#chiffres

Home Office’s rush to deport asylum seekers before Brexit was ‘inhumane’, watchdog finds

‘Unprecedented levels of self-harm and suicidal thoughts’ were recorded at the #Brook_House_Immigration_Removal_Centre in late 2020

▻https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-asylum-seekers-home-office-b1850796.html
#suicides #santé_mentale #UK #Angleterre #asile #migrations #réfugiés #détention_administrative #rétention #statistiques #chiffres #2020

#paywall

Push back of responsibility: Human Rights Violations as a Welcome Treatment at Europe’s Borders

In a new report, DRC in partnership with six civil society organisations across six countries, have collected records of thousands of illegal pushbacks of migrants and refugees trying to cross Europe’s borders. Testimonies also reveal unofficial cooperation between authorities in different countries to transfer vulnerable people across borders to avoid responsibility.

During only three months, authorities illegally prevented 2,162 men, women and children from seeking protection. The instances of illegal pushbacks were recorded from January to April 2021 at different border crossings in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Bosnia-and-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and Hungary. More than a third of the documented pushbacks involved rights violations such as denial of access to asylum procedure, physical abuse and assault, theft, extortion and destruction of property, at the hands of national border police and law enforcement officials.

https://i.imgur.com/KQnClS7.png

Further, the report (►https://drc.ngo/media/mnglzsro/prab-report-january-may-2021-_final_10052021.pdf) documents 176 cases of so-called “chain-pushbacks” where refugees and migrants were forcefully sent across multiple borders via informal cooperation between states to circumvent their responsibility and push unwanted groups outside of the EU. This could be from Italy or Austria through countries like Slovenia and Croatia to a third country such as Bosnia-and- Herzegovina.

▻https://pro.drc.ngo/resources/news/push-back-of-responsibility-human-rights-violations-as-a-welcome-treatment-
#droits_humains #asile #migrations #réfugiés #responsabilité #frontières #push-backs #refoulements #rapport #DRC #statistiques #chiffres #2021 #Balkans #route_des_Balkans #frontière_sud-alpine #Italie #France #refoulements_en_chaîne

Pour télécharger le rapport:
►https://drc.ngo/media/mnglzsro/prab-report-january-may-2021-_final_10052021.pdf

Darmanin : En matière d’immigration, notre main est ferme

Au total, il y a 30 % d’#éloignements_forcés de plus que sous les deux quinquennats précédents. Dans le même temps, nous naturalisons 30 % de moins. Nous avons durci les conditions d’intégration et les entretiens d’assimilation.

https://i.imgur.com/aQka1bm.png https://i.imgur.com/eBmSxbz.png https://i.imgur.com/BtFoMLO.png

▻https://twitter.com/GDarmanin/status/1390583304378847232

–-> les 3 tweet de Darmanin likés par #Macron

–—

Commentaire de François Gemenne :

Un éloignement forcé, c’est toujours un échec. Qu’un ministre de l’Intérieur se félicite de cela, c’est comme si un ministre de l’Education se félicitait de l’augmentation du taux de redoublement, ou un ministre de la Justice de la hausse du nombre de prisonniers. Quelle misère.

▻https://twitter.com/Gemenne/status/1391787516731273219

#Darmanin #Gérard_Darmanin #France #expulsions #statistiques #chiffres #migrations #renvois #asile #réfugiés #machine_à_expulser #naturalisation #intégration #conditions_d'intégration #assimilation #titre_de_séjour #rhétorique #fermeté

ping @isskein @karine4

Francia devolvió a España casi 16.000 migrantes en solo cinco meses

Los números se han disparado coincidiendo con una mayor presión migratoria desde Canarias y con el blindaje que los franceses mantienen en los pasos compartidos.

Los controles que ha impuesto Francia en sus puestos fronterizos con España como respuesta a la amenaza terrorista y a la covid están teniendo consecuencias en materia migratoria. Entre noviembre y marzo, las autoridades galas devolvieron a España 15.757 inmigrantes en situación irregular, más de 3.000 al mes, según datos de la policía francesa de fronteras divulgados por el diario francés Le Figaro (▻https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/clandestins-les-frontieres-ont-ete-verrouillees-avec-l-italie-et-l-espagne-) y confirmados a El PAÍS. Los números se han disparado respecto al mismo periodo del año anterior coincidiendo con una mayor presión migratoria desde Canarias, pero también con el blindaje que los franceses mantienen unilateralmente en los pasos compartidos.

La inmensa mayoría de los inmigrantes, 12.288 personas, fueron devueltos cuando intentaban entrar en territorio francés. La cifra triplica la registrada entre noviembre de 2019 y marzo de 2020. Las restantes 3.469 personas fueron interceptadas en departamentos vecinos, en particular de los Pirineos Orientales, que hacen frontera con Cataluña. En este caso se trata de un aumento del 25%. En esos controles las autoridades francesas han detenido a 108 personas por facilitar el cruce de los migrantes por la frontera. “Pueden ser camioneros o compatriotas, no son necesariamente parte de una organización estructurada”, declaró a Le Figaro el portavoz adjunto de la policía francesa, Christian Lajarrige.

España y Francia forman parte del espacio Schengen y, en teoría, no hay frontera entre los dos países. Pero, desde los ataques terroristas de 2015, París ha establecido controles fronterizos amparándose en un artículo del tratado europeo que le permite realizarlos por razones de “seguridad nacional”. El pasado mes de noviembre, tras los últimos atentados en Francia, su presidente, Emmanuel Macron, dobló el número de efectivos en las fronteras (▻https://elpais.com/internacional/2020-11-05/macron-refuerza-los-controles-en-la-frontera-con-espana-e-italia-ante-el-ter) y desplegó 4.800 policías, gendarmes y militares para establecer controles 24 horas al día. Macron, que teme el ascenso de la extrema derecha de Marine Le Pen en las elecciones presidenciales del año que viene, cerró además 19 puestos fronterizos con España.

El refuerzo de los controles también ha repercutido en la frontera alpina entre Francia e Italia. Entre noviembre y marzo, Francia impidió la entrada a 23.537 personas, el doble que en el mismo periodo un año antes, según las cifras citadas. A ellos se añaden, 2.502 migrantes detenidos en territorio francés, un aumento del 39%.

Para expulsar a los inmigrantes que entran irregularmente a su territorio, Francia y España se valen de un acuerdo bilateral de 2002 (►https://elpais.com/politica/2018/11/02/actualidad/1541179682_837419.html) que les permite la devolución en las cuatro horas siguientes al paso de la frontera. El acuerdo contempla una serie de garantías, como que los inmigrantes sean entregados a la policía española o que se formalice por escrito su devolución. Los datos de la policía francesa no especifican cuántos inmigrantes han sido devueltos sobre la base de este acuerdo bilateral, pero fuentes policiales y los propios inmigrantes han señalado que la mayor parte se realiza sin que medie un solo trámite.

Las abultadas cifras no significan, en cualquier caso, que todas las personas devueltas se queden en España. Los gendarmes controlan con celo puentes, estaciones, autobuses, coches y trenes, pero la mayoría de los migrantes lo vuelve a intentar tres, cuatro y hasta cinco veces hasta que finalmente consiguen cruzar. Entre marzo y abril EL PAÍS ha estado en contacto con 14 migrantes, la mayoría malienses, que tenían como objetivo llegar a París y a otras ciudades francesas. Todos, antes o después y tras varios intentos, lo lograron.

Buena parte de los migrantes que estos meses se han dirigido a la frontera francesa proceden de Canarias. Tras meses bloqueados en las islas han conseguido llegar a la Península por sus propios medios o, en el caso de los más vulnerables, ha sido la Secretaría de Estado de Migraciones la que los ha derivado a centros de acogida en otras provincias. No se conoce cuántos de ellos deciden quedarse en España, pero siempre hay un porcentaje importante que se marcha a Francia y a otros países europeos para encontrarse con parientes y amigos.

Estos flujos migratorios, los llamados movimientos secundarios, son una obsesión para París y Berlín que presionan a Madrid para que evite que los migrantes se muevan por el continente. Francia, de hecho, ya ha puesto sobre la mesa una reforma del tratado Schengen para revisar las normas que rigen el espacio de libre circulación en Europa y reforzar el control de fronteras interiores.

▻https://elpais.com/espana/2021-04-24/francia-devolvio-a-espana-casi-16000-migrantes-en-solo-cinco-meses.html?ssm=

#France #Espagne #renvois #expulsions #frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #chiffres #statistiques
#accord_bilatéral #accord_de_réadmission #accords_de_réadmission

–—

voir la liste des accords de réadmissions signés par des pays européens et utilisés pour renvoyer (directement sans leur donner la possibilité de déposer une demande d’asile) des personnes à la recherche d’un refuge :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/736091

Nearly 17 child migrants a day vanished in Europe since 2018

Investigation finds one in six were solo and under 15, as experts say cross-border cooperation ‘nonexistent’.

At least 18,000 unaccompanied child migrants have disappeared after arriving in European countries including Greece, Italy and Germany.

An investigation by the Guardian and the cross-border journalism collective Lost in Europe found that 18,292 unaccompanied child migrants went missing in Europe between January 2018 and December 2020 – equivalent to nearly 17 children a day.

In 2020 alone, 5,768 children disappeared in 13 European countries.

Most of the children who have gone missing over the past three years came to Europe from Morocco, but Algeria, Eritrea, Guinea and Afghanistan were also among the top countries of origin. According to the data available, 90% were boys and about one in six were younger than 15.

The investigation, which collated data on missing unaccompanied minors from all 27 EU countries, as well as Norway, Moldova, Switzerland and the UK, found the information provided was often inconsistent or incomplete, meaning the true numbers of missing children could be much higher.

Spain, Belgium and Finland provided figures only up to the end of 2019. Denmark, France and the UK provided no data at all on unaccompanied missing children.

The findings of the investigation raise serious questions about the extent European countries are able or willing to protect unaccompanied child migrants.

Federica Toscano, head of advocacy and migration at Missing Children Europe, a non-profit organisation that connects grassroots agencies across Europe, said the data was “extremely important” for understanding the scale of the problem in Europe. “The high number of missing children is a symptom of a child-protection system that doesn’t work,” she said.

She said unaccompanied children were among the migrants most vulnerable to violence, exploitation and trafficking. “Criminal organisations are increasingly targeting migrant children,” said Toscano, “especially unaccompanied ones and many of them become victims of labour and sexual exploitation, forced begging and trafficking.”

In March 2019, the Guardian and Lost in Europe found that at least 60 Vietnamese children had disappeared from Dutch shelters. Dutch authorities suspected they had been trafficked into Britain to work on cannabis farms and in nail salons.

Herman Bolhaar, the Dutch national rapporteur on human trafficking, said the investigation showed the urgent need for cooperation at the European level to address why thousands of unaccompanied migrant children have disappeared without a trace. “We cannot lose sight of these children,” he said. “They deserve our protection.”

While almost all of the countries in the investigation have detailed procedures in place intended to deal with the disappearance of unaccompanied minors, they do not always work well in practice, according to a 2020 report from the European Migration Network, part of the European Union. Problems include failure to follow up when children are reported missing and insufficient cooperation between police and asylum or child protection authorities.

“Very little is recorded in a file of a missing migrant child,” said Toscano, “and too often it is assumed that a migrant child is somewhere safe in another country, although cross-border collaboration on these cases is practically nonexistent.”

There are multiple reasons why children go missing, she said, including “the lengthy and burdensome procedures to obtain international protection or to be reunited with their family”. Many were also held in inadequate facilities, often with no access to education, she added.

A spokesperson for the European commission said there was “deep concern about children going missing”, adding that member states needed “to take action to prevent and respond to the disappearances of children in migration … by improving data collection and cross-border collaboration.”

▻https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/apr/21/nearly-17-child-migrants-a-day-vanished-in-europe-since-2018

#MNA #mineurs_non_accompagnés #asile #migrations #disparition #Europe #réfugiés #disparitions #enfants #enfance #réfugiés

–-

ajouté au fil de discussion autour des #statistiques de la « disparition » de MNA :

►https://seenthis.net/messages/714320
#chiffres

Tribune de l’#Observatoire_du_décolonialisme
–-> observatoire déjà signalé ici :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/901103
►https://seenthis.net/messages/905509

« #Décolonialisme et #idéologies_identitaires représentent un quart de la #recherche en #sciences_humaines aujourd’hui »

Les tenants du décolonialisme et des idéologies identitaires minimisent ou nient leur existence. La montée en puissance de ces #idéologies dans la recherche est pourtant flagrante et on peut la mesurer, démontrent les trois universitaires.

Dans les débats sur le terme d’#islamo-gauchisme, beaucoup ont prétendu qu’il n’existait pas, puisque ni les islamistes ni les gauchistes n’emploient ce terme. De même, dans de multiples tribunes et émissions, les tenants du décolonialisme et des idéologies identitaires minimisent ou nient leur existence en produisant des chiffres infimes et en soulignant qu’il n’existe pas de postes dont l’intitulé comprend le mot décolonialisme. À ce jeu-là, un essai intitulé « Les Blancs, Les Juifs et nous » [nom du livre de Houria Bouteldjane, porte-parole du Parti des Indigènes de la République, NDLR] ne serait évidemment pas #décolonial, puisqu’il n’y a pas le mot « décolonial » dedans.

Parler de « décolonialisme », ce n’est donc pas s’intéresser au mot « décolonial » mais aux notions qui le structurent dont le vocabulaire est un reflet, mais pas seulement. La rhétorique, la syntaxe, la stylistique : tout participe à un ensemble qui détermine le caractère d’un écrit. Par exemple, « pertinent » est un adjectif qui nous sert à caractériser un essai. On dit par exemple d’un article qu’il est « pertinent » - Mais le mot « pertinent », c’est nous qui l’employons. Il n’est pas présent dans le texte évalué. C’est le propre du jugement de dégager une idée synthétique à partir des mots exprimés.

Mais soit, faisons le pari des mots et jouons le jeu qui consiste à croire que les #mots disent le contenu. Mais alors : de tous les mots. Et pas seulement de ceux que l’on nous impose dans un débat devenu byzantin où un chef d’entreprise-chercheur nous explique que tout ça est un micro-phénomène de la recherche qui n’a aucun intérêt, que le mot ne pèse que 0,001% de la recherche en sciences humaines et où, par un psittacisme remarquable, on en vient presque à prouver que la sociologie elle-même ne publie rien.

Partons simplement d’un constat lexical : sous le décolonialisme tel que nous pensons qu’il s’exprime en France dans l’université au XXIe siècle, nous trouvons les idées qui « déconstruisent » les sciences - la #race, le #genre, l’#intersectionnalité, l’#islamophobie, le #racisme. Que ces mots occupent les chercheurs avec des grilles de lecture nouvelles, tantôt pour les critiquer tantôt pour les étayer et que ces mots - dans le domaine bien précis des Lettres - occupent une place qu’ils n’occupaient pas autrefois - ce qui dénote une évolution de la discipline.

Dans un premier temps, nous nous intéresserons au fonctionnement des #blogs à visée scientifique, dont nous pensons qu’ils constituent un lieu de la littérature marginale scientifique. Puis dans un second temps, à la #production_scientifique au prisme des #publications présentes à travers les revues et les livres. On s’intéressera en particulier à l’#OpenEdition parce que c’est précisément un lieu-outil où la recherche se présente aux instances gouvernantes comme un mètre-étalon des livrables de la recherche.

Notre vocabulaire réunit quelques mots identifiés comme représentatifs des thématiques décoloniales et intersectionnelles, sans préjuger du positionnemenent de l’auteur soit pour ou contre (décolonial, #postcolonial, #discriminations, race(s), genre(s), racisme(s), intersectionnalité et synonymes). Il nous suffit d’acter que le sujet occupe une place plus ou moins importante dans le débat.

Sur OpenEdition, réduit à la part des blogs (Hypotheses) et événements annoncés (Calenda) : une recherche « courte » sur « genre, race et intersectionnalité » donne près de 37578 résultats sur 490078 (au 20 mars 2021) soit 7% de la recherche globale. Ce qui à première vue semble peu. Une recherche étendue sur « racisme et #discrimination » présente d’ailleurs une faible augmentation avec 32695 occurrences sur 39064 titres, soit 8% des objets décrits sur la plateforme.

Toutefois, si on s’intéresse à la période 1970-2000, le nombre de résultats pour le motif « racisme discrimination » est de 9 occurrences sur 742 documents soit à peine 1% des objets d’études. En 20 ans, la part représentée par des sujets liés à ces mots-clés a donc été multipliée par 7.

À ce volume, il faut maintenant ajouter les recherches sur « décolonial ». Le mot est totalement absent de la recherche avant 2001, comme le mot « #islamophobie ». Le mot « #post-colonial », c’est 76 documents. Après 2002, le mot « décolonial » pèse 774 tokens ; « post-colonial » (et son homographe « postcolonial »), c’est 58669 ; islamophobie : 487. Au total, ces mots comptent donc au 20 mars 59930 occurrences et représentent 12% des blogs et annonces de recherche. Maintenant, si nous prenons l’ensemble des mots du vocabulaire, ils représentent 89469 documents soit 20% des préoccupations des Blogs.

Si maintenant, on s’intéresse à la production scientifique elle-même représentée par des articles ou des livres : une recherche sur « racisme genre race intersectionnalité discrimination » renvoie 177395 occurrences sur 520800 documents (au 20 mars), soit 34% des documents recensés.

Le rapport entre le volume de résultats montre que la part d’étude sur « racisme et discrimination » ne pèse en fait que 43962 documents (au 20 mars), soit 9% de la recherche globale mais 25% des résultats du panel. Si nous réduisons la recherche à « genre, race et intersectionnalité », on trouve en revanche 162188 documents soit 31% du volume global - un tiers - mais 75% du panel.

Cet aperçu montre à quel point ces objets occupent une place importante dans les publications, sans préjuger de l’orientation des auteurs sur ces sujets : critiques ou descriptifs. Simplement on montre ici que les préoccupations pressenties par l’Observatoire du Décolonialisme et des idéologies identitaires ne sont pas vaines.

À titre de comparaison, pour toute la période 1970-2021, la recherche sur « syntaxe et sémantique » c’est 55356/520849 items, soit 10% de la recherche pour une thématique qui représente 48% des enjeux de recherches en linguistique qui elle-même ne pèse que 115111 items en base toute sous-discipline confondue, soit 22% de la recherche (22% qui peuvent parfaitement créer une intersection avec l’ensemble de la recherche décoloniale comme par exemple cet article : « Quelle place occupent les femmes dans les sources cunéiformes de la pratique ? » où l’on identifie les tokens linguistiques comme « écriture cunéiforme » et des tokens intersectionnels dans le sommaire : « De l’histoire de la femme à l’histoire du genre en assyriologie » ).

Maintenant, si on reprend ces mêmes motifs de recherche globaux appliqués aux seuls revues et livres, on réalise que le total de publications sur ces sujets est de 262618 sur 520809 (au 20 mars) soit 50.4% de la recherche exprimée à travers les publications scientifiques.

La recherche en décolonialisme pèse donc 20% de l’activité de blogging et d’organisation d’événements scientifiques et la moitié (50%) de la part des publications.

Que faut-il comprendre d’une telle donnée ? Dans un premier temps, il faut déjà acter la forte pénétration des enjeux de recherches liés aux thématiques décoloniales, pour d’excellentes raisons sans doute qu’il n’est pas question de discuter.

Presque la moitié des activités du cœur de l’évaluation des carrières - revues et livres - passe par la description toutes disciplines confondues des objets de la sociologie. La disparité avec les activités scientifiques d’édition journalière ou d’annonces d’événements ne contredit pas bien au contraire cette envolée.

Le marché symboliquement lucratif en termes d’enjeux de carrière de l’édition est saturé par les thématiques décoloniales qui sont porteuses pour les carrières jugées sur les publications sérieuses. Cette situation crée un #appel_d’air du côté de l’activité fourmillante des marges de la recherche où se reportent les activités scientifiques « fondamentales » parce qu’elles trouvent dans ces nouveaux lieux des moyens de faire subsister simplement leurs thématiques.

Andreas Bikfalvi dans son article intitulé « La Médecine à l’épreuve de la race » rappelle certaines données de la science qui confirment l’orientation générale. Car, si les sciences sociales sont très touchées par l’idéologie identitaire, les #sciences_dures et même les #sciences_biomédicales n’en sont pas exemptées.

Une recherche sur la plateforme scientifique Pubmed NCBI avec comme mot-clé racism ou intersectionality montre des choses étonnantes. Pour racism, il y avait, en 2010, seulement 107 entrées, avec ensuite une augmentation soutenue pour atteindre 1 255 articles en 2020. Par ailleurs, en 2018, il y avait 636 entrées et, en 2019, 774 entrées, ce qui signifie une augmentation de 100 % en à peine deux ans, et 62 % en à peine un an.

Avant 2010, le nombre d’entrées s’était maintenu à un niveau très faible. Pour intersectionality, il n’y avait que 13 entrées en 2010, avec, en 2020, 285 entrées.

L’augmentation de ces deux mots-clés suit donc une évolution parallèle. C’est certainement explicable par les événements récents aux États-Unis, à la suite de l’apparition de groupes militants de « #justice_sociale », dans le sillage du mouvement « #Black_Lives_Matter », qui ont eu un impact significatif dans les différentes institutions académiques. Cela ne reflète donc pas l’augmentation des problèmes raciaux, mais une importation récente de ces problématiques dans la recherche.

Le rapport entre les différentes entrées lexicales dans la galaxie de la pensée décoloniale à travers certaines unités lexicales caractérise un discours hyperbolique. On voit parfaitement que la comparaison de l’emploi de certaines expressions comme « #écriture_inclusive » ou « #place_de_la_femme » qu’un regard hâtif pourrait dans un premier temps juger faible est en nette surreprésentation par rapport à des unités liées comme « place de l’enfant » ou « écriture cursive ».

Inutile d’effectuer ici une analyse scientométrique précise. Mais on peut dire que la qualité des divers articles des journaux est variable si on se réfère au facteur impact, depuis des publications marginales comme Feminist Legal Studies (IF : 0,731) à des revues parmi les plus prestigieuses au monde, comme New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) (IF : 74.699) et The Lancet (IF : 60.392). Les titres et le contenu de ces articles sont aussi évocateurs.

Pour citer quelques exemples : « Devenir une communauté antiraciste néonatale » (1). L’article prône une prise de conscience critique basée sur les stratégies visant à améliorer l’équité en santé, à éliminer les biais implicites et à démanteler le racisme en néonatalogie et périnatalogie. « Vers une neuroscience compassionnelle et intersectionnelle : augmentation de la diversité et de l’équité dans la neuroscience contemplative » (2). Un cadre de recherche appelé « neuroscience intersectionnelle » est proposé, qui adapte les procédures de recherche pour être plus inclusif et plus « divers ». « Intersectionnalité et traumatologie dans la bio-archéologie » (3). Ici, les auteurs parlent de l’utilité du concept d’intersectionnalité de K. Crenshaw dans l’examen des squelettes lors des fouilles archéologiques. « Six stratégies pour les étudiants en médecine pour promouvoir l’antiracisme » (4). Ici, on prône l’introduction de l’activisme racialiste dans les programmes des études de médecine à la suite du racisme anti-noir, de la brutalité policière et de la pandémie de Covid-19. 1

Entre les 0,01% de mots de la recherche décoloniale identifiés par certains lexicomètres et nos 50%, la marche est grande. On entend déjà les uns hurler au blasphème, les autres à la caricature et les troisièmes déclarer qu’entre deux extrêmes, la vérité est forcément entre les deux.

Ce #dogme de la #parité d’où émerge la voie médiane est une illusion rhétorique - mais quand bien même : disons que de 1 à 50, la vérité soit 25 : cela signifie donc qu’un quart de la recherche en Sciences Humaines est occupée aujourd’hui par ces questions transverses - ce qui est non négligeable. Mais pour couper court au débat stérile qu’entraîneront les ratiocinations, rappelons deux ou trois choses que l’on voit en première année de licence de lettres :

Il n’est pas exclu qu’une idéologie repose sur des mots, mais une idéologie repose surtout et avant tout sur une argumentation : le #vocabulaire n’en est que le grossissement superficiel. Supposer que des mots-clés permettent le recensement d’une idéologie est une proposition à nuancer : elle néglige la stylistique des titres et résumés de thèses, la façon contournée de dire les choses. Bref, comme le disait un kremlinologue, les mots servent à cacher les phrases.

Or, dans leur étude reprise par « Le Monde », nos collègues n’ont retenu que trois mots et sous une forme unique (racialisé et pas racisé, intersectionnalité et pas intersectionnel, etc.). Ils négligent par exemple genre ou #féminin ou islamophobie…

Cette étude suppose aussi que l’ idéologie qu’ils minimisent se trouve dans les documents officiels qui ont été choisis par eux. Mais le corpus dans lequel nos collègues cherchent est nécessairement incomplet : les annonces de colloques et de journées d’étude, les interventions ponctuelles dans les séminaires et les séminaires eux-mêmes ne sont pas pris en compte, ni les ateliers et autres événements para-institutionnels.

Les écrits des universitaires dans la presse ne figureront pas non plus. Un site comme GLAD ne sera vraisemblablement pas pris en compte alors qu’il est saturé de ces mots clés. Un titre comme « Les blancs, les juifs et nous » ne comporte aucun mot déclencheur et n’apparaît ni dans son étude, ni dans la nôtre. On peut multiplier les exemples : il suffit qu’au lieu de genre on ait « féminin » (« Déconstruire le féminin ») pour que cette thématique soit gommée. Efficace ?

En réalité, partir de #mots-clés suppose le principe de #déclarativité : l’idéologie serait auto-déclarée, conformément à la théorie performative du langage propre au discours intersectionnel. Selon ce principe, il n’existerait aucun texte islamo-gauchiste ni antisémite, puisqu’ils ne comportent pas ces mots-clés dans leur propre description.

Avec ce raisonnement, il n’existerait pas non plus de thèse médiocre, ni excellente puisque ces mots n’y seront pas repérables… Les termes à repérer sont donc nécessairement neutres axiologiquement : si des mots sont repérables, c’est qu’ils sont considérés comme acceptables et qu’ils pénètrent le champ de la recherche. La recrudescence repérée de ces mots-clés indiquerait alors une idéologie de plus en plus affichée. Il faut donc prendre en compte l’évolution numérique comme un indice fort.

Pour obtenir des conclusions plus solides, il faudrait contraster des chiffres relatifs, pour comparer ce qui est comparable : les thématiques ou les disciplines (avec des termes de niveaux différents comme « ruralité » ou « ouvrier » ; voire des domaines disciplinaires plus larges : narratologie, phonologie…). On peut aussi circonscrire d’autres champs d’analyse (Paris 8 sociologie, au hasard) ou regarder combien de thèses ou articles en sociologie de la connaissance ou en esthétique, etc. Il y aurait de quoi faire un état des lieux de la recherche…

1. Vance AJ, Bell T. Becoming an Antiracist Neonatal Community. Adv Neonatal Care 2021 Feb 1 ;21(1):9-15.

2. Weng HY, Ikeda MP, Lewis-Peacock JA, Maria T Chao, Fullwiley D, Goldman V, Skinner S, Duncan LG, Gazzaley A, Hecht FM. Toward a Compassionate Intersectional Neuroscience : Increasing Diversity and Equity in Contemplative Neuroscience. Front Psychol 2020 Nov 19 ;11:573134.

3. Mant M, de la Cova C, Brickley MB. Intersectionality and Trauma Analysis in Bioarchaeology. Am J Phys Anthropol 2021 Jan 11. doi : 10.1002/ajpa.24226.

4. Fadoju D, Azap RA, Nwando Olayiwola J. Sounding the Alarm : Six Strategies for Medical Students to Champion Anti-Racism Advocacy. J Healthc Leadersh, 2021 Jan 18 ;13:1-6. doi : 10.2147/JHL.S285328. eCollection 2021.

►https://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/decolonialisme-et-ideologies-identitaires-representent-un-quart-de-la-reche

et déjà signalé par @gonzo ici :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/908608

#Xavier-Laurent_Salvador #Jean_Szlamowicz #Andreas_Bikfalvi
–—

Commentaire sur twitter de Olivier Schmitt, 27.03.2021 :

Cette tribune est tellement bourrée d’erreurs méthodologiques qu’elle en dit beaucoup plus sur la nullité scientifique des auteurs que sur la recherche en SHS.
Pour gonfler leurs stats, ils comptent toutes les occurrences du mot « racisme ». Vous travaillez sur le racisme et avez ce terme dans votre publication ? Vous êtes forcément un postcolonial tenant des idéologies identitaires...
Idem, et ce n’est pas anodin, ils incluent l’occurence « post-colonial » (avec le tiret). Qui est simplement un marqueur chronologique (on parle par exemple couramment de « sociétés post-coloniales » en Afrique ou en Asie) et n’a rien à voir avec une idéologie « postcoloniale »
Et oui, un tiret à de l’importance... Mais donc vous êtes historien et travaillez sur, au hasard, Singapour après l’indépendance (donc post-colonial), et bien vous êtes un tenant des idéologies identitaires...
Et même en torturant les données et les termes dans tous les sens pour gonfler complètement artificiellement les chiffres, ils arrivent à peine à identifier un quart des travaux...
C’est définitivement pathétiquement débile.
Et puisqu’ils veulent « mesurer » et « objectiver », un truc comme ça dans n’importe quelle revue un minimum sérieuse, c’est un desk reject direct...

▻https://twitter.com/Olivier1Schmitt/status/1375855068822523918

Sur les #chiffres en lien avec les recherches sur les questions post- / dé-coloniales, voir ce fil de discussion :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/901103
#statistiques

ping @isskein @cede @karine4

Glocal Climate Change

https://i.imgur.com/AURsnMY.png

Global warming is not only about melting icebergs or expanding deserts. It is something which does happen in our backyard as well. Data and estimates on the mean temperatures at the local level indicate that climate change has been affecting almost every corner of Europe, as mean temperatures have increased by more than 2°C in half a century in multiple areas.

▻https://climatechange.europeandatajournalism.eu/en/map

Les données sont présentées au niveau de la commune, ici par exemple Grenoble :

https://i.imgur.com/mUw38tF.png

#carte #cartographie #visualisation #changement_climatique #climat #local #Europe #températures #données #database #statistiques #chiffres #commune

ping @reka @visionscarto @simplicissimus

Working conditions in essential occupations and the role of migrants

https://migrationpolicycentre.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/working-condition-occupations-role-migrants.png

Following a national #lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, state governments in Germany published lists of “essential” occupations that were considered necessary to maintain basic services such as health care, social care, food production and transport. Against this background, this paper examines working conditions and identifies clusters of similar jobs in these essential occupations. Differences across clusters are highlighted using detailed data on job characteristics, including tasks, educational requirements and working conditions. Two clusters with favourable or average working conditions account for more than three-quarters of jobs in essential occupations. Another two clusters, comprising 20% of jobs in essential occupations, are associated with unfavourable working conditions such as low pay, job insecurity, poor prospects for advancement and low autonomy. These latter clusters exhibit high shares of migrants. Further evidence suggests that this pattern is linked to educational requirements and how recent migrants evaluate job characteristics. It is argued that poor working conditions could affect the resilience of basic services during crises, notably by causing high turnover. Policies towards essential occupations should therefore pay close attention to working conditions, the role of migrant labour and their long-term implications for resilience.

▻https://cadmus.eui.eu//handle/1814/70541

#migrations #travail #covid-19 #essentiel #crise_sanitaire #coronavirus #conditions_de_travail #rapport #Migration_Policy_Centre (#MPC) #confinement #Allemagne #statistiques #chiffres

ping @isskein @karine4

Symptômes dépressifs : hospitalisations des moins de 15 ans en hausse de 80 % - France - Le Télégramme
▻https://www.letelegramme.fr/france/symptomes-depressifs-hospitalisations-des-moins-de-15-ans-en-hausse-de-

https://www.letelegramme.fr/images/2021/03/22/symptomes-depressifs-hospitalisations-des-moins-de-15-ans-en_5591242_1000x526.jpg

Angèle Consoli, pédopsychiatre à l’hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière et membre du Conseil scientifique, a noté une « augmentation des symptômes dépressifs chez les moins de 15 ans, avec une augmentation des passages aux urgences et du nombre d’hospitalisations après passage de 80 % », ce lundi matin sur France Inter.

Invitée ce lundi matin sur France Inter, Angèle Consoli est revenue sur la santé des jeunes. Et la pédopsychiatre n’a pas caché son inquiétude : « Il y a des retours de terrain, de l’ensemble des collègues sur tout le territoire national qui montrent qu’il y a beaucoup de demandes de soins, de consultations, d’indications d’hospitalisations, d’idées et de crises suicidaires, avec des jeunes qui relèvent de soins psychiatriques. Il y a aussi des données épidémiologiques fiables qui montrent une augmentation des symptômes dépressifs chez les moins de 15 ans, avec une augmentation des passages aux urgences et du nombre d’hospitalisations après passage de 80 %. De même pour la tranche 12/17 ans, avec des symptômes anxieux, dépressifs et des crises suicidaires ».

« Un impact sur la santé mentale »
Angèle Consoli a aussi expliqué déceler les symptômes chez les jeunes : « Certains signes doivent alerter les parents : un changement de comportement, ce qu’on appelle une rupture avec l’état antérieur. Si l’enfant est plus irritable, plus colérique, plus explosif, ou plus en retrait, qu’il s’isole… Ce sont des signes qui doivent alerter, aussi à l’école ou via le réseau de sien. Il faut qu’on soit vigilants : il y a un impact sur la santé mentale. Si cela arrive, il faut parler avec son enfant, quel que soit son âge, avec les mots adaptés. Lui demander ce qui l’inquiète, ce qui l’angoisse ».

#Santé

Le procès de l’Hôpital public , blog, PAR FLORIAN VIVREL
▻https://blogs.mediapart.fr/florian-vivrel/blog/060221/proces-de-lhopital-public-chapitre-5-2009-loi-hopital-patients-sante

Belle illustration du monde merveilleux vanté par les êtres supérieurs que sont les gens "responsables", "rationnels", "sérieux", "bons gestionnaires", "courageux" etc.

Cash investigation - Santé : la loi du marché / intégrale - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pPCt0XqZLs

Cash investigation - Santé : la loi du marché

Laboratoires pharmaceutiques un lobby en pleine santé (Les infiltrés - France 2) - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7dPq8F6k1k

Maladies à vendre, en VOD - ARTE Boutique
▻http://boutique.arte.tv/f7062-maladies_a_vendre
Maladies à vendre - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8R-h76mjp8

Les médicamenteurs - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXKZyok0V_o

Ehpad : l’heure des comptes ?
▻https://www.france.tv/france-2/cash-investigation/3103799-ehpad-l-heure-des-comptes.html
#Fraude_fiscale

« L’#OMS : dans les griffes des lobbyistes ? » : un documentaire troublant diffusé sur Arte
►https://mrmondialisation.org/loms-dans-les-griffes-des-lobbyistes
#Conflits_d'intérêts #Documentaires #Organisations_internationales #Santé #Sciences #Multinationales

« au cours des trois dernières décennies, la structure internationale a perdu son indépendance financière : Aujourd’hui, ses principales ressources proviennent de plus en plus de fonds privés et d’entreprises dont les intérêts dépendent de ses décisions »

« Bien qu’elle ait toujours été financée pour partie par des mécènes privés, cette part ne s’élevait qu’à 20% dans les années 1970 : les autres 80% provenaient des États membres des Nations Unis. Or, aujourd’hui, la situation s’est inversée. »

« la structure est de plus en plus dépendante des financements en provenance de mécènes privés, comme Bill Gates ou les industriels pharmaceutiques, car elle manque d’aides publiques »

Hôpital public sous pression : la raison du malaise - Chronique Mediapart #01 - Osons Causer
▻http://osonscauser.com/hopital-public-pression-raison-malaise-chronique-mediapart

BALLAST Hôpital public à l’agonie. Par Sarah Kilani
►http://www.revue-ballast.fr/hopital-public-a-lagonie

" Les cotisations ont été rebaptisées « charges », le système de santé a été accusé de « coûter » et on ne présente plus le fameux « trou de la Sécu »."

" La part de la valeur ajoutée affectée à la masse salariale (renommée « coût du travail ») a commencé à décroître, faisant perdre à la Sécurité sociale plusieurs centaines de milliards d’euros"

"Alors que, de longue date, les hôpitaux publics étaient financés par une dotation globale forfaitaire (allouée à chaque établissement), la réforme de l’assurance maladie de 2004 a profondément bouleversé le fonctionnement des établissements de santé. La grande majorité de leur financement s’effectue désormais sur le principe de la tarification à l’activité (ou T2A) et dépend dès lors du nombre et de la nature des actes et des séjours réalisés2. À chaque acte correspond un code, lequel donne droit à un remboursement de la part de l’assurance maladie."

"Ce système pousse très fortement les hôpitaux à orienter leur politique vers une course aux actes lucratifs afin de leur permettre d’engranger de l’argent et de survivre. Les médecins sont incités à augmenter leur activité (notamment les chirurgiens et ceux qui ont une activité de consultation). Les dérives sont nombreuses et les patients opérés hors indications ne sont pas rares. Les activités peu lucratives et coûteuses pour les hôpitaux sont, de fait, délaissées.

Certains médecins, afin de faire survivre leur service, sont amenés à dépasser très largement les limites acceptables de l’éthique — en mettant en place des soins inutiles ou en maintenant artificiellement certains patients en vie pour pouvoir coder ces actes ou débloquer les enveloppes allouées à ce type de soins."

"Afin de « récupérer des parts de marché » dans l’offre de soin, les hôpitaux se placent en concurrence directe avec les cliniques pour les actes lucratifs (notamment chirurgicaux). La concurrence a parfois même lieu au sein de l’hôpital, où certains services s’arrachent les activités lucratives (...) la T2A désavantage nettement l’hôpital public par rapport aux cliniques puisque le premier gère les pathologies lourdes, assure une activité de recherche et d’enseignement et, en tant que service public, ne peut sélectionner ses patients."

"Afin d’optimiser au maximum ce codage, de nombreux hôpitaux ont désormais recours à des « cabinets d’optimisation » — comme Altao."

"Plusieurs témoins, dans des hôpitaux différents et même d’anciens employés de ces entreprises privées, affirment l’existence d’une triche lors du codage visant à déclarer des actes non réalisés ou à aggraver l’état des patients afin d’arnaquer la Sécurité sociale"

"Il arrive alors que des patients hospitalisés soient gardés un ou deux jours de plus que nécessaire, avant leur transfert dans une autre unité, lorsque le service dispose de lits vides — et ce afin d’augmenter artificiellement son taux d’occupation et d’éviter à terme les fermetures de lits jugés pas assez rentables pour les administrations. (...) Ce système les incite parfois à exagérer la gravité de l’état des patients lorsqu’ils codent le séjour du patient, sous peine de ne pas voir débloquer le financement forfaitaire associé : en deçà d’un certain seuil de gravité du patient (...) celui-ci n’est pas rémunéré. Les médecins sont prisonniers d’un dilemme omniprésent : tricher ou voir leur service ou une partie de leurs lits fermés "

"Les tentatives de rappel des administrations à l’ordre et de légiférer sur le temps de travail des internes12 se sont souvent soldées par un échec. Pour cause : ces derniers ne dénoncent que très rarement leurs conditions de travail de peur de perdre des opportunités professionnelles (durant leurs études, ils sont mis en compétition pour l’accession aux postes très prisés de chef de clinique-assistant)"

"Alors que les médecins disposent d’une enveloppe annuelle pour leur formation continue, certains préfèrent se faire financer les congrès hors de prix par les laboratoires pharmaceutiques afin d’épargner ce coût à leur hôpital : cela génère les problèmes d’indépendance que l’on sait"

"La dégradation de la qualité de vie au travail pour les soignants a rendu l’hôpital public de moins en moins attractif, au profit, bien souvent, des établissements à but lucratif qui pour la plupart appartiennent à des groupes financiers"

"Avec la loi Touraine, un nouveau cap a été passé. Sous un prétexte totalement fallacieux d’accès aux soins, le tiers-payant a été généralisé : véritable cheval de Troie des mutuelles. Son opacité va pouvoir masquer aux yeux des citoyens une réalité qui ne se fera probablement pas attendre : le déremboursement progressif des soins par l’assurance maladie au profit des assurances privées. Le patient n’ayant plus à avancer le tarif des soins, il ne verra plus quelle part est prise en charge par l’assurance maladie et quelle part est remboursée par sa mutuelle. Le transfert du financement de la santé de la cotisation sociale vers les marchés privés peut commencer en toute discrétion."

"La loi Touraine impose également la création des groupements hospitaliers de territoire (GHT). La mise en place de ce projet, inspiré par le rapport Larcher de 2008 (remis sous la présidence de Nicolas Sarkozy), a débuté ce mois-ci et doit être abouti en 2021. Cette procédure prévoit la création de pôles d’activité clinique inter-établissements visant à « coordonner l’offre de soins ». Sauf que, dans le contexte de restrictions budgétaires, au nom de « l’optimisation » et de « la mutualisation des moyens »15, il ne faut pas douter que cela donnera lieu à la fermeture de certains services "

"Quand les hôpitaux seront définitivement précarisés et redevenus des dispensaires, comme avant la construction des CHU financée grâce à la cotisation sociale dans les années 196018, les patients n’auront plus que le choix de se diriger vers les cliniques pour se faire soigner. S’ils en ont les moyens. Car le gel des cotisations, la compression continue de la masse salariale, le chômage et les nombreux cadeaux de l’État aux entreprises en termes de cotisations patronales finiront par mettre à terre l’assurance maladie, au bénéfice des mutuelles qui auront la part belle."

"Que les médecins ne se fassent plus d’illusions : la sécurité de l’emploi et la liberté d’exercice dont ils disposent en France seront sans tarder balayées quand les mutuelles et les cliniques soumises aux objectifs actionnariaux de rentabilité seront reines. Les patients n’auront probablement plus le choix de leur médecins ; les mutuelles les dirigeront vers ceux avec qui elles auront passé des contrats aux prix qui leur conviendront."

#Lobbying : les labos pharmaceutiques ne lâchent rien | Alternatives Economiques
▻https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/lobbying-labos-pharmaceutiques-ne-lachent-rien/00082521

L’hôpital, objet de convoitises des labos | Alternatives Economiques
▻https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/lhopital-objet-de-convoitises-labos/00082527

Enième illustration du bouclage de la boucle :

« Faute de budget public, la formation médicale des praticiens continue en effet à être financée à hauteur de 98 % par l’industrie pharmaceutique, selon l’Igas »

« Pour obtenir l’autorisation de mise sur le marché (AMM) d’un médicament, un laboratoire doit en effet effectuer des essais cliniques, qui sont encadrés par des normes internationales et doivent obligatoirement avoir lieu en CHU. D’où la nécessité pour les industriels de trouver des équipes médicales au sein de ces établissements »

Comment les labos s’immiscent dans les facs de médecine | Alternatives Economiques
▻https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/labos-simmiscent-facs-de-medecine/00082529
Quand les labos soufflent à l’oreille des pouvoirs publics | Alternatives Economiques
▻https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/labos-soufflent-a-loreille-pouvoirs-publics/00082530

Overdoses sur ordonnance aux États-Unis, par Maxime Robin (Le Monde diplomatique, février 2018) #Multinationales
►https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/02/ROBIN/58390

Vaccinations obligatoires, le débat confisqué, par Leïla Shahshahani (Le Monde diplomatique, janvier 2018)
▻https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/01/SHAHSHAHANI/58252

Overdoses sur ordonnance aux États-Unis, par Maxime Robin (Le Monde diplomatique, février 2018)
►https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/02/ROBIN/58390
#Lobbying

"à l’origine réservé aux malades du cancer en phase terminale et à la chirurgie lourde. Un marché très limité. Pour l’étendre, le laboratoire lance en 1995 une campagne de lobbying agressive : il entend repenser totalement le rapport à la souffrance du patient. La douleur, quelle que soit son intensité, devient le nouvel ennemi du corps médical. Des études financées par l’entreprise recommandent aux praticiens de la considérer comme un « cinquième signe vital », au même titre que le pouls, la température, la pression artérielle et la respiration."

L’heure des comptes pour Purdue Pharma, par Maxime Robin (Le Monde diplomatique, février 2018)
▻https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/02/ROBIN/58388

« L’activité philanthropique des Sackler rayonne dans les plus grands musées du monde. Elle a valu à l’un de leurs patriarches, Mortimer Sackler, d’être nommé chevalier par la reine d’Angleterre en 1999. »
« Le laboratoire dispose de moyens immenses pour assurer sa défense. Jusqu’à présent, il s’est tiré d’affaire en versant de l’argent, dans des règlements à l’amiable qui lui ont permis d’éviter des condamnations pénales »

La médicalisation de l’expérience humaine, par Gérard Pommier (Le Monde diplomatique, mars 2018)
►https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/03/POMMIER/58465
#Multinationales #Conflits_d'intérêts #Lobbying #Etats-Unis #Marketing #Santé #Sciences

"ils savent se montrer plutôt généreux (par exemple en offrant des croisières de « formation » aux jeunes psychiatres)."

"Le lobbying de « Big Pharma » a gagné aussi les facultés de médecine, où l’on n’enseigne plus que le DSM. Mieux encore, il arrive que les laboratoires dispensent eux-mêmes les enseignements — de multiples conflits d’intérêts ont été dénoncés."

"Le marketing du DSM est simple : il suffit d’inventer à intervalles réguliers de nouveaux troubles"

"des associations de parents, dont certaines sont subventionnées par les laboratoires pharmaceutiques (par exemple l’association HyperSupers TDAH France, soutenue par les laboratoires Mensia Technologies, Shire, HAC Pharma et NLS Pharma)."

"Jerome Kagan, professeur à Havard, déclarait dans un entretien en 2012 que le TDAH n’est pas une pathologie, mais « une invention. Quatre-vingt-dix pour cent des 5,4 millions d’enfants sous Ritaline aux États-Unis n’ont pas un métabolisme anormal (4)  »"

Traitement de choc pour tuer l’hôpital public, par André Grimaldi, Thomas Papo & Jean-Paul Vernant (Le Monde diplomatique, février 2008)
▻https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2008/02/GRIMALDI/15627

#États_Unis : ces malades qui s’endettent pour se soigner
▻https://mobile.francetvinfo.fr/monde/usa/etats-unis-ces-malades-qui-s-endettent-pour-se-soigner_3423709.h

Les laboratoires pharmaceutiques en accusation, par Paul Scheffer (Le Monde diplomatique, octobre 2015)
►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2015/10/SCHEFFER/53952

Promesses et limites du séquençage de l’ADN
L’eldorado de la médecine sur mesure. par Raúl Guillén 
▻https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2021/09/GUILLEN/63456

Des conflits d’intérêts qui suscitent la défiance.
Une médecine sous influence.par Philippe Descamps, novembre 2020 #Santé
►https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2020/11/DESCAMPS/62393

La #pauvreté des enfants au niveau local : cartographie communale

En #Belgique, plus d’un enfant sur six vit sous le #seuil_de_pauvreté, mais cette pauvreté n’est pas répartie de la même façon dans toutes les communes. Actuellement, seule la #Flandre dispose d’un outil de mesure de la pauvreté des enfants au niveau communal : le #Kansarmoede_Index. Afin de mieux cerner le phénomène, la Fondation Roi Baudouin a chargé l’Université de Mons en 2018 de cartographier les facteurs de risque de pauvreté des enfants sur l’ensemble du pays et à l’échelon communal.

Vous trouverez ci-dessous six cartes représentant la Belgique avec, pour chacune d’elles, les données de chaque commune relatives à un indicateur de risque de pauvreté des enfants. Ces cartes sont interactives : en les parcourant avec la souris, vous verrez apparaître à l’écran les chiffres pour chaque commune.

https://i.imgur.com/ZKQiVj2.png

Les cinq premières cartes présentent cinq indicateurs indirects de risque de #pauvreté_des_enfants. Ils portent sur l’ensemble de la Belgique et mesurent des facteurs de (haut) #risque_de_pauvreté dans les #ménages avec enfants de 0 à 18 ans, mais pas la pauvreté des enfants en tant que telle. Il faut donc les interpréter avec précaution. Les cartes sont individuelles, mais complémentaires : c’est en prenant en compte plusieurs indicateurs indirects qu’on obtient une meilleure image du risque de pauvreté couru par les enfants de chaque commune.

1. Les bénéficiaires d’un #revenu_d’intégration_sociale (#RIS) ou équivalent (eRIS) en charge d’un ménage

Cet indicateur met en évidence le pourcentage de familles bénéficiaires du RIS ou eRIS dans chaque commune et parmi les ménages avec enfants. Plus une commune compte de bénéficiaires d’un RIS ou eRIS en charge d’un ménage, plus le risque de pauvreté des enfants est élevé.

2. Les revenus moyens par ménage

Cet indicateur donne une approximation de la richesse des ménages dans chaque commune. Plus l’indicateur est élevé, plus faible est le risque de pauvreté des enfants.

3. La part des #mineurs vivant dans un ménage sans revenu du travail

Vivre dans un ménage sans revenu du travail est l’indicateur indirect le plus fiable du risque de pauvreté des enfants. Plus cet indicateur est élevé, plus nombreux sont les enfants à risque de pauvreté.

4. La part des ménages vivant dans un logement public social

Cet indicateur doit être interprété avec précaution. Même si les enfants vivant dans un logement public social sont plus à risque de pauvreté, un taux élevé de ménages vivant dans un logement public social peut aussi refléter une stratégie communale active de lutte contre la précarité des familles.

5. Le type de ménage – focus sur les ménages monoparentaux

Vivre dans une famille monoparentale, dont le parent est le plus souvent une femme seule, augmente le risque de pauvreté des enfants. Toutefois, cet indicateur doit être interprété avec prudence car certains parents seuls disposent de revenus suffisamment élevés, d’un réseau social ou d’autres types de ressources qui protègent leur(s) enfant(s) du risque de pauvreté.

6. Le dernière carte présente le Kansarmoede Index (Index de risque de pauvreté), le seul indicateur direct de la pauvreté des enfants développé par l’organisme flamand Kind en Gezin et disponible uniquement pour la Flandre. Cet indicateur fournit le pourcentage d’enfants entre 0 et 3 ans qui vivent dans un ménage défavorisé. Le pourcentage de risque de pauvreté est calculé sur la base de six domaines : le revenu mensuel de la famille, le niveau d’éducation des parents, le niveau de stimulation de l’enfant, la situation professionnelle des parents, la qualité du logement et la santé. Les familles sont considérées comme à risque de pauvreté lorsque leur situation est impactée négativement dans trois des six domaines. Plus cet indicateur est élevé, plus les familles sont à risque de pauvreté.

►https://www.kbs-frb.be/fr/cartographie_pauvreteinfantile

#cartographie #Belgique #pauvreté #enfants #enfance #visualisation #chiffres #statistiques #pauvreté_des_enfants #communes #indicateurs

via @suske

Utviste 58 passasjerer fra én flyging til Torp – NRK Vestfold og Telemark – Lokale nyheter, TV og radio

La Norvège ne rigole pas avec la fermeture des frontières et les règles très strictes pour l’entrée. en 2020 et 2021 so far, 7 600 personnes ont été interdites d’entrée sur le territoire norvégien, et renvoyées d’où elles venaient par le même avion avec lequel elles sont arrivées. Et quand c’était les avions du soir, les passagers étaient placés en hôtel de quarantaine sou surveillance pour être remise dans le premier avion retour le lendemain matin.
▻https://www.nrk.no/vestfoldogtelemark/utviste-58-passasjerer-fra-en-flyging-til-torp-1.15414142

https://gfx.nrk.no/NbaX9wWbiN5CMi6TN1-EMwOJaq0ev6by_jKKn_g4nZSg.jpg

Tall fra politiet viser en stor økning i antall bortvisninger i grensekontrollen. 600 er hittil i år sendt tilbake fra Gardermoen.

I januar måtte 332 personer returnere til hjemlandet fra Torp, mens tallet for februar er 125.

– Det at så mange ble bortvist i januar kommer nok delvis av endringer i regelverk og fordi mange som jobber i Norge var i hjemlandet på juleferie.

Statistikk i forbindelse med koronaviruset – Politiet.no
▻https://www.politiet.no/aktuelt-tall-og-fakta/tall-og-fakta/statistikk-i-forbindelse-med-koronaviruset

https://www.politiet.no/globalassets/01-forside-admin/politiet.png

I uke 9 ble 380 personer bortvist fra Norge. Det er 52 flere enn uken før. 60 av bortvisningene skyldtes manglende dokumentasjon på negativ Covid-19-test. For 294 personer var bortvisningsgrunnen at de ikke hadde rett til innreise som følge av innreiserestriksjoner. For de øvrige var det andre årsaker til bortvisningen.

Så langt i år er 3094 personer bortvist fra Norge.

#norvège #corona

#Développement_humain (2020)

- L´#indice_de_développement_humain et ses composantes
– L´évolution de l´indice de développement humain
– L´indice de développement humain ajusté aux #inégalités
– L´indice de développement de #genre
– L´indice d´#inégalités_de_genre
– Indice de #pauvreté multidimensionnelle : pays en développement
– Tendances démographiques
– #Santé
– Niveaux d´#instruction
– #Revenu_national et composition des ressources
– #Travail et #emploi
– #Sécurité_humaine
– #Mobilité humaine et flux de capitaux
– Qualité du développement humain
– Inégalités femmes-hommes sur le cycle de vie
– Autonomisation des #femmes
– #Durabilité_environnementale
– Viabilité socio-économique

▻http://www.cartostat.eu/dr=2020_developpement_humain/F/TABLEAU.html

#cartothèque #cartes #visualisations #développement_humain
#ressources_pédagogiques #statistiques #chiffres #monde
#inégalités #démographie #éducation #mobilité_humaine #dette #tourisme #migrations #téléphone #téléphone_mobile #mortalité_infantile #paludisme #tuberculeuse #VIH #HIV #scolarisation #alphabétisation #PIB #chômage #réfugiés #IDPs #déplacés_internes #suicide #suicides #violence_domestique #violence_conjugale #alimentation #déficit_alimentaire #espérance_de_vie #lits_d'hôpitaux #soins #médecin #PISA #électricité #eau_potable #assainissement #travail_domestique #accouchement #contraception #congé_maternité #combustibles_fossiles #CO2 #émissions_de_CO2 #forêt #engrais #industrie_agro-alimentaire #pollution #pollution_atmosphérique #hygiène #dépenses_militaires #armée #pauvreté

ping @reka

Bâti dispersé, bâti concentré, des #disparités_territoriales persistantes

Les #bâtiments sont concentrés dans les #villes et #villages dans le quart nord-est de la #France alors qu’ils sont beaucoup plus souvent dispersés dans des #hameaux et des #lieux-dits dans l’ouest et le sud. Ainsi, en 2005, 91 % des bâtiments de la région #Grand_Est sont concentrés, contre 62 % en #Bretagne. Ces #spécificités_géographiques perdurent dans le temps. Les nouveaux bâtiments tendent à reproduire l’organisation existante du bâti.

Cette inertie pourrait refléter la diversité des #paysages plus ou moins propices à l’installation de nouveaux bâtiments en dehors des espaces déjà bâtis. La plupart des bâtiments devant être reliés aux réseaux routiers existants, les différentes configurations paysagères peuvent freiner ou favoriser la construction de nouveaux bâtiments éloignés du bâti concentré existant. Les formes des #parcelles cadastrales se différencient selon le type de #paysages : petites et presque carrées dans les paysages de champs clôturés, allongées et rectilignes dans ceux de champs ouverts. Confronter les images de ces parcelles à la localisation effective des nouvelles constructions confirme l’inertie dans le temps du bâti : 82 % des nouveaux bâtiments se font en continuité de bâti dans les paysages de champs ouverts, contre 65 % dans ceux de champs clôturés.

https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/graphique/5229207/figure2a.png

▻https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/5229207
#cadastre
#chiffres #statistiques #cartographie #visualisation

Gender Gap in #Wikimedia projects

Denelezh provides statistics about the gender gap in the content of Wikimedia projects.

For example, as of September 21, 2020, only 18.6 % of biographies in the English Wikipedia are about women.

Denelezh allows you to explore the gender gap by several dimensions:

– Gender Gap by year of birth
- Gender Gap by country of citizenship
- Gender Gap by occupation
– Gender Gap by Wikimedia project

You can mix these four dimensions, for example to gather data about the biographies in the German Wikipedia about French politicians born in the 19th century.

Last but not least, Denelezh allows you to track the evolution of gender gap in Wikimedia projects since the beginning of 2017.

You can learn more about Denelezh and how it works by reading its documentation.

▻https://denelezh.wmcloud.org

#gender_gap #wikipedia #femmes #genre #inégalités #wiki #statistiques #chiffres

Pandemic Prompts Rise in Poverty to Levels Unprecedented in Recent Decades and Sharply Affects Inequality and Employment

https://www.cepal.org/sites/default/files/pr/images/social_panorama_document_cover_eng.jpg?timestamp=1614861577#.jpg

In a new annual report, #ECLAC estimates that the total number of poor people rose to 209 million by the end of 2020, which is 22 million more people than in the previous year. In addition, it calls for creating a new welfare state.

Poverty and extreme poverty in Latin America reached levels in #2020 that had not been seen in the last 12 and 20 years, respectively, while the indices of inequality in the region worsened along with employment and labor participation rates, among women above all, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and despite the emergency social protection measures that countries have adopted to halt this phenomenon, the #Economic_Commission_for_Latin_America_and_the_Caribbean (ECLAC) reported today.

The Executive Secretary of the United Nations regional commission, Alicia Bárcena, presented a new edition of the flagship annual report Social Panorama of Latin America 2020, which indicates that the pandemic burst forth in a complex economic, social and political scenario of low growth, rising poverty and growing social tensions. In addition, it exposes the structural inequalities that characterize Latin American societies and the high levels of informality and lack of social protection, as well as the unfair sexual division of labor and social organization of care, which undermines women’s full exercise of rights and autonomy.

According to ECLAC’s new projections – as a result of the steep economic recession in the region, which will notch a -7.7% drop in GDP – it is estimated that in 2020 the extreme poverty rate was 12.5% while the poverty rate affected 33.7% of the population. This means that the total number of poor people rose to 209 million by the end of 2020, affecting 22 million more people than in the previous year. Of that total, 78 million people found themselves living in extreme poverty, or 8 million more than in 2019.

The document indicates that gaps remain between population groups: poverty is greater in rural areas, among children and adolescents; indigenous and Afro-descendent persons; and in the population with lower educational levels. It adds that the increase in poverty and extreme poverty levels would be even greater in the absence of the measures implemented by governments to transfer emergency income to households. Governments in the region implemented 263 emergency social protection measures in 2020, reaching 49.4% of the population, which is approximately 84 million households or 326 million people. Without these measures, the incidence of extreme poverty would have surged to 15.8% and that of poverty, to 37.2% of the population.

“The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the region’s major structural gaps and currently, we are living in a time of heightened uncertainty in which neither the way out of the crisis nor the speed of that process is yet known. There is no doubt that the costs of inequality have become unsustainable and that it is necessary to build back with equality and sustainability, aiming to create a true welfare state, a task long postponed in the region,” Alicia Bárcena affirmed.

That is why ECLAC calls for guaranteeing universal social protection as a central pillar of the welfare state. It specifies that in the short term, it is necessary to implement or maintain the emergency transfers proposed by the Commission: the emergency basic income (EBI) and the anti-hunger grant and EBI for women. In the medium and long term, countries must move towards a universal basic income, prioritizing families with children and adolescents, and get behind universal, comprehensive and sustainable social protection systems, increasing their coverage, as a central component of a new welfare state.

The Commission also urges for moving towards new social and fiscal compacts for equality in times of pandemic, and for ensuring health, education and digital inclusion, so that no one lags behind.

“ECLAC’s call for a new social compact is more relevant than ever: the pandemic is a critical juncture that is redefining what is possible, and it opens a window of opportunity to leave the culture of privilege behind,” the high-level United Nations official emphasized.

The report indicates that the pandemic’s adverse impact on people’s income mainly affects lower and lower-middle income strata. It is estimated that in 2020, some 491 million Latin Americans were living with income of up to three times the poverty line. And around 59 million people who belonged to the middle strata in 2019 experienced a process of downward economic mobility.

According to the document, inequality in total income per person is expected to have grown in 2020, leading to the average Gini index being 2.9% higher than what was recorded in 2019. Without the transfers made by governments to attenuate the loss of wage income (the distribution of which tends to be concentrated in low and middle income groups), the increase in the average Gini index for the region would have been 5.6%.

The report also underscores the major labor market impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. The regional unemployment rate ended 2020 at 10.7%, which represents an increase of 2.6 percentage points versus the figure recorded in 2019 (8.1%). It adds that the overall drop in employment and withdrawal from the workforce have had an intensified impact on women, informal workers, young people and migrants.

The report includes a special chapter on the care economy as a strategic sector for a recovery with equality. It emphasizes that the pandemic has revealed the enormous cost the region’s countries have borne because they do not have an integrated, defeminized and quality care system with broad coverage. In light of this, it warns that “it is urgently necessary to invest in this sector to tackle the crisis, guarantee the right to give care and receive care, as well as to reactivate the economy from a perspective of equality and sustainable development.”

To this end, ECLAC urges for moving towards a care society that would allow for guaranteeing an egalitarian and sustainable recovery in Latin America and the Caribbean.

▻https://www.cepal.org/en/pressreleases/pandemic-prompts-rise-poverty-levels-unprecedented-recent-decades-and-sharply
#pauvreté #pandémie #inégalités #travail #rapport #Amérique_latine #Caraïbes #statistiques #chiffres

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https://i.imgur.com/GLnQpws.png

ping @reka

The big wall

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An ActionAid investigation into how Italy tried to stop migration from Africa, using EU funds, and how much money it spent.

There are satellites, drones, ships, cooperation projects, police posts, repatriation flights, training centers. They are the bricks of an invisible but tangible and often violent wall. Erected starting in 2015 onwards, thanks to over one billion euros of public money. With one goal: to eliminate those movements by sea, from North Africa to Italy, which in 2015 caused an outcry over a “refugee crisis”. Here we tell you about the (fragile) foundations and the (dramatic) impacts of this project. Which must be changed, urgently.

–---

Ready, Set, Go

Imagine a board game, Risk style. The board is a huge geographical map, which descends south from Italy, including the Mediterranean Sea and North Africa and almost reaching the equator, in Cameroon, South Sudan, Rwanda. Places we know little about and read rarely about.

Each player distributes activity cards and objects between countries and along borders. In Ethiopia there is a camera crew shooting TV series called ‘Miraj’ [mirage], which recounts the misadventures of naive youth who rely on shady characters to reach Europe. There is military equipment, distributed almost everywhere: off-road vehicles for the Tunisian border police, ambulances and tank trucks for the army in Niger, patrol boats for Libya, surveillance drones taking off from Sicily.

There is technology: satellite systems on ships in the Mediterranean, software for recording fingerprints in Egypt, laptops for the Nigerian police. And still: coming and going of flights between Libya and Nigeria, Guinea, Gambia. Maritime coordination centers, police posts in the middle of the Sahara, job orientation offices in Tunisia or Ethiopia, clinics in Uganda, facilities for minors in Eritrea, and refugee camps in Sudan.

Hold your breath for a moment longer, because we still haven’t mentioned the training courses. And there are many: to produce yogurt in Ivory Coast, open a farm in Senegal or a beauty salon in Nigeria, to learn about the rights of refugees, or how to use a radar station.

Crazed pawns, overlapping cards and unclear rules. Except for one: from these African countries, more than 25 of them, not one person should make it to Italy. There is only one exception allowed: leaving with a visa. Embassy officials, however, have precise instructions: anyone who doesn’t have something to return to should not be accepted. Relationships, family, and friends don’t count, but only incomes, properties, businesses, and titles do.

https://i.imgur.com/QDxx95h.png

For a young professional, a worker, a student, an activist, anyone looking for safety, future and adventure beyond the borders of the continent, for people like me writing and perhaps like you reading, the only allies become the facilitators, those who Europe calls traffickers and who, from friends, can turn into worst enemies.

We called it The Big Wall. It could be one of those strategy games that keeps going throughout the night, for fans of geopolitics, conflicts, finance. But this is real life, and it’s the result of years of investments, experiments, documents and meetings. At first disorderly, sporadic, then systematized and increased since 2015, when United Nations agencies, echoed by the international media, sounded an alarm: there is a migrant crisis happening and Europe must intervene. Immediately.

Italy was at the forefront, and all those agreements, projects, and programs from previous years suddenly converged and multiplied, becoming bricks of a wall that, from an increasingly militarized Mediterranean, moved south, to the travelers’ countries of origin.

The basic idea, which bounced around chancelleries and European institutions, was to use multiple tools: development cooperation, support for security forces, on-site protection of refugees, repatriation, information campaigns on the risks of irregular migration. This, in the language of Brussels, was a “comprehensive approach”.

We talked to some of the protagonists of this story — those who built the wall, who tried to jump it, and who would like to demolish it — and we looked through thousands of pages of reports, minutes, resolutions, decrees, calls for tenders, contracts, newspaper articles, research, to understand how much money Italy has spent, where, and what impacts it has had. Months of work to discover not only that this wall has dramatic consequences, but that the European – and Italian – approach to international migration stems from erroneous premises, from an emergency stance that has disastrous results for everyone, including European citizens.
Libya: the tip of the iceberg

It was the start of the 2017/2018 academic year and Omer Shatz, professor of international law, offered his Sciences Po students the opportunity to work alongside him on the preparation of a dossier. For the students of the faculty, this was nothing new. In the classrooms of the austere building on the Rive Gauche of Paris, which European and African heads of state have passed though, not least Emmanuel Macron, it’s normal to work on real life materials: peace agreements in Colombia, trials against dictators and foreign fighters. Those who walk on those marble floors already know that they will be able to speak with confidence in circles that matter, in politics as well as diplomacy.

Shatz, who as a criminal lawyer in Israel is familiar with abuses and rights violations, launched his students a new challenge: to bring Europe to the International Criminal Court for the first time. “Since it was created, the court has only condemned African citizens – dictators, militia leaders – but showing European responsibility was urgent,” he explains.

One year after first proposing the plan, Shatz sent an envelope to the Court’s headquarters, in the Dutch town of The Hague. With his colleague Juan Branco and eight of his students he recounted, in 245 pages, cases of “widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population”, linked to “crimes against humanity consciously committed by European actors, in the central Mediterranean and in Libya, in line with Italian and European Union policies”.

The civilian population to which they refer comprises migrants and refugees, swallowed by the waves or intercepted in the central Mediterranean and brought back to shore by Libyan assets, to be placed in a seemingly endless cycle of detention. Among them are the 13.000 dead recorded since 2015, in the stretch of sea between North Africa and Italy, out of 523.000 people who survived the crossing, but also the many African and Asian citizens, who are rarely counted, who were tortured in Libya and died in any of the dozens of detention centers for foreigners, often run by militias.

“At first we thought that the EU and Italy were outsourcing dirty work to Libya to block people, which in jargon is called ‘aiding and abetting’ in the commission of a crime, then we realized that the Europeans were actually the conductors of these operations, while the Libyans performed”, says Shatz, who, at the end of 2020, was preparing a second document for the International Criminal Court to include more names, those of the “anonymous officials of the European and Italian bureaucracy who participated in this criminal enterprise”, which was centered around the “reinvention of the Libyan Coast Guard, conceived by Italian actors”.

Identifying heads of department, office directors, and institution executives in democratic countries as alleged criminals might seem excessive. For Shatz, however, “this is the first time, after the Nuremberg trials, after Eichmann, that Europe has committed crimes of this magnitude, outside of an armed conflict”. The court, which routinely rejects at least 95 percent of the cases presented, did not do so with Shatz and his students’ case. “Encouraging news, but that does not mean that the start of proceedings is around the corner”, explains the lawyer.

At the basis of the alleged crimes, he continues, are “regulations, memoranda of understanding, maritime cooperation, detention centers, patrols and drones” created and financed by the European Union and Italy. Here Shatz is speaking about the Memorandum of Understanding between Italy and Libya to “reduce the flow of illegal migrants”, as the text of the document states. An objective to be achieved through training and support for the two maritime patrol forces of the very fragile Libyan national unity government, by “adapting” the existing detention centers, and supporting local development initiatives.

Signed in Rome on February 2, 2017 and in force until 2023, the text is grafted onto the Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation signed by Silvio Berlusconi and Muammar Gaddafi in 2008, but is tied to a specific budget: that of the so-called Africa Fund, established in 2016 as the “Fund for extraordinary interventions to relaunch dialogue and cooperation with African countries of priority importance for migration routes” and extended in 2020 — as the Migration Fund — to non-African countries too.

310 million euros were allocated in total between the end of 2016 and November 2020, and 252 of those were disbursed, according to our reconstruction.

A multiplication of tools and funds that, explains Mario Giro, “was born after the summit between the European Union and African leaders in Malta, in November 2015”. According to the former undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from 2013, and Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs between 2016 and 2018, that summit in Malta “sanctioned the triumph of a European obsession, that of reducing migration from Africa at all costs: in exchange of this containment, there was a willingness to spend, invest”. For Giro, the one in Malta was an “attempt to come together, but not a real partnership”.

Libya, where more than 90 percent of those attempting to cross the central Mediterranean departed from in those years, was the heart of a project in which Italian funds and interests support and integrate with programs by the European Union and other member states. It was an all-European dialogue, from which powerful Africans — political leaders but also policemen, militiamen, and the traffickers themselves — tried to obtain something: legitimacy, funds, equipment.

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Fragmented and torn apart by a decade-long conflict, Libya was however not alone. In October 2015, just before the handshakes and the usual photographs at the Malta meeting, the European Commission established an Emergency Trust Fund to “address the root causes of migration in Africa”.

To do so, as Dutch researcher Thomas Spijkerboer will reconstruct years later, the EU executive declared a state of emergency in the 26 African countries that benefit from the Fund, thus justifying the choice to circumvent European competition rules in favor of direct award procedures. However “it’s implausible – Spijkerboeker will go on to argue – that there is a crisis in all 26 African countries where the Trust Fund operates through the duration of the Trust Fund”, now extended until the end of 2021.

However, the imperative, as an advisor to the Budget Commission of the European Parliament explains, was to act immediately: “not within a few weeks, but days, hours“.

Faced with a Libya still ineffective at stopping flows to the north, it was in fact necessary to intervene further south, traveling backwards along the routes that converge from dozens of African countries and go towards Tripolitania. And — like dominoes in reverse — raising borders and convincing, or forcing, potential travelers to stop in their countries of origin or in others along the way, before they arrived on the shores of the Mediterranean.

For the first time since decolonization, human mobility in Africa became the keystone of Italian policies on the continent, so much so that analysts began speaking of migration diplomacy. Factors such as the number of migrants leaving from a given country and the number of border posts or repatriations all became part of the political game, on the same level as profits from oil extraction, promises of investment, arms sales, or trade agreements.

Comprising projects, funds, and programs, this migration diplomacy comes at a cost. For the period between January 2015 and November 2020, we tracked down 317 funding lines managed by Italy with its own funds and partially co-financed by the European Union. A total of 1.337 billion euros, spent over five years and destined to eight different items of expenditure. Here Libya is in first place, but it is not alone.

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A long story, in short

For simplicity’s sake, we can say that it all started in the hot summer of 2002, with an almost surrealist lightning war over a barren rock on the edge of the Mediterranean: the Isla de Persejil, the island of parsley. A little island in the Strait of Gibraltar, disputed for decades between Morocco and Spain, which had its ephemeral moment of glory when in July of that year the Moroccan monarchy sent six soldiers, some tents and a flag. Jose-Maria Aznar’s government quickly responded with a reconquista to the sound of fighter-bombers, frigates, and helicopters.

Peace was signed only a few weeks later and the island went back to being a land of shepherds and military patrols. Which from then on, however, were joint ones.

“There was talk of combating drug trafficking and illegal fishing, but the reality was different: these were the first anti-immigration operations co-managed by Spanish and Moroccan soldiers”, explains Sebastian Cobarrubias, professor of geography at the University of Zaragoza. The model, he says, was the one of Franco-Spanish counter-terrorism operations in the Basque Country, exported from the Pyrenees to the sea border.

A process of externalization of Spanish and European migration policy was born following those events in 2002, and culminating years later with the crisis de los cayucos, the pirogue crisis: the arrival of tens of thousands of people – 31,000 in 2006 alone – in the Canary Islands, following extremely dangerous crossings from Senegal, Mauritania and Morocco.

In close dialogue with the European Commission, which saw the Spanish border as the most porous one of the fragile Schengen area, the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero reacted quickly. “Within a few months, cooperation and repatriation agreements were signed with nine African countries,” says Cobarrubias, who fought for years, with little success, to obtain the texts of the agreements.

The events of the late 2000s look terribly similar to what Italy will try to implement a decade later with its Mediterranean neighbors, Libya first of all. So much so that in 2016 it was the Spanish Minister of the Interior himself, Jorge Fernández Díaz, who recalled that “the Spanish one is a European management model, reproducible in other contexts”. A vision confirmed by the European Commission officials with whom we spoke.

At the heart of the Spanish strategy, which over a few short years led to a drastic decrease of arrivals by sea, was the opening of new diplomatic offices in Africa, the launch of local development projects, and above all the support given to the security forces of partner countries.

Cobarrubias recounts at least four characteristic elements of the Madrid approach: the construction of new patrol forces “such as the Mauritanian Coast Guard, which did not exist and was created by Spain thanks to European funds, with the support of the newly created Frontex agency”; direct and indirect support for detention centers, such as the infamous ‘Guantanamito’, or little Guantanamo, denounced by civil society organizations in Mauritania; the real-time collection of border data and information, carried out by the SIVE satellite system, a prototype of Eurosur, an incredibly expensive intelligence center on the EU’s external borders launched in 2013, based on drones, satellites, airplanes, and sensors; and finally, the strategy of working backwards along migration routes, to seal borders, from the sea to the Sahara desert, and investing locally with development and governance programs, which Spain did during the two phases of the so-called Plan Africa, between 2006 and 2012.

Replace “Spain” with “Italy”, and “Mauritania” with “Libya”, and you’ll have an idea of what happened years later, in an attempt to seal another European border.

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The main legacy of the Spanish model, according to the Italian sociologist Lorenzo Gabrielli, however, is the negative conditionality, which is the fact of conditioning the disbursement of these loans – for security forces, ministries, trade agreements – at the level of the African partners’ cooperation in the management of migration, constantly threatening to reduce investments if there are not enough repatriations being carried out, or if controls and pushbacks fail. An idea that is reminiscent both of the enlargement process of the European Union, with all the access restrictions placed on candidate countries, and of the Schengen Treaty, the attempt to break down internal European borders, which, as a consequence, created the need to protect a new common border, the external one.
La externalización europea del control migratorio: ¿La acción española como modelo? Read more

At the end of 2015, when almost 150,000 people had reached the Italian coast and over 850,000 had crossed Turkey and the Balkans to enter the European Union, the story of the maritime migration to Spain had almost faded from memory.

But something remained of it: a management model. Based, once again, on an idea of crisis.

“We tried to apply it to post-Gaddafi Libya – explains Stefano Manservisi, who over the past decade has chaired two key departments for migration policies in the EU Commission, Home Affairs and Development Cooperation – but in 2013 we soon realized that things had blown up, that that there was no government to talk to: the whole strategy had to be reformulated”.

Going backwards, through routes and processes

The six-month presidency of the European Council, in 2014, was the perfect opportunity for Italy.

In November of that year, Matteo Renzi’s government hosted a conference in Rome to launch the Khartoum Process, the brand new initiative for the migration route between the EU and the Horn of Africa, modeled on the Rabat Process, born in 2006, at the apex of the crisis de los cayucos, after pressure from Spain. It’s a regional cooperation platform between EU countries and nine African countries, based on the exchange of information and coordination between governments, to manage migration.
Il processo di Khartoum: l’Italia e l’Europa contro le migrazioni Read more

Warning: if you start to find terms such as ‘process’ and ‘coordination platform’ nebulous, don’t worry. The backbone of European policies is made of these structures: meetings, committees, negotiating tables with unattractive names, whose roles elude most of us. It’s a tendency towards the multiplication of dialogue and decision spaces, that the migration policies of recent years have, if possible, accentuated, in the name of flexibility, of being ready for any eventuality. Of continuous crisis.

Let’s go back to that inter-ministerial meeting in Rome that gave life to the Khartoum Process and in which Libya, where the civil war had resumed violently a few months earlier, was not present.

Italy thus began looking beyond Libya, to the so-called countries of origin and transit. Such as Ethiopia, a historic beneficiary of Italian development cooperation, and Sudan. Indeed, both nations host refugees from Eritrea and Somalia, two of the main countries of origin of those who cross the central Mediterranean between 2013 and 2015. Improving their living conditions was urgent, to prevent them from traveling again, from dreaming of Europe. In Niger, on the other hand, which is an access corridor to Libya for those traveling from countries such as Nigeria, Gambia, Senegal, and Mali, Italy co-financed a study for a new law against migrant smuggling, then adopted in 2015, which became the cornerstone of a radical attempt to reduce movement across the Sahara desert, which you will read about later.

A year later, with the Malta summit and the birth of the EU Trust Fund for Africa, Italy was therefore ready to act. With a 123 million euro contribution, allocated from 2017 through the Africa Fund and the Migration Fund, Italy became the second donor country, and one of the most active in trying to manage those over 4 billion euros allocated for five years. [If you are curious about the financing mechanisms of the Trust Fund, read here: ▻https://thebigwall.org/en/trust-fund/].

Through the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS), born in 2014 as an operational branch of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Italy immediately made itself available to manage European Fund projects, and one idea seemed to be the driving one: using classic development programs, but implemented in record time, to offer on-site alternatives to young people eager to leave, while improving access to basic services.

Local development, therefore, became the intervention to address the so-called root causes of migration. For the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the newborn AICS, it seemed a winning approach. Unsurprisingly, the first project approved through the Trust Fund for Africa was managed by the Italian agency in Ethiopia.

“Stemming irregular migration in Northern and Central Ethiopia” received 19.8 million euros in funding, a rare sum for local development interventions. The goal was to create job opportunities and open career guidance centers for young people in four Ethiopian regions. Or at least that’s how it seemed. In the first place, among the objectives listed in the project sheet, there is in fact another one: to reduce irregular migration.

In the logical matrix of the project, which insiders know is the presentation – through data, indicators and figures – of the expected results, there is no indicator that appears next to the “reduction of irregular migration” objective. There is no way, it’s implicitly admitted, to verify that that goal has been achieved. That the young person trained to start a micro-enterprise in the Wollo area, for example, is one less migrant.

Bizarre, not to mention wrong. But indicative of the problems of an approach of which, an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explains to us, “Italy had made itself the spokesperson in Europe”.

“The mantra was that more development would stop migration, and at a certain point that worked for everyone: for AICS, which justified its funds in the face of political landscape that was scared by the issue of landings, and for many NGOs, which immediately understood that migrations were the parsley to be sprinkled on the funding requests that were presented”, explains the official, who, like so many in this story, prefers to remain anonymous.

This idea of the root causes was reproduced, as in an echo chamber, “without programmatic documents, without guidelines, but on the wave of a vague idea of political consensus around the goal of containing migration”, he adds. This makes it almost impossible to talk about, so much so that a proposal for new guidelines on immigration and development, drawn up during 2020 by AICS, was set aside for months.

Indeed, if someone were to say, as evidenced by scholars such as Michael Clemens, that development can also increase migration, and that migration itself is a source of development, the whole ‘root causes’ idea would collapse and the already tight cooperation budgets would risk being cut, in the name of the same absolute imperative as always: reducing arrivals to Italy and Europe.

Maintaining a vague, costly and unverifiable approach is equally damaging.

Bram Frouws, director of the Mixed Migration Center, a think-tank that studies international mobility, points out, for example, how the ‘root cause’ approach arises from a vision of migration as a problem to be eradicated rather than managed, and that paradoxically, the definition of these deep causes always remains superficial. In fact, there is never talk of how international fishing agreements damage local communities, nor of land grabbing by speculators, major construction work, or corruption and arms sales. There is only talk of generic economic vulnerability, of a country’s lack of stability. An almost abstract phenomenon, in which European actors are exempt from any responsibility.

There is another problem: in the name of the fight against irregular migration, interventions have shifted from poorer and truly vulnerable countries and populations to regions with ‘high migratory rates’, a term repeated in dozens of project descriptions funded over the past few years, distorting one of the cardinal principles of development aid, codified in regulations and agreements: that of responding to the most urgent needs of a given population, and of not imposing external priorities, even more so if it is countries considered richer are the ones doing it.

The Nigerien experiment

While Ethiopia and Sudan absorb the most substantial share of funds destined to tackle the root causes of migration — respectively 47 and 32 million euros out of a total expenditure of 195 million euros — Niger, which for years has been contending for the podium of least developed country on the planet with Central African Republic according to the United Nations Human Development Index — benefits from just over 10 million euros.

Here in fact it’s more urgent, for Italy and the EU, to intervene on border control rather than root causes, to stop the flow of people that cross the country until they arrive in Agadez, to then disappear in the Sahara and emerge, days later — if all goes well — in southern Libya. In 2016, the International Organization for Migration counted nearly 300,000 people passing through a single checkpoint along the road to Libya. The figure bounced between the offices of the European Commission, and from there to the Farnesina, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs: faced with an uncontrollable Libya, intervening in Niger became a priority.

Italy did it in great style, even before opening an embassy in the country, in February 2017: with a contribution to the state budget of Niger of 50 million euros, part of the Africa Fund, included as part of a maxi-program managed by the EU in the country and paid out in several installments.

While the project documents list a number of conditions for the continuation of the funding, including increased monitoring along the routes to Libya and the adoption of regulations and strategies for border control, some local and European officials with whom we have spoken think that the assessments were made with one eye closed: the important thing was in fact to provide those funds to be spent in a country that for Italy, until then, had been synonymous only with tourism in the Sahara dunes and development in rural areas.

Having become a priority in the New Partnership Framework on Migration, yet another EU operational program, launched in 2016, Niger seemed thus exempt from controls on the management of funds to which beneficiaries of European funds are normally subject to.

“Our control mechanisms, the Court of Auditors, the Parliament and the anti-corruption Authority, do not work, and yet the European partners have injected millions of euros into state coffers, without imposing transparency mechanisms”, reports then Ali Idrissa Nani , president of the Réseau des Organizations pour la Transparence et l’Analyse du Budget (ROTAB), a network of associations that seeks to monitor state spending in Niger.

“It leaves me embittered, but for some years we we’ve had the impression that civil liberties, human rights, and participation are no longer a European priority“, continues Nani, who —- at the end of 2020 — has just filed a complaint with the Court of Niamey, to ask the Prosecutor to open an investigation into the possible disappearance of at least 120 million euros in funds from the Ministry of Defense, a Pandora’s box uncovered by local and international journalists.

For Nani, who like other Nigerien activists spent most of 2018 in prison for encouraging demonstrations against high living costs, this explosion of European and Italian cooperation didn’t do the country any good, and in fact favoured authoritarian tendencies, and limited even more the independence of the judiciary.

For their part, the Nigerien rulers have more than others seized the opportunity offered by European donors to obtain legitimacy and support. Right after the Valletta summit, they were the first to present an action plan to reduce migration to Libya, which they abruptly implemented in mid-2016, applying the anti-trafficking law whose preliminary study was financed by Italy, with the aim of emptying the city of #Agadez of migrants from other countries.

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The transport of people to the Libyan border, an activity that until that point happened in the light of day and was sanctioned at least informally by the local authorities, thus became illegal from one day to the next. Hundreds of drivers, intermediaries, and facilitators were arrested, and an entire economy crashed

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But did the movement of people really decrease? Almost impossible to tell. The only data available are those of the International Organization for Migration, which continues to record the number of transits at certain police posts. But drivers and foreign travelers no longer pass through them, fearing they will be arrested or stopped. Routes and journeys, as always happens, are remodeled, only to reappear elsewhere. Over the border with Chad, or in Algeria, or in a risky zigzagging of small tracks, to avoid patrols.

For Hamidou Manou Nabara, a Nigerien sociologist and researcher, the problems with this type of cooperation are manifold.

On the one hand, it restricted the free movement guaranteed within the Economic Community of West African States, a sort of ‘Schengen area’ between 15 countries in the region, making half of Niger, from Agadez to the north, a no-go areas for foreign citizens, even though they still had the right to move throughout the national territory.

Finally, those traveling north were made even more vulnerable. “The control of borders and migratory movements was justified on humanitarian grounds, to contrast human trafficking, but in reality very few victims of trafficking were ever identified: the center of this cooperation is repression”, explains Nabara.

Increasing controls, through military and police operations, actually exposes travelers to greater violations of human rights, both by state agents and passeurs, making the Sahara crossings longer and riskier.

The fight against human trafficking, a slogan repeated by European and African leaders and a central expenditure item of the Italian intervention between Africa and the Mediterranean — 142 million euros in five years —- actually risks having the opposite effect. Because a trafiicker’s bread and butter, in addition to people’s desire to travel, is closed borders and denied visas.

A reinvented frontier

Galvanized by the activism of the European Commission after the launch of the Trust Fund but under pressure internally, faced with a discourse on migration that seemed to invade every public space — from the front pages of newspapers to television talk-shows — and unable to agree on how to manage migration within the Schengen area, European rulers thus found an agreement outside the continent: to add more bricks to that wall that must reduce movements through the Mediterranean.

Between 2015 and 2016, Italian, Dutch, German, French and European Union ministers, presidents and senior officials travel relentlessly between countries considered priorities for migration, and increasingly for security, and invite their colleagues to the European capitals. A coming and going of flights to Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Tunisia, Senegal, Chad, Guinea, to make agreements, negotiate.

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“Niamey had become a crossroads for European diplomats”, remembers Ali Idrissa Nani, “but few understood the reasons”.

However, unlike the border with Turkey, where the agreement signed with the EU at the beginning of 2016 in no time reduced the arrival of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi citizens in Greece, the continent’s other ‘hot’ border, promises of speed and effectiveness by the Trust Fund for Africa did not seem to materialize. Departures from Libya, in particular, remained constant. And in the meantime, in the upcoming election in a divided Italy, the issue of migration seemed to be tipping the balance, capable of shifting votes and alliances.

It is at that point that the Italian Ministry of the Interior, newly led by Marco Minniti, put its foot on the accelerator. The Viminale, the Italian Ministry of the Interior, became the orchestrator of a new intervention plan, refined between Rome and Brussels, with German support, which went back to focusing everything on Libya and on that stretch of sea that separates it from Italy.

“In those months the phones were hot, everyone was looking for Marco“, says an official of the Interior Ministry, who admits that “the Ministry of the Interior had snatched the Libyan dossier from Foreign Affairs, but only because up until then the Foreign Ministry hadn’t obtained anything” .

Minniti’s first move was the signing of the new Memorandum with Libya, which gave way to a tripartite plan.

At the top of the agenda was the creation of a maritime interception device for boats departing from the Libyan coast, through the reconstruction of the Coast Guard and the General Administration for Coastal Security (GACS), the two patrol forces belonging to the Ministry of Defense and that of the Interior, and the establishment of a rescue coordination center, prerequisites for Libya to declare to the International Maritime Organization that it had a Search and Rescue Area, so that the Italian Coast Guard could ask Libyan colleagues to intervene if there were boats in trouble.

Accompanying this work in Libya is a jungle of Italian and EU missions, surveillance systems and military operations — from the European Frontex, Eunavfor Med and Eubam Libya, to the Italian military mission “Safe Waters” — equipped with drones, planes, patrol boats, whose task is to monitor the Libyan Sea, which is increasingly emptied by the European humanitarian ships that started operating in 2014 (whose maneuvering spaces are in the meantime reduced to the bone due to various strategies) to support Libyan interception operations.

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The second point of the ‘Minniti agenda’ was to progressively empty Libya of migrants and refugees, so that an escape by sea would become increasingly difficult. Between 2017 and 2020, the Libyan assets, which are in large part composed of patrol boats donated by Italy, intercepted and returned to shore about 56,000 people according to data released by UN agencies. The Italian-European plan envisages two solutions: for economic migrants, the return to the country of origin; for refugees, the possibility of obtaining protection.

There is one part of this plan that worked better, at least in terms of European wishes: repatriation, presented as ‘assisted voluntary return’. This vision was propelled by images, released in October 2017 by CNN as part of a report on the abuse of foreigners in Libya, of what appears to be a slave auction. The images reopened the unhealed wounds of the slave trade through Atlantic and Sahara, and helped the creation of a Joint Initiative between the International Organization for Migration, the European Union, and the African Union, aimed at returning and reintegrating people in the countries of origin.

Part of the Italian funding for IOM was injected into this complex system of repatriation by air, from Tripoli to more than 20 countries, which has contributed to the repatriation of 87,000 people over three years. 33,000 from Libya, and 37,000 from Niger.

A similar program for refugees, which envisages transit through other African countries (Niger and Rwanda gave their availability) and from there resettlement to Europe or North America, recorded much lower numbers: 3,300 evacuations between the end of 2017 and the end of 2020. For the 47,000 people registered as refugees in Libya, leaving the country without returning to their home country, to the starting point, is almost impossible.

Finally, there is a third, lesser-known point of the Italian plan: even in Libya, Italy wants to intervene on the root causes of migration, or rather on the economies linked to the transit and smuggling of migrants. The scheme is simple: support basic services and local authorities in migrant transit areas, in exchange for this transit being controlled and reduced. The transit of people brings with it the circulation of currency, a more valuable asset than usual in a country at war, and this above all in the south of Libya, in the immense Saharan region of Fezzan, the gateway to the country, bordering Algeria, Niger, and Chad and almost inaccessible to international humanitarian agencies.

A game in which intelligence plays central role (as also revealed by the journalist Lorenzo D’Agostino on Foreign Policy), as indeed it did in another negotiation and exchange of money: those 5 million euros destined — according to various journalistic reconstructions — to a Sabratha militia, the Anas Al-Dabbashi Brigade, to stop departures from the coastal city.

A year later, its leader, Ahmed Al-Dabbashi, will be sanctioned by the UN Security Council, as leader for criminal activities related to human trafficking.

The one built in record time by the ministry led by Marco Minniti is therefore a complicated and expensive puzzle. To finance it, there are above all the Trust Fund for Africa of the EU, and the Italian Africa Fund, initially headed only by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and unpacked among several ministries for the occasion, but also the Internal Security Fund of the EU, which funds military equipment for all Italian security forces, as well as funds and activities from the Ministry of Defense.

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A significant part of those 666 million euros dedicated to border control, but also of funds to support governance and fight traffickers, converges and enters this plan: a machine that was built too quickly, among whose wheels human rights and Libya’s peace process are sacrificed.

“We were looking for an immediate result and we lost sight of the big picture, sacrificing peace on the altar of the fight against migration, when Libya was in pieces, in the hands of militias who were holding us hostage”. This is how former Deputy Minister Mario Giro describes the troubled handling of the Libyan dossier.

For Marwa Mohamed, a Libyan activist, all these funds and interventions were “provided without any real clause of respect for human rights, and have fragmented the country even more, because they were intercepted by the militias, which are the same ones that manage both the smuggling of migrants that detention centers, such as that of Abd el-Rahman al-Milad, known as ‘al-Bija’ ”.

Projects aimed at Libyan municipalities, included in the interventions on the root causes of migration — such as the whole detention system, invigorated by the introduction of people intercepted at sea (and ‘improved’ through millions of euros of Italian funds) — offer legitimacy, when they do not finance it directly, to the ramified and violent system of local powers that the German political scientist Wolfram Lacher defines as the ‘Tripoli militia cartel‘. [for more details on the many Italian funds in Libya, read here].
Fondi italiani in Libia Read more

“Bringing migrants back to shore, perpetuating a detention system, does not only mean subjecting people to new abuses, but also enriching the militias, fueling the conflict”, continues Mohamed, who is now based in London, where she is a spokesman of the Libyan Lawyers for Justice organization.

The last few years of Italian cooperation, she argues, have been “a sequence of lost opportunities”. And to those who tell you — Italian and European officials especially — that reforming justice, putting an end to that absolute impunity that strengthens the militias, is too difficult, Mohamed replies without hesitation: “to sign the Memorandum of Understanding, the authorities contacted the militias close to the Tripoli government one by one and in the meantime built a non-existent structure from scratch, the Libyan Coast Guard: and you’re telling me that you can’t put the judicial system back on its feet and protect refugees? ”

The only thing that mattered, however, in that summer of 2017, were the numbers. Which, for the first time since 2013, were falling again, and quickly. In the month of August there were 80 percent fewer landings than the year before. And so it would be for the following months and years.

“Since then, we have continued to allocate, renewing programs and projects, without asking for any guarantee in exchange for the treatment of migrants”, explains Matteo De Bellis, researcher at Amnesty International, remembering that the Italian promise to modify the Memorandum of Understanding, introducing clauses of protection, has been on stop since the controversial renewal of the document, in February 2020.

Repatriations, evacuations, promises

We are 1500 kilometers of road, and sand, south of Tripoli. Here Salah* spends his days escaping a merciless sun. The last three years of the life of the thirty-year-old Sudanese have not offered much else and now, like many fellow sufferers, he does not hide his fatigue.

We are in a camp 15 kilometers from Agadez, in Niger, in the middle of the Sahara desert, where Salah lives with a thousand people, mostly Sudanese from the Darfur region, the epicenter of one of the most dramatic and lethal conflicts of recent decades.

Like almost all the inhabitants of this temporary Saharan settlement, managed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and — at the end of 2020 — undergoing rehabilitation also thanks to Italian funds, he passed through Libya and since 2017, after three years of interceptions at sea and detention, he’s been desperately searching for a way out, for a future.

Salah fled Darfur in 2016, after receiving threats from pro-government armed militias, and reached Tripoli after a series of vicissitudes and violence. In late spring 2017, he sailed from nearby Zawiya with 115 other people. They were intercepted, brought back to shore and imprisoned in a detention center, formally headed by the government but in fact controlled by the Al-Nasr militia, linked to the trafficker Al-Bija.

“They beat us everywhere, for days, raped some women in front of us, and asked everyone to call families to get money sent,” Salah recalls. Months later, after paying some money and escaping, he crossed the Sahara again, up to Agadez. UNHCR had just opened a facility and from there, as rumour had it, you could ask to be resettled to Europe.

Faced with sealed maritime borders, and after experiencing torture and abuse, that faint hope set in motion almost two thousand people, who, hoping to reach Italy, found themselves on the edges of the Sahara, along what many, by virtue of investments and negotiations, had started to call the ‘new European frontier’.

Three years later, a little over a thousand people remain of that initial group. Only a few dozen of them had access to resettlement, while many returned to Libya, and to all of its abuses.

Something similar is also happening in Tunisia, where since 2017, the number of migrants and refugees entering the country has increased. They are fleeing by land and sometimes by sea from Libya, going to crowd UN structures. Then, faced with a lack of real prospects, they return to Libya.

For Romdhane Ben Amor, spokesman for the Tunisian Federation for Economic and Social Rights, “in Tunisia European partners have financed a non-reception: overcrowded centers in unworthy conditions, which have become recruitment areas for traffickers, because in fact there are two options offered there: go home or try to get back to the sea “.

In short, even the interventions for the protection of migrants and refugees must be read in a broader context, of a contraction of mobility and human rights. “The refugee management itself has submitted to the goal of containment, which is the true original sin of the Italian and European strategy,” admits a UNHCR official.

This dogma of containment, at any cost, affects everyone — people who travel, humanitarian actors, civil society, local governments — by distorting priorities, diverting funds, and undermining future relationships and prospects. The same ones that European officials call partnerships and which in the case of Africa, as reiterated in 2020 by President Ursula Von Der Leyen, should be “between equals”.

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Let’s take another example: the Egypt of President Abdel Fetah Al-Sisi. Since 2016, it has been increasingly isolated on the international level, also due to violent internal repression, which Italy knows something about. Among the thousands of people who have been disappeared or killed in recent years, is researcher Giulio Regeni, whose body was thrown on the side of a road north of Cairo in February 2016.

Around the time of the murder, in which the complicity and cover-ups by the Egyptian security forces were immediately evident, the Italian Ministry of the Interior restarted its dialogue with the country. “It’s absurd, but Italy started to support Egypt in negotiations with the European Union,” explains lawyer Muhammed Al-Kashef, a member of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Right and now a refugee in Germany.

By inserting itself on an already existing cooperation project that saw italy, for example, finance the use of fingerprint-recording software used by the Egyptian police, the Italian Ministry of the Interior was able to create a police academy in Cairo, inaugurated in 2018 with European funds, to train the border guards of over 20 African countries. Italy also backed Egyptian requests within the Khartoum Process and, on a different front, sells weapons and conducts joint naval exercises.

“Rome could have played a role in Egypt, supporting the democratic process after the 2011 revolution, but it preferred to fall into the migration trap, fearing a wave of migration that would never happen,” says Al-Kashef.

With one result: “they have helped transform Egypt into a country that kills dreams, and often dreamers too, and from which all young people today want to escape”. Much more so than in 2015 or that hopeful 2011.

Cracks in the wall, and how to widen them

If you have read this far, following personal stories and routes of people and funds, you will have understood one thing, above all: that the beating heart of this strategy, set up by Italy with the participation of the European Union and vice versa, is the reduction of migrations across the Mediterranean. The wall, in fact.

Now try to add other European countries to this picture. Since 2015 many have fully adopted — or returned to — this process of ‘externalization’ of migration policies. Spain, where the Canary Islands route reopened in 2019, demonstrating the fragility of the model you read about above; France, with its strategic network in the former colonies, the so-called Françafrique. And then Germany, Belgium, Holland, United Kingdom, Austria.

Complicated, isn’t it? This great wall’s bricks and builders keep multiplying. Even more strategies, meetings, committees, funds and documents. And often, the same lack of transparency, which makes reconstructing these loans – understanding which cement, sand, and lime mixture was used, i.e. who really benefited from the expense, what equipment was provided, how the results were monitored – a long process, when it’s not impossible.

The Pact on Migration and Asylum of the European Union, presented in September 2020, seems to confirm this: cooperation with third countries and relaunching repatriations are at its core.

Even the European Union budget for the seven-year period 2021-2027, approved in December 2020, continues to focus on this expenditure, for example by earmarking for migration projects 10 percent of the new Neighborhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument, equipped with 70 billion euros, but also diverting a large part of the Immigration and Asylum Fund (8.7 billion) towards support for repatriation, and foreseeing 12.1 billion euros for border control.

While now, with the new US presidency, some have called into question the future of the wall on the border with Mexico, perhaps the most famous of the anti-migrant barriers in the world, the wall built in the Mediterranean and further south, up to the equator, has seemingly never been so strong.

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But economists, sociologists, human rights defenders, analysts and travelers all demonstrate the problems with this model. “It’s a completely flawed approach, and there are no quick fixes to change it,” says David Kipp, a researcher at the German Institute for International Affairs, a government-funded think-tank.

For Kipp, however, we must begin to deflate this migration bubble, and go back to addressing migration as a human phenomenon, to be understood and managed. “I dream of the moment when this issue will be normalized, and will become something boring,” he admits timidly.

To do this, cracks must be opened in the wall and in a model that seems solid but really isn’t, that has undesirable effects, violates human rights, and isolates Europe and Italy.

Anna Knoll, researcher at the European Center for Development Policy Management, explains for example that European policies have tried to limit movements even within Africa, while the future of the continent is the freedom of movement of goods and people, and “for Europe, it is an excellent time to support this, also given the pressure from other international players, China first of all”.

For Sabelo Mbokazi, who heads the Labor and Migration department of the Social Affairs Commission of the African Union (AU), there is one issue on which the two continental blocs have divergent positions: legal entry channels. “For the EU, they are something residual, we have a much broader vision,” he explains. And this will be one of the themes of the next EU-AU summit, which was postponed several times in 2020.

It’s a completely flawed approach, and there are no quick fixes to change it
David Kipp - researcher at the German Institute for International Affairs

Indeed, the issue of legal access channels to the Italian and European territory is one of the most important, and so far almost imperceptible, cracks in this Big Wall. In the last five years, Italy has spent just 15 million euros on it, 1.1 percent of the total expenditure dedicated to external dimensions of migration.

The European Union hasn’t done any better. “Legal migration, which was one of the pillars of the strategy born in Valletta in 2015, has remained a dead letter, but if we limit ourselves to closing the borders, we will not go far”, says Stefano Manservisi, who as a senior official of the EU Commission worked on all the migration dossiers during those years.

Yet we all know that a trafficker’s worst enemy are passport stamps, visas, and airline tickets.

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Helen Dempster, who’s an economist at the Center for Global Development, spends her days studying how to do this: how to open legal channels of entry, and how to get states to think about it. And there is an effective example: we must not end up like Japan.

“For decades, Japan has had very restrictive migration policies, it hasn’t allowed anyone in”, explains Dempster, “but in recent years it has realized that, with its aging population, it soon won’t have enough people to do basic jobs, pay taxes, and finance pensions”. And so, in April 2019, the Asian country began accepting work visa applications, hoping to attract 500,000 foreign workers.

In Europe, however, “the hysteria surrounding migration in 2015 and 2016 stopped all debate“. Slowly, things are starting to move again. On the other hand, several European states, Italy and Germany especially, have one thing in common with Japan: an increasingly aging population.

“All European labor ministries know that they must act quickly, but there are two preconceptions: that it is difficult to develop adequate projects, and that public opinion is against it.” For Dempster, who helped design an access program to the Belgian IT sector for Moroccan workers, these are false problems. “If we want to look at it from the point of view of the security of the receiving countries, bringing a person with a passport allows us to have a lot more information about who they are, which we do not have if we force them to arrive by sea”, she explains.

Let’s look at some figures to make it easier: in 2007, Italy made 340,000 entry visas available, half of them seasonal, for non-EU workers, as part of the Flows Decree, Italy’s main legal entry channel adopted annually by the government. Few people cried “invasion” back then. Ten years later, in 2017, those 119,000 people who reached Italy through the Mediterranean seemed a disproportionate number. In the same year, the quotas of the Flow decree were just 30,000.

Perhaps these numbers aren’t comparable, and building legal entry programs is certainly long, expensive, and apparently impractical, if we think of the economic and social effects of the coronavirus pandemic in which we are immersed. For Dempster, however, “it is important to be ready, to launch pilot programs, to create infrastructures and relationships”. So that we don’t end up like Japan, “which has urgently launched an access program for workers, without really knowing how to manage them”.

The Spanish case, as already mentioned, shows how a model born twenty years ago, and then adopted along all the borders between Europe and Africa, does not really work.

As international mobility declined, aided by the pandemic, at least 41,000 people landed in Spain in 2020, almost all of them in the Canary Islands. Numbers that take us back to 2006 and remind us how, after all, this ‘outsourcing’ offers costly and ineffective solutions.

It’s reminiscent of so-called planned obsolescence, the production model for which a technological object isn’t built to last, inducing the consumer to replace it after a few years. But continually renewing and re-financing these walls can be convenient for multinational security companies, shipyards, political speculators, authoritarian regimes, and international traffickers. Certainly not for citizens, who — from the Italian and European institutions — would expect better products. May they think of what the world will be like in 10, 30, 50 years, and avoid trampling human rights and canceling democratic processes in the name of a goal that — history seems to teach — is short-lived. The ideas are not lacking. [At this link you’ll find the recommendations developed by ActionAid: ▻https://thebigwall.org/en/recommendations/].

❞

►https://thebigwall.org/en
#Italie #externalisation #complexe_militaro-industriel #migrations #frontières #business #Afrique #budget #Afrique_du_Nord #Libye #chiffres #Niger #Soudan #Ethiopie #Sénégal #root_causes #causes_profondes #contrôles_frontaliers #EU_Trust_Fund_for_Africa #Trust_Fund #propagande #campagne #dissuasion

–—

Ajouté à la métaliste sur l’externalisation :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/731749
Et plus précisément :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/731749#message765328

ping @isskein @karine4 @rhoumour @_kg_

Décryptage | Les incitations financières au renvoi et à la clandestinité. Le coût de l’humanité

La « crédibilité » de la politique d’asile serait, selon les discours des autorités suisses, tributaire de sa capacité à exécuter les renvois des personnes dont la demande d’asile a été refusée. Une crédibilité qui s’entend comme la façon dont le public et les potentiels demandeurs d’asile perçoivent le système migratoire suisse. Celui-ci est volontiers présenté comme garant de la « tradition humanitaire » helvétique, à savoir « protégeant celles et ceux qui en ont besoin », tout en étant implacable avec les « indésirables », qui (ab)useraient de la porte de l’asile pour trouver une vie meilleure en Suisse. Berne encourage ainsi financièrement les cantons à user de tous les stratagèmes pour exécuter les renvois. Ou à pourrir la vie des gens de façon à ce qu’ils disparaissent, y compris dans la clandestinité, plutôt que de recourir au minimum de survie qu’est l’aide d’urgence. Des millions de francs de « réserves » ont ainsi été engrangés par certains cantons. Sans que la Confédération s’en émeuve. L’objectif est de rester crédible.

https://i1.wp.com/asile.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/VivreEnsembleSoA1b2.jpg?resize=768%2C768&ssl=1#.jpg

PAYER POUR GARDER SON ÂME

En avril 2019, le gouvernement bâlois a publiquement refusé d’exécuter le renvoi d’un jeune Afghan vers l’Autriche, pays responsable de sa demande d’asile en vertu du règlement Dublin. La décision du Secrétariat d’État (SEM) aux migrations avait été confirmée par le Tribunal administratif fédéral (TAF). Bâle a choisi de suivre la majorité de son parlement et de s’écarter de l’interprétation faite par Berne du droit applicable à la situation du jeune homme (voir encadré). Ce faisant, elle s’expose sciemment aux sanctions financières de la Confédération.

La Loi sur l’asile révisée en 2016 fait en effet désormais peser sur les cantons la totalité des frais d’accueil et d’intégration des personnes non renvoyées « par leur faute ». Son article 89 b prévoit le non-versement ou le rembourse- ment des forfaits fédéraux prévus. Aux cantons d’assumer les coûts liés au séjour de la personne sur son territoire, qu’elle soit déboutée définitivement et placée à l’aide d’urgence ou qu’elle obtienne le statut de réfugié. Le « manque à gagner » en termes de participation fédérale peut être important. Dans l’affaire bâloise, la Basler Zeitung évoque le chiffre de 128000 francs dans le cas où le jeune Afghan se voit reconnaître un besoin de protection sous forme d’« admission provisoire ». Un chiffre qui ne tient compte ni du fait que le jeune pourrait contribuer à son canton d’accueil s’il s’intègre rapidement et trouve rapidement sa place sur le marché de l’emploi, ni du coût administratif ou humain des renvois.

C’est ce que relève Aldo Brina, chargé d’information au Secteur réfugié du CSP Genève dans Le Temps[1]. Revenant sur les déclarations de la nouvelle conseillère fédérale responsable du DFJP Karin Keller-Sutter, il met en exergue la perversité d’un système qui, particulièrement dans le cas de l’application du Règlement Dublin, viole le droit d’asile et les droits fondamentaux et incite les cantons à pousser les « déboutés » dans la clandestinité.

Karin Keller-Sutter annonçait en effet le 11 mars 2019 que le canton de Vaud aurait été sanctionné de quelque 4 millions de francs faute d’avoir exécuté avec suffisamment de zèle les renvois dans le cadre du Règlement Dublin entre octobre 2016 et décembre 2018. Pour sa défense, le Conseiller d’État Leuba fait valoir une lecture partiale des statistiques par Berne.[2] Si ses explications flirtent parfois avec les approximations, elles sont également riches d’enseignement.

Réfugié avec ses parents en Iran, le jeune Afghan déclare avoir déserté l’armée iranienne, dans laquelle il avait été engagé comme soldat alors qu’il était encore mineur. L’Iran voulait l’envoyer en Syrie avec son frère. Celui-ci y a été tué. Entré en Europe via l’Autriche, le jeune homme y a été enregistré comme majeur. Sa demande d’asile y a été rejetée et il devait être renvoyé vers l’Afghanistan où il n’a jamais vécu. Il s’est alors tourné vers la Suisse, qui l’a, malgré ses déclarations, considéré comme majeur. Le Secrétariat d’État aux migrations (SEM) a rendu une décision de non-entrée en matière « NEM Dublin » à son encontre, confirmée par le Tribunal administratif fédéral (TAF). Le jeune Afghan a toujours prétendu être mineur en arrivant en Suisse. Si cet état de fait avait été reconnu par le SEM, celui-ci serait vraisemblablement entré en matière sur sa demande d’asile pour examiner ses motifs de fuite. C’est une pétition au Grand Conseil bâlois, adoptée par les 2/3 de l’hémicycle, demandant d’offrir une protection au jeune homme, qui évitera à ce dernier l’expulsion vers l’Autriche. Bien que non lié par le vote des députés, le Conseil d’État a publiquement choisi de suivre le parlement cantonal et de s’opposer à la décision fédérale. Même si pour cela, il doit assumer financièrement les frais d’accueil et d’intégration du garçon.
Source : Basler Zeitung, 18.04.19

50 % DE DISPARITIONS DANS 7 CANTONS

Il souligne d’abord combien le canton de Vaud excelle dans le taux de « renvois contrôlés » par rapport au nombre de décisions Dublin : « Vaud est le cinquième canton qui exécute le plus de renvois ! » Il assure aussi qu’en comparaison à d’autres, Vaud comptabilise moins de disparitions. Par « disparitions », il entend les « départs non contrôlés » chiffrés par le SEM dans ses statistiques. Et les statistiques 2018 attestent effectivement que dans sept cantons suisses, plus de la moitié des personnes disparaissent. (Tableau ci-dessous)

Philippe Leuba affirme à cet égard que son canton serait le seul à ne pas procéder à des arrestations dans les locaux du SPOP au moment où les personnes viennent renouveler leur demande d’aide d’urgence[3]. Il insinue que les autres profiteraient de la détresse des débouté-e-es pour tenter de les interpeller. Préférant la clandestinité au renvoi, une partie renoncerait à demander ce montant de survie.

On rappellera à ce titre que cette « aide » d’urgence découle de l’article 12 de la Constitution suisse qui consacre le droit au minimum vital pour toute personne sur le territoire, indépendamment du statut de la personne. Elle vient compenser la suppression de l’aide sociale conjuguée à l’interdiction de travail faite aux personnes déboutées de leur demande d’asile. Qui surveille et garantit l’exercice effectif de ce droit fondamental dans les cantons ? Berne a en tous cas d’autres priorités.

https://i1.wp.com/asile.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/VE_renvois_tableau1_.-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C646&ssl=1#.jpg

Départ non contrôlé ne veut pas dire départ de Suisse. Dans son interview, Philippe Leuba relève que ces personnes « ne quittent pas forcément le pays pour autant. » Il critique à cet égard une législation qui pénalise les cantons n’exécutant pas les renvois, et qui « ne dit rien sur les clandestins. Or la clandestinité est un risque pour les personnes concernées, de plus elle favorise le travail au noir, etc. »

Il s’écarte ainsi du discours affirmant que le régime d’aide d’urgence pousserait les personnes à « quitter le territoire ».[4] Le Conseil d’État genevois l’affirmait encore récemment dans une réponse à une question urgente au Parlement, qui l’interrogeait sur les conséquences sociales et financières pour le canton d’un centre de départ, notamment en cas de passage de personnes concernées dans la clandestinité.[5] La réponse du Conseil d’État : « Concernant les ‹ départs non-contrôlés ›,il est à préciser qu’il s’agit, selon les observations de l’office cantonal de la population et des migrations sur le terrain, d’une catégorie de migrants qui, dans sa majorité, quitte le canton pour rechercher d’autres opportunités migratoires dans les pays d’Europe. En l’espèce, il s’agit généralement de migrants économiques utilisant la procédure d’asile comme moyen d’accès dans l’espace Schengen. »

À l’heure où Genève fonce tête baissée vers la construction dudit centre au Grand-Saconnex, le gouvernement genevois serait avisé de se questionner à nouveau sur l’impact et les reports de charges que celui- ci impliquera. Au centre-test de Zurich et à Boudry, il a été constaté une forte augmentation du nombre de « départs non contrôlés ». Où sont parties les personnes découragées par la procédure d’asile accélérée ? Où sont aujourd’hui les personnes ayant renoncé aux prestations d’aide d’urgence ?

Pour la Suisse, on peut imaginer qu’une partie d’entre elles, évincée de petits cantons ruraux, a choisi de se réfugier dans des centres urbains, plus propices à une vie informelle et invisible. Certain-e-s ont recours aux services sociaux et médicaux d’urgence de ces cantons, y travaillent, dans des conditions déplorables. Mais les autorités fédérales préfèrent ignorer ces conséquences « locales ». Comme elles ont ignoré le constat d’inefficacité de l’aide d’urgence à faire rapidement « disparaître » les gens, puisque certain-e-s préfèrent en survivre des années plutôt que d’être renvoyé-e-s vers la situation qu’ils ou elles ont fui. Se voilant la face, Berne s’est contenté de créer une nouvelle catégorie administrative, elle des bénéficiaires de longue durée de l’aide d’urgence.

LES DISPARITIONS ENCOURAGÉES

Les disparitions sont également encouragées par Berne via son mode de financement. La Confédération ne se préoccupe pas de savoir comment les cantons dépensent l’argent de l’aide d’urgence. Elle verse un montant unique, lorsque la décision négative entre en force, et prévoit la constitution de réserves par les cantons « pour financer les coûts ultérieurs durant les années suivantes »[6]. Or ces réserves s’accumulent dans certains cantons. Le dernier rapport de suivi publié par le SEM relève que « sur l’ensemble de la période 2008-2017,vingt cantons ont pu constituer des réserves dont le montant cumulé représente près de 128 millions de francs. Sur la même période, six cantons ont cumulé des déficits à hauteur de 83 millions de francs ».

https://i0.wp.com/asile.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/VE_renvois_tableau2_.jpg?w=463&ssl=1#.jpg

Le tableau ci-contre montre que les Romands, hormis Fribourg, sont largement déficitaires. Et que d’autres ont accumulé des millions de francs de réserves. Comment les ont- ils constituées ? Chaque canton, voire commune, gère l’hébergement, l’entretien et l’encadre- ment des personnes à l’aide d’urgence selon ses propres règles et son éthique. L’exhortation fédérale étant une « incitation au départ », que ce soit du territoire ou vers la clandestinité, le résultat ne peut être qu’un nivellement par le bas des conditions de vie. Françoise Kopf le dénonçait déjà en 2010 dans Vivre Ensemble.

Et les choses risquent de se dégrader avec la restructuration qui prévoit une baisse conséquente des forfaits fédéraux de l’aide d’urgence aux cantons. Le montant unique de 6000 francs versés jusqu’ici par personne déboutée se réduira à 400 francs si celle-ci relève d’une procédure Dublin close, et à 2013 francs pour une personne sortant d’une procédure accélérée. Elle restera à 6006 francs dans le cadre d’une procédure étendue. Les réserves risquent d’en prendre un coup. Si les cantons s’étaient tardivement émus du report de charge prévu par la Confédération dans le cadre de la consultation de l’ordonnance sur la révision de la loi (Ordonnance 2), ils n’ont visiblement pas été entendus.

Berne se sert là aussi du porte-monnaie pour inciter les cantons à durcir leur pratique en matière de renvois. À voir jusqu’où les cantons accepteront de s’abaisser. Face aux menaces de sanctions financières articulées par Keller-Sutter, Leuba relève que « parmi les personnes dont le renvoi n’a pas été exécuté en 2018, il y a des familles et des malades ». Une justification qui s’appuie sur des considérations, humanitaires, prévues par la loi. À Genève, le Conseil d’État vient de rendre son rapport sur une motion appelant à une « application digne et humaine de la politique d’asile » dans le cadre du Règlement Dublin. Il reconnaissait avoir été amené « à plusieurs reprises, à retarder un départ au motif d’une situation médicale particulière, pour garantir le respect du principe de l’unité familiale ou encore pour veiller à ce que le renvoi se déroule, en principe, hors d’une période scolaire, en informant préalablement le SEM ». Et s’engageait, « guidé par les valeurs humanitaires genevoises », à appliquer « avec pragmatisme et compassion le nouveau droit fédéral ». Reste à savoir si ces deux concepts vont trouver leur place dans la mise en œuvre de la restructuration.

Bâle a montré la voie. On espère que d’autres se joindront à lui. Dans ce contexte, la société civile doit plus que jamais maintenir la pression.

►https://asile.ch/2019/07/22/decryptage-les-incitations-financieres-au-renvoi-et-a-la-clandestinite-le-cout
#asile #migrations #réfugiés #Suisse #disparitions #statistiques #chiffres #exécution_des_renvois #renvois #expulsions #abus #clandestinisation #aide_d'urgence #responsabilité #dépenses #cantons

Le prix du foot : 6500 travailleurs migrants morts sur les chantiers liés au Mondial 2022 au Qatar
▻https://www.bastamag.net/Mondial-2022-Qatar-FIFA-au-moins-6500-travailleurs-migrants-tues-sur-les-c

Au Qatar, les chantiers liés à la future Coupe du monde tuent, beaucoup. Les alertes ...

Border barrier boondoggle. Trump’s promised inexpensive, impregnable wall was anything but.

“I would build a great wall — and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me. And I’ll build them very inexpensively,” Donald Trump said in 2015 as he announced his presidential run. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” During the campaign, Trump offered more details. His wall would span the entire length of the border, or nearly 2,000 miles, it would be fashioned with concrete — not unlike the Berlin Wall — and would be “impregnable” and “big and beautiful.”

It didn’t quite work out that way. By the end of Trump’s term, his administration had completed construction of about 450 miles of barrier, none of which was concrete and all of which was demonstrably pregnable, at a cost at least five times that of the existing barriers. Mexico did not pay a dime for it. And the “beautiful” part? That, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.

https://i.imgur.com/ipOEV4X.png

When Trump first promised to build the wall along the border, he apparently didn’t realize that his predecessors had already constructed hundreds of miles of barriers. It all started in 1996, when President #Bill_Clinton signed the #Illegal_Immigration_Reform_and_Responsibility_Act. Fences were constructed in urban areas, such as #Nogales and #San_Diego, with the intention of driving border crossers into the desert, where they could be more easily apprehended — but also where they were at greater risk of dying of heat-related ailments.

https://i.imgur.com/3ZqlzRP.png https://i.imgur.com/vuvsfJl.png https://i.imgur.com/M0FDWU9.png

A decade later, President George W. Bush signed the #Secure_Fence_Act of 2006, authorizing the construction of 700 miles of barriers. As a result, 652 miles of pedestrian and vehicle barriers already lined the border, mostly between #El_Paso and San Diego, by the time #Trump was elected. All the evidence, however, suggests that it did very little to stop undocumented migration, in part because at least two-thirds of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. arrived on #visas and then overstayed them.

Besides, no wall is truly impregnable, as Trump himself indicated in a speech on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he said: “Let the fate of the Berlin Wall be a lesson to oppressive regimes and rulers everywhere: No Iron Curtain can ever contain the iron will of a people resolved to be free.” Oddly enough, “iron curtain” may be the most accurate description of Trump’s new segments of the wall.

On the day of his inauguration, President Joseph Biden signed an executive order halting further construction. Now, many observers are urging him to go further and dismantle the barrier, as well as try to repair the damage done. Or, as President Ronald Reagan put it in 1987, “Tear down this wall!”

▻https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.3/infographic-borderlands-border-barrier-boondoggle
#cartographie #infographie #visualisation #murs #prix #coût #longueur #barrières_frontalières #Trump #promesses #promesses_non_maintenues #statistiques #chiffres #George_Bush #overstayers #Joe_Binden #walls_don't_work

ping @reka

"Les routes de la migration africaine mènent rarement à l’Europe"

https://scd.infomigrants.net/media/resize/my_image_big/c5af80a1bfe48ab6022b5ef395c04b39448a927a.jpeg

Les migrations africaines sont bien plus diverses et complexes qu’on ne pourrait le penser. Non seulement la proportion d’Africains qui décident de tenter l’aventure vers l’étranger est relativement faible, mais la plupart des migrants ne cherchent pas à aller vers l’Europe : ils restent sur le continent. Les Presses Universitaires du Québec viennent de publier un ouvrage collectif qui s’éloigne des approches réductrices sur ce sujet. Il s’intitule Migrations et gouvernance en Afrique et ailleurs . La chercheuse Sylvie Bredeloup est l’un de ses auteurs. Elle est notre invitée.

▻https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/30537/les-routes-de-la-migration-africaine-menent-rarement-a-l-europe
#Migrations_Sud-sud #migrations_Sud-nord #migrations #Afrique

ping @_kg_ @rhoumour @karine4 @isskein @fbahoken @reka

–—

ajouté au fil de discussion sur les #statistiques et #chiffres en lien avec les « routes migratoires africaines » (et la relativisation des migrations Sud —> Nord) :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/482464

Pour replacer le contexte, celui des supposées « dérives intellectuelles idéologiques dans les milieux universitaires »...

Pour rappel, le contexte étant celui-ci :

https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH699/tr5F37Hpng-228d4-427ba.png

Donc, pour replacer le contexte, des #chiffres et #statistiques à partir de la base de données qui recense les thèses soutenues et en cours en France.

https://i.imgur.com/3oYmcoy.png

Quelques chiffres utiles cher·es collègues. Avant de commencer ma journée de travail Bnf, je vais vous donner des informations sur les nombres de thèses soutenues ou en cours avec certains mots clefs dont « #lgbt », « #queer », « #patriarcal » ou « #décolonial ».
Je parlerai surtout de ma discipline, la littérature. Sources : ▻http://THESES.FR (avec les failles que l’on sait, mais c’est un indicateur). Déjà, combien de thèses en France aujourd’hui avec le mot « décolonialisme » en titre ou résumé : aucune.
Aucune thèse avec le terme « décolonialisme » toutes disciplines confondues à ce jour.
Essayons décolonial maintenant, un terme connu depuis longtemps. Toutes disciplines confondues, 13 thèses, dans tous les domaines, histoire, géographie, sociologie, psychanalyse etc. En littérature : une seule, soutenue en 2013.
Passons à « #patriarcat », une notion ancienne également. Là on en a 12, toutes disciplines confondues, aucune en littérature.
Essayons patriarcal. Il y en 4 en littérature. Observons les sujets : féminisme, littérature et cinéma en Inde, sur les violences faites aux femmes au Mexique, sur la notion de divinité dans l’espace méditerranéen, et dans la prose féminine russe du 20e siècle. C’est tout.
Quand je dis c’est tout, l’adjectif « patriarcal » ne me fait sortir aucune thèse dans d’autres disciplines. Je dois certainement me méfier du moteur de recherche, mais il est officiel.
L’acronyme LGBT maintenant, pour Lesbien Gay Bi Trans. J’ai 13 thèses au total, et en littérature UNE SEULE, sur un sujet très spécifique (les réfugiés LBGT en Turquie).
Le terme Queer remporte plus de succès, la notion étant prise en compte en tant que concept épistémologique depuis au moins les années 1990 : 39 thèses au total. Deux en littérature, sur des monographies (James Baldwin et Dorothy Allison).
Et maintenant je vais vous donner un autre chiffre, pour mettre en balance cette soi disant vague de recherche sur les études de genre ou décoloniales (dont on voit bien qu’elles ne sont PAS étudiées en fait) : il y a eu 85 thèses sur le seul auteur Claude Simon. Fin du thread.

▻https://twitter.com/neolitterature/status/1364869234283675652

#thèses #France #décolonial #doctorat #recherche #mots-clé #université #facs

Combien de requérant·e·s d’asile y a-t-il en Suisse ?

https://i.imgur.com/BdPMClE.png

Fin 2019, il y avait en Suisse 11’700 requérant·e·s d’asile (permis N) et 48’000 personnes au bénéfice d’une admission provisoire (permis F). Par rapport à l’année précédente, le nombre de personnes titulaires d’un permis F a augmenté et le nombre de requérant·e·s d’asile a diminué. Dans l’ensemble, les effectifs sont légèrement inférieurs à ceux de 2018. Cela représente au total une proportion de 0,7 % de la population permanente et de 2,7 % de la population étrangère.

Les requérant·e·s d’asile et les personnes admises à titre provisoire sont attribué·e·s aux différents cantons en fonction de la taille de la population cantonale. Cette clé de répartition explique la faible variation entre les cantons. En 2019, la proportion de requérant·e·s / personnes admises provisoirement variait peu, entre 8,8 (Glarus) et 8,7 (Berne) pour 1’000 habitant·e·s (Berne) et 3,6 pour 1’000 (Thurgovie). Les variations découlent des départs de Suisse ou des décisions d’octroi d’une autorisation de séjour par les autorités dans le cadre de la procédure d’asile.

À l’échelle des communes, en revanche, les variations sont considérables, puisqu’un nombre élevé de requérant·e·s d’asile est attribué à un centre d’accueil. De nombreuses communes n’ont dénombré aucune personne en procédure d’asile dans leur population fin 2019. D’autres communes accueillent en revanche un·e requérant·e d’asile ou personne admise provisoirement pour sept habitant·e·s.

▻https://nccr-onthemove.ch/indicators/combien-de-requerant%c2%b7e%c2%b7s-dasile-y-a-t-il-en-suisse/?lang=fr

#cartographie #Suisse #demandeurs_d'asile #visualisation #asile #migrations #réfugiés #statistiques #chiffres #densité #taux #distribution #répartition #répartition_territoriale #communes #cantons #clé_de_distribution

Where did all the migrants go? Migration data during the pandemic

The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are visible across the whole of society, and migration is no exception. From late March 2020, restrictions on travel, the closure of visa centres, and economic turmoil have had huge impacts on the immigration system. Following a large decline in international travel after the first UK lockdown, passenger numbers remained well below recent averages throughout the year. Grants of visas in categories across the immigration system also dropped in 2020.

One of the major questions facing migration researchers and policymakers currently is what this all means for migration patterns overall. How much lower is migration because of the pandemic? Who is still coming to the UK and who is not? Who is leaving? Is the migrant population declining?

The main source of data used to measure immigration and emigration flows—the International Passenger Survey—has been suspended due to the pandemic. As a result, recent attempts to examine how the migrant population is changing have used population survey data, which does not give a direct measure migration flows but does give some insight into the migrant population and how it is changing.

This commentary examines what we know from currently available data about how the total size of the migrant population has changed in 2020, and concludes:

- Headline data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) suggest that the number of migrants living in the UK fell in 2020. In Q3 2020, the estimated foreign-born population was 8.3 million, down from 9.2 million in the same quarter a year earlier. This is a decline of 894,000 or 10%. However, there is enormous uncertainty about these estimates and compelling reasons to believe that they are not accurate.
- Estimates of the migrant population are based on pre-pandemic projections of the total UK population that are likely to be too high. During the pandemic, the UK population may have declined, but this is not factored in to estimates of the migrant population. All else equal, this would mean that the official figures underestimated the decline in the foreign-born population. But all else is not equal.
– When the pandemic hit, ONS switched to a socially distanced method of recruiting people into statistical surveys, and this appears to have disproportionately affected migrants’ participation. If migrants are less likely to participate than non-migrants with the new method of data collection, this means their numbers will be underestimated.
- When we look at data on people recruited into the survey before the pandemic but surveyed in mid-2020, there is still a considerable decline in the migrant share of the UK’s population (e.g. due to emigration), particularly in London. But it is smaller than the headline figures suggest.
- All this creates significant uncertainty and means that we should be cautious when comparing data from 2019 and 2020. Some of the changes we see will be real but some will be due to new biases in the data caused by the pandemic.

The demise of the data

Covid-19 has seriously affected migration data. This means that many of the key questions that we are accustomed to being able to answer about the nature and scale of migration to the UK are now more uncertain.

First, the International Passenger Survey, which the Office for National Statistics (ONS) previously used to examine immigration, emigration and net migration, was suspended in March 2020 because of the difficulty collecting data through face-to-face interactions at ports and airports during the pandemic. While this survey had many flaws (including a likely overestimate of non-EU net migration and an underestimate of EU net migration), its disappearance leaves us without an alternative set of data measuring overall UK migration flows. ONS had already planned to move away from the IPS when measuring migration, and is currently working on a replacement data source that will draw on administrative records (e.g. tax and benefits payments) instead, but this will not be ready until later this year at the earliest.

Before the pandemic, National Insurance Number (NINo) registration data also used to provide some insight into migration patterns. (Again, there were many limitations, including the fact that people who are not working will not necessarily apply for a NINo, and that some migrants entering the country live here for much longer than others before applying.) However, this data source also became much less useful in 2020, because the issuance of NINos was disrupted by Covid and new registrations for EU citizens have been suspended.
Population data from the Labour Force Survey

In the meantime, we do still have another data source that is often used for examining the migrant population: the Labour Force Survey. This ONS survey continues to collect data from households around the UK about the composition of the current population. A variant of the dataset with some additional respondents (known as the Annual Population Survey [APS]) is used to produce regular estimates of the total migrant population of the UK, by country of birth and nationality. Historically, the LFS/APS has been one of the most important sources of data for research on migration, though it has limitations too.

In theory, the data can be used to track rises or falls in the migrant population over time. It does not provide a direct measure of migration and excludes people in communal establishments, which are not included in the survey, and has also underrepresented newly arrived migrants. However, over the long run it should give some insight into the impact of migration on the migrant population. If, for example, Covid-19 caused a big decrease in immigration and an increase in emigration, we should expect to see changes in the migrant population living in the UK too.

Headline LFS data for the first three quarters of 2020 do in fact show a big decline in the estimated migrant population in 2020. In Q3 2020, the estimated foreign-born population was 8.3 million, down from 9.2 million in the same quarter a year earlier. This is a decline of 894,000 or 10%.

https://i.imgur.com/c182k8P.png

So have close to one million migrants really emigrated? Unfortunately, it is very difficult to say.

This is because we know that the pandemic caused serious problems in the collection of data, and it is possible that these have particularly affected data on migrants.

There are two main ingredients in the estimate of the migrant population, both of which are creating uncertainty:

– The LFS/APS data: this is used to calculate the share of the population that is foreign born or UK born.
– ONS projections for the size of the population: these are needed to translate information on characteristics of people in the LFS/APS into absolute numbers of people.

Uncertainty about the size of the UK’s population

The LFS only tells us the share of the population that has a particular characteristic, like being born abroad. It does not tell us how big the population is. Usually, assumptions about the total population are based on population projections, which are set out in advance and do not account for short-term shocks like a pandemic. The LFS methodology assumes that the total population of the UK increased by around 370,000 in the year ending Q3 2020. This is based on the annual population growth estimated by the ONS, which is accurate under normal circumstances. However, if the total population had changed – e.g. due to large-scale emigration or excess deaths – this would not be reflected in the figures. In other words, the LFS-based estimates are based on the (surely incorrect) assumption that the UK’s population continued to grow in 2020 in the same way it had done in previous years.

A consequence of this is that when the estimated share of the UK population that was born abroad declined in 2020, this mechanically led to an estimated 1.25m increase in the estimated number of UK-born people living in the UK (Figure 2). In practice, this is not plausible. It cannot be explained by births and deaths (births are relatively constant over time and deaths went up in 2020). It is unlikely to be explained by overseas-resident Brits returning home: LFS data suggest that, at least in Q2 2020, the number of Brits who had been living overseas a year earlier was only 79,000 – similar to the figure in previous years.

https://i.imgur.com/v4SItHZ.png

As Jonathan Portes and Michael O’Connor have pointed out in separate analysis, we can adjust the data so that the UK-born population is held at a plausible level and the total estimated UK population is adjusted downwards to account for likely emigration. Doing this means that the estimated decline in the migrant population is even larger than 894,000. Their calculations put the adjusted figure at just under 1.3m.

However, there is something else going on in the data that changes the picture, and works in the opposite direction.
Changes in data collection methods may disproportionately affect migrants

As a result of the pandemic, ONS changed the way it contacts people to participate in the LFS. Both pre- and post-pandemic, respondents were sent letters telling them they had been selected into the sample. Where previously interviewers would knock on the door in person for a face-to-face first interview (there are five interviews in total), instead respondents had to get in touch to provide their phone number. If they did not, ONS could chase them up if they could obtain their phone number from other sources, but in many cases this is not possible.

This change in recruitment method was followed by a big drop in response rates, particularly among people living in rented accommodation (rather than owner-occupied homes). This is a problem because it introduces new bias into the estimates (e.g. if renters are less likely to participate, we will underestimate the number of renters in the UK). To address this, ONS adjusted the weights that are used to analyse the data, so that the share of the population living in different accommodation types remained constant. As ONS has pointed out, this is a temporary and imperfect solution to the problem and does not address the risk of bias resulting from other groups of people who might have become less likely to respond to the survey, including migrants.

It is possible that migrants were disproportionately affected by the change in the way survey respondents were recruited (the move to telephone contact) and therefore that some of what we saw in 2020 is an increase in migrants not participating in the survey, rather than just emigration.

Existing research shows that survey response rates are often lower for migrants, and are affected by factors like language proficiency, trust and survey data collection methods. In the UK case, migrants may have been less likely to get in touch with ONS to participate in the survey, or less likely to have a landline allowing ONS to chase up non-responders.

Without another data source to check the figures against, there is no hard and fast way to identify how much of the apparent decrease in the foreign-born population is due to emigration and how much is due to migrants not responding to the survey. However, there are some clues in the data that suggest that some of what we are seeing is a statistical rather than a real change.
Some indications that the drop in the migrant population may be smaller than the headline figures suggest

Survey participants remain in the LFS for five quarters, unless they move house, emigrate or decide to drop out. In the summer of 2020 (Q3), some of the LFS respondents were people who were recruited into the survey before the pandemic, under the old, face-to-face method; some were people who had been selected under the new, socially distanced method.

Figure 3 shows the estimated share of the population from 2018 to 2020 based on different groups of respondents. The purple line shows only those who are in their third, fourth or fifth wave of the survey; the large majority of these people will not have been affected by the change in selection method in 2020, because they were recruited by the end of March 2020. The blue line shows the share estimated using only the first and second waves of the survey. By Q3 2020, all of this group would have been recruited using the new method.

The figures are presented as percentages rather than absolute numbers, to avoid the problem that we do not have a reliable estimate for the UK population in 2020.

https://i.imgur.com/xmDSlWV.png

Normally, the estimated migrant share of the population is quite similar regardless of whether we look at waves 1-2 or waves 3-5. (In recent years it has actually been slightly higher on average for waves 3-5, with UK-born respondents more likely to drop out of the survey between waves.) However, the two lines diverge substantially in 2020. In other words, the recent decline in the estimated foreign-born population share is larger among people recruited under the new method.

When we look at all waves of data, the foreign-born share of the population falls by 1.4 percentage points from Q3 2019 to Q3 2020, from 13.9% to 12.5%. For respondents recruited under the new system, however, the estimated migrant share fell from 13.5% to 11.2% (2.3 percentage points). Among people recruited under the old method, the decline was smaller: 14.3% to 13.7% or 0.7 percentage points.

The potential impact of migrant non-response outweighs the effect of uncertainty about the population discussed above. As a back-of-the envelope calculation, Table 1 shows what happens if we assume that the migrant share of the population only declined by the amount the waves 3-5 data suggests, i.e. that it was 14.3% in Q3 2019 and 13.7% in Q3 2020. It then multiplies these percentages by various different options for the total UK population size. The data suggest that even if the UK’s population had declined by 1 million, the total decline in the migrant population would be “only” around 580,000.

https://i.imgur.com/bQPXUtF.png

These figures are not at all conclusive, and are not intended to be a ‘better’ estimate of the decline in the migrant population. Estimates from the LFS are often volatile, and data from a single quarter often change more than one would expect as a result of sampling variation alone. It is usually therefore not a good idea to draw strong conclusions from just a couple of quarters of data. People who participate in waves 3-5 of the LFS may also be different to the ones who only participate in the first 1-2 interviews. The figures are therefore simply designed to illustrate the uncertainty we currently face when comparing pre- and post-pandemic figures over time.

However, with these caveats in mind we can reasonably draw three conclusions. First, a decline in the migrant population does appear to have taken place in 2020, at least from the data that is available to us at present. Second, migrant non-response has probably amplified the estimated decline in the migrant population, which could be considerably smaller than headline figures suggest. And third, a change in the data collection method means we should be cautious about comparing figures from before and after the change in recruitment method.
How has the profile of migrant respondents changed?

In theory, we should expect groups of migrants who are less ‘established’ in the UK to be more likely to leave – for example, people who have recently arrived and who do not have family here. However, these may be some of the same groups who could be more likely not to participate due to the new sampling method (e.g. recently arrived people with language difficulties), making it difficult to disentangle the two.

When we look in more detail at the groups that have seen the largest declines in the estimated migrant population in the all-wave data, some changes seem plausible given our theoretical expectations about what might have happened during the pandemic, while others are less so.

Decreases in the estimated migrant population are highest among those who arrived recently, as one might expect, whether the reason is emigration or non-response (Table 3). Recently arrived migrants may be more likely to leave the country, but they could also be more likely not to respond to surveys under the new recruitment method, for example if they are less confident speaking English.

https://i.imgur.com/wtIQl6m.png

Similarly, we should expect young people to be more likely to leave the UK than older people, who are more likely to be settled with multiple attachments keeping them in the country. We do indeed see the largest decline in the estimated number of migrants appears among those in their 20s (Table 3), although there are also declines in older age groups too. (Some of these are relatively small and within the bounds of normal sampling variation in the LFS.)

https://i.imgur.com/tWNzKH1.png

Surprisingly, however, most of the decline between Q3 2019 and Q3 2020 was driven by families that included dependent children (Table 4) (note that these dependent children may themselves be either UK or foreign born). It would be surprising to see large-scale emigration in this group given that it can be difficult for people with school-age children to move. In principle, we should on the contrary expect single people with fewer attachments to be the most likely to leave the UK.

Therefore seems likely that people with dependent children have simply become less likely to respond to the survey. Indeed, among the UK-born there is also a decrease in the share of survey respondents with dependent children in the family (data not shown), suggesting higher non-response in these types of families across the board. Since people in families with dependent children make up over half of the decline in the estimated migrant population, this creates another reason to doubt the narrative that emigration alone is driving the change.

https://i.imgur.com/H0xIIlB.png

What is happening in London?

One of the most striking changes in the data is in the geographic distribution of the migrant population. Figure 4 shows the estimated change in the foreign-born share of the population from Q3 2019 to Q3 2020. The first panel uses all the LFS data, and the second panel uses only waves 3-5, i.e. those not affected by the change in data recruitment method.

The largest decline in the estimated foreign-born share of the population is seen in London (Figure 4). This appears regardless of whether we restrict the analysis to waves 3-5. The all-wave data suggest that the foreign-born share of the population fell by 4.3 percentage points, from 36.0% in Q3 2019 to 31.7% in Q3 2020. (This translates into a decline of over 360,000 people using the [problematic] assumptions about the total population discussed above.) The wave 3-5 data suggest it fell by 3.6 percentage points, from 36.8% to 33.2%. Either way, these are significant changes.

https://i.imgur.com/vhBFWqy.png

Which countries of origin are driving the change?

The change in the migrant share of the population for the UK as a whole appears for both EU and non-EU born groups. The full LFS data show a 0.9 percentage point decline in the non-EU born population share and a 0.5 percentage point decline for EU citizens. The wave 3-5 figures show a 0.5 percentage point decline in the population share for non-EU born and 0.2 percentage point decline for EU. In London, however, both methods suggest that the decline in the migrant share is driven primarily by the non-EU born (Figure 5).

https://i.imgur.com/D5Ryw0Y.png

How can the uncertainty be resolved?

To understand what has really happened to the UK’s migrant population, we would ideally consult a different data source not affected by the problems discussed here.

One option is the Census. This will be conducted on 21 March 2021 in most of the UK (the Scottish Census has been postponed to 2022 due to the pandemic). The data are due to become available starting from around 12 months after the Census date. This will not resolve questions about changes over the past year, since it is only conducted every 10 years, but it will at least provide a more accurate figure for most of the UK in 2021.

Another option is administrative data, such as HMRC and DWP records or visa data. Over the course of 2021 and early 2022 the Home Office will start to publish data on grants of visas under the new immigration system. This now covers both EU and non-EU citizens (unlike in 2020 when EU citizens still had free movement rights) and will give good insight into new arrivals but not the numbers of people living in the country or the numbers leaving.

The ONS is already in the process of moving towards using administrative data to produce broader migration estimates that will be more similar to previous immigration and emigration figures that were published for 2019 and previous years. However, it may be some time before new statistical publications are regularly available using the data.

▻https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries/where-did-all-the-migrants-go-migration-data-during-the-p
#données #fiabilité #migrations #UK #Angleterre #chiffres #statistiques #pandémie #covid-19 #coronavirus #démographie #étrangers #population_étrangère #Londres

ping @simplicissimus

Is the world poor, or unjust ?

Social media has been ablaze with this question recently. We know we face a crisis of mass poverty: the global economy is organized in such a way that nearly 60% of humanity is left unable to meet basic needs. But the question at stake this time is different. A couple of economists on Twitter have claimed that the world average income is $16 per day (PPP). This, they say, is proof that the world is poor in a much more general sense: there is not enough for everyone to live well, and the only way to solve this problem is to press on the accelerator of aggregate economic growth.

This narrative is, however, hobbled by several empirical problems.

1. $16 per day is not accurate

First, let me address the $16/day claim on its own terms. This is a significant underestimate of world average income. The main problem is that it relies on household surveys, mostly from Povcal. These surveys are indispensable for telling us about the income and consumption of poor and ordinary households, but they do not capture top incomes, and are not designed to do so. In fact, Povcal surveys are not even really legitimate for capturing the income of “normal” high-income households. Using this method gives us a total world household income of about $43 trillion (PPP). But we know that total world GDP is $137 trillion (PPP). So, about two-thirds of global income is unaccounted for.

What explains this discrepancy? Some of the “missing” income is the income of the global rich. Some of it is consumption that’s related to housing, NGOs, care homes, boarding schools, etc, which are also not captured by these surveys (but which are counted as household consumption in national accounts). The rest of it is various forms of public expenditure and public provisioning.

This final point raises a problem that’s worth addressing. The survey-based method mixes income- and consumption-based data. Specifically, it counts non-income consumption in poor countries (including from commons and certain kinds of public provisioning), but does not count non-income consumption or public provisioning in richer countries. This is not a small thing. Consider people in Finland who are able to access world-class healthcare and higher education for free, or Singaporeans who live in high-end public housing that’s heavily subsidized by the government. The income equivalent of this consumption is very high (consider that in the US, for instance, people would have to pay out of pocket for it), and yet it is not captured by these surveys. It just vanishes.

Of course, not all government expenditure ends up as beneficial public provisioning. A lot of it goes to wars, arms, fossil fuel subsidies and so on. But that can be changed. There’s no reason that GDP spent on wars could not be spent on healthcare, education, wages and housing instead.

For these reasons, when assessing the question of whether the world is poor in terms of income, it makes more sense to use world average GDP, which is $17,800 per capita (PPP). Note that this is roughly consistent with the World Bank’s definition of a “high-income” country. It is also well in excess of what is required for high levels of human development. According to the UNDP, some nations score “very high” (0.8 or above) on the life expectancy index with as little as $3,300 per capita, and “very high” on the education index with as little as $8,700 per capita. In other words, the world is not poor, in aggregate. Rather, income is badly maldistributed.

To get a sense for just how badly it is maldistributed, consider that the richest 1% alone capture nearly 25% of world GDP, according to the World Inequality Database. That’s more than the GDP of 169 countries combined, including Norway, Argentina, all of the Middle East and the entire continent of Africa. If income was shared more fairly (i.e., if more of it went to the workers who actually produce it), and invested in universal public goods, we could end global poverty many times over and close the health and education gap permanently.

2. GDP accounting does not reflect economic value

But even GDP accounting is not adequate to the task of determining whether or not the world is poor. The reason is because GDP is not an accurate reflection of value; rather, it is a reflection of prices, and prices are an artefact of power relations in political economy. We know this from feminist economists, who point out that labour and resources mobilized for domestic reproduction, primarily by women, is priced at zero, and therefore “valued” at zero in national accounts, even though it is in reality essential to our civilization. We also know this from literature on unequal exchange, which points out that capital leverages geopolitical and commercial monopolies to artificially depress or “cheapen” the prices of labour in the global South to below the level of subsistence.

Let me illustrate this latter point with an example. Beginning in the 1980s, the World Bank and IMF (which are controlled primarily by the US and G7), imposed structural adjustment programmes across the global South, which significantly depressed wages and commodity prices (cutting them in half) and reorganized Southern economies around exports to the North. The goal was to restore Northern access to the cheap labour and resources they had enjoyed during the colonial era. It worked: during the 1980s the quantity of commodities that the South exported to the North increased, and yet their total revenues on this trade (i.e., the GDP they received for it) declined. In other words, by depressing the costs of Southern labour and commodities, the North is able to appropriate a significant quantity effectively for free.

The economist Samir Amin described this as “hidden value”. David Clelland calls it “dark value” – in other words, value that is not visible at all in national or corporate accounts. Just as the value of female domestic labour is “hidden” from view, so too are the labour and commodities that are net appropriated from the global South. In both cases, prices do not reflect value. Clelland estimates that the real value of an iPad, for example, is many times higher than its market price, because so much of the Southern labour that goes into producing it is underpaid or even entirely unpaid. John Smith points out that, as a result, GDP is an illusion that systematically underestimates real value.

There is a broader fact worth pointing to here. The whole purpose of capitalism is to appropriate surplus value, which by its very nature requires depressing the prices of inputs to a level below the value that capital actually derives from them. We can see this clearly in the way that nature is priced at zero, or close to zero (consider deforestation, strip mining, or emissions), despite the fact that all production ultimately derives from nature. So the question is, why should we use prices as a reflection of global value when we know that, under capitalism, prices by their very definition do not reflect value?

We can take this observation a step further. To the extent that capitalism relies on cheapening the prices of labour and other inputs, and to the extent that GDP represents these artificially low prices, GDP growth will never eradicate scarcity because in the process of growth scarcity is constantly imposed anew.

So, if GDP is not an accurate measure of the value of the global economy, how can we get around this problem? One way is to try to calculate the value of hidden labour and resources. There have been many such attempts. In 1995, the UN estimated that unpaid household labour, if compensated, would earn $16 trillion in that year. More recent estimates have put it at many times higher than that. Similar attempts have been made to value “ecosystem services”, and they arrive at numbers that exceed world GDP. These exercises are useful in illustrating the scale of hidden value, but they bump up against a problem. Capitalism works precisely because it does not pay for domestic labour and ecosystem services (it takes these things for free). So imagining a system in which these things are paid requires us to imagine a totally different kind of economy (with a significant increase in the money supply and a significant increase in the price of labour and resources), and in such an economy money would have a radically different value. These figures, while revealing, compare apples and oranges.

3. What matters is resources and provisioning

There is another approach we can use, which is to look at the scale of the useful resources that are mobilized by the global economy. This is preferable, because resources are real and tangible and can be accurately counted. Right now, the world economy uses 100 billion tons of resources per year (i.e., materials processed into tangible goods, buildings and infrastructure). That’s about 13 tons per person on average, but it is highly unequal: in low and lower-middle income countries it’s about 2 tons, and in high-income countries it’s a staggering 28 tons. Research in industrial ecology indicates that high standards of well-being can be achieved with about 6-8 tons per per person. In other words, the global economy presently uses twice as much resources as would be required to deliver good lives for all.

We see the same thing when it comes to energy. The world economy presently uses 400 EJ of energy per year, or 53 GJ per person on average (again, highly unequal between North and South). Recent research shows that we could deliver high standards of welfare for all, with universal healthcare, education, housing, transportation, computing etc, with as little as 15 GJ per capita. Even if we raise that figure by 75% to be generous it still amounts to a global total of only 26 GJ. In other words, we presently use more than double the energy that is required to deliver good lives for everyone.

When we look at the world in terms of real resources and energy (i.e., the stuff of provisioning), it becomes clear that there is no scarcity at all. The problem isn’t that there’s not enough, the problem, again, is that it is maldistributed. A huge chunk of global commodity production is totally irrelevant to human needs and well-being. Consider all the resources and energy that are mobilized for the sake of fast fashion, throwaway gadgets, single-use stadiums, SUVs, bottled water, cruise ships and the military-industrial complex. Consider the scale of needless consumption that is stimulated by manipulative advertising schemes, or enforced by planned obsolescence. Consider the quantity of private cars that people have been forced to buy because the fossil fuel industry and automobile manufactures have lobbied so aggressively against public transportation. Consider that the beef industry alone uses nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land, to produce only 2% of global calories.

There is no scarcity. Rather, the world’s resources and energy are appropriated (disproportionately from the global South) in order to service the interests of capital and affluent consumers (disproportionately in the global North). We can state it more clearly: our economic system is not designed to meet human needs; it is designed to facilitate capital accumulation. And in order to do so, it imposes brutal scarcity on the majority of people, and cheapens human and nonhuman life. It is irrational to believe that simply “growing” such an economy, in aggregate, will somehow magically achieve the social outcomes we want.

We can think of this in terms of labour, too. Consider the labour that is rendered by young women in Bangladeshi sweatshops to produce fast fashion for Northern consumption; and consider the labour rendered by Congolese miners to dig up coltan for smartphones that are designed to be tossed every two years. This is an extraordinary waste of human lives. Why? So that Zara and Apple can post extraordinary profits.

Now imagine what the world would be like if all that labour, resources and energy was mobilized instead around meeting human needs and improving well-being (i.e., use-value rather than exchange-value). What if instead of appropriating labour and resources for fast fashion and Alexa devices it was mobilized around providing universal healthcare, education, public transportation, social housing, organic food, water, energy, internet and computing for all? We could live in a highly educated, technologically advanced society with zero poverty and zero hunger, all with significantly less resources and energy than we presently use. In other words we could not only achieve our social goals, but we could meet our ecological goals too, reducing excess resource use in rich countries to bring them back within planetary boundaries, while increasing resource use in the South to meet human needs.

There is no reason we cannot build such a society (and it is achievable, with concrete policy, as I describe here, here and here), except for the fact that those who benefit so prodigiously from the status quo do everything in their power to prevent it.

▻https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/2/21/is-the-world-poor-or-unjust

#pauvreté #injustice #économie #croissance_économique #inégalités #Povcal #statistiques #chiffres #revenus #monde #PIB #sondage