I think i have mentioned before that I am maintaining a list of reported deaths of immigrants trying to enter the European Union called meanwhile at the border. This is quite a depressing routine that builds on a couple of google news alerts and a number of highly customized rss-feeds. some of the links that i am getting in my inbox do not immediately reveal if the linked pages are indeed news reports concerning drowned/shot/dehydrated migrants which means i get to see a fair amount of websites that contain any possible combination of the words ‘migrants’, ‘dead’, ‘drowned’, ‘illegal’ and so forth while following up on them.

Today i ran into a remarkable feature on the site of maltatoday.com. They have a page that lists this week’s headlines and the current edition of which exists for almost 50% of headlines related to the influx of migrants to the island of Malta:

Sunday, 25 June

Child born on patrol boat

A Somali woman gives birth to a boy on board the Armed Forces patrol boat that goes out to rescue a group of illegal immigrants, including the woman, caught out at sea. The AFM rescues 25 migrants and the mother gives birth to her child the moment she is transferred to the military patrol boat. Both mother and child are reportedly in good health after being transferred to St Luke’s Hospital.[…]

Monday, 26 June […]

Migrants give the slip

Seven migrants are on the run after landing with a group of 27 others at Xghajra in the dead of night. The migrants are noticed during a police patrol in Xghajra and apprehended by the police after a thorough search of the area. Seven Africans, remain on the loose. […]

Tuesday, 27 June

Mass breakout

Almost 400 illegal immigrants escape from the Safi detention centre and attempt to march all the way to Valletta to protest against detention. The mass breakout also turns violent at times with immigrants hurling stones at police officers and soldiers who at times seemed to be overwhelmed. A sizeable group of immigrants gets as far as the roundabout leading to Garibaldi Road in Marsa before being forced back into the centre by the security forces almost two hours later. Several police officers, soldiers and immigrants are slightly injured. Security personnel, called in from all parts of Malta, show great restraint in controlling an extremely tense situation.

266 more migrants

The largest group to date of immigrants is sighted off Malta’s coast after the boat they are on stalls. The 266 immigrants initially refuse the army’s assistance but then are persuaded to board an army patrol boat and brought to shore. The immigrants hail from Morocco and Egypt and are very likely to be repatriated soon.[…]

Thursday, 29 June […]

More migrants arrive

A group of 28 illegal immigrants including three women arrive in Malta aboard a boat. They land at Benghisa in Birzebbuga and are rounded up by the police.

Friday, 30 June […]

48 migrants arrive

Another group of 48 illegal immigrants, all men, arrives in Malta after being brought in by the army to Haywharf. Saturday, 1 July

I guess this pretty much speaks for itself. Also in other news today one migrant was shot and two fell to death while trying to enter Melilla (a.k.a Europe) from Morocco and 21 bodies of sub-saharan migrants washed up on a beach in western Morocco)

Ok, cant go on being abusive of other people her like in the last couple of posts. does not really add too much to the whole and apparently it will be held against me by some prospective employer in the future anyway. Speaking about employment: it is no secret that the dutch economy (especially the construction, cleaning and agricultural sectors employ a huge number of (temporary) workers from Poland and other Eastern European countries (ironically germany seems to become an Eastern European country as well at least in this aspect if one is to believe the mdr (google cache).

Many of these migrants combine working in the the Netherlands (or western Europe for that matter) with living in Poland. these pendular migration strategies are made possible by the vastly improved transportation facilities between the east and the west. When reading about ‘improved transprotation’ images of high speed trains and low cost airlines come to mind, but these migration patterns seem to fundamentally rely on a parallel transportation infrastrcuture:

In my thesis i had already mentioned this parallel infrastructure (without giving much thought to it then):

A trip from Perlejewo to Brussels and back costs approximately 80 dollars, and the increased competition among coach companies is reducing the cost of such fares even more. The trip lasts approximately 24 hours, and there are even ‘door to door’ transport services. (Frejka et al. as cited on p. 53)

Last weekend i drove back from Berlin to Amsterdam relatively early on Sunday morning, and this provided me with an opportunity to see these transport services in action. A significant amount of the cars traveling west on the A2 were minibuses registered in Poland (and either displaying signs of polish tour operators or even more tellingly of Dutch temporary work agencies). Some of them traveling alone some of them traveling in convoys of 3 or 4 vehicles. in total i think i saw at least 60 or so of these vehicles of more than 40 companies, which as we are traveling at at approximately the same speed most likely is only a small share of the total traffic on that day. That translates into a lot of people commuting from Poland to work in NL on that Sunday.

In the last 3 years i have travelled a lot between Berlin and Amsterdam, but almost exclusively by train and while the direct trains from Berlin to Amsterdam originate in poland i have never really noticed polish workers using the train to commute to Holland. This is probably due to the exorbitant prices of railway tickets nowadays (a standard return ticket berlin amsterdam is €184) but having seen these minibuses in action there is obviously another advantage to them. most of them were traveling at 140KM/h or more and if one combines this with the fact that these buses seem to offer door to door services, this probably translates into enormous time savings especially when one assumes that most of the trips taken by these pendular migrants are from small rural places to small rural places (which tend to have lousy public transport connectivity). In any case i was quite impressed by this almost hidden, highly flexible parallel transport infrastructure.

Right now i am at the media shed in Southend on Sea (a.k.a.the end of the world) just out of London where mongrel is hosting a launch party for two new projects: Hairy MP’s & Telephone Trottoire. One of the people giving a speech is Yoshitaka Mouri of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts & Music. He just showed Lampedusa, a disturbingly beautiful project about the ‘two sides’ of the island, by Frederico Baronello & Takuji Togo:

Lampedusa is the southernmost summer resort island of Italy, the border between Europe and Africa. In recent years there has been a massive and constant influx of immigrants who try to illegally enter the country by setting off in small boats from the coast of North Africa. The CPT (Centre for the Immigrants’ First Acceptance) is a detention house next to the airport of Lampedusa. Here, foreigners who have been denied refugee status are sent back to Libya, and arriving tourists are welcomed to visit the island. There is also a space of the island cemetery dedicated to the refugees, many of whom died trying to make the journey across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Check it out here (and make sure you have sound enabled).

The border film project by Brett Huneycutt. Victoria Criado and Rudy Adler has some amazing pictures online. The project distributed hundreds of disposable cameras to undocumented migrants attempting to cross from Mexico into the US of A (they also distributed them to so called minuteman vigilantes trying to stop the immigrants from coming there). The migrants used the cameras during their travels and then returned them to the project. Pictures are still coming and the ones already available on the website give a very impressive (and intimate) insight into the process of crossing borders.

One of the more prominent themes at CeBIT this year was the whole security/surveillance/biometric systems complex. hall 6 and 7 where full of companies demonstrating that you can stick an RFID chip on just about anything in order to then read it and know where just about everything comes from or goes to or belongs to or how much it costs. (only thing they did not show was that thanks to RFID you can now infect your cat with a computer virus).

On extremely popular sub-genre of things you can slap an RFID tag on are passports (interesting to think of what happens if your passport gets infected by an RFID virus transmitted by the cat of your host in a far away country, but i am getting distracted here…) and lots of countries showed their ePassport systems on the floor. The booth of Pakistan’s National Database & registration Authority (NARDA) was extremely entertaining not only because they had these wonderful multi identity passports to demonstrate their machines but also because they where extremely detailed in explaining their system and allowed me to take photographs of just about everything. As a good-bye present i got a bunch of brochures including one about the ‘Multi Biometric e-Passport Project’ currently being implemented in Pakistan:

The aim of this project is to create a highly secure integrated system encompassing immigration - Automated Border Control and passport issuance […] while ensuring the genuinenness of the holder as a valid Pakistani citizen. […] The system requires minimum human intervention that ensures transparency while maintaining ease of exit/entry of citizens without the ordinary people being harassed unnecessarily.

While i do not want to contribute to unnecessary harassment of the ordinary people (unnecessary harassment should be strictly reserved to criminals and terrorists who can easily be spotted because they have a beard?behave differently?will not get a passport because they are not ordinary? …??) i do have a slight suspicion that either the system minimizes human intervention so much that the operators get bored that the operators do not really regard security as their prime concern. otherwise it would be difficult to explain why a number of screen shots in the brochure reveal that next to the Pakistani passport system application the machine is running a anonymous web based chat client (see the iloveIM.com and x7.iloveim.com tabs in the task bar):

I am not sure if it really makes sense to develop a highly secure system and then have the operators IM with unidentifiable others while having access to the sensible data in plain text. On the other hand being on IM is getting a more and more important part of the social fabric and why should one not use the connectivity provided by the employer for a chat or two?

… and why does the url of this site begin with www.voyantes.net?

[Answer:] long before i had this blog i started collecting little paper flyers from people calling themselves ‘voyantes’ that where thrown through the letterbox of my apartment in Amsterdam [later i also started to find them on public transport in Paris and Strasbourg]. On these cards individuals, who claim to have special healing powers and the ability to look into the future, offer their services. most of them also claim to be mediums and it is quite common that they claim to have inherited this powers form powerful ancestors. It seems that the people who offer their services on these cards are part of the social fabric of sub-saharan migrant communities in these cities.

I do not know why i got fascinated by these cards and started collecting them. it probably is the mixture of (in my eyes) absurd religious beliefs and the almost taxonometric lists of ailments these people claim to be able to relieve. another aspect is the strange mixture between blunt and poetic language:

Spécialiste du retour rapide et définitif de l’être aimé. Si vous voulez vous faire aimer, ou si votre ami(e) vous a quitté(e) il ou elle va courrir derrière vous comme un chien derrière son maître.

[note: this is the only card among 50 or so that tries to imply gender neutrality. on all the others the lost partner that will be summond back to ‘run behind you like a dog behind his master’ is generally assumed to be female]

When my collection grew to more than 50 cards i decided to make them accessible on-line, by building a little app that enables you to chose three problems you would like to have solved. based on the choice of problems, the app will present you with the card(s) that claim to offer treatment for the chosen combination of problems. At the moment i have 71 cards online. If anyone out there ever comes across one of these these cards i would really appreciate it if you could send me a scan (on a black background) so i can add it to my database…

Since december 2002 I have been counting dead people. To be more specific I have been collecting news reports about migrants that have been killed while trying to get to Europe. Since i have started i have found news articles documenting a total of 1354 1356 deaths and these are only those incidents that have been mentioned in news sources indexed by google news or which I have stumbled upon while reading the newspaper (and this figure does not include the people reported to be missing after the many incidents involving ships, most of them can be safely assumed to be dead as well). In addition there are lots of incidents that never make it into these publications.

I never really questioned myself why i am doing this, I just started to do it once it became feasible without to much hassle (e.g when google news got launched). Clearly i am not expecting that someday someone stumbles across the page, realizes how fucked up the the european attitude towards migrants is and then changes the system. People generally do not care when people with a different skin color die, and i do not really think this will ever change.

Also I never really found other people engaged in the particular activity of counting dead migrants. So imagine my astonishment when i came across someone who does not only also count dead migrants but on top of it knows exactly why he is doing it:

Martin Kelly runs a ‘new occasionalseries‘ on his blog ‘the purpose of which is to record the deaths of migrant workers’. Now that sounds pretty similar to what i am doing, but our Mr. Kelly here has a real mission:

He is collecting migrant deaths in the UK to prove that mass migration is bad and because of this ‘common humanity dictates that somebody try and keep track of the casualty figures’ of the poor souls ‘who would still be alive if tighter border and labour controls were in place’. Thankfully for the rest of the ‘british victims of migrant criminals’ Mr. Kelly has come to the rescue and taken up the burden of recording these incidents so that someday someone will stumble across his blog and decides that ‘common humanity’ dictates that a wall must be built around british isles, because ‘until we are prepared to change our ways, such tragedies as happened yesterday will continue. As migration grows, there will be more of them…’

Guess you have to be pretty fucked up to come to this kind of conclusions when reading about a car incident. This guy really leaves me speechless… what a fucking idiot!

Here are some more argumentative jewels form his insane ‘Right-Wing Rants, Ramblings, Ravings and Ruminations from the West of Scotland‘:

That the process of identifying the migrants should be estimated to be ‘lengthy’ exposes the laxity and inadequacy of our migration controls. Yet consider also its inhumanity – these men died here, far away from their own homes and families, and there is no one official to whom the police can turn who will be guaranteed to know their names. […]

They join Jean Charles de Menezes, Karolina Mikolajewska [pk: a polish care worker murdered in Bristol in feb 2006], the october men [pk: no clue here] and the martyrs of Morecambe Bay in the ranks of mass migration’s victims; for they are victims, just as surely as any British victim of a migrant criminal.

If we had had an immigration system that worked, De Menezes might have been deported; but at least he would still be alive! […]

Now i can read heartfelt sympathy for all those victims from the quotes above. Almost makes me believe that he really cares for the poor victims. In fact he seems to care so much that he has another blog purely focussed on ensuring that the family of Jean Charles de Menezes will not be compensated for his liquidation by the Metropolitan Police.

It is almost four years ago that i finally finished my thesis (‘The freedom of movement of workers in the context of the Eastern enlargement of the European Union’ – download the pdf here) and concluded my studies in comparative political science at the University of Amsterdam. After finishing the thesis and getting my diploma a quickly turned my attention to other projects and never really looked back at what i had written. however given the fact that in my thesis i set out to draw up…

… a clear picture of what can be expected in terms of intra-EU migration when the European Union of 15 is enlarged towards the East and Southeast. The aim of this paper is not to make a prediction about the exact amounts of migrants that are to be expected in a given constellation of events, but to give a theoretically funded assessment of the possible impacts of a change in political structure on migration from the Eastern European Candidate Countries (EECC) to the European Union of 15 (EU15) as it exists today….

… it would have been natural to look back on a couple of occasions to see if my ‘theoretically funded (sic!) assessment’ (which of course is bloated language for ‘my interpretation of the current situation beefed up with as many graphs, pie-charts and quotes as i can come up with’) did indeed turn out to be true. until today i have never really done this for whatever reasons.

Now today the European Commission published a report on the effects of workers mobility between the 10 new member states and the EU15 since the Eastern Enlargement on the 1st of may 2004 (FAQs here). The accession treaty required the Commission to come up with such a report in order to give the member states which opted to impose restrictions on the freedom of movement of workers from the EU10 (that is all old member except britain, sweden & ireland) an empirical basis for the reassessment of their position after 2 years (due on 30 april). now i have not had time to read the full report but if one can believe the media it pretty much confirms the concluding predictions of my thesis:

according to various news reports published today, the report that claims that ‘There was no evidence of a surge in either numbers of workers or welfare expenditure following enlargement, compared to the previous two years. New Member State (EU10) nationals represented less than 1% of the working age population in all countries except Austria (1,4% in 2005) and Ireland (3,8% in 2005)’ (EU comission) it further notes ‘… that East European workers sought out employment and did not abuse social security payments when they moved to Western countries’. (IHT) and that ‘…the barriers put in place when the EU had 12 members did not stop workers moving into these countries. But many workers had disappeared into the underground economy’ (idem.)

Anyway it is nice to know that I have not completely missed the mark while spending so much time on writing my thesis. I will try to re-read my paper and compare it to the report over the weekend and if there are more interesting findings I will report them back here…

Seems like everybody and his mother needs an iPod nowadays. First it is american senators who need the shiny device in order to understand that copying is not all that bad as the MPAA and RIAA tell them. Next thing you know it is the starving masses in our former colonies that demand the accessory of choice among the spoiled inhabitants of the former colonial powers. At least that is the message of stencil graffiti’s (by mantis) that have recently appeared in the UK:

Now as it is already known that people do horrible things to get their iPods, so maybe this is another incentive to try a little bit harder in keeping the have-nots out. We really don’t want them to mug iPods from senators thereby sending us to another dark age reigned by chaos, DRM and poverty – or something like this. (via gizmodo)

Got reminded again that the Netherlands have turned into a society of discussing racist cowards less then 10 hours after arriving back back in amsterdam. on the front-page of todays Volkskrant there is an article titled ‘Verdonk: op straat alleen Nederlands‘ (link requires paid registration). In English this translates into ‘Verdonk: Dutch must be spoken in the streets’. Apparently the minster for ‘integration’ has completely lost her mind (not that this is any news). The local website for english speaking non-dutch speakers has the following summary the speech given by the minister last weekend:

Immigration and Integration Minister Rita Verdonk favors the introduction of a code of conduct for the public to emphasize Dutch identity, including speaking Dutch in the street

I really do not know what to say about this. What about the fact that the Netherlands have been in the front line for criticizing the turks for not allowing the kurds to speak kurdish in public for a long time? They even made this a requirement for Turkey in order to start membership talks with the EU. does that mean that the Netherlands should be kicked out of the EU?

And why would any sane individual want to have more Dutch spoken in the street anyway? It is one of the most ugly sounding languages in the whole universe (if in doubt try travelling in the bord-bistro of a sunday evening berlin amsterdam intercity train). I would rather listen to anything expressed in Arabic or Tamazight (the two languages that Verdonk really wants to ban with her stupid proposal).