Human rights body says European states are increasingly resorting to illegal pushbacks of asylum seekers
European countries are increasingly resorting to illegal pushbacks of refugees and asylum seekers “with minimal accountability”, a report from the continent’s leading human rights body, the Council of Europe, has found.
The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee (CPT) said it had identified “clear patterns of physical ill-treatment” against people trying to cross borders all over Europe.
Council of Europe’s experts say bill is ‘step backwards’ in fight against modern slavery
Europe’s human rights watchdog has warned the UK government that its plans to curb the rights of trafficking victims in its illegal migration bill is a “significant step backwards” in the fight against human trafficking and modern slavery and demonstrates a lack of compliance with international law.
In a highly unusual move, the Council of Europe’s group of experts on action against trafficking in human beings (Greta) on Wednesday expressed deep concern about the bill and its lack of compliance with core elements of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Council of Europe commissioner raises concerns that legislation may not meet human rights standards
A European human rights commissioner has warned UK parliamentarians, before a debate on the government’s illegal migration bill, to uphold international obligations when scrutinising the proposed legislation.
In a letter to the House of Commons and House of Lords published on Monday, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatović, said: “It is essential that parliamentarians prevent legislation that is incompatible with the United Kingdom’s international obligations being passed.”
New Human Rights Watch head Tirana Hassan says UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers is ‘cheap politics’
The UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda would “completely erode” Britain’s standing on the world stage, the new head of Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said.
Tirana Hassan, who takes over as HRW’s executive director on Monday, also said other conservative governments in Europe were considering following Britain’s lead and looking at African states as an offshore dumping ground for asylum seekers, potentially dealing further blows to established refugee protections.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Last year, the short-term facility in Kent ballooned into a vast, unsafe camp holding thousands of people, including children. How did our asylum system get so broken – and what does it reveal about Rishi Sunak’s promise to stop the small boats?
In late September last year, a Home Office employee walked into a newly opened section of the Manston short-term holding facility in Kent and realised that conditions there were spiralling out of control: “It had got way beyond what was ethical and humane.”
The site, a collection of marquees in the grounds of a former army barracks near a disused airport, was overcrowded, and staff were improvising increasingly unsuitable makeshift expansions. “There were people who’d been sleeping on a mat on the floor of a marquee for 20 days. We’d run out of space, so we were opening old bits of the site. They’d put some mats on the floor of the gym – a really old building. It looked like it was about to fall down. None of it had been set up with decent hygiene facilities, bedding or anything. You walked in and your heart just sank. I had a feeling of: ‘Oh my God, what have we got into here?’” says the official, who asked not to be identified.
Refugee Council’s claims on impact of her bill come as the home secretary, on a visit to Rwanda, faces pressure from her own party
Suella Braverman’s plan to stop the Channel crossings would see as many as 45,000 children effectively barred from refugee status in the UK, the Observer has been told.
The claims are made in a forthcoming Refugee Council report analysing the overall impact of the illegal migration bill, which reveals the possible extent of children who could have their asylum claims deemed inadmissible under the new laws. The news comes as the home secretary is facing a mounting rebellion from both wings of the Tory party over her controversial plans to tackle the Channel crossings, amid growing concerns over their impact on children and trafficking victims.
Seven thousand British children were sent to Australia last century, told they were orphans or unwanted. It wasn’t true. Now facing old age, 1,400 are still searching for their families
It wasn’t until he was 71 that Michael Lachmann found out what a different life he might have had. He had always believed he was an orphan. But, already an old man, he discovered he was never an orphan. He had been loved and wanted. During the second world war his mother had left letters at a residential nursery saying she was only placing him in care while she was working and until “daddy gets home from Japan and we will be making a home for little Michael”. There was no childcare then, unless you were rich.
Instead of being collected by his mother at the war’s end, at the age of five he was shipped to Australia and placed in the Castledare Boys Home, run by the Christian Brothers, where numerous boys were starved, beaten and subjected to sexual abuse. He was told his mother was dead.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Rishi Sunak’s pretence of serious statecraft is belied by his embrace of shabby populism when it comes to immigration law
Britain did not sign up to the 1951 United Nations refugee convention by accident, nor was the country bamboozled into the European convention on human rights and cooperation with the Strasbourg court that enforces the convention. It was an architect of those institutions.
The ambition was to lay solid foundations of European cooperation for the establishment of a peaceful democratic order after the second world war. Winston Churchill was a leading advocate of that project.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Rishi Sunak says bill will ‘take back control of our borders’ but critics argue the proposals are unworkable
Suella Braverman has admitted the government is attempting to push “the boundaries of international law” with legislation aimed at reducing small boat crossings in the Channel.
The law, to be disclosed to MPs at lunchtime on Tuesday, is expected to place a legal duty on the home secretary to detain and remove nearly all asylum seekers who arrive “irregularly” such as via small boats in the Channel.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Immigrants living in terror after president’s racist speech – but many in country welcome strongman’s power grab
A group of men and women from Sierra Leone gathered by makeshift tarpaulin tents outside the offices of the International Organisation for Migration in Tunis. The outline of small children could be seen wriggling beneath the cheap nylon blankets wrapped around their parents, as they tried to escape the cold and rain-flecked wind that blew in off the nearby lake.
A young man, withholding his name, spoke for all. “They came for us with knives and machetes,” he said. “They robbed us. They kicked down the door and dragged us from our apartment.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Last weekend, at least 67 people drowned when a wooden boat carrying about 150 people ran into trouble on rocks off the coast of Calabria, Italy. There were 20 children, including a newborn baby, among the dead. It is an appalling reminder of the risks some people are willing to take to flee desperate circumstances – often including conflict and torture – in their home countries.
This movement of people across borders is age old and governments have never been able to fully control it despite developments in border enforcement and technology. It is driven primarily by patterns of conflict and economic deprivation and will increasingly be shaped by the climate crisis. It is a relatively small issue for the west: because the majority of refugees prefer to stay close to their home country to maximise their chances of returning, three-quarters of the world’s refugees live in low- and middle-income countries and seven in 10 in countries that neighbour their country of origin.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Freedom of information responses reveal damning findings of internal investigations into power cuts at Harmondsworth in 2022
A catalogue of maintenance failures over more than a decade caused power cuts that triggered disturbances at Europe’s largest immigration detention centre last year, the Guardian has learned.
The disturbances at Harmondsworth, the 676-bed centre near Heathrow, led to elite prison squads and the Metropolitan police being called to the scene to quell the protest. As a result of the power failure the centre had to be closed for several weeks and detainees relocated to other detention centres and prisons around the UK.
No evidence of maintenance of air circuit breakers since installation and one had been tripping multiple times since June 2022
Some equipment still at risk of failure because it is obsolete and no longer manufactured
Switching strategy on some equipment not operational since 2008/9
Excessive heat buildup in the electrical switch room
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This story is excerpted from The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, published by Simon & Schuster.
It was March 2021, and Sheri Neil was throwing together po’boys for the lunch crowd at her namesake Sheri’s Snack Shack, the only restaurant in the small bayou village of Pointe-aux-Chenes, Louisiana. The counter-service sandwich joint stands elevated about 12 feet off the ground, with a big red deck where people can sit as they enjoy one of Sheri’s renowned milkshakes.
At the height of the lunch hour, a woman drove into the parking lot and came running up the stairs. She was a teacher at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary School, which served about 80 children from the village of Pointe-aux-Chenes and nearby Ile de Jean Charles, both Indigenous communities that had been eroding for decades. Earlier that morning a representative from the parish school board had shown up unannounced and informed the staff that the parish was closing the school, effective that summer. People had been leaving Pointe-aux-Chenes for decades, driven out by frequent floods and the decline of the local shrimping industry, and enrollment at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary had fallen well below the district’s target. The village no longer merited its own school, officials said.
There were about a dozen people at the restaurant when the teacher drove up, and each of them ran at once to tell their families and friends. By nightfall everyone in town had heard the news, and by the next morning the residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes leapt into action as only the residents of a small town could. They started a Facebook group on behalf of the school and alerted the new cub reporter for the daily newspaper in the nearby city of Houma. The leader of the local tribal organization called the tribe’s attorney and asked her to help them file a lawsuit against the parish. The town staged a small picket outside the school, with students and parents holding up handwritten signs.
This was far from the first school closure in coastal Terrebonne Parish, which had seen broad population loss over the previous two decades. The story was more or less the same in every town: the shrimp business crashed, the flooding got worse, and people moved up to dry land, leaving empty desks in every classroom. No one who lived in Pointe-aux-Chenes could deny that the bayou population was shrinking. The parish had shut down the library branch a few years earlier, warehousing the books in the school building, and the bayou had lost two grocery stores in the past decade. The only remaining general store was operating on thinner and thinner margins. You couldn’t go more than a mile without seeing a FOR SALE sign.
Still, closing the school at this time felt like an unnecessary escalation, one that would push the town further toward depopulation and decay. Fifty years earlier, when Indigenous children had first attended classes there after the integration of the state school system, the school had been a hostile place, but in the decades since it had become a kind of cultural melting pot for the whole bayou community, a bridge between the white Cajun and Indigenous sides of Pointe-aux-Chenes. The school had one of the largest Indigenous populations of any school in the state, and teachers made a point of educating students about the rich history of the bayou, bringing in tribal leaders to demonstrate ceremonial dances and drum rituals. The bayou had no museum, no archive, no dedicated historian, so it was through the school that each generation of residents passed down their unique traditions to the next. If that went away, what would the town have left?
Even more painful was the fact that the decision had come just a few years after the Army Corps of Engineers had finished a new levee system that would protect the bayou, part of a massive project the agency had been working on since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The erosion exodus that had begun two generations earlier seemed like it was finally about to slow down: The main reason so many people had left over the years was to escape the flood problem, but now the town would be protected from all but the most devastating storms. The marshland outside the levees might disappear, but the town itself would be safe for decades to come.
Residents had seen what could happen without that investment in flood protection. Like Pointe-aux-Chenes, Ile de Jean Charles, just a few miles to the west, had been losing population for decades amid storm and erosion — indeed, around 98 percent of the island’s landmass had disappeared over half a century. The federal government had excluded the island community from its protective levee network, and rather than protect the island with flood walls the state government had opted to relocate its remaining 40-odd residents to a new tract of land farther inland. The relocation was funded by the federal government through an Obama-era grant program, and it amounted to the first whole-community climate migration in the history of the continental United States. The original idea for the relocation had come from a senior leader of the island tribe, but many had grown dissatisfied with the state’s handling of the program: The new site lacked direct access to the water that had sustained the island tribe for generations, and many residents had vowed never to leave the island, but as of 2021 most remaining residents were preparing to make their final move inland.
The residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes had hoped they would avoid this fate after the completion of the Army Corps’s levee system. The most optimistic residents were saying the bayou was poised for a minor renaissance now that the state had addressed the main driver of migration. The closure of the elementary school dashed these hopes: Pointe-aux-Chenes might be better protected than Isle de Jean Charles from flooding, but in the long run it was destined to suffer the same cycle of disinvestment and depopulation. Decades of erosion had already altered life on the bayou for good. The new levees had arrived too late.
The Terrebonne Parish School Board convened the next month to take a final vote on the closure. The meeting began with a public comment period during which parents and community members could address the board. The nine members sat Supreme Court–style at a long wooden desk, all arranged to face a single public podium. The residents of the bayou stood up one by one, white and Indigenous, and pleaded with the board to reconsider its decision. A few board members seemed moved by the show of support, but it wasn’t enough: The board voted six to three to shut the school down. The 80-odd students at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary would attend Montegut Elementary five miles away the following autumn. The tribe’s lawsuit against the parish was still pending, but it didn’t seem likely to succeed, since the board had the authority to manage its school system the way it saw fit.
Among the audience members at the meeting was Mary Verdin, whose husband was Alton Verdin, a tugboat captain and lifelong resident of Pointe-aux-Chenes. Alton’s uncle had been a legendary tribal leader, known for getting in frequent fistfights with white police officers, and in keeping with the labyrinthine family trees of the bayou, Mary was Alton’s fifth cousin on both his mother’s and his father’s side.
Working on a tugboat didn’t bother Alton the way it bothered many other Pointe-aux-Chenes residents who had been forced to give up shrimping and fishing. The tugboat pay had been enough for Alton to support Mary and their seven children, not to mention Mary’s mother, who lived with them and helped them take care of the kids. The family had a one-story brick house on the upper end of the bayou town, the part that had once been off-limits to Indigenous people like them. The wide marshland on the edge of their property sometimes flooded during heavy rains, but the house itself was modern and sturdy, and the family had hunkered down there during several hurricanes. Some of Alton’s older relatives still lived farther down the bayou, in the open-water areas that previous generations of the tribe had called home, but much of Alton and Mary’s extended family had moved up to join them on the solid territory of the mainland.
The school closure hit Mary hard, driving her first to depression and then to anger. Five of her seven children had graduated from the school already, but Gabrielle, the second youngest, still had one more year to go before she graduated to middle school, and Raelynn, the youngest, was just two years old. Mary had always been involved at the school, collecting box tops and Community Coffee proofs of purchase, and they lived close enough that she and Alton could go and have lunch with their daughters when Alton was home from the tugboat. One year Alton had driven his daughter Abigail to a father-daughter dance in a stretch limousine — the drive took, in total, about 30 seconds — and had shown off his traditional Cajun dance moves in the school cafeteria during the talent show. Now all of that would vanish. Gabrielle would finish elementary school in the ancient Montegut Elementary building one town over, with its steep stairs and single set of bathrooms, and Raelynn would never set foot in the school that had witnessed so much history.
To Alton, who had lived in Pointe-aux-Chenes his whole life, it seemed like the levee had arrived too late. With the school closed, the out-migration from the town would become all but irreversible. Who would move down the bayou to start a family, to raise their children, knowing that with every passing year a new rip would appear in the town’s social fabric?
The closure of the school had started to make Alton and Mary doubt their future in Pointe-aux-Chenes. They needed to rip the floors out to fix long-term water damage, which would take thousands of dollars, and Alton wondered whether they should sell the house and find something inland in the nearby cities of Montegut or Houma. Their eldest daughter had just become a real estate agent and was looking for her first commission, so she was helping them scout out houses that might serve as suitable replacements. Both wanted to move, but they didn’t want to leave Pointe-aux-Chenes. Even as the school year began, they were stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for a sign about what they should do.
Gabrielle attended Montegut Elementary for less than two weeks before Hurricane Ida cut her school year short. The storm intensified to the threshold of Category 5 over the course of just three days as it pushed up the Gulf of Mexico, and made landfall a few miles south of Pointe-aux-Chenes with winds of around 150 miles per hour. The parish issued a mandatory evacuation order ahead of the storm, but many hardened bayou residents stayed behind and watched as the wind ripped telephone poles out of the ground and sheared the walls off double-wide trailers. The erosion of the bayou had eliminated the natural protection system that weakened storms as they made landfall, allowing Ida to retain its full strength for far longer than it would have decades earlier.
The devastation on the bayou was total. It took close to a week for the water to drain back out of the town, and when aid workers at last made it all the way down the length of the bayou road, they found that almost no structure had escaped the storm. It would take weeks for the parish to restore electricity and running water, and even longer to drag away the mountains of gnarled debris that lined the side of every road. The sole remaining grocery store sustained so much damage that its owner, Mary’s uncle, decided to shut it down for good. The final insult was that the storm had seemed to confirm the parish board’s decision to shut down Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary. The school in Montegut had survived the storm, but the old white building on the bayou had not. The storm had twisted the structure’s metal roof like a nautilus shell and rolled it out into the street. There were shards of white wood all down the block.
Alton and Mary’s house was in better condition than many of the trailers and elevated houses around them, but it was far from livable. The roof was in tatters and water had dripped into the bedrooms and the living room. Resource-strapped FEMA wouldn’t arrive with temporary trailers for three months, and Alton’s contractor told him it would take about seven months before his house was fixed. In the meantime, Alton and his family would have to find somewhere else to stay, as would thousands of other people from Pointe-aux-Chenes and elsewhere in Terrebonne Parish.
It might sound counterintuitive, but the storm strengthened Alton and Mary’s resolve to stay on the bayou. They figured if their house had survived Ida, it could survive just about anything, and they didn’t want to abandon their ailing hometown as it began the tortuous recovery process. Unfortunately, it wasn’t up to them: There was almost no livable housing anywhere on the bayou, and certainly none that they could rent on a short-term basis. The storm had walloped the nearby city of Houma, destroying dozens of hotels and apartment complexes, which meant the closest rental they could find was all the way in Mississippi. The owner asked for $900 a month at first, but by the time Mary went to go look at the place he had jacked it up to $1,500, plus a steep deposit. She said she’d rather buy a generator and take her chances back in Pointe-aux-Chenes.
The following summer, as the residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes struggled to make it back to the bayou, the Louisiana state legislature voted unanimously to reopen Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary as a French-language magnet school. The tragedy of the hurricane had inspired lawmakers to override the parish board’s decision and offer the bayou community a new lease on life. Alton, Mary, and the kids returned to their battered house once the power and water came back on, and Gabrielle resumed school at Montegut Elementary, taking some of her classes in trailers.
Despite the saving grace of the school’s reopening, the recovery has been even longer and more painful than Alton feared. Instead of seven months, it has taken 15 months for the repairs on his house to begin. He and his family are now living in a camper as contractors work on fixing up the property, and even now Alton is still fighting with a supplemental adjuster over the details of the insurance payout. Hundreds of other families on the bayou and elsewhere in Louisiana are in a similar limbo: They can’t yet come back to the homes they lost, but they have nowhere else to go. Many residents are still living with family or in temporary apartments, and haven’t yet made it back to the bayou.
To make matters worse, FEMA will stop distributing temporary housing payments to the victims of Hurricane Ida next week. The agency only dispenses post-disaster aid for 18 months after a storm or fire, and after that it shifts its resources elsewhere, but the recovery in Pointe-aux-Chenes has taken much longer than 18 months, and FEMA’s withdrawal will only stretch it out further. The long process of displacement that began decades ago and has continued through an endless succession of floods is still going on, and there is no reason to think that Alton and Mary have seen the end of it. Even once the school reopens, it will take a long time before Pointe-aux-Chenes gets back to the way it was, if it ever does.
Nevertheless, the Verdins are hunkering down, trying to hold on a little longer.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Louisiana’s coast disappears, its historic communities are disappearing too on Feb 22, 2023.
This post was originally published on Grist.
UK’s shortest-serving prime minister says she ‘learned a lot’ from time in government but does not want top job again. This live blog is now closed
Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, has also criticised ministers again for refusing to engage in meaningful talks on pay. She told PA Media this morning:
This government has not at any time in this dispute come to the table about the substantive issue on pay, and that is the real issue. There isn’t going to be any other way to end this dispute until they come to the table and talk about pay.
They said on many occasions that they’re in constructive talks; first of all, I don’t know what those constructive talks are – they are certainly not on pay.
Nobody wants to see these strikes, nobody wants to be on strike – the last thing nurses want to do is to be on strike.
What they do want is a government that can show leadership, get around the negotiating table and settle this dispute.
Home Office reportedly proposed two options to try to prevent those crossing Channel from claiming asylum
Rishi Sunak is proposing to stop asylum seekers who cross the Channel in small boats from appealing against their deportation, according to reports.
The Home Office, led by Suella Braverman, had put forward two options for the prime minister’s consideration as he attempts to automatically prevent those arriving in Britain from claiming asylum, the Times reported.
Advocates say ombudsman’s findings lay bare ‘inhumane’ treatment in Australia’s detention centres
An immigration detainee served a contaminated meal was not offered an alternative because the maggots were “just on the vegetables”, a report by the federal watchdog has found.
The claims by the commonwealth ombudsman – which are denied by the Australian Border Force – come in a report into conditions inside federal detention centres as part of Australia’s obligations under a UN anti-torture treaty – the optional protocol to the convention against torture (Opcat).
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
When Hurricane Ian hit Central Florida last fall, Milly Santiago already knew what it was like to lose everything to a hurricane, to leave your home, to start over.
For her, that was the outcome of Hurricane Maria, which struck her native Puerto Rico in September 2017, killing thousands of residents and leaving the main island without power for nearly a year.
So in September 2022, nearly five years to the day when Maria tossed her life apart, Santiago was in suburban Orlando, visiting a friend. As torrents of heavy rain battered the roof of her friend’s home, and muddy waters flooded the streets, she realized they were trapped.
And that her life was going to change, again.
“It created such a brutal anxiety in me that I don’t even know how to explain,” she said in Spanish.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Santiago was one of more than 100,000 Puerto Ricans who left Puerto Rico and relocated to places like Florida, seeking safety, economic opportunities, and a place to rebuild their lives. Only now, with displacement caused by Hurricane Ian, as well as one of the worst housing crises in the country, the stability for Puerto Ricans in hurricane-battered Florida has never felt more at risk. With those like Santiago twice displaced, many are finding their resilience and sense of home tested like never before.
Santiago’s life right before Maria was based in Canóvanas, a town on the outskirts of Puerto Rico’s capital of San Juan. There, she lived with her teenage daughter and son. Hurricane Irma visited first, grazing the United States territory in early September and causing widespread blackouts. When Hurricane Maria hit on September 20, it ultimately took the lives of more than 4,000 Puerto Ricans, making it the most devastating tropical storm to ever hit the region. It would take 11 months for power to be fully restored to Puerto Rico’s main island, home to the majority of the territory’s population of just over 3 million.
Santiago lost her business as a childcare provider in the wake of the devastation to Puerto Rico’s economy and infrastructure. She decided she had no other option but to leave. By mid-October of that year, Santiago, with her children — and their father —relocated to metro Orlando.
It took her years to adjust to her new life. And then Ian happened.
“It was already a nightmare for me,” said Santiago, “because it was like reliving that moment when Maria was in Puerto Rico.” In the aftermath of Ian, Santiago was displaced from a rental home where she had lived for only a week.
Santiago’s déjà vu is not unique among Puerto Rican survivors of Maria living in Central Florida. Many are still reeling from the trauma of economic hardship, poor relief efforts, and displacement that was only now starting to be addressed in Puerto Rico itself.
“There are people who feel like, ‘Man, I just came here from Puerto Rico and here I am in this situation again,’” said Jose Nieves, a pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Kissimmee, a suburb of Orlando. Nieves’ work in recent years has extended to supporting immigrant families affected by natural disaster displacement in Central Florida.
Central Florida is home to large Latin American and Caribbean communities. Many members work in low-wage and low-skilled jobs in the area’s robust tourism industry, which is nonetheless vulnerable to the economic fallout from natural disasters like Ian. Puerto Ricans and other Latin Americans are also among the millions of Florida residents who live in homes without flood insurance.
Earlier waves of Puerto Ricans had relocated to the mainland primarily for economic reasons. Along with those who came to Florida directly from the main island, thousands more had moved in recent years from other long-established Puerto Rican communities in New York and other parts of the Northeast.
By the time Santiago and her family arrived in Orlando in 2017, the metro area was already one of the fastest growing regions in the country. Over one million people of Puerto Rican origin now live in Florida, surpassing the number in New York. In Central Florida, Puerto Ricans make up the largest community of Latinos. Among them are sizable Colombian, Venezuelan, and other Latin American nationalities.
Like many other Puerto Ricans who had come before her, Santiago thought that a new life in Florida would provide what Puerto Rico couldn’t: wages that they could live well on, stable housing and infrastructure, and a local government that was responsive to their needs and that would uphold their rights as U.S. citizens. There was also the benefit of a large network of Spanish speakers who could provide support and share resources on how to navigate social and civic life on the mainland. And perhaps above all, there was also a sense that in Florida their vulnerability to the devastation of tropical storms like Maria would be lessened.
At first, Santiago and her family settled at her sister’s house in Kissimmee. World famous theme parks like Walt Disney World and Universal Studios were minutes away, as was Orlando’s international airport. In December 2017, after finding out that the local government was providing hotel accommodation for those displaced by Maria, Santiago and her family moved into a local Super 8, one of several motels along Highway 192, Kissimmee’s main drag. Its concentration of hotels and motels has earned Kissimmee the moniker of “the hotel capital of Central Florida.”
In August of 2018, after more than eight months living at the Super 8, Santiago and her family started looking for more permanent places to stay. “By then the rents had skyrocketed and they were asking for $50 to $75 [a night] per head of family,” Santiago said of the motels. Landlords were also asking for two to three months rent for a deposit, a standard practice in Florida but one that took Santiago by surprise. “We said if we plan to stay we are going to [need] that money,” she said, “because we left Puerto Rico only with what little we had.” The family eventually settled in an apartment in Orlando.
Ian hit at a time when the cost of living in Central Florida had soared, housing had become more unaffordable, and wages had stagnated. “We’ve just seen this massive spike in the cost of rent and in the cost of everything else,” said Sam Delgado, the programs manager at Central Florida Jobs with Justice, or CFJWJ, an Orlando-based workers’ rights organization.
“They say we have California’s expenses and Alabama’s wages.”
Sam Delgado, program manager at Central Florida Jobs with Justice
Delgado explained that the timing of Hurricane Ian at the end of the month left many local families struggling with whether to prioritize emergency expenses or rent. In the wake of the storm’s devastation, many households were forced to use rent money to buy non-perishable food items and gasoline, or temporarily relocate their families to hotels. “People just don’t have enough money for an emergency,” he said.
Florida’s affordable housing crisis, as in the rest of the U.S., is the result of several factors: limited housing stock, zoning laws restricting construction of new rental housing, and stagnant wages that have not kept up with the cost of living. “They say we have California’s expenses and Alabama’s wages,” said Delgado.
Central Florida’s low-income Latino communities are among the hardest hit by the state’s housing crisis. They have some of Florida’s fewest financial and social resources to both prepare for disasters before they happen and to respond adequately after they do. Many live in properties such as mobile homes that are more affordable but less resilient to wind or flood damage.
For families that have previously been evicted or have a poor credit history, it’s even more difficult to secure housing in the traditional rental market. Throughout Orange County (of which Orlando is a part), Osceola County immediately south (home to Kissimmee), and even the Tampa Bay area along the Gulf Coast, the last option for these families is to move into hotels or motels. A number of such makeshift apartment complexes also became micro-communities for Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane Maria. The award-winning 2017 film, “The Florida Project,” dramatized the life of a family living in a motel in Kissimmee. But few see this trend as sustainable. “It’s expensive to be poor here because it costs way more to rent a hotel [room],” said Delgado.
And it’s only getting more expensive, as more extreme weather and displacement is putting pressure on the rental market. Prices for apartments are rising higher and higher to meet this demand. After recently looking for an apartment for she and her daughter, Santiago returned to her friend’s home, having had no luck at finding anything affordable. One place she looked at was asking $2,500 per month. “I don’t know what they were thinking,” she said.
In many ways, the housing crisis has faced no greater urgency. Coupled with the lack of affordable housing, many in the Puerto Rican and larger Latino communities feel that the local and state government is not doing enough to support those who have been displaced.
“If you were out of your house for 15, 20 days because of the flood, because you didn’t have electricity or services, it shows that [the state] was negligent,” said Martha Perez, who is a resident of Sherwood Forest, a RV resort community in Kissimmee. Perez was forced to leave her home, where she lived alone, after Ian’s floodwaters made her community uninhabitable for weeks. Both Milly Santiago and Perez, a Mexican citizen, have received material support from Hablamos Español Florida, a social services organization geared to Latino immigrant families in the state.
“When our community gets hit by a hurricane, the recovery doesn’t take days or weeks. I mean, the reality is that many of those families are going to be struggling with the effects of the hurricanes for the next two years,” said Nieves of First United Methodist Church in Kissimmee. He says that the damage from Hurricane Ian has taken hundreds of homes off of the housing market, further exacerbating the affordability crisis.
For many locals and advocates, the needs that have arisen around housing, wages, and climate resilience are effectively the result of an unwillingness from those in power to address the needs of the state’s most vulnerable communities. And social support organizations and volunteers can only do so much. “Every time it’s a nonprofit organization responding to these immediate needs in communities, it looks more like a policy failure than it does a community coming together to help people,” said Delgado.
“What do I want from the government?” said Santiago. “I want them to be more fair with us, because there is a lot of injustice.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After Hurricane Maria, many Puerto Ricans fled to Florida. Then Ian happened. on Dec 16, 2022.
This post was originally published on Grist.
Group says Moroccan and Spanish police failed to provide even basic first aid for hours after deadly crush at enclave
The “widespread use of unlawful force” by Moroccan and Spanish authorities contributed to the deaths of at least 37 people who perished during a mass storming of the border fence between Morocco and Spain’s north African enclave of Melilla in June, according to a report.
The Amnesty International report also accuses Moroccan and Spanish police of failing to provide even basic first aid to those injured in the crush as they were left “in the full glare of the sun for up to eight hours”. It says Moroccan authorities prioritised moving corpses and treating security officials above the needs of injured migrants and refugees.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Organisation questions use of ‘illegal’ to describe asylum seekers in report calling for radical crackdown
A report partially endorsed by the UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, calling for a radical crackdown on those seeking asylum has been criticised by a UN body for “factual and legal errors”.
Braverman wrote the foreword to the report by the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies that says “if necessary” Britain should change human rights laws and withdraw from the European convention on human rights in order to tackle Channel crossings by small boat.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Exclusive: With almost no publicly available information about ‘Apods’, researchers say the lack of transparency is concerning for human rights
Researchers have mapped dozens of hotels used for immigration detention by the Australian government, the first nationwide visualisation of a practice that has operated largely in the shadows.
But the data remains incomplete.
The federal government is being urged to restore the priority status given to a handful of tech jobs after it abruptly revoked the priority skilled migration list in a move that has surprised industry amid the ongoing skills crunch. Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil introduced a ministerial direction last month that revokes the list…
The post Govt urged to restore tech visa priority after ‘surprise’ edict appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
Manston processing site ‘gummed up’ as more than 100,000 asylum claims waiting to be decided, says select committee chair
A migrant processing centre in Kent is “catastrophically overcrowded”, with people waiting for their asylum applications to be processed kept in inhumane conditions and guards not being trained properly, a union leader says.
Criticism of the government’s handling of the facility is mounting, with the chair of a parliamentary select committee saying a “crisis” was brewing given the backlog of more than 100,000 cases.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The Albanese government has deepened the Global Talent visas cuts made by the former Morrison government, despite lifting the overall migration cap by 35,000 places this financial year. Migration planning levels released following Tuesday’s federal Budget show the intake for the Global Talent (Independent) visa will drop by 40 percent to 5,000 places this financial…
The post Global talent, innovation visas to fall despite migration cap rise appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
Australian industry has queried the workability of a proposed trilateral ‘AUKUS-visa’ for highly skilled professionals to smooth the technology transfer process in AUKUS-related research and manufacturing projects. Proposed in a report published by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, an AUKUS visa would allow Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United…
The post Technology transfer goals face ‘AUKUS visa’ hurdles appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
Court of session rules criteria that meant Ola Jasmin missed out by 58 days breached her human rights
Students from migrant families in Scotland will have the same right to free university tuition as their peers, after a landmark court judgment which legal experts say highlights the positive impact of human rights legislation.
The court of session in Edinburgh found that Iraq-born Ola Jasim, who has lived in Scotland for nine years but missed out on the criteria for free tuition fees by 58 days, had her human rights breached.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Woman, said to have been trafficked, is only adult allowed back since end of Islamic State ground war
A British woman and her child have been repatriated from a Syrian camp, the first time an adult has been allowed to come back to the UK from detention since the end of the ground war against Islamic State.
The Foreign Office said that British policy to those held in Syria remained unchanged, and that it considered requests for help on “a case by case basis”, but campaigners said it was a significant first step.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Almost a third of Australia’s most in-demand occupations facing shortages are ICT-related professions, according to an annual assessment of Australia’s labour market highlighting areas of acute gaps. The 2022 Skills Priority List, released by the National Skills Commission on Thursday, is the latest clarion call for training and migration reforms, and comes ahead of a…
The post One third of occupations facing acute shortages are tech jobs appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
About 60 wives, sons and daughters of slain or jailed IS combatants to be rescued from Roj camp, but some women face arrest upon return to Australia
The youngest, most unwell and most vulnerable of the Australian children currently held in squalid Syrian detention camps will be the first ones repatriated to Australia. But some of their mothers could face arrest – and potential charges – upon return to the country.
The Australian government is currently implementing plans to repatriate about 60 Australian women and children – wives, sons and daughters of slain or jailed Islamic State combatants – who have been held for more than three years in the dangerous detention camps in north-east Syria.
Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
By Lucy Xia, RNZ News reporter
A group of migrants who have been helping a New Zealand investigation into immigration fraud may soon be forced to leave the country.
The group were some of the 50 Chinese construction workers who claimed a New Zealand-based recruiter had misled them about their pay and working rights.
Last year an arrest warrant was issued for Li Wenshan, also known as Peter Li, who fled New Zealand before charges were laid.
Li still faced charges for immigration fraud.
Meanwhile, two other people associated with Li face a trial in December this year.
Ten workers are expected to give evidence in court, claiming they were duped.
But last week, the workers were told by Immigration authorities that they would be expected to leave the country within a month of the trial ending.
Undermining probe efforts
Green Party immigration spokesman Ricardo March said the treatment of this group undermined efforts to combat migrant exploitation.
“These workers are not pieces of evidence, they are human beings, and so to put them in a situation where they are treated as expendable once they’re not deemed useful to provide evidence is unjust,” March said.
“And, actually [it] will undermine the government’s intent to create a supportive environment , where workers are able to come forward and participate in processes to hold employers to account.”
March called for the immigration minister to intervene, and to send a strong message that workers holding employers to account would be supported.
One of the men due to give evidence in court, 50-year-old carpenter Sheng Canhong, felt he had been punished for doing the right thing.
“The New Zealand government doesn’t like people who speak up and affect New Zealand’s reputation. Such people are not welcome here,” he said.
Sheng arrived on a work visa in 2018, but was left with no work for the initial months, and was consequently moved to a limited visa to assist with the investigation.
‘No option but to speak up’
“Because of the work situation, we had no option but to speak up. Think about it, we were in Tauranga for three months without work, we had to pay for food and accommodation, where do we get that money?
“When I came here I only had $200. So I owed people money for the living costs, and could only pay back later when I found work,” he said.
The ten workers had also missed out on the chance to apply for one-off residency.
Many of them had tried to move back onto work visas, but their applications failed despite having full time jobs, and they struggled to understand why.
Unite Union director Mike Treen, who has assisted the men since 2019, is also calling for a pathway to residency for this group.
“We ought to be giving them something to compensate them for the hurt, humiliation and exploitation that they’ve suffered while they’re here,” he said.
Treen said the system of temporary visas had fuelled migrant exploitation and needed to change.
System of ‘migrant exploitation’
“Immigration New Zealand [INZ] created a system of migrant labour exploitation, and they throw out the people who have helped expose it,” he said.
“Ten percent of workers in New Zealand were on temporary visas, 30 to 40 percent of workers in construction and hospitality and agriculture and horticulture were on temporary visas.”
INZ referred RNZ News to the minister for comment on the workers’ situation.
Minister Michael Wood said due to legal and privacy reasons he was unable to comment on the circumstances of the workers and the case.
Meanwhile, Li Wenshan is still on the loose and it is uncertain when he will make an appearance in court.
INZ declined to answer questions on whether they were looking to extradite Li.
An INZ spokesperson said for legal and privacy reasons, they would not make further comment on Li.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
