has been translated into English by Peter Clark, a British translator. The protagonist will be a black man as well, and the story will uncover the (sexual) bastardness, racism and discrimination against blacks in the Arab world. Another novel I worked on, Diaries of a Slain Person, touches upon blacks in a new narrative game. These are themes that we must take into consideration, as I noticed in my many trips across the Arab world, with my careful observation, that Arabs are perfectly racist. A month ago, I was joined by a black Arab poet in Algeria, and was stunned by how she was received. All of this has confirmed to me that I am heading into the right track with this theme. Even in Tunisia, the most civilized Arab country, we still refer to whites as “free” and black as “slaves”. Blacks still suffer from being marginalized despite the fact that the law of the land and the constitution call for equality. […] We still curse each other using “you’re Jewish” or “you’re Kurdish”, this is also racial and religious discrimination. Watch any Egyptian sitcom and tell me about the image of the Sudanese character. Listen to the Tunisian jokes about the Libyans or jokes about people from Hums in Greater Syria. Listen to the debates regarding noble families and family lineage… even horses now are divided between what is considered “noble” and what is not. We are racists to the bones. Attempting to hide or silence this fact will not help with the matter because we are a sick society which still suffers from the complexes of color and race. 1

Document B : The Plight of Migrant Workers in the Middle East and North Africa By Simba Russeau Global Research, September 17, 2015 CAIRO, May 20, 2011 – As the world rallies in support of the popular uprisings sweeping across the Arab world, which were provoked by long social and economic injustice, the plight of migrant workers from Africa and Asia find themselves jobless, penniless and subjected to threats and beatings. Many of the estimated twenty million migrant workers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are from poor countries whose leaders have long failed to put in place mechanisms to protect their nationals from abuse, inhumane working conditions, trafficking and a means for repatriation during times of crisis. Migrant rights advocates – and workers themselves – say their remittances have contributed to increasing foreign currency reserves, reducing devaluation of labour sending country’s monies, investments in infrastructure and the repayment of foreign debts like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. But despite growing complaints of mistreatment, governments are unwilling to listen. “For those in Bahrain, their were human rights violations previously but in the current crisis there is no where to go and most of the embassies are not equipped enough to take care of their nationals,” says Mohammad Harun Al Rashid, regional coordinator of CARAM (Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility) Asia. “These countries need to provide better representation in labour receiving countries. However, most labour sending countries are only looking at the remittances and not the working and living conditions of their citizens. The governments are not listening to their nationals and to rectify this problem they need to establish relationships with community leaders.” Jan De Wilde, coordinator at the International Organization of Migration (IOM) office in Tunisia, says that although evacuation mechanisms are usually the responsibility of the employers or labour sending countries in situations like this the international community needs to step in and assist in evacuating third party nationals before matters get worse. According to De Wilde, there are massive amounts of migrants – mainly from Bangladesh, the Philippines, Egypt, West and sub-Saharan Africa – streaming out of Libya since midFebruary at a rate of 1,000-3,000 per day. “Many have not been paid and are having a lot of difficulty getting food, medical care and many of the Black Africans have been severely discriminated against,” says De Wilde. “People are becoming very restless, impatient and fighting amongst themselves because one group thinks that another group is being favoured and they’re becoming very difficult to manage. The situation is going to become worse once the summer arrives as the temperatures are already over twenty during the day and they’ll be going up to fifty.”

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Tales of mistreatment long before uprisings South Asians in Bahrain, mainly migrant workers from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India and Pakistan, constitute nearly fifty percent of the country’s population of 1.2 million. Demographics like Bahrain are commonplace throughout the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, where the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates migrant workers comprise nearly forty percent of the workforce – and in some cases outnumber the population. [...] Since the Bahraini government ordered the crackdown on street protests, nearly eight migrants have been killed and forty-nine wounded with the majority of the attacks targeting the Pakistani community. Faraz Sanei, a researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch in Bahrain says that although Indians represent the largest community in Bahrain with 350,000 migrants, Pakistanis are overwhelmingly visible in the riot police and are usually implicated in the deaths of protestors. In addition, opposition groups calling for political and social reforms have long argued that the influx of Sunni nationals from outside in the last fifteen years is the government’s attempt to change the sectarian demographics of Bahrain. “Before the violence a lot Bahrainis when dealing with riot police complained that they couldn’t speak to them because they don’t share the same language or have limited Arabic. Whenever there are investigations in villages there is this us versus them mentality because of this language barrier,” adds Sanei. ‘We’re like slaves here’ The winds of change, for more democracy, rights and decent work taking place in Yemen – as anti-regime protestors demand the immediate end of the thirty-two year authoritarian rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh – bypasses the approximately forty to sixty thousand Ethiopian domestic workers who are forced to work all day under mental torment and abuse. In Yemen, which has an unemployment rate of thirty-five percent and is one of the poorest countries in the Arab world; Somali, Sudanese and Ethiopian female refugees or migrants work as housemaids for a monthly salary of merely seventy to one hundred and fifty dollars. Despite incidents of violence targeting female migrant workers during street protests in Yemen have failed to make the press, ongoing maid abuse has definitely put countries in the Middle East in harsh spotlight. Angelique, a 26-year-old domestic worker from Congo, escaped the conflict in her country and travelled to Lebanon on a six-year contract to work as a housemaid. Woken daily at 5:30am, she works 18 hours confined to the apartment, without any time off. “I have only six months left and then I will go back to the Congo. You see Madame has cut off all of my hair. Every day I clean and cook. I sleep on the floor in the kitchen and I can’t take any more of this life,” says Angelique, who did not want to give her real name for fear of retribution, speaking from across the balcony. “Even the dogs are allowed to go out but we’re stuck. We’re like slaves here.” Angelique earns just US$100 a month, three times below the minimum wage, and sends all of it home to Congo. 3

Being stranded is not new for migrants Migrant workers being left stranded by their employers or their governments are not a new phenomenon in the Arab world. During the US-led invasion of Iraq and the 2006 summer war in Lebanon thousands of migrant workers were left to fend for themselves. According to the UNHCR, nearly 140,000 foreign nationals have fled Libya via land borders. Including an estimated 69,000 Egyptians, who have crossed to the Egyptian border and another 75,000 Asians and Africans that have crossed into Tunisia while another 50,000 – including over 10,000 Egyptian workers – remain stranded in Tunisia. Libya has been a major destination for migrant workers following the 1969 revolution as a massive influx of construction workers from Tunisia, teachers from Egypt and Palestine and health care workers from Yugoslavia and Bulgaria poured in to assist in rebuilding. Twenty years later a second wave of migrants, mainly from Asia, sub-Saharan and West Africa arrived to take advantage of the relatively high salaries of almost $300 per month, for unskilled labour. Globally, remittances sent home by migrants and refugees have become a key feature in the socio-economic fabric of developing countries in Africa and Asia. On the macro level, Dr. Ibrahim Awad, Director of the Center for Migration and Refugees Studies at the American University in Cairo, says that remittances assist in reducing chronic trade deficits and contribute in balancing the economy in countries like Egypt due to their reliance and countercyclical nature, which help sustain consumption and investment during economic downturns. However on the micro level, labour sending economies could be at risk from the exodus of migrants fleeing violence in Libya as people supplying the labour take a hit, an increase in the demand of jobs as unemployed workers return and reliance on remittances to spur economic activity as a means of reducing poverty is halted. “The crisis highlights the reliance of some migrant sending countries on remittances. In some countries remittances constitute over thirty percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) like in Egypt, which has a relatively high proportion of the GDP at sixty percent. Reliance on this money influx suggests that any reduction will mainly impact the household level as well as create external financing gaps, which are hard to fill,” said Dr. Awad in an interview with IPS. With no end in sight, concerns are growing amongst some developing nations that turmoil in the region could spread to oil rich Gulf states where foreign labour accounts for more than eleven million of the workforce. But instead of waiting for the rebellions to die down in order to send migrants to Libya again or redirect efforts in locating new markets, labour sending countries should adopt appropriate policy measures to end reliance on manpower export and create incentives that encourage their nationals to say home. “Migrant sending countries should not rely solely on migration as a means of solving unemployment. The issue of lack of jobs should be solved internally. Countries of origin should therefore put in place effective policies for the reinsertion of returning migrant workers into their labour markets by creating decent work where people live,” adds Dr. Awad.

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Document C: Gado, Human trafficking.

https://www.nytsyn.com/cartoons

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For centuries, the common migration pattern was migration from the poor or developing South to the rich North. Now, patterns are shifting: South-South migration is expanding and studying migration patterns of the Middle-East and North Africa (MENA) will bring this new pattern out. The MENA region is the largest producer of refugees and one of the main producers of immigrants worldwide. However, the MENA region also hosts 18% of the world's refugees and 14% of the global migrants. That is why considering and studying the MENA region as a host region is very interesting.

What is the MENA? The acronym MENA covers an extensive region, extending from Morocco to Iran, including all Mashriq and Maghreb countries. This region has been in conflict since the collapse of the Ottoman empire in the 20th century. It is a region that is commonly depicted as unstable, devastated by different wars and conflicts, and the Arab Spring reinforced the image of a chaotic region. However, the region is not a monolithic block: Some countries are collapsing, that is the case of Syria, but others are economically thriving and still attract many international migrants. The MENA region is welcoming an increasing number of migrants which profiles are very different: They are mainly economic migrants, but there are also refugees and people seeking political asylum. As the recent Libyan slave scandal showed it, immigrants – especially non-Arab people – have to face many obstacles in their host countries, including structural racism. I choose the topic of migration in the MENA because the migration pattern there is very different from the migration pattern in other countries or regions. For instance, migrants account for the majority of the population in Bahrain which is an unprecedented case. The topic of migration also steers my thought around the issue of xenophobia and racism in the region. Finally, the study of this dossier also gives an overview of the political and economic situation of the MENA region. Which are the top destination countries of the MENA? The top destinations countries are, of course, the richest one of the region, meaning Gulf countries. Indeed, 74% of international migrants in the MENA region are in the Gulf. Migration in these countries is very unusual as migrants represent sometimes the majority of the population. We can take the example of Bahrein, a very small country where immigrants constitute nearly fifty percent of the population. It is easy to guess why Gulf countries are among top destinations: The region is thriving through its oil reserves and tourism. We can also think about Qatar which will welcome the World Cup in 2022. For this occasion, the country is building stadiums and improving its infrastructure. Therefore, the country needs workers and they are mainly migrants working in dreadful conditions. 6

Who are these migrants? The profile of migrants is very diverse, some come from the region itself and other immigrants are external to the region: 36% of immigration in the MENA is intra-regional. In the 1960s, many Egyptians, Tunisians and Algerians left their countries for Libya where Muammar Gaddafi was leading massive infrastructure projects and was rebuilding the country. Intra-regional migrants also flee wars. There was the “tide” of Palestinians who flew their lands in 1948, what was called the “naqba”, the “catastrophy.” They flew to neighbouring countries, mainly Lebanon and Jordan. Today, we can obviously think of Syrian and Kurdish people fleeing their countries as Syrians and Kurds see their lives threatened both by Bashar al Assad and ISIL. And they follow the same pattern than Palestinian refugees in 1948: They mainly go to Lebanon and Jordan where they live in appalling conditions in refugees camps. We can also talk about refugees from Yemen. In 2011, war broke out in Yemen in the context of the Arab Spring. Today, the country is still going through a destructive civil war opposing Houthis, a shia-led movement, to Sunni factions supported by Sunni countries and some Western countries. In between, Yemeni civilians are facing a massive famine, the “worst famine in decades” according to the UN. Nonetheless, a majority of the immigrants (64%) comes from outside the MENA. For instance, Libya knew the immigration of workers from Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and migrants from Asia, sub-Saharan and West Africa in the 60s. Today, migrants in the Gulf are mainly from Southeast Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh...) , as well as from Africa. Pull factors. In North Africa, Libya was the most attractive country for migrant workers as Libyan wages were very high, and the country was very wealthy thanks to its petroleum resources. Gulf countries attract the majority of migrant workers. We can take the example of Qatar which attracts many South-Asian migrants to build and prepare the infrastructure to welcome the World Cup in 2022. Women migrants tend to go to Lebanon, Yemen and Egypt and very often work as nannies or maids. Push factors: As contradictory as it might seem to be, the MENA region welcomes many asylum seekers and war refugees. We can take the example of Eritreans that flee their own country that is torn up by war and a dictatorship known as the world's most brutal dictatorship. Eritreans tend to go to Israel, but many also go to Yemen which is highly paradoxical as Yemen is also facing a terrible war that is currently destroying the country.

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Racism, Xenophobia and mistreatment... Now, migrants go through many hurdles in their home countries. The second document denounces conditions of work in MENA countries, and the mistreatment migrant workers have to go through. The article shows that cases of mistreatment are far from being isolated and relates testimonies of migrant workers who suffered abuse and exploitation in the workplace. However, the article does not tackle the issue of “kafala”. The “kafala” system requires all unskilled laborers to have an in-country sponsor, usually their employer, who is responsible for their visa and legal status. The employer usually takes away passports and all documents and has a total control over the migrant. It helps creating easy opportunities for the exploitation of workers. The article is also very interesting as it focuses on the fate of migrant women. They are usually Ethiopian, Eritreans or Congolese and tend to go to Lebanon, Yemen and Egypt and very often work as nannies or maids. The article introduces Angelique a Congolese migrant, who suffered abuse while working as a nanny in Lebanon. Many labour unions condemned Lebanon's maid trade as modified slavery. Indeed, nannies and maids in Lebanon work also under the kafala system. They have a sponsor and have to work with no recourse to Lebanese labour law or other state protections. Migrant maids or nannies become victims of their sponsors and suffer abuse, including beatings, withheld wages and the practice of holding employees hostage inside locked houses, which was the case of Angelique. On top to that, migrants in the MENA are the target of racist behaviours. To deal with that, I chose the first document which is an interview of a Tunisian writer which tackles the issue of racism in his books. Racism is widespread in MENA countries, and the author says that it targets Kurds and Black people just as well as Egyptians and Libyans. I do not agree with that, I would rather call it xenophobia when it comes to Egyptians and Libyans. Racism in MENA countries targets specifically non-Arab people, meaning Kurds, Berbers and mainly Black people. Sub-Saharan immigrants in North Africa are often Francophone West African students who pursue their university diplomas and Sub-Saharan nationals who work in low-paid job...