More Global Apartheid?
(LINKS UPDATED 6.4.2020) In my previous post, I've quoted anthropologist Owen Sichone about the concept of "Global apartheid":
Whatever the advantages of apartness are (more economic than cultural), the South African system came to an end just as the rest of the world was reinventing it in new forms. Global apartheid policed by the regime of visas and passports in a manner that African migrant workers (...) would easily recognize as colonial still does the job of keeping wealth and poverty apart.
The French government is planning a new immigration law, furthering these developments towards more global apartheid, according to anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid who writes:
According to this new law, immigration to France should be “chosen” (immigration choisie) rather than “suffered from” or “undergone” (subie). In practice, this means that people who are useful to the French economy are invited in, while the law will be more restrictive on the others – the asylum-seekers, the family reunions and the unregistered sans-papiers.
On yesterdays' demonstration against the law, she writes, "quite a few demonstrators today had come to the conclusion that the interior minister obviously doesn’t love France as she is, so they suggested that he packs his bags and leave."
Salih Booker and William Minter define Global Apartheid this way:
Global apartheid, stated briefly, is an international system of minority rule whose attributes include: differential access to basic human rights; wealth and power structured by race and place; structural racism, embedded in global economic processes, political institutions and cultural assumptions; and the international practice of double standards that assume inferior rights to be appropriate for certain "others," defined by location, origin, race or gender.
>> read their whole article in The Nation
UPDATE (8.5.06):
Anthony Katombe from GlobalVoices reviews francophone blogs on African immigrants’ latest tribulations in France and Belgium. Blogger Le Pangolin belies Sarkozy’s assertions that France wants to start “choosing its immigrants” through new, tighter policies:
France has always chosen its immigrants. Remember the Senegalese janitors whom France imported from Senegal and Mali, the Renault and Peugeot auto factory workers they went to fetch in Maghreb to break the communist party and the CGT union’s strong influence between 1950 and 1970.
Le Pangolin ridicules a French government drowning under youth unemployment protests attempting desperately to redirect public attention towards a scapegoat, the African immigrant
>> read the whole post on GlobalVoices
SEE ALSO:
Yash Tandon: What is global apartheid and why do we fight it?
Charles Mutasa: Global Apartheid Continues to Haunt Global Democracy
Owen Sichone on Global Apartheid: Poor African migrants no less cosmopolitan than anthropologists
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