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Tag Archives: no one is illegal
Freedom University (Georgia, USA)
- Home / Incio
- Mission / Misión
- Board of Advisors / Consejo de asesores
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MISSION / MISIÓN
Founded in 2011, Freedom University is a volunteer-driven organization that provides rigorous, college-level instruction to all academically qualified students regardless of their immigration status. Our faculty are fully committed to providing our students with college courses equivalent to those taught at the state’s most selective universities. We believe that all Georgians have an equal right to a quality education. Separate and unequal access to higher education contravenes this country’s most cherished principles of equality and justice for all.
Fundada en 2011, la Universidad de la Libertad es una organización impulsada por voluntarios que ofrece rigurosa instrucción universitaria a todos los estudiantes académicamente calificados, independientemente de su estatus migratorio. Nuestros profesores están enteramente comprometidos a proporcionarles a nuestros estudiantes cursos universitarios equivalentes a los que enseñan en las universidades más selectivas del estado de Georgia. Creemos que todos los habitantes en Georgia tienen derecho a una educación de calidad. Acceso separado y desigual a la educación superior contraviene los más preciados principios de este país de igualdad y justicia para todos.
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To the University System of Georgia Board of Regents:
We the undersigned oppose the Board of Regents’ decision to ban undocumented students from the state’s most selective universities, including the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, the Medical College of Georgia, and Georgia College and State University.
The ban represents a formal step towards the re-segregation of higher education in our state. Banishing Georgia’s high school graduates to separate and unequal educational facilities tarnishes the state’s reputation, squanders talent, abets hostility towards immigrants, and makes it harder to recruit and retain top faculty and students.
The long-term economic and ethical costs of discrimination are immense. Please rescind the ban on undocumented students and do everything in your power to ensure that all Georgians have equal access to higher education. The Board of Regents should support in-state tuition for all Georgia students regardless of their immigration status. Nebraska, Texas, California and nine other states now charge in-state tuition to undocumented high school graduates and Georgia should follow their example.
SIGN HERE.
Babi Badalov: My Life Report in Paris (Prague)
BABI BADALOV: MY LIFE REPORT IN PARIS
11.11. 2010 – 16.01. 2011 • opening Thursday, November 11, 8 p.m.
tranzitdisplay • Dittrichova 9/337, 120 00 Prague 2 CZ
curated by Zbyněk Baladrán
Babi Badalov is an artist and poet. His visual poetry very often takes the form of a diary, created every day through a combination of his own linguistic research of manipulated pictorial material, mainly with political content. He uses drawing to complete various collages on pages, often organized into books. In writing, Badalov uses a combination of Cyrillic and Latin characters and those of all languages that he knows – from Persian to Russian to English and French.
A record is very often maintained through a phonetic logic, then creating unexpected combinations and word play that are possible owing only to such radical means. The drawing often blends with the writing creating a collage, sometimes as though it overflows and fills the format in an unexpected horror vacuum. Very often this consists of ironic political commentary, ridiculing policies and social events, integration processes and mainly the EU asylum policy with which the artist has sufficient experience.
Babi Badalov was born near the Iranian border in Azerbaijan, but has lived the life of a nomad in recent years, partially forced, when through various reversals in fortune he ended up in France, where he is now requesting asylum as a political refugee, and partially from the longing to live in an open society without prejudices where he can be a poet without having to worry.
Babi Badalov decided to exhibit at tranzitdisplay his visual diary from asylum homes and from his current home – the streets of Paris. Unfortunately, due to the very strict terms for granting asylum in France he cannot attend the exhibition personally. The linearly installed double-sided A4 pages guide us through the latest extremely depressing eight months of the life of a person who awaits in fear and frustration for “redemption“ in the form of civic identity mediated by the authorities. On the one hand, we see the endlessly long communication with the bureaucratic system that endeavours to encumber as much as possible the granting of asylum and, on the other hand, we see a schematic collage from pieces of printed and signed papers, transportation tickets and product packaging that are traces of human existence on the edge of society.
Babi Badalov (*1959, Lerik, Azerbaijan), is an artist and poet living in Paris. He has exhibited in Thessaloniki, Tallinn, Athens, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Istanbul, St Petersburg, Dresden, Cardiff, and Milan. His works have been collected in museums and private collections such as the Russian Museum, St Petersburg; Azerbaijan State Museum of Art, Baku; Museum of Art, Emden, Germany; and Martigny Art Museum, Switzerland, and Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp, previously MuHKA.
tranzitdisplay
opening hours Tue-Sun 12:00 noon – 6.00 p.m.
Dittrichova 9/337, Prague 2, CZ
www.tranzitdisplay.cz info@tranzitdisplay.cz
main partner: ERSTE Foundation
support: Česká spořitelna a.s., Ministry of Culture, City of Prague, Prague 2 Municipality
media partner: A2 cultural bi-weekly, Radio 1
http://babibadalov.wordpress.com/
http://babibadalov.livejournal.com/
http://babibadalovvisualpoetry.wordpress.com/
Filed under art exhibitions, contemporary art, immigration
No One Is Illegal: Support the Dale Farm Travelers!
What a bloody wretched world we live in. Apparently, for lack of a better plan and in hopes of rallying the “natives” to the neoliberal self-destruction programme (or, rather, distracting them from it), so-called western governments have begun moving in flashy fashion against various “illegals,” from the Roma in Europe to Mexicans and other Hispanics in the US.
Here is yet another dispatch from that ongoing war. Thanks, as always, to the Reclaiming Spaces mailing list for bringing this to our attention.
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http://dalefarm.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/102/
Traveler sites across Europe are facing eviction from their homes in a wave of mounting intolerance against traveler communities.
On Tuesday 7th September, the eviction of seven traveler families began at the Hovefields site in Essex. At 8 in the morning bailiffs Constant & Co, accompanied by police, arrived at the site and began telling families to leave their homes. The bailiffs occupied a pitch at the site, which they made a base for their operations, and then proceeded to bring in diggers to smash plots of ground, preventing later re-entry.
Many individuals attended the eviction as legal observers and monitors of human rights and health and safety. They documented the eviction, and identified numerous breaches of international human rights law, including the failure to provide alternative housing, the disruption to children’s education, and the failure to keep heavy machinery within the safety perimeter. There were no authorized government representatives present and bailiffs and police refused to facilitate legal observers’ access to the site. When these issues were brought up with the police overseeing the eviction process, they refused to respond, maintaining that they were there to prevent breaches of the peace by those resisting eviction, no matter the legality of the operation itself.
Two supporters were arrested early in the day, and a seventy-two year old man, John Lee, had his nose fractured after his face was smashed into his caravan before legal observers arrived.
At the end of the day, one pitch had been bulldozed, and three families had left the site. The other four families whose pitches are being evicted stayed, though the bailiffs had already cut off access to electricity and water for the majority of the site. The families who left the Hovefields site went to a nearby unoccupied site that had previously been earmarked by the national government as a potential resettlement area; but this move was refused by Basildon Council, eager to chase the traveler community out of Essex. Police arrived at 9 this morning with a 3 hour ultimatum for the families to move on. The eviction is likely to be ongoing through this week – people interested in coming up to provide human rights monitoring and support should contact savedalefarm[at]gmail.com.
The Hovefields site eviction is taking place in the run-up to the planned eviction of the Dale Farm traveller site, very close to Hovefields. Bailiffs Constant & Co., whose conduct is the subject of serious complaints relating to brutality and human rights breaches, were recently granted a £2 million contract by Basildon District Council to evict Dale Farm. Dale Farm is the largest traveller site in England, and is home to roughly one thousand people. The eviction, pushed through by the Conservative-controlled Council, is being monitored by the United Nations Advisory Group on Forced Evictions and the Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Like the Hovefields families, the Dale Farm community is facing intolerance, racism and brutal evictions, and it is vital that people come forward to provide support in the run-up to the planned eviction.
It is essential that people mobilize to support the Dale Farm community in the coming weeks. Check out http://dalefarm.wordpress.com for information about human rights monitoring, local groups, and getting involved in the campaign to save Dale Farm. The Dale Farm Support network urges people across the UK to form groups and arrange transportation for coming up to Dale Farm when the eviction commences. Supporters will be notified of the eviction via a text message service – sign up at: https://smsalerts.tachanka.org/dalefarm.
Website: http://dalefarm.wordpress.com
Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=124229427082
Raising Arizona
We’ve been having a hard time shaking the sick feeling in our stomach after yesterday’s post about May Day in Nizhniy Novgorod. Even where the akaby (as in A.C.A.B.) didn’t resort to such tactics, the holiday was, as in recent years, an excuse to line and encircle the boulevards, sidewalks, rooftops, and squares where the sparsely attended marches and rallies were held with thousands upon thousands of beat cops, riot cops, and God knows what other kinds of cops. The message was clear: all those who wanted to reaffirm the real values of May Day are marginals and a potential threat to public safety. May Day, after all, is really just a good excuse to celebrate the return of spring.
This, apparently, is what May Day should look like.
The air was electrified by a presence not felt since the Gran Marcha of 2006. At least 100,000 people marched through Downtown in solidarity with Arizona’s victims of a new law that legalizes racial profiling. It is a law that has been denounced by President Obama, DHS Head Janet Nopalitano, the Mayor of Phoenix, the Sheriff of Pima County (Arizona), and even some Republicans who see it as draconian legislation.
Many of the protest signs carried bold statements calling the Arizona law “racist”and “Nazi”-like. There was a sense of urgency in their voices, demanding to “Boycott Arizona” and overturn Arizona’s SB 1070 law on the grounds that it was racially discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Unlike other marches where several other “niche issues” are brought into the march, this May Day march was focused like a laser: Arizona’s new state law is a modern-day version of legalized White Supremacy, smacking of the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany and Apartheid “Pass Laws” in South Africa.
As usual, the march began at Olympic and Broadway and continued north about a dozen blocks, ending near City Hall. The crowd surged with optimism as music played and ralliers chanted to Boycott Arizona and pressure President Obama to take swift action against Arizona’s legalized Apartheid.
It should also be mentioned that Los Angeles Police Department had a very light footprint at the march, with only a few officers monitoring from the sidelines. And just as well: the march was peaceful, upbeat, and a proud statement of civic resistance to “legal” fascism.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was pleasantly surprised to see the diversity of protesters in the crowd. There was a noticeable amount of White, Chinese, and African-American protesters who all felt that they also had a reason to stand up against what SNL’s Seth Myers labeled as “dry fascism” on national TV.
This is a reminder to us all that there are non-racist Whites out there who are willing to speak out against White Supremacy. They see that this is a Human Rights issue (the humanity of Mexican and “Central American” people is being totally violated) and the human part of them also feels violated by Arizona’s law.
Walking to the march, I happened to get flagged down by a European-descent couple vacationing from Australia. They asked me to explain the march and the issues. We had an excellent conversation about the ongoing legacy of European colonialism and how that applied to “wild west” Arizona. Again, I was reminded that truth and logic will prevail in this struggle. But we also have to summon the courage to demand that our rights be recognized. Those of us Mexicans and “Central Americans” are NOT immigrants to this continent. We are Indigenous (mixed and full-blood) people of this land. Our blood is native to this soil, and has been spilled over and over on it, paying for this land many times over. We absolutely cannot remain dehumanized as we have been during the last 500 years since Europeans invaded and colonized our continent. This is OUR time for CHANGE (to borrow a phrase).
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Filed under activism, anti-racism, anti-fascism, immigration, protests
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