A few recent links
Migration museums
The UNESCO initiative on migration museums has a shiny new(ish) website. So far there’s not much on it, but it’s a useful way of staying in touch with developments around the world.#
Diaspora and migration research
I recently came across this Finnish website, focused on diaspora research. The links page is particularly useful. [Note to self - must set up a del.ici.ous account with some of this stuff]
‘Memoryology’
Arthur Goldhammer has interesting analysis (in English) of Fillon’s speech on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Vel d’hiv. Whilst Fillon accepts less responsibility on behalf of the state than Chirac he argues that you can’t draw conclusions about their underlying principles from this discourse. I’d be inclined to dispute this; I would agree the difference in attitudes towards the Holocaust is now – happily – infinitesimal but in a context where some of these debates are still live issues Fillon is sending out a clear signal that victims of the genocide (and by extension other crimes in which the French state was complicit) have nothing to ask of the current government. And it ties into a discourse about national pride – ‘we have nothing to be ashamed of’, we remain a great (and great because untarnished) nation – that is political.
Migration policy – the human(e) side
A couple of fantastic recent articles from the Society Guardian. Ban Ki-Moon (UN Secretary General) makes the case for migration as a source of global prosperity [link]. And a wonderful, generous account of the sacrifices recent (and not so recent) migrants in Peckham (SE London – and not far from my future new home 
) to support family members thousands of kilometers away [link]. We could all learn a lot from such solidarity.
Migration research and political neutrality
What should we make of researchers with known political sympathies who intervene as experts in the public debate? This issue has been raised by Patrick Weil’s recent criticism of Sarkozy’s objective to raise the percentage of economic migration in the total immigration figures to 50% (as Weil notes, a nonsense, achievable only by attacking the rights of families to live together in dignity in the same country) [Le Monde]. Boite noire ponders this issue, and suggests we go back to Weber. The current debate is also covered, albeit with minimum commentary in the very useful Actualite droit de l’immigration.
Petition for a regular TV programme on migration
So many people are convinced about the utility of museums in changing attitudes towards migration but what about the most wide-reaching of all media: TV? This French petition for a regular programme on one of the main terrestrial channels is gaining support.
July 23, 2007 at 1:23 pm
[...] Crossrefs : Mary Stevens. [...]
July 24, 2007 at 4:00 pm
On the subject of the lengths immigrants go to, I saw an item on the news the other day about the collapse of First Solutions Money Transfer. Up to 2000 customers may stand to lose £1.7 million, often money they had saved to send to family in Bangladesh.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2007/07/03/towerhamlets_transfer_video_feature.shtml
Despite the involvement of George Galloway, there seems to have been much less coverage of this compared with (say) the collapse of the Farepak Christmas Club last year, although to be fair, Farepak affected 75 times as many people, and 35 times the amount of money (150,000 people lost an average of £400).