2019 has been a marathon of a news year. And it wasnt justimpeachment.

This past year, 101.9 WDET reported at a marijuana industry conventionin Detroit, on the migrant crisis at the Southern border of the U.S.,anddown the street from our Midtown studios on a racial discrimination lawsuit against Founders Brewingtaproom.

Our online audience may digest our news in different waysstreaming and reading stories at wdet.org, on NPR One, over a Google Home or Amazon Alexa or through our podcasts like MishMash and Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson, but there were some clear stories and local news events that stood out no matter themedium.

Heres our top stories, news and issues of2019.

TOP ISSUE OF2019

Eli Newman

Sandbags are stacked to precent flooding in Jefferson Chalmers, a neighborhood of Detroit that suffers from flooding due toitscanals.

In 2019, WDETs listeners and readerszeroed in on the dramatic effects of a warming planet.

This summer, WDETs Pat Batcheller reported on Great Lakes water levels reaching historic highs, after fluctuating for years, threatening homeowners alongLakeErie and Lake St. Claire with flooding and propertydamage.

Ellen Rutt

Cass Tech students painted signs with the help of artist Ellen Rutt for the Global Youth Climate Strikein2019.

Elsewhere, WDETs Eli Newman saw what flooding looks like in Jefferson-Chalmers, where residents saw water flowing into basements and homes. Residents said city officials were not doing enough to address theproblem.

My issue is blame, says Caroline Hardy-Grannum, a longtime resident of the area whose basement has about two feet of water in it. We all recognize what the canals are going to do. It has been predicted. But not what the drains are goingtodo.

For people around the world, standing up against climate change became a political moment. But others,Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson found,suffered fromecological grief brought on by wildlife loss and environmental change.

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TOP STORY OF2019

I dont want the church to go away. Its broken everybodysheart.

Mike Grobbel

WDETs Quinn Klinefelter reported on how Center Lines St. Clement Church couldface closure due to budget concerns. He attended mass one Sunday to hear what parishionersthought.

Its a beautiful church, everybodys friendly, Kelly Kannan said, her voice stained with tears. Beautiful church, I dont want the church to go away. Stay here. [The thought of it closing,]its brokeneverybodysheart.

It was one of our most-listened to and read stories of 2019, sparking discussions around architecture, faith, community and the preservation of historicspaces.

Read thestory

TOP LOCAL NEWS EVENTS OF2019

From automotive mergers to legal marijuana and budget stalemate in Lansing, WDETs airwaves wasnt short on local news to bring to our listeners. Here are the top news events and trends of 2019, as determined by our audience through page clicks, listens andshares.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has had a memorable first-term, with her signature .45-cent gas tax increase to fund road improvementsgetting caught up in budget haggling, the threat of a state shutdown, and eventually leading to her issuing nearly a billion dollars inline-item vetoes in aRepublican-passedstatebudget.

She also exercisedexecutive authority through a banof flavored-vaping productanda controversy at Wayne State University (Editors Note: WSU owns WDETslicense).

Readmore

Shiraz Ahmed / WDET

Empty shelves at a prospective medical marijuana facility in CenterLine,Mich.

Legalization of recreational marijuana may have passed at the ballot box last year, but it quickly became apparent that customers would have to wait for the industry to get setup.

Municipalities got to vote on what recreational marijuana would like in their backyard, and many turned down the offer.

But the first establishments did open up in Ann Arbor, and even medical marijuana is continuing to grow in thestate.

Readmore

Despite an anti-gerrymandering ballot measure that creates a redistricting commission to draw political mapspassing last year, the practice continues to threaten representation inMichigan.

First, a US Supreme Court decision passed down said thatfederal courts cannot intervene in partisan gerrymandering cases. The decision involved cases out of Maryland and North Carolina, but it had a major impact on a case that was waiting appealinMichigan.

Meanwhile, the redistricting commission began taking applications to serve on the board, but funding for the commission was threatened during state budgetnegotiations.

Readmore

The announcement of Fiat Chryslers merger with French automaker Peugeot turned heads around the world, but particularly here in metroDetroit.

One expert thinks the merger is representative of the future of the autoindustry.

Readmore

Jake Neher/WDET

The historic UAW strike against General Motors was one of our top news events of the year. It drew attention nationwide, and caught the glance of various Presidentialcandidates.

WDETs Laura Herberg wantedto show the human side of what a labor action looks like. She reported on what strikers do in their spare timeand spoke to workers striking outside GMs Warren Transmission Operationsfacility.

The strike ended up lasting a month and costing the state $18.5 million in lost income tax andwages.

Editors note:WDETreporters are members of the Professional and Administrative Union, Local 1979,UAW

Readmore

Of course, no listing of news events in 2019 wouldbe complete without the impeachment of President Donald Trump, only the third president to be impeached in U.S.history.

The Presidents first stop after being impeached was Battle Creek,Mich.for a plannedrally. The vote draws attention to Michigans Democratic Congressional delegation, specifically Reps. Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens, two red-to-blue 2018 swingdistricts.

But this story will continue in 2020, as the Senate tries Trump on the two articles ofimpeachment.

Readmore

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WDET's Top Story, News and Issue of 2019 - WDET

Hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children on the Greek island of Lesbos are living in conditions that pose severe risks to their physical and mental well-being, Human Rights Watch said in a new report. The Greek government announced plans to resettle children on the mainland, but aid organizations on Lesbos see little improvement so far.

Unaccompanied minors on the Greek island of Lesbos are being exposed to degrading conditions and often left to "fend for themselves," according to areportthis week from Human Rights Watch.

The research draws on anonymized interviews with 22 children from October this year, some as young as 14, living on Lesbos. Severe overcrowding in Moria, the island's main camp, has led to a lack of age-appropriate accommodation for children traveling alone or separated from family. The majority of the children spoken to for the report were living either in areas alongside unrelated adults, or in a large informal area that has sprung up outside the camp.

The report calls for an urgent response to the dangerous and unsanitary conditions the children are living in. One 16-year-old interviewee reported sleeping on a cardboard carton on the floor.

Sharing tents with adult strangers

Lesbos, alongside other Greek island "hotspots" on Samos and Chios, has experienced the biggest increase of boat arrivals since 2016, when the EU-Turkey Deal was introduced in an attempt to stem the flow of refugees to the continent.

With over 18,000 people now in a camp with capacity for little over 2,000, thousands -- includingthose with complex health needs, pregnant women, and young children -- are sleeping in tents on the rough, sloping ground of an olive grove. The area is often referred to as the "jungle" by those living there.

There are currently 968 unaccompanied and separated children on Lesbos, according to the latest UN figures. With only 147 spots for age-appropriate accommodation outside the camp, and 210 spaces inside Moria, hundreds are being left vulnerable and exposed to insecure, and sometimes violent, conditions.

Interviewees in the Human Rights Watch report described having to share tents with adult strangers, or on the ground without shelter -- some for as long as three months.

One 16-year-old interviewee from Afghanistan said in the report that he couldnt sleep while in the large main tent in Moria camp, intended for new arrivals. "There is no control who will come and sleep in there," he said. "The most difficult [thing] is that there's no light in the tent at night because the lamps are broken. It's terrifying because you don't know who or what is moving inside the tent."

"Everything is dangerous here -- the cold, the place I sleep, the fights," said one 14-year-old interviewee, who stated they lived in a rat-infested tent with 50 other people.

Not enough shelters available

There has always been a fragmented child protection system for unaccompanied minors on the island, Elina Sarantou from legal service provider HIAS on Lesbos, pointed out. Problems have included lack of information, an inefficient guardianship system, poor quality asylum interviews and delays, and inhumane reception conditions.

"The numbers however have now increased and it is therefore difficult, or even impossible, to ignore anymore," said Sarantou, adding that the current situation is directly related to shelter.

"In order for a minor to be transferred, a space has to open up on the mainland," Sarantou told InfoMigrants. "And since there are only shelters for a quarter of the minors in Greece, there is an obvious bottleneck."

In November the Greek government announced plans to respond to the severe overcrowding of hotspot areas such as Lesbos on the Greek islands. Plans include moving 20,000 people to the mainland early next year, and shutting camps on Lesbos, Chios and Samos - replacing them with 'closed' facilities that human rights advocates have feared will constitute detention centers. While transfers from the islands to the mainland have increased in recent months, high numbers of boat arrivals have also continued.

Relocation to the mainland

At the end of last month the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis also announcedNo Child Alone, a new scheme to respond to the situation of unaccompanied minors on the islands -- promising to quickly settle thousands of children on the mainland. HIAS however say they have seen little implementation on Lesbos so far.

At the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) pediatric clinic outside Moria, mental health activity manager Angela Modarelli says, since October, they have started to see unaccompanied minors accessing psychological support "because the situation is getting worse and worse."

"They are in an unknown place, an unknown world - not speaking the language - without any support," said Modarelli, adding they are treated like adults even though they are children. "Every night when it becomes dark, they have to find a way to keep themselves safe.''

"Mostly when they arrive to see us it's already a crisis moment," said Modarelli. She has seen cases of self-harm, depression, suicidal ideation and plans, sometimes attempts. "And we had kids of 16 and 17 having a plan to end their life. Because... this is too much. They dont see that they are welcome here."

Most of the unaccompanied minors interviewed in the recent Human Rights Watch report also reported experiencing psychological distress.

Although long term solutions are urgently needed now, Afshan Khan, UNICEF special coordinator for the migrant response in Europe, toldInfoMigrants,Greece could not be expected to provide this support alone.

"UNICEF is once again urging European Governments to increase pledges to relocate unaccompanied and separated refugee and migrant children, fast-track family reunifications for those who already have relatives in Europe and increase funds supporting response efforts," said Khan.

"Unaccompanied children are among the most vulnerable people on the Greek islands, and they need Greece and other European countries to take care of them," said Coss in the Human Rights Watch report. "The EU and its member states should demonstrate responsibility and care for kids who suffer there every day."

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A crisis within a crisis: Hundreds of unaccompanied minors left to 'fend for themselves' on Lesbos - InfoMigrants

Swedens right-wing Sweden Democrats are now neck and neck with the ruling Social Democrats in opinion polls. Though vilified and demonized, the partys success represents a complete failure of liberalism in the face of reality.

The Sweden Democrats - who were until recently dismissed as a fringe, racist party - are now surging in the polls. A voter survey, commissioned by the Dagens Nyheter newspaper last week, puts the party within 0.2 percentage points of Prime Minister Stefan Lofvens left-wing Social Democrats. Moreover, voters now agree with the partys policies on nine out of nine issues.

On immigration, 43 percent of voters side with the party and its leader, Jimmie Akesson. Only 15 percent favor Lofvens policies. Likewise, 31 percent favor Akessons position on law and order, compared to 19 percent for Lofven.

The press has not made Akessons ride to the top easy. Yet, most outlets have failed to dig up dirt on the 40-year-old politician, who like Frances Marine Le Pen, has made a point of distancing his party from its extreme-right roots and presenting a clean-cut image.

Akesson was rounded in the media for admitting to an online gambling addiction several years ago, but voters evidently didnt mind. Akessons past comments about homosexual parents were dug up by author Jonas Gardell for a much-publicized op-ed two weeks ago, readers gave him their vote a week later regardless. Do-gooding musician Bono even made a spectacle of comparing Akesson to Hitler before last years elections, to no avail.

Its not difficult to find the real reason for Akessons popularity. Sweden is in the throes of a crime wave. Murder, assault, rape, threats, and harassment have all skyrocketed since 2015, according to the countrys Crime Prevention Council. Sexual offenses in particular have tripled in the last four years, while murder and manslaughter have more than doubled.

Furthermore, Sweden has emerged as the hand grenade attack capital of Europe. In 2018 there were 162 bombings reported to police, and 93 reported in the first five months of this year, 30 more than during the same period in 2018. The level of attacks is extreme in a country that is not at war, Crime Commissioner Gunnar Appelgren told SVT last year.

A 2017 investigation found that immigrants, the majority of them from the Middle East and North Africa, were behind 90 percent of shootings in Sweden. Meanwhile, the countrys police force has identified 50 immigrant-heavy neighborhoods as vulnerable - a term many have taken to mean no-go zones.

The Sweden Democrats reject multiculturalism, and have proposed a tightening of immigration law and a return of refugees to their home countries. The party has advocated life without parole for serious offenses, and the deportation of foreigners found guilty of serious crimes.

Many of us remember another Sweden, Akesson wrote in an op-ed last month. An everyday life where crime was there but not so close. Crime that was not as crude and ruthless as what we see today.

Akessons paean to the past has been criticized as the typical nostalgia of nationalism, but in its place, Lofven has only offered denial, blaming segregation, poverty and unemployment for the crime in Swedens ghettos.

The segregation is because there is...too high unemployment in these areas. But that would have been the same regardless of who had lived there. If you put people born in Sweden under the same conditions, you get the same result he said in an interview with SVT last month.

However, unemployment has fallen as shootings have risen. Even if unemployment alone is to blame for violence, Lofven did not mention the fact that the unemployment rate among migrants in Sweden is triple the national average, while 90 percent of refugees who arrived since the 2015 migrant crisis are unemployed.

Instead, his government has engaged in across-the-board denialism. The taxpayer-funded Swedish Institute puts out videos downplaying the crime problem and literally telling critics on Twitter that nothing has happened here in Sweden. The institute has also created an Arabic-language advertising campaign inviting prospective migrants in with promises of generous welfare benefits.

Lofven publicly denied the existence of no-go zones in a statement given at the White House last year. But when crime statistics tell a different story, the Ministry of Justice has a plan for that too: suppress politically sensitive information, meddle with figures, and ignore embarrassing results.

Lofvens liberalism may have resonated with voters when he came to power in 2014. But the migrant crisis and subsequent crime wave that followed a year later proved its undoing, as the country was repaid for its humanitarianism in blood and a drain on welfare. A quick google search reveals hundreds of articles that pose questions like Why is Sweden shifting to the right?

The answer to that question is simple. Liberalism has clashed with reality, and lost.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Triumph of the right in Sweden is a result of the total failure of liberalism - RT

Pope Francis has described indifference towards the migrant crisis as a sin and called detention centres in Libya as places of torture and despicable slavery.

The Pope, who has made defending refugees a key part of his time at the head of the Catholic Church, was speaking as he welcomed 33 migrants to the Vatican from a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos.

He said all detention centres, which are overcrowded and a hot spot for human rights violations, should be closed and migrant traffickers punished.

Exact migrant figures in Libya are difficult to determine with many held in unofficial camps where abuse is particularly rife, but the figure is believed to be well over 600,000.

So far in 2019 just under 100,000 migrants arrived by sea to Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus and Malta, according the UNs refugee agency. Some 1,277 are dead or missing.

While the figures are a far cry from 2015 when over a million made the voyage by sea, the percentage of deaths to arrivals has risen sharply.

"How can we fail to hear the desperate cry of so many brothers and sisters who prefer to face a stormy sea rather than die slowly in Libyan detention camps, places of torture and ignoble slavery?", the Pope said.

"How can we remain indifferent to the abuses and violence of which they are innocent victims, leaving them at the mercy of unscrupulous traffickers? Our ignorance is a sin."

Pope Francis criticised the policy of preventing migrants from landing in Europe, which has repeatedly seen rescue ships stranded in the Mediterranean and unable to dock.

This approach has emboldened the Libyan coastguard to lead rescues, which typically sees the migrants returned to detention centres.

"Serious efforts must be made to empty the detention camps in Libya, evaluating and implementing all possible solutions," Pope Francis said.

"We must denounce and prosecute traffickers who exploit and abuse migrants,"

The Popes comments came as he unveiled a cross adorned with a life jacket, which had been worn by a migrant who died last year while crossing the Mediterranean.

I decided to expose here this life jacket, crucified on this cross, to remind us that we must keep our eyes open, keep our hearts open, to remind everyone of the absolute commitment to save every human life, a moral duty that unites believers and non-believers, he said.

In 2016 Pope Francis flew three Syrian families languishing in Lesbos to the Vatican and he has been highly critical of the mistreatment of migrants.

Updated: December 20, 2019 04:35 PM

Continued here:

Pope Francis decries Libyan migrant camps as places of torture and slavery - The National

Twenty-nineteen was another powerful year for world cinema, if not an entirely compelling one for American filmshence the fact that six of my entries for the past year were international movies. But its a masterpiece from one of the dominant voices of American independent cinema in the aughts that claims the No. 1 spot.

Ash is Purest White, the master Chinese director JiaZhangkes existential spin on the gangster epic, follows Qiao, the fiercelyfaithful girlfriend to Bin, a middling mobster. After serving five years inprison for firing a gun to protect Bin, Qiao must forge a new life, griftingfrom one mark to another while searching for Bin, whose allegiances haveshifted. Zhangkes direction and narrative preoccupations drift much like hisunorthodox heroine, following her on boat and train, and culminating in afascinating reversal of fortune. Doubling as a metaphor for Chinas owncomplicated growth over the 21st century, Ash is Purest White is a pristinejewel of movie with stylistic associations ranging from Antonioni to Scorsese.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults stirring Waves is acombustible family drama of unusual enormity, and one that hits literally closeto home: It was filmed in Broward and Dade counties. When a shoulder injurythreatens to derail a star athletes plans for the future, it sets off a chainof tragic consequences presented with almost unbearable tension. A diptych of amovie, its second half, which follows his sister Emily through her firstbudding romance, is more contemplative, but no less profound. Set against thebackdrop of the brutal Darwinism of the college admissions process and thedouble standards society places on black Americans to excel, Waves is aguidebook for coping in the 21st century. Its emotionally draining, and worthevery minute.

This German import marries the harrowing solitude of asurvivalist drama with headline-ripped social commentary. During a characterssolo voyage to lush Ascension Island, she faces a brutal stormone renderedwith a camera that yaws from side to side along with her yacht, and anunnerving sound design that places us among the creaking infrastructure of theboat and the apocalyptic torrents of Mother Nature. But the movies darkestturn arrives later, when she happens upon a wrecked fishing trawler ofabandoned passengers, of whose plight the Coast Guard seems curiously unmoved.Examining the human capacity to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, itsmoral heft reverberates like an unanswered SOS call.

In director Christian Petzolds slippery adaptation of AnnaSegherss World War II-era novel, he transforms her story about an unnamedFrench narrator fleeing the German invasion into a temporal jumble ofhistorical rhymes and repeats. It could be 1944, 1984 or 2014, and maybe itsall three of these. Petzold wants us to feel unmoored; this is a story, afterall, about dislocation as a permanent state. Transitis propelledby enough bureaucratic cul-de-sacs and absurdist ironies that its as if aKafka story was filmed in the slick style of late 1960s Hitchcock, to saynothing of the looming influence of Samuel Beckett. Petzolds unspecifieddystopia has plenty to say about the Nazi regime, about third-worlddictatorships, about todays unfolding migrant crisis, all of them connected bya universal condition ofstuckness.

Quentin Tarantinos black comedy, set against the backdrop of the Manson Family/Sharon Tate murder 50 years ago, is a chronicle of inside-Hollywood metafiction. Its a layered love letter to the films Tarantino himself famously binged while working the register at Video Archives in Los Angeles in his 20s, and is thus a cinephiles heaven. Tarantinos trademark leisurely pacinghis propensity to let scenes play out past other filmmakers expiration timesworks to the movies loosely structured favor. There is very little plot to speak of but a great deal of insightful observations, witty asides, and generous dips into kidney-shaped pools of Hollywood nostalgia. Yet the movies revisionist history, boisterous humor and self-referentiality skate over its blunt assessment of a studio system in its death spasms and a generation losing its innocence.

Read the full review here

Celine Sciammas historical romance is a defiant erasure ofthe male gaze, a domineering fixture and a theoretical bugaboo since the dawnof cinema. The story is simple enough: A painter, Marianne, travels to a remoteisland in Brittany to paint a commissioned portrait of the aristocraticHeloise, an unwilling subject who is soon to be shipped off to Milan in anarranged marriage. The women end up falling in love, which is, of course,forbidden. What could have been the stuff of Merchant-Ivory prestige cinemainstead borrows its syntax from rigorous filmmakers such as Ophuls, and Powelland Pressburger, co-opting their rigorous melodrama as a shot across the bow topatriarchies everywhere. Distinctions between artist and model, mistress andservant, and form and content burn away in the movies crackling fireplace,while its symbolic send-off is at once subversive and heartbreaking.

Greta Gerwigs masterly follow-up to Lady Bird extends her affinities for young women who chafe againstsocietys strictures. She shuffles the source material into an ambitiousbifurcated narrative that oscillates between the characters young adulthood,after three of the sisters have left the March family home, and a formativeperiod seven years earlier, when they all lived together as the Civil War woundto its bloody close. This approach allows past and present to rhyme in waysthat are both richly ironic and devastating, so that its themes ofproto-feminism, gender roles, sacrifice and patriotism can ripple across thecanvas like leitmotifs. Though in some ways her movie is a modernist, playfuladaptation, she is in the best way a reverential classicist, with countlessimages that evoke John Ford. Every shot resembles the sort of painting youwould like to step into.

Pedro Almodvars tender memory filmabout a reclusive,physically hurting filmmaker whose latest festival invitation prompts his past tolap against his present like waves on a beachfrontis unlike anything yet made from this naughty provocateur ofcandy-colored melodrama. Yet as a remembrance of things past and a lucidreckoning with the directors own weaknesses and misgivings,Pain andGloryis a pinnacle of autofiction, in many ways representingeverything his oeuvre has been building toward. He saves the films mostself-reflexive masterstroke for the marvelous final sequencean act of bravuramagic that, once you unpeel its layers, speaks to the curative properties offilmmaking.

WithParasite, the South Korean mad genius Boon Joon-ho has crafted a satire so funny, so savage and so necessary in our present moment of global unrest and anxiety that it makes Luis Bunuels bourgeois vivisections look almost tame. Think pieces will be written about popular cultures response to this young centurys grift, class envy and income inequality; many will lead withParasite. But its his refusal to demonize or caricature either of the movies warring families that renders the films pathos so powerful.Parasitehas a great deal to say about a range of other topics, toolike globalization American cultural appropriationbut its the moments of casual malice, whether delivered from the bubble of privilege, in one familys case, or by the need to feel superior toanyoneelse, in the others case, that condemn both sides.

Read the full review here

The title is seemingly cynical, as no movie has betterexplored the brutality and absurdity of the soulless divorce industrythanMarriage Story. Yet writer-director Noah Baumbach, whosescreenplay drew partly from his own divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, takesthe sober, cosmic view of marriages inextricable hold on people even whendocuments, and feelings, and life itself suggest otherwise. Marriage Storyischock full of lived-in insights that perhaps only a middle-aged person couldreliably write. And without much of a plot to propel the scenes forward, themovie assumes its power from its accretion of accurate details, its micro setpieces, its deadpan wit even in times of pain and sorrow. All of which is tosay thatMarriage Storyisdespite its achieved sublimity, thetears it will doubtlessly induce, and its characters (literal, in one case)open woundsan unlikely comedy.

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Top 10 Films of 2019 - Boca Raton

In Vathy, in the overcrowded migrant camp on the Greek island of Samos, news agencies are reporting that riots have broken out. Fires were started and the police were met with stones and protests when they arrived to break up the unrest.

Accordingto the German press agency dpa, local media reported that the Greek police setoff tear gas to try and calm the protests at the Greek island camp of Vathy onThursday morning.

Migrantsare reported to have started fires and thrown stones at the police in protest at the overcrowded conditions in the camp.Schools in a 600-meter radius from the camp were reportedly evacuated becauseof the smoke from the fires.

Dpa saysthat the protests are thought to have come this time from the African community in the camp who have beendemanding for days that they be transferred to the Greek mainland.

Similar clashes in October

InfoMigrants reported that similar clashes broke outin the same camp in October2019. At that point the trouble stemmed from a mass brawl between Afghan andSyrian residents, which forced police to use tear gas to disperse the crowd.

At thattime, the medical charity, Doctors without Borders (MSF) said that almost halfof the camps inhabitants were women and children. In November, the International Presidentof MSF Christos Christou tweeted after visiting Samos that he had seen a protractedstate of human tragedy.

Numbers keep increasing

Accordingto the UNHCRs latest data, more than 71,000 migrants have arrived in Greecethis year alone. Although the Greek government has been making efforts totransfer people from overcrowded accommodation on the islands to the Greekmainland, there are still some 40,500 refugees and migrants residing on theAegean islands. The majority of that population is from Afghanistan (around45%), Syria (20%) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (6%).

Theauthorities have been transferring around 1,000 people every week to themainland but more people continue to arrive. In the week 9-15 December almost2,000 people arrived with a little more than 1,000 on Lesbos and 208 on theisland of Samos.

On December10, MSF Germany posted pictures of a makeshift room in the Vathy camp. They tweeted in German: This is a bathroom.Difficult to believe dont you think? What is even more difficult to believe isthat this bathroom is where three small children have to shower, and thatthis bathroom is in Europe. This is the sad reality of life for around 2,500 childrenliving in the Vathy camp on Samos.

Tense situation

Samosmayor Georgios Stantzos has been speaking out for months about securityproblems related to the overcrowding in the camps, according to the Germanweekly newspaper Die Zeit. On December 18, an English language local websiteGreekReporter posted a video from Samos24.grin which Stantzos was filmed inthe town square chasing migrants and shouting Go the F**k Away. GreekReporter added that his intervention followed a police operation to dispersea demonstration on the square.

The mayorreportedly told Greek Reporter that he regretted using foul language but saidthat it was a knee-jerk response to an incident which could have turned veryviolent. It was a human response to a very tense situation. The mayor addedthat the migrants had been blocked from occupying the square and that on theway to their demonstration they had vandalized at least five cars.

Stantzossaid that his reactions and those of his fellow islanders were not racist andthat he was just against the few migrants who were intent on creating trouble.Stantzos told Greek reporter that the overcrowding had become a human rightsproblem [and] a law and order issue as severe delinquency problems arise.

ManosLogothetis, government commissioner for migration in Greece told the GermanFunke media group on Wednesday: The crisis is happening now, and it is serious.

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Riots in overcrowded Greek migrant camp on Samos - InfoMigrants

What a year its been for Italy, from the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinicis death to the collapse of the government.

As a new year and decade approaches, lets take a look at the biggest news to come out of Italy in 2019.

Two weeks into January, Italian authorities confirmed that fugitive left-wing militant and convicted murderer Cesare Battisti had been captured in Bolivia after almost three decades on the run.

Battisti (pictured below),who had been sentenced to life in prison for four murders in the 1970s, was arrested on January 14 after an international police squad tracked him tothe Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de La Sierra.

He had been living in Brazil for years, until the nations outgoing president signed a decree ordering his extradition.

Two months after he was brought back to Italy, Battisti confessed to four murders during the 1970s, after decades of denying any involvement in the homicides.

He confessed to killing a policeman and a prison guard, to taking part in the murder of a butcher and to helping plan the killing of a jeweller who died in a shootout which left his 14-year-old son in a wheelchair.

As people settled in to 2019, Italys migrant crisis became an even more pressing issue following the governments decision to block Italian ports to charity rescue ships.

On January 9, a weeks-long standoff came to an end when 49 migrants stranded at sea for weeks aboard two rescue ships arrived in Malta after eight EU member states, including Italy, agreed to take them in.

TheSea-Watch 3 had rescued 32 people from an unsafe boat off the coast of Libya on December 22, while another German charity, Sea-Eye, had rescued 17 others on December 29.

Both ships had been floating in Maltese watersfor weeks after all EU countries refused to offer them a safe port to dock.

This was the first standoff of the year, but certainly not the last.

On January 30, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced that 47 migrants stranded aboard a rescue boat operated by German NGO Sea-Watch could finally disembark after Italy and six other countries had agreed to take them in.

The vessel had been stranded in Sicilian waters for over a week after Italy and other European nations had refused to let it dock.

Sea-Watchhad earlier filed an urgent case at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against Italy for refusing to allow its ship to dock and the mainly sub-Saharan migrants, including 15 minors, to disembark.

Italys Interior Minister Matteo Salvini was later placed under investigation for alleged false imprisonment after refusing to allow the migrants to disembark.

In February, more than 10 million viewers tuned in to Italian state broadcaster Rai for theopening night of the Sanremo Music Festival.

Famous Italian singer Andrea Bocelli wowed crowds on the night, performing an evocative duet with his son Matteo.

Following five exciting evenings of performances, Mahmood (pictured below)was crowned the winner of the 69th edition of the festival, for his song Soldi (Money).

Born to an Egyptian father and Sardinian mother, Mahmood became a symbol of multiculturalism at a time when the nation was grappling with the anti-immigrant rhetoric of far-right League leader Matteo Salvini.

In Rome, flights were suspended and a terminal was evacuated at Ciampino airport on February 7, when three World War II bombs were discovered during construction work.

The bombs weighed a combined 150 kilograms, including around 75 kilograms of gunpowder.

Less than two weeks later, flights from Ciampino airport were delayed after the departures area was closed due to a fire in the terminal basement.

While the blaze was reportedly put out in less than a minute, it caused crowds and flight cancellations for most of the day.

In February, Pope Francis held alandmark summit on sexual abuse and paedophilia within the Church, calling for an all-out battle against the widespread scandal.

Over four days, 114 senior bishops listened to speeches about the outrage of the people and heard the horror stories of victims.

On the first day of the summit,Pope Francis called for concrete measuresto tackle clerical sexual abuse and paedophilia.

If in the Church there should emerge even a single case of abuse which already in itself represents an atrocity that case will be faced with the utmost seriousness, he said.

Just days before the summit, Pope Francis had defrocked a former archbishop and cardinal over sexual abuse accusations in a first for the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican banned AmericanTheodore McCarrick (pictured below)from practising as a priest after he was found guilty in January of sexually abusing a teenager 50 years ago.

He was the first ever cardinal to be defrocked for sexual abuse.

Just this week, the Pope made even more progress, announcing sweeping changes to the way the Roman Catholic Church deals with cases of sexual abuse of children, abolishing the rule of pontifical secrecy that previously covered them.

This is an epochal decision, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, the Vaticans most experienced sexual abuse investigator, told Vatican Radio.

The lifting of pontifical secrecy in sexual abuse investigations was a key demand by church leaders, including Scicluna and the German cardinal Reinhard Marx, at the summit held in February.

March began with the sad news that crews were searching for a missing Italian climber and his British climbing partner stuck on a treacherous peak known as Killer Mountain.

Daniele Nardi (pictured below) and Tom Ballard were attempting the 8126-metre climb in Pakistans Himalayas, one of the hardest mountaineering feats in the world, when they went missing.

The bodies of the two climbers were found almost two weeks after the pair went missing.

The nation was rocked again when eight Italians and several British and Irish UN employees based in Rome were among those killed in the tragic Ethiopian Airlines disaster on March 10.

Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 passengers and eight crew on board.

Italy was wrapped up in another international tragedy in March: the Christchurch mosque massacre.

The weapons and ammunition used in the mass shooting of 50 Muslims in the New Zealand city were emblazoned with the names of several violent white supremacists, including Italian mass shooter Luca Traini.

Traini is an Italian neo-Nazi sympathiser who injured six African migrants in a series of racially-motivated drive-by shootings in Macerata on February 3, 2017.

Meanwhile back home, Italians received the news that a bus driver had abducted 51 children and their chaperones outside Milan, ordering the childrens hands to be bound and threatening to kill all those on board before setting fire to the vehicle.

Twelve children and one adult were taken to hospital for low-level smoke inhalation and the hijacker himself was treated for burns.

Ousseynou Sy, the driver who carried out thehijackingto protest againstmigrant deaths at sea, claimed he acted after hearing the voices of children dying in the Mediterranean.

The interior ministry later announced it would speed up granting citizenship to a quick-thinking student who hid and called authorities when the bus was hijacked.

The Carabinieri police of Sandonato Milanese identified the student as 13-year-old Ramy Shehata (pictured below).

Ramy, who has been hailed a hero by classmates and authorities, was born in Italy but is not an Italian citizen.

Speaking of astounding teens, March 15 saw thousands of Italian students walk out of school as part of a global strike to demand action on climate change by world leaders.

The initiative was spearheaded by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who just this month was name Time magazines Person of the Year.

Thunberg later visited Italy to make her message loud and clear.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for the adults and politicians to tell us what they consider is politically possible in the society they have created, the 16-year-old told a crowd of around 25,000 demonstrators in Rome in April.

Teenage pedal power was used to charge the stage where Thunberg gave her speech.

Around 128 bicycles were rigged up to a dynamo and generator in Piazza del Popolo.

During her visit, Thunberg also met with the Pope, who encouraged her to carry on with her mission.

April 7 marked 10 years since LAquila was struck by an earthquake which killed 309 people, left at least 80,000 homeless and devastated around 56 villages in the area.

The bells of Santa Maria del Suffragio church in the citys historic centre chimed 309 times at 3:32 am on the day the time the tremor hit a decade ago in memory of the dead.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte were among those who joined local residents for a candlelit commemoration in the towns central Piazza Duomo.

The wound of a local community is a wound of the national community, Conte said.

We have a duty not to forget, but above all we have a duty to be constantly striving to relaunch this territory.

A few days later, the Stefano Cucchi murder case, which had gripped the country for a decade, had a major breakthrough when a police officer gave an eyewitness account of the events leading up to Cucchis death in 2009.

Francesco Tedesco, one of three military police officers charged with Cucchis murder, told a courtroom in Romethat his colleagueshad kicked and punched the 31-year-old (pictured below) in the face repeatedly, causing his death.

Tedesco also alleged he had been threatened by officials who told him to stay silent and conceal his report about the incident.

In November, Carabinieri officers Alessio di Bernardo and Raffaele dAlessandro were both found guilty of the involuntary manslaughter of 31-year-old Cucchi and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Speaking after the ruling, Cucchis sister Ilaria told local media: Stefano was killed. We knew that and weve been repeating it for 10 years. Now perhaps my brother can rest in peace.

It was an eventful year for Italian football, with Juventus winning a record-extending eighth straight Italian Serie A title with a 2-1 win over Fiorentina.

Juventus forward Cristiano Ronaldo was crowned this years best player in Italys Serie A competition at an awards ceremony in Milan this month.

Ronaldoscored 26 goals in his debut season inItalyand led Juventus towards another domestic title.

But it wasnt all good news.

Italian football saw a surge in racist incidents at matches this season, with Inter Milan strikerRomelu Lukakuhaving been the victim of monkey chants in Cagliari and Brescia starMario Balotelli threatening to walk off the pitch following abuse in Verona.

In September, Fiorentinas Braziliandefender Dalbert Henrique asked the referee to halt play when he was abused byfans.

In October, Roma issued an apology after its supporters racially abused Sampdorias English midfielder Ronaldo Vieira.

Meanwhile, Romas city rivals Lazio received a partial stadium ban from UEFA after racist chanting during a game with French outfit Rennes.

All 20 of Italys Serie A clubs on November 29 signed a joint open letter to fans condemning racism in stadiums.

Just days after the letter was signed, Italian sports daily Corriere dello Sport was accused of fuelling racism and crossing the line of acceptability with the front-page headline Black Friday.

May 2 marked the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vincis death.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron came together to commemorate the historic event.

Many discoveries were made public during the year to mark the anniversary, including the DNA testing of a hair believed to be Leonardos and the proof the genius was ambidextrous.

On the fashion front, Prada announced in May that it would remove animal fur from its collections starting from their 2020 Spring/Summer Womens collections, becoming the latest brand to join the fur-free alliance.

June had an explosive start, when Mount Etna erupted on the first weekend of the month, spitting molten lava high into the sky and putting on a show for locals and tourists on the southern Italian island.

While no one was injured on that occasion, a hiker was killed the following month when Stromboli erupted(pictured below).

It was like being in hell because of the rain of fire coming from the sky, Italian news agencies quoted local priest Giovanni Longo as saying.

It was a year of wild weather for Italy, from a record-breaking heatwave in June, to severe storms in November which left Venice and many other parts of Italy under water.

One of the biggest stories to come out of Italy rocked the nation in July, when police officer Mario Cerciello Rega (pictured below) was stabbed to death on a street in Rome.

Hundreds of people attended Cerciello Regas funeral, including then deputy prime ministers, Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio.

Two Americans, Gabriel Natale Hjorth, 18, and Finnegan Elder, 19, were charged with aggravated homicide and attempted extortion following the murder in Romes upmarket Prati neighbourhood.

Elder later confessed to stabbing Cerciello Rega with a US Marine partially-serrated, close-quarters combat knife, police said, as they gave a detailed account of what happened on the night of the attack.

View original post here:

The biggest news from Italy in 2019 Italianmedia - Il Globo

The president of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado, will ask the international community for help in the face of an influx of migrants, the government said Sunday.

As you know, we are a country that receives migration and refugees, mainly from Nicaragua and also from Venezuela, as well as from other countries, said the president shortly before leaving for the World Forum on Refugees in Geneva, Switzerland.

The outbreak of the Nicaraguan political crisis due to the repression of the anti-government protests that began in April 2018 caused a wave of migration to Costa Rica from that country.

Costa Rica has received some 55,000 Nicaraguans of the 88,000 who left the country because of the crisis, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

Our participation (in Geneva) will aim to position the shared responsibility of the countries in the face of the phenomenon of refuge and the phenomena of migration, and obtain resources of international cooperation to address it, Alvarado said.

Central America is also a transit route for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, as well as African and Asian countries, seeking to reach the United States.

Costa Rica is one of the co-sponsors, along with Ethiopia, Turkey, Germany and Pakistan, of the migration forum that will begin Tuesday.

Alvarado plans to meet Monday with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, to discuss ways to address the flow of migration in Central America and Mexico.

The country already generates an important counterpart of support for the migrant population, but we need support from other countries to realize that shared responsibility, the Costa Rican president said.

Three former Costa Rican presidents, Miguel ngel Rodrguez, Laura Chinchilla and Luis Guillermo Sols, supported the call for international cooperation funds to assist migrants and refugees.

The three disseminated their message in a video prepared by the SOS Human Rights Nicaragua organization that warns of the deterioration of the Nicaraguan political situation.

We are, in our hemisphere, the country that has received the second-highest migrant population, after the United States. We estimate that by the end of this year we will have about 100,000 Nicaraguans and 30,000 Venezuelans living with us, President Chinchilla said in the video.

Original post:

Costa Rica will ask for international help to assist migrant crisis - The Tico Times

The Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog has cleared officials 0f wrongdoing in the cases of two migrant children's deaths.

The inspector general released two separate reports after investigating the deaths of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal on December 8, 2018, and 8-year-old Felipe Gmez Alonzoon December 24, 2018.

The Associated Press reported that thewatchdog previously issued a report that criticized Border Patrol for "dangerous overcrowding" amid "an acute and worsening crisis" in its Rio Grande Valley detention facilities.

Photos and statements in the report detailed dangerously strained space and resources in the facility, piling on to the concerns months after the children died about the threats facing migrant families while in US custody.

Jakelin died at a hospital in El Paso, Texas, eight hours after Customs and Border Protection took her into custody.

According to a timeline released by CBP, agents first became aware of the girl's symptoms during a bus ride to a Border Patrol station after the girl was apprehended with a larger group of migrants.

By the time the group arrived at the station 90 minutes later, Jakelin had stopped breathing.

Border Patrol officials said agents did "everything in their power" to save the girl but that she had not had food or water for days. They added that an initial screening showed no evidence of health problems and that her father had signed a form indicating she was in good health.

In Felipe's case, he also died not long after crossing the border. He and his father arrived at a hospital in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where he was found to have a fever of 103 degrees. Staff diagnosed him with a common cold, and released him just before 3 p.m., according to the Associated Press. He was then reportedly prescribed the antibiotic Amoxicillin and the painkiller Ibuprofen before he was taken with his father to a holding facility.

By 10 p.m., his condition appeared to have worsened, and he died shortly before midnight.

The Jakelin and Felipe's deaths were just two of several reported child fatalities that prompted scrutiny over CBP's medical care for migrant children. The Trump administration noted at the time that there was a surge in border crossings that put immense pressure on the facilities and overwhelmed agents and staff.

President Donald Trump has since backed down on his daily claims of a "crisis" at the US-Mexico border, but immigration and conditions at the border have been ongoing headaches for the administration, and will likely get a renewed spotlight as the 2020 US presidential election draws closer.

Here is the original post:

Officials have been cleared of wrongdoing in the deaths of 2 migrant kids last year, an internal watchdog says - Business Insider

BBC reporter Simon Jones has tweeted: "It's thought three more boats carrying migrants have crossed the Channel this morning - despite the cold and the rain. "Dover lifeboat is looking for a possible fourth migrant boat. Home Office confirms that Border Force is currently dealing with 'ongoing small boat incidents' off the Kent coast."

British and French coastguards have joined forces to intercept the suspected migrant boat, with at least 20 suspected migrants having been landed at Dover in the early hours of this morning.

The danger of the sea seems to be no deterrent for the desperate stranded near Calais and hoping to start a new life in the UK.

Migrants are traversing the channel in increasingly unsuitable crafts.

Since 2016 more security and fencing around Calais has made illegally boarding lorries much more difficult.

It is one of the reasons people are now taking to the sea and crossing the Channel on flimsy boats and rafts.

A UK Home Office spokesperson speaking to Sky news said that "anyone crossing the Channel in a small boat is taking a huge risk with their life and the lives of their children."

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promised to tackle the issue of illegal immigration into the United Kingdom.

The Conservative Party leader has a large majority to pass policies to set out to abolish free movement.

He has promised to deport those who crossed the English Channel illegally.

READ MORE:France cancels controversial boat delivery to Libyas coastguard

There have been a significant increase in the number of migrants attempting to cross from France to the United Kingdom in boats such as the four small craft intercepted on 17 November by UK Border Force officials that had 39 Iranian migrants on board.

An asylum seeker now living in the West Midlands said he crossed the Channel in a canoe which he bought in Calais.

Mr Masoud Mohammadifar, a 39-year-old Iranian, used to run Iran's national boating team, but had to flee Iran after being accused of being a western spy he told Sky News.

His crime was that he swapped t-shirts with a competitor from the US at an international competition.

Excerpt from:

At least three migrant boats intercepted trying to cross Channel in horrific conditions - Express

Valeria Luiselli says that she began writing Lost Children Archive in July 2014, inspired by a road trip to the south-west of the US as the refugee crisis at the Mexican border was coming into visibility. It became impossible to ignore the reality around me, she said, and so she started writing.

But the project stalled. Perhaps not surprisingly, as Emma Brockes explained here at the start of the year, the book started out as an angry screed, overly didactic and too bogged down in politics. Luiselli told Brockes that she was using the book as a vehicle for my own rage, stuffing it with everything from childrens testimonies to the history of American interventionism in central America It just wasnt working. Theres a different way of assuming a political sense in fiction, I think.

So she paused. She wrote a book of essays that articulated some of her anger and then returned to her story in time for publication this year. The opening pages of the finished novel suggest that she found her way by focusing on the human and the personal: Mouths open to the sun, they sleep. Boy and girl, foreheads pearled with sweat, cheeks red and streaked white with dry spit. They occupy the entire space in the back of the car, spread out, limbs offering, heavy and placid.

This is one of several lovely (not to mention amusing) depictions of the narrators two sleeping children. Passages that help remind us that those lost little ones in the title are not statistics, or dots moving around the map, or bureaucratic expenses. They are beautiful innocent dreamers.

This bridge to the migrant crisis is strengthened as we follow the family on a road trip from New York to Arizona. Their intimate bickering, their jokes and their conversations about audiobooks make them feel close to exactly the kind of literate reader you might expect to pick up a book like this one.

Which makes it all the more jolting when Luiselli reminds us that there are also crucial differences. As the family go further south, they encounter increasing hostility and danger. People go silent when they learn that the narrator is Mexican. Police and authority figures start to exude menace.

We realise that these people who have become our intimates are equally close to the alien families who feature on the fringes of the novel. To those who have been trying to cross to the US, who have been interned, have lost their children, or encountered other forms of desperation. And so we realise that but for accidents of birth and fate, we too could be labelled as aliens.

Its effective and theres plenty more to admire in these early pages. There are, for instance, beautiful sentences: An old lady answered the phone, her voice like a distant fire, crackling its way into my ear.

There are also a few things to grumble about. Now and again the politics and big ideas feel shoehorned in. News about the migrant crisis comes a little too conveniently over the car radio. Overheard conversations can rather neatly sum up the books big themes. The narrator listens in on a book group in Asheville, who decide that the value of the novel they are discussing is that it is not a novel. That its fiction but also it is not. Aha!

I also had a few doubts in the early pages about the narrators youngest daughter. She is supposed to be five, but often feels much older. Would she really want to have a stake in a conversation about whether to listen to On the Road or Lord of the Flies on audiobook?

But soon I was won over. How not to love a girl who responds to one of her parents conversational tics by saying the point is, the point is, the point is always pointy? Theres also a fantastic running joke about Jesus Fucking Christ and who he may actually be. This deeply serious book can be very funny. I especially loved a passage in which the narrator tells someone who loves westerns: My favourite western is Bla Tarrs Sttang! This prompts a terrifying drunken idea. Why, asks the man, dont we rent it and watch it together in our house?

Well, I was roaring. Luiselli explains that the film is seven hours long, but perhaps the joke only really works if youve seen a Bla Tarr film? Or, more to the point, if youve stopped watching one in despair when youre three hours in but not even halfway and all thats happened is that its started raining.

While I was laughing, I was also feeling smug for getting the reference. In this way, Luiselli cleverly flatters us. Her narrator shares hundreds of similarly literate and smart allusions and ideas with the gentle ease of one talking to equals. She is never patronising. She always assumes shared values and understanding. She makes readers feel almost as clever as the family we are reading about.

Its a good trick and not just that. The intellectual amplitude and the moral seriousness are fortifying and instructive, wrote James Wood in the New Yorker. Id be tempted to go even further. In an age when experts and the intelligentsia are supposed to be the enemy, this celebration of shared culture feels vital. These are our people, we are reminded. And all people are potentially our people. We should hold them close. We should never listen to those who seek to divide them from us and to treat them like aliens.

Read the original here:

How Lost Children Archive estranges the idea of aliens - The Guardian

A TERRIFIED boy was found wandering alone on the M6 near Birmingham last night.

Cops say he is a migrant who has become separated from his parents and could be in the country without them.

1

The Central Motorway Police Group (CMPG) said they found the boy on Wednesday night after responding to reports of a pedestrian on the motorway.

"He was split up from his parents a few days ago, and doesn't know which country they're in," the CMPG said in a statement.

"It's impossible to imagine how scared someone would be, not knowing where they are, not knowing where their parents are, unable to speak the language.

"We've taken him to a place of safety with food and water until social services can come and take him to care."

It comes after 39 migrants were found dead in the back of a lorry in Essex.

The lorry driver accused of their deaths pleaded guilty to plotting to assist illegal immigration last month.

And earlier this year we showed the moment migrants scrambled onto a Kent beach amid a wave of more than 270 people descending onto Britain in just a week.

A staggering 1,451 migrants are thought to have crossed the Channel so far this year almost three times the number throughout the whole of 2018 -despite millions being spent on security measures to prevent crossings.

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Of that figure, more than 200 have made it from France to Britain in August alone. Most of the migrants claim to be either Iran or Iraq nationals.

Only a handful of them 65 - have been deported back overseas since January.

Two migrants are known to have died trying to cross the Channel in August, with a 48-year-old Iraqi man found dead after trying to swim over.

Read more:

Terrified boy found wandering alone on M6 is migrant who doesnt know where his parents are - The Sun

Archbishop Jason Gordon has called on the government to secure the country's borders to slow the influx of Venezuelan migrants into T&T.

This, as he says the numberof migrants turning up at the Living Water Community for assistance continues to increase dramatically.

The Archbishop made the comments on Friday during a media conference at Archbishop's House in St Clair.

He said the Catholic church is providing aid to refugees and migrants but if more continue to come it will put T&T in a difficult position.

Gordon said some 1100 new people are coming in for assistance each month and the church can only do so much.

Twenty parishes are doing incredible work but they are saying they cant keep up," Gordon noted.

"The numbers are escalating every single week.

He said this acceleration is "unprecedented".

Gordon added that much of the assistance provided to migrants has been funded through the generosity of the public and the business community. He said some international agencies have provided funding as well but it is not enough to deal with the number of Venezuelan migrants requiring food, shelter and other necessities.

We really are trying to work with resources that dont exist, he lamented.

He said the government has a responsibility to secure the nation's borders because the greater good of the country will be destroyed once a certain number of Venezuelans come in.

"I don't know what the number is but if we accepted a million Venezuelans, we will no longer be the country that we are."

However, Gordon said the Catholic church will continue to do what it can to help the migrants who arrive in T&T.

"Everybody who comes we have to find a way to welcome, protect, integrate and ensure they get what they need. We have to ensure that whoever comes is going to be treated like a human being with incredible dignity and given what they need to have a good life.

He said the migrant crisis cannot be ignored as some may feel they have no other choice but to turn to crime to survive.

As such, the Catholic church will continue to provide schooling for migrant children, he said.

Originally posted here:

Church can't keep up with rising refugee numbers, Archbishop says - Loop News Trinidad and Tobago

If you ask an African migrant in Europe who came across the Mediterranean Sea in a boat if they would make the journey again, most of them would say yes. Many of them had been on vans and trucks that took them across the dangerous Sahara Desert, and many of them had been onboard vessels that struggled to get across the choppy waters.They might have seen their fellow migrants die of thirst or of drowning, but none of that halts their conviction that theyd cross the sands and the seas again.

Harsh treatment by European border guards and an overwhelming experience of racism inside European society do not bring regret or suggest that they would not do it again.

It was all to earn money, said Drissa from Mali. Thinking of my mom and my dad. My big sister. My little sister. To help them. That was my pressure. Thats why Europe.

A United Nations Development Programme report, released on 17 October, shows that 97% of the nearly 2 000 African migrants in Europe interviewed would take the same risks to come to Europe again knowing what they know now about the danger of the journey or what life in Europe would be like. What is powerful about this UN report is that it dispels the many myths about African migration.

There is a terrible view that Africans are somehow invading Europe, even worse swarming into Europe. Anti-immigration rhetoric speaks of building fences and creating a Fortress Europe. It is as if there is a war, and Europeans must arm themselves against invaders.

A year ago, the UNs Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng warned that European politicians fan the flames with hateful rhetoric that is legitimising hatred, racism and violence. While extremists spread inflammatory language in mainstream political discourse under the guise of populism, hate crimes and hate speech continue to rise. Hate crimes constitute one of the clearest early-warning signs for atrocity crimes. At the UN in Geneva this May, Dieng a Senegalese lawyer said, Big massacres start always with small actions and language.

The UN report shows that the hatefulness around the African migrant is misplaced. The reasons for major flows of migration to Europe actually come from within Europe itself. Those leaving war zones Syria and Afghanistan in West Asia, but also Eritrea and Libya come in expected numbers as they flee bombs that are often produced inside Europe. These numbers are much higher than for those Africans who come to Europe for work.

In fact, more than 80% of African migrants stay on the continent. The proportion of African emigration out of the continent compared to Africas population is one of the lowest in the world, says the United Nations. Most of the migrants who go to Europe, according to European data, come by regular channels with a visit to the embassy, an application for a visa, the granting of the visa and then a flight into the country; irregular arrivals, many of whom might come by boat, are far fewer than those who come with a valid visa. It is racism that fails to acknowledge this reality.

If you dig into the numbers from the UNDP report, you find that 58% of the African migrants in Europe were either employed at home or in school when they decided to leave; most of the migrants had jobs and earned competitive wages. What drove them is the insecurity in their countries, and the fact that they felt they could earn more elsewhere. More than half of the migrants had been supported financially by their families to make the journey, and 78% sent back money to their families.

World Bank statistics show that remittances to African countries are growing. In line with the global trend, sub-Saharan Africa received more foreign exchange from remittances than from foreign direct investment (FDI).

In 2018, according to the World Bank, remittances to sub-Saharan Africa totalled $46-billion almost 10% more than in 2017. The countries that received high remittances were Comoros, Gambia, Lesotho, Cabo Verde, Liberia, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Togo, Ghana and Nigeria.

The total FDI flow into sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), was $32-billion, up by 13% from 2017, but a significant amount less than the remittance flows.

Migrants who send money home are more important than the corporations and banks that bring investment dollars into these countries. Its too bad the bankers are treated better than the migrants.

Africa is on the threshold of a major debt crisis.

The last debt crisis was in the 1980s, as part of the broader Third World debt crisis. In the decolonisation period, Africa looted of its wealth by colonialism had to borrow money for development; these funds were large, but worse was the manipulation of dollar-denominated debt by the London Interbank Borrowing Rate (LIBOR) and by the US Treasurys interest rates.

Skyrocketing debt in the 1980s produced a long period of austerity and suffering. That debt simply could not be paid as long as multinational corporations effectively stole Africas resources and refused to pay taxes on that drain of wealth. This was the reason why initiatives such as the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) and Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) were created by the World Bank and the IMF in 1996 and 2005, respectively. By 2017, these initiatives provided $99-billion to reduce Africas debts from a debt-to-GNI (gross national income) ratio of 119% to 45%.

No change in the structure was made no assault on transfer mispricing and base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), mechanisms used by Western-based multinationals to continue their plunder of the African continent. When the 2014 commodity price shock came, many African countries slipped gradually toward a new debt crisis. The new debts are not all government debt, but they include very high proportions of private-sector debt, which has tripled from $35-billion (2006) to $110-billion (2017) according to World Bank figures. Debt repayments have risen dramatically, which means that investments in health and education have declined, as has access to capital for small-scale private-sector businesses.

Currently, according to World Bank numbers, half of the 54 states in Africa struggle with high debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) with many of these over the 60% threshold that signals a crisis. The rate of increase of this debt has set off alarms across the continent.

What does this mean?

It means that if there is any financial crisis in the West, it will draw away financing from Africa, plunge the region into another major debt crisis and set millions of people in search of better earning opportunities. Families and countries in Africa have come to rely upon these remittances. They are part of the structural fabric of finances.

Racism against the migrant is an enormous problem, and it must be tackled in itself.

But deeper than that is another problem that has grown as a result of no effective post-colonial policy the structural problem of the ongoing theft of resources from Africa, and of the lack of financing for the continent to develop its own potential. Allowing multinational firms to steal African resources, and allowing foreign banks to lend to Africa at virtually usurious conditions, simply creates a cycle of crisis that results in migration and remittances as the bandaids.

Europe does not have a refugee or migration crisis. The real crisis is in Africa, where the thief often a European firm continues to undermine the continents ability to breathe.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Read more:

Seeds of Europe's 'migrant crisis' are in Europe - Mail and Guardian

By TNH Staff November 5, 2019

FILE - Refugees and migrants take part in a protest outside an overcrowded refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos, on Friday, Oct. 18, 2019. (AP Photo/Michael Svarnias)

ATHENS A timid European Union is allowing Turkey to have keep sending refugees and migrants overwhelming Greek islands with a new crisis and wont confront Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to stop it, Retired Admiral Konstantinos Ginis said.

The honorary chief of Greeces armed forces told SKAI TV that Greece is facing an asymmetrical threat from Turkey and that the EU is incapable and unwilling to deal with the issue, except except superficially, putting money into it, reluctant to take on the tough Turkish leader.

He said that Greece needs to change course toward Turkey Greece supports Turkeys long-delayed hopes of joining the EU with the former military leader saying the new New Democracy government should the condemn the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement on migration and get a new deal that would require other EU countries to take in refugees and migrants.

The EU has closed its borders to them and reneged on promises to help take some of the overload of some 78,000 refugees and migrants being held in detention centers and camps, including more than 33,00 on islands.

Technically violating the EU deal, Greeces new government is going to move thousands off islands to the mainland and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said his goal is to send back 20,000 to Turkey who arent eligible for asylum, for which virtually all have applied.

New Democracys toughening of asylum procedures and plans to speed applications but also deportations was criticized by human rights groups who dont want anyone returned and said the policy should be more lenient.

Greece must also stress to Turkey that its failure to help slow the flow across the Aegean to Greek islands is an act of aggression, Ginis said, but no Greek government has been willing to do anything with Erdogan other than plead with him.

Ginis dismissed efforts by the government to speed up the asylum procedure as a tertiary issue, saying that the focus needs to be on why all these people are coming and how.

Do we have a strategy for preventing their arrival? Ginis asked, saying that Greece needs to strengthen its presence along its border with Turkey and he said the transfer of refugees and migrants would only be an incentive for more to come, thinking they would find sanctuary.

Noting photos of buses taking refugees and migrants to hotels instead of camps he said that, Its like were telling them: Come over, to Greece.

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Retired Admiral Says Turkey Pushing Refugee, Migrant Crisis on Greece - The National Herald

In the three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, European countries have built about 1,000 kilometres of border walls and fences.

That amounts to six times the length of the Berlin Wall, the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI) flagged in a new report on Tuesday, adding that most have been built since 2015 when Syria's civil war and the migrant crisis was at its height.

"This time Europe is divided not so much by ideology as by perceived fear of refugees and migrants, some of the world's most vulnerable people," the report notes.

Newly-built barriers are in locations across the continent, including:

READ MORE: Meet the women reunited 58 years after Berlin Wall was built

"Land walls and fences on European borders are the most visible aspects of Fortress Europe. By themselves though, they are mostly symbolic," the TNI stresses.

It adds that these physical walls and fences are accompanied by maritime borders naval operations patrolling the Mediterranean extending another 4,750 kms as well as virtual borders border-control systems seeking to stop people entering or even travelling within Europe.

The research institute estimates that the global market for border security was worth approximately 17.5 billion in 2018 and projects it will grow by an annual 8% annually in the coming years.

EU countries, meanwhile, are believed to have spent between 900 million and 1 billion on land walls and fences since the Cold War. Adding to that was money spent by the bloc's External Borders Fund (1.7 billion between 2007 and 2013) and the Internal Security Fund (2.76 billion between 2014 and 2020).

The European Commission has also planned to earmark 9.3 billion for the 2021-2027 period as part of a new Integrated Border Management Fund.

The primary beneficiaries in Europe have been companies including Thales, Leonardo and Airbus which all produce equipment used for land and maritime border patrolling including helicopters but also sensors and radars.

Spanish firm European Security Fencing was also identified as a key player. It produces razor wire and in particular a coiled wire known as concertinas that is used around Ceuta and Melilla, Calais, as well as along the Hungary-Serbia, Bulgaria-Turkey, and Austria-Slovenia borders.

For the TNI, "everything points to a further heightening and strengthening of the walls of Fortress Europe." This is turn will lead to refugees and migrants "to take more risks to cross borders, to encounter violence, and to end up living 'illegally in dire circumstances or in detention, awaiting deportation to unsafe countries of origin".

It argues that pouring more money will not solve the issue and might even exacerbate it.

READ MORE: 30 years on from 1989, central Europeans say democracy is again at risk

Meanwhile, Istvan Viragvolgyi, the curator of an exhibition entitled "Walls of Power" which explores man-made barries in Europe, told Euronews about walls of segregation. These are barriers within a society.

An example he flagged is a picture from Slovakia where locals collected money and lobbied the authorities to erect a wall separating them from a Roma settlement.

"They (Roma people) have to walk around the wall because it's not a complete wall. It's just a couple of hundred metres and then you actually walk around it. They just diverted the traffic basically so the Roma people going into the town, they diverted them around their houses," he said.

"In human history, all the walls that were built were demolished," he stressed. "Maybe (it took a) longer, shorter time but eventually they were all demolished. So we really have to think about what the real problem is and somehow come up with a solution."

"I think we have the false feeling that we dealt with the problem already and it's behind us," he concluded.

READ MORE: How barriers still divide Europe 30 years since fall of Berlin Wall

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Europe has built barriers six times the length of the Berlin Wall since 1989 - Euronews

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The U.S. might not want "to play ball" if Canada wishes to renegotiatethe Safe Third Country Agreement, according to an expert on refugees and immigration.

"The reality is that most asylum seekers cross over from the U.S. into Canada and not the other way around," said Robert Falconer, a researcher specializing in immigration and refugee-related issues, at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy.

The Safe Third Country Agreement recognizes both countries as safe for refugees, so people fleeing persecution are required to claim asylum in the first country they enter.

The agreement is being challenged in federal court this week on the grounds that the U.S.'s immigration crackdown under President Donald Trump's administrationhas made it unsafe for refugees.

The Liberal government is arguing against the legal challenge, but has suggested the deal signed in December 2004 could be renegotiated to modernise it, and cover all border crossings.

A revised agreement might mean Canada could return refugees to the U.S., Falconertold The Current's interim host Laura Lynch.

"And U.S. immigration policy is all about freezing out asylum seekers right now."

Texas-based immigration lawyer Luis Campos thinks Canada should scrap the agreement.

"I don't see the United States as a safe place for asylum seekers," he said.

Campos has been working with asylum claimants for 20 years. He said he has "never seen circumstances as poor" for refugees and migrants being held in U.S. detention centres, while theywait for their asylum claims to be processed.

He's worked on cases where 150 to 200 people were packed into cells designed for 50. A lack of bedding meant people had to sleep in shifts, and the single toilet was in full view, and prone to overflowing.

He said he has also heard of the officials in charge dissuading detainees from seeking medical attention, with threats it could delay their case from being heard.

"In one specific case, an individual was forced to extract his own tooth because he wouldn't get dental attention," Campos said.

Falconer warned that a successful legal challenge could lead to a suspension, and"negatively impact" Canada-U.S. relations.

"We're already in a sort of a tenser period ... than we have been," he said, pointing to ongoing issues with trade and the fact that the revised NAFTA agreement isn't yet "across the finish line."

Craig Damian Smith suggested that Canada should wait for a change in U.S. leadership before trying to renegotiate the deal.

"My policy prescription is essentially keep our heads down until we have a rational partner to negotiate with in the U.S.," said Smith, the associate director of the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in Toronto.

He said the Safe Third Country Agreement is similar to the deal known as the Dublin Regulations that made the EU member countries an "open-border regime."

That deal works by pooling countries' resources to control the external borders, he explained, with the aim of sharing the burden internationally.

Refugees are expected to claim asylum in the EU country the first arrive in. However the system has been put under strain by the migrant crisis, which has seen hundreds of thousands of displaced people to seek asylum.

Faced with those numbers, Smith said that countries like Italy, Greece or Hungary have begun accepting support like equipment and personnel from non-port-of-entry states.

But other states have been less forthcoming in offering to take in the "hundreds of thousands" of people stranded in the countries they arrive in, he said.

"When states can't co-operate, then they make deals with less scrupulous states, states that aren't signatories to the convention, or just autocratic states," he told Lynch.

"When you have a fight between France and Italy over who is going to accept these asylum seekers, Italy will go and make a deal with Libya to keep the people at bay," he said.

Smith said something similar is happening with the U.S. right now, as the country "is trying to control migration to its southern border by cutting deals with Central American states."

The Trump administration is working onagreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras that would require refugees on their way to the U.S. to seek asylum in those countries first.

Falconer said that migrants travelling through those countries are at a high risk of violence.

The researcher cited a 2015 UNHCR report that said women fleeing through Central America preemptively "took contraceptives before traveling, in order to reduce the possibility of becoming pregnant if they were raped during flight."

The U.S. is signing these agreements "not with the idea of burden sharing for asylum seekers, [or] that everybody will get a fair chance of safety," he said.

"They're using it more in a way to avoid taking asylum seekers within the U.S."

Written by Padraig Moran. Produced by Karin Marley.

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U.S. too focused on 'freezing out asylum seekers' to fix refugee deal with Canada: researcher - CBC.ca

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A rubber dinghy carrying migrants is pictured at sea in the Mediterranean. (Reuters / Karsten Jager / Sea-Eye)

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On the night of July 7, 2019, Alessandra Sciurba of the humanitarian rescue organization Mediterranea was aboard a sailboat in Libyan territorial waters. The boat wasnt meant to save people at sea; she and the crew were just supporting another ship from the German NGO Sea Eye. But suddenly an Alarm Phone alert notified them of a nearby boat in distress, so the crew sailed toward a rapidly deflating dinghy with 59 migrants aboard.Ad Policy

We got there and found men, women, children, even a 5-month-old baby. Some of them had signs of torture, signs of electrocution with wires. They were all sitting there in this dinghy that didnt have a hull anymore, it was just a few wooden planks on a black tarp, recalled Sciurba, who is a researcher in law and human rights at the University of Palermo and has volunteered with Mediterranea since its start in 2018.

As the crew started transferring people from the dinghy to the boat, the Libyan Coast Guard arrived; some of the rescued migrants remarked that they would have rather been thrown into the sea than handed over to the Libyan authorities, says Sciurba. The Libyan Guard ultimately declined to intervene, leaving them at sea with a boat that was too small to carry 59 migrants plus an 11-person crew, had no food, and whose two toilets had broken immediately.Related Article

At that point the EU abandoned us for 50 hours, she told The Nation. All we got from them was a written order not to dock in Lampedusa [an island off the coast of Sicily], which was handed over to us from an Italian police patrol boat while we were still outside of Italian territorial waters.

The Mediterranea crew eventually declared an emergency and the coordination center of the Italian Coast Guard allowed the boat to dock on the island, which sits only a few nautical miles from the borders of the Libyan search-and-rescue area. As soon as everyone disembarked, the boat was sequestered by Italian authorities and the migrants were transferred to mainland reception centers to begin the seemingly interminable process of claiming asylum.

For years, such an episodemarked by peril, confusion, and desperate hopeshas been the norm in Southern Europe. Matteo Salvini, leader of Italys far-right Lega party, famously cracked down on immigration; his open war on NGOs in the Mediterranean made life for rescuers like Sciurba so difficult that many rescue organizations ceased to operate. His policies also emboldened the Libyan Coast Guard (a group comprising former militiamen from the UN-backed Libyan government that Italy struck a deal with in 2017) to go after migrants crossing the Mediterranean and bring them back to war-torn Libya, or just let them die. Salvinis hard-line stance sent ripple effects throughout Europe, embroiling neighboring countries in disputes over who was responsible for welcoming the migrants that Italy was rejecting.

A month and a half after the sailboat rescue, Salvini was ousted. His departure seemed to herald a new era not only in Italy but in Europe at large. French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte made public pledges to remove right-wing populist rhetoric from the discourse on immigration. We must make sure the issue of migration isnt left to those that use it as a permanent topic for their propaganda, said Macron during a meeting with Conte in September.Current Issue

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These leaders bid to overcome what we could call the Salvini doctrine rested on the assumption that European countries would find a long-lasting way to cooperate on the intake of people arriving in Europe via seathat asylum seekers like the ones Sciurba encountered would no longer be ignored for days on end.

Nearly four months after Salvinis ouster, that assumption has not been borne out.

In the wake of an inconclusive meeting of interior ministers in Luxembourgwhich itself followed another promising but ultimately inconclusive meeting two weeks earlier with representatives of France, Italy, Germany, and Finland on the island of Maltathe question of migrant intake is no closer to being answered.

Participants of the Malta summit proposed a voluntary disembarkation scheme in which governments could offer a port of entry to rescue ships, and migrants would then be relocated within Europe according to quotas. Its an informal accord that only a handful of European countries seem interested in observing; some of the countries most deeply impacted by the question of migrant intakenamely, Greece and Spaindidnt even have a seat at the table.

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Plus, the plight of those who attempt to cross the central Mediterranean on unsafe vessels still isnt resolved when they get rescued by humanitarian boats. The provisional, voluntary, nonbinding nature of the Malta accord still makes it possible for rescue ships to be stranded at sea for a long time before a government reacts. In the latest such case, it took 11 days for Italy, France, and Germany to come up with a plan to take in roughly 200 migrants rescued at sea.

The imminent renewal of the 2017 Libya-Italy deal lays bare the difficulty not only of moving away from Salvinis policies but also of changing the core principles that have shaped European migration policy for the past two years. An explosive report by the Italian daily Avvenire recently revealed that the Italian government in office before the latest 2018 elections negotiated strategies to limit departures of migrants from Libya with a man who turned out to be a ruthless human trafficker. The deal, which could have terminated by November 2, is now set to be renewed as of February 2, 2020, for three more years.

The ethics of pulling migrants back into a country where gross human rights violations are regularly documented is highly questionablebut so is the policy flipside. Preventing people from leaving Libya doesnt work, because some keep wanting to leave, notes Matteo Villa, a research fellow in the migration program at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI).

Salvini purported to resolve the issue of migrant intake in Southern Europe by declaring Italian harbors closed to them. But he did very little at the institutional level to solve a key exacerbating factor in the migration issue: regulations that weigh disproportionately on Mediterranean countries. Salvinis call for other European governments to absorb the migrants pushing to enter Italy never resulted in actual policy discussion at the European level. Yet the post-Salvini discussions are failing to move beyond the same old flawed models.

Italys new interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese, for example, saluted the Malta agreement as a pathway to revising the common European asylum system. But this pathway, experts note, builds on previous attempts to reform the Dublin regulation (which requires asylum seekers to be registered and processed in their first EU country of arrival) that were never effective.Related Article

Politicians seem to have difficulty understanding that reform of the Dublin treaty must happen via legal principles that are applicable under all circumstances, says Leonardo Marino, a lawyer in the Sicilian city of Agrigento who has represented Carola Rackete, the German ship captain arrested for docking a migrant rescue ship in Lampedusa this past June.

In the absence of new strategies and of a concerted effort by European leaders to manage immigration in an effective and humane way, the promise to move away from Salvinism is doomed to remain unfulfilled.

We are left with what has traditionally been the EUs most fundamental policy, says Massimo Frigo, a senior lawyer and expert on migration with the International Commission of Jurists. What this new [Italian] government did was realign itself with the traditional agenda on immigration. It certainly isnt a pro-immigration government. EU policy on migration hasnt been an open harbor one for almost 20 years now.

While humanitarian organizations like Mediterranea are still fighting their legal battles to regain access to sequestered ships in the aftermath of Salvinis tenure, the European Parliament voted down a proposed resolution that would have enjoined member states to keep their ports open to humanitarian ships. Even though the vote wasnt binding (a decision on rescue operations at sea would need to come from the European Council, after consideration by every member state), it sent a clear signal.

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This is a red flag showing how much Europe is divided about the choice around its ethical-political guiding principles, says Matteo Villa from ISPI.

The Malta agreement also states that NGOs shouldnt create a pull factor for migrationan idea thats infected the institutional lingo since at least 2016 and which is based on faulty evidence.

Even moderate governments trying to reach an agreement and show solidarity with other EU countries need to reckon with the mainstream narration of the past yearsthat to take action so that people are saved at sea is to create a pull factor for more migrants to come in, Villa says.

Meanwhile, people continue to die, some a mere few nautical miles from the patch of Italian land closest to Africa.Related Article

On October 6, 13 women and eight children drowned right off the coast of Lampedusa as their vessel capsized. The sixth anniversary of one of the islands most infamous and disturbing milestonesthe fiery shipwreck that saw the deaths of over 360 Eritrean, Somalian, and Ghanaian migrantsfell only five days earlier.

The only way out of the deadlock, many analysts and activists maintain, is to open legal pathways for migration into Europe.

The only way to properly remember those dead people would be to reopen government-backed European rescue missions and open a humanitarian corridor from Libya, Annalisa Camilli, an Italian journalist and expert on migration, wrote on Facebook.

Our goal is to never have to go out to sea and save people again, insists Alessandra Sciurba.

While Salvinis exceptionally cruel reign may have ended, the underlying facts of the migrant crisis remain effectively unchanged. As Europe picks up where it left off before Salvini, the collective efforts necessary to reform European migration policy still arent on the horizon.

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There's Still No Plan to Deal With Migrants in the Mediterranean - The Nation

France will start setting quotas for migrant workers from next year as Emmanuel Macron toughens his stance on immigration in an apparent attempt to appeal to rightwing voters.

The French labour minister, Muriel Pnicaud, said on Tuesday that France would set quotas for the first time, with the government working with employers to identify industries lacking qualified candidates and where foreigners could fill the gap.

This is about France hiring based on its needs. Its a new approach, similar to what is done in Canada or Australia, Penicaud told BFMTV.

She did not say how many foreign workers would be granted visas, nor if an applicants nationality would be taken into account, a proposal floated last month by the prime minister, douard Philippe. The quotas were presented as a way to simplify the hiring process for businesses.

Currently, employers have to take part in a complex administrative process and justify why a French citizen cannot be hired for a position they intend to give to a foreign worker needing a visa.

With Marine Le Pens far-right National Rally hoping to make gains in local elections in March and Le Pen still seen as Macrons main political rival in the run up to 2022 presidential elections, the centrist president has recently begun focusing on immigration and hardening his stance.

The number of foreigners in France is not the main worry of the electorate who are more concerned about making ends meet and growing fears over the climate crisis but Le Pens anti-immigration party continues to focus on the issue and is seeking to win over voters from the mainstream right.

Macron, who was elected with support from voters on both the right and left, appears to be preparing the ground for a second presidential stand-off with Le Pen, seeking to address rightwing voters who complain there are too many foreigners in France.

Macron has steadily heightened his rhetoric on immigration since September, when he told Europe 1 radio: France cannot host everyone if it wants to host people well. In order to be able to welcome everyone properly, we should not be too attractive a country.

The question of setting quotas for economic migrants was an idea of the former rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 but was never put in place. Macron distanced himself from the idea of quotas during the 2017 election campaign andpraised the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for saving our collective dignity by allowing in large numbers of refugees.

However, he recently sparked criticism on the left when he gave an interview focused on immigration and Islam to the conservative weekly magazine Valeurs Actuelles, where his views were considered as appealing to readers on the right and far right. When an outraged voter criticised Macron for doing the interview, he said: You have to speak to everyone.

The prime minister, will unveil a series of measures on Wednesday after France received a record 122,743 asylum requests last year, up 22% from the year before.

The new measures could include restrictions on migrants bringing over family members or limiting access to health care for asylum seekers while their claims are processed.

France has also called for an overhaul of the EUs efforts to halt the surge of migrants fleeing conflict and poverty in Asia, the Middle East and Africa since 2015.

The French president wants more EU members to share the burden of taking in migrants allowed to stay, a move opposed by several countries in eastern and central Europe.

But Macron sparked anger from Bulgarias government last week after he said he wanted legal migrants from Guinea or Ivory Coast rather than clandestine networks of Bulgarians and Ukrainians.

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France to set migrant worker quotas in bid to appeal to rightwing voters - The Guardian