ClimateChangeFork

My Global Family Vacation Part 4: Malta

Posted on September 13, 2016 by climatechangefork

Figure 1 (from August 2 blog)

Figure 1 from my August 2nd blog shows my summer vacation route. Malta is a tiny dot on that map but I felt it necessary to show the context so I can emphasize the country’s critical location with regards to African refugees seeking safety in Europe. I also included a more detailed map of the island country.

Although Malta is an attractive tourist attraction, we did not know that before visiting. Our main objective was to meet my cousin and his wife and spend a quality week with them. This desire was consistent with our aims throughout the trip. Originally, we were going to meet him at his home in Australia but he decided he’d rather take a Mediterranean cruise than stay for the Australian winter (our summer). He and his wife are older than us so we respected their wishes and looked for places around the Mediterranean that would coincide with their cruise. Croatia looked promising until we realized it would require long drives, which they preferred to avoid. Instead, once we pulled out a magnifying glass to look at the map, we decided on Malta. Among other pros, we could guarantee that long drives would not be necessary.

We had magnificent time. In addition to the family event we also got to act as tourists, exploring archeology that can be traced back 5,000 years, enjoying the people and the beautiful landscape. I would strongly recommend adding it to any vacation itinerary.

One can find a short description of Malta and its rich history via Wikipedia:

Malta’s location has historically given it great strategic importance as a naval base, and a succession of powers, including the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Moors, Normans, Sicilians, Spanish, Knights of St. John, French and British, have ruled the islands.

King George VI of the United Kingdom awarded the George Cross to Malta in 1942 for the country’s bravery in the Second World War.^[12] The George Cross continues to appear on Malta’s national flag.^[13] Under the Malta Independence Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1964, Malta gained independence from the United Kingdom as an independent sovereign Commonwealth realm, officially known from 1964 to 1974 as the State of Malta, with Elizabeth II as its head of state.^[14] The country became a republic in 1974, and although no longer a Commonwealth realm, remains a current member state of the Commonwealth of Nations. Malta was admitted to the United Nations in 1964 and to the European Union in 2004; in 2008, it became part of the Eurozone.

Malta has a long Christian legacy and its Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Malta is claimed to be an apostolic see because, according to the Acts of the Apostles,^[15] Paul the Apostle was shipwrecked on Malta.^[16] Catholicism is the official religion in Malta.^[17]^[18]

Malta is a popular tourist destination with its warm climate, numerous recreational areas, and architectural and historical monuments, including three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum,^[19] Valletta,^[20] and seven Megalithic Temples, which are some of the oldest free-standing structures in the world.

My cousin and his wife were both Holocaust refugees. Each made his or her way to Australia after the war. Like me, my cousin was born in Warsaw and basically spent the war under Nazi occupation. He often recalls the Oscar-winning Roman Polanski film, “The Pianist,” which tells the story of Władysław Szpilman in Nazi-occupied Warsaw – specifically the scene when a German officer spots Szpilman hiding in the ruins of a building but leaves him alone without harming him or reporting him to others. He had an almost identical experience. Also, like me, my cousin ended up immigrating to Palestine, where he went to school and served in the Israeli army.

His wife had the good fortune of avoiding the Holocaust. Her parents were in a mixed marriage: she had a Christian Austrian mother and a Jewish father. Before the war, her parents decided that Austria was not a suitable place for their family’s kind of arrangement, so they too immigrated to British Palestine. She attended school at a convent in Jerusalem. They immigrated to Australia independently, where they met, married, started a very successful business, and raised three children. They now have four grandchildren and the entire family are now Australian citizens. We had not heard their full story until this visit but this is not the best place to lay it all out. Instead, with their help, I am trying to share that on Tapestry, the app that I am co-developing. You can access it at www.tapestry.life.

Family connections aside, I wanted to explore Malta’s role in the African refugee migration to Europe. The magnitude of this issue can be realized from the following rescue operation by the Italian navy that was recently reported by the NYT:

Italian naval ships and vessels from nongovernmental groups rescued thousands of migrants off the Libyan coast on Monday, responding to the latest surge in desperate attempts to flee war, poverty and human traffickers. The operation took place 13 miles north of Sabratha, Libya. Groups such as Proactiva Open Arms and Doctors Without Borders helped save about 3,000 people who had been traveling in some 20 small wooden boats.

Tens of thousands of Africans take the dangerous Mediterranean Sea route as a gateway to a better life in Europe, alongside those fleeing wars in countries like Syria and Afghanistan.

According to other sources, 400,000 Africans have taken the dangerous Mediterranean Sea route from Libya to Italy since the beginning of 2014.

We visited both Malta and Gozo (see Figure 2). During the taxi drive from the airport to Gozo I chatted with the taxi driver about the issue of refugees in Malta. He expressed admiration for Prime Minister Joseph Muscat (who has served since 2013), from the Labor party, for minimizing the presence of the refugee crisis in Malta to almost non-existent.

Initially, I wanted to try to visit the main refugee center in Malta, but I quickly learned that would be impossible. Instead, we drove by the center, stopped, walked around, and took some photographs. We saw a few black guys sitting on the fence outside the center. We assumed that these men were refugees but realized that we were stereotyping and were reticent to ask them their stories lest it come across as inappropriate. The whole place looked mundane and deserted.

Instead, I had to resort to more official channels of information.

The best that I could find was an old report of a visit to Safi emigration center by representatives of EFUS (European Forum for Urban Security) in March 2012 that I cite below:

The Safi Detention Centre for Immigrants is situated on an army base at Hal Safi, in the southeast of Malta, close to the international airport. It occupies a three story building at the back of the compound. Surrounded by a barbed wire fence and with barred windows, through which detainees wave and shout at visitors, the centre looks very much like a prison.

Safis the second largest of the three migrant detention centres of Malta. As the Maltese government follows a mandatory detention policy, all migrants arriving in Malta have to go through a detention centre. There, they are screened by authorities who register them in the EU Eurodac database of fingerprints of applicants for asylum and illegal immigrants. They also undergo a medical check-up and receive medical attention if necessary.

Identifying migrants and obtaining papers from their country of origin is a time consuming process. It is followed by another process to determine if a migrant is entitled to asylum, which can last up to one year, although Maltese authorities say they usually do it in five months. If they are granted asylum, migrants are relocated in open centres, where they are provided with a room and daily meals. They are also given a work permit, and benefit from the same social and medical services as Maltese citizens. Those who are not granted asylum are returned to their country of origin, either with the help of Frontex (the EU frontier agency) or by a flight directly chartered by the Maltese government. However, if the process to determine asylum is not completed in 18 months, migrants are also released into an open centre where they have to await the final decision. Unaccompanied children, families with children, pregnant women, people with special needs and elderly people are not detained but only screened and sent to open centres.

When the Efus delegation visited Safi, 218 people were detained there, including 45 women. Safi centre is divided into five zones that all include bedrooms and toilets, as well as a kitchen, a living room, and a first aid room. A doctor is present every day on the premises. There is also a classroom where detainees can attend classes of English and “life adaptation”.

The challenge, he says, is also to manage the cultural diversity of migrants. Safi detainees come from 36 countries, and there are often conflicts between East and West Africans, Muslims and Christians, and various tribes and ethnic groups. The centre has set up special procedures, notably with the help of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), in particular for Somalian refugees who represent about 55% of arriving migrants, and who are granted asylum in most cases. Moreover, the detention centres cooperate with various NGOs, such as the Red Cross. Indeed, we saw Red Cross delegates during our visit at Safi. Also, Maltese authorities have improved the procedure for granting asylum, which is now faster than a few years ago.

The numbers speak for themselves; this is an enormous issue.

A much more recent short report by the Economist, draws an equivalent. Malta doesn’t play a significant role in mitigating African refugee issues. The photographs that I took of the refugee center convey relatively little. Much more revealing is the cartoon that came as a part of the Economist’s short report:

Figure 3

WHEN the European Union picked Malta as the site for this week’s EU-Africa migration summit, it seemed a logical choice. The island nation is perched in the Mediterranean halfway between Libya and Italy. For a time, it was one of the top destinations for migrants from Africa trying to reach Europe. And Valletta, Malta’s fortified Baroque capital, is a very telegenic spot for a summit. (In “Game of Thrones”, a television series, it serves as the backdrop for the port city of Pentos, whose own asylum seekers include the Targaryans, an exiled royal family.) But Malta is also apt in a way EU leaders may not have intended: as a standpoint from which to observe Europe’s increasingly confused attitude towards refugees and other immigrants.

African migrants encounter as much undisguised hostility here as anywhere in Europe. Neil Falzon, who runs Aditus, a local human rights organisation, says many have been spat upon in the street. As in much of eastern Europe, unfamiliarity breeds contempt. Until the turn of the century, the island had one of the most ethnically homogenous societies in Europe, though its unique identity is actually the product of centuries of racial mingling. (The result is a native population who look a bit like Italians, speak a bit like Arabs and drive on the left like the British.)

In the early 2000s, when thousands of African asylum seekers began landing here annually, it came as a shock. “A lot of elderly people had never seen a coloured person,” says the leader of the opposition Nationalist Party, who condemns racism (while unwittingly using a politically incorrect term). Maltese xenophobes can fall back on a rational argument: Malta is both the EU’s smallest state and its most densely populated one. Maltese feel they should have to take fewer migrants than larger states.

Yet strangely, without anyone much noticing, they seem to have got what they want. Malta is barely 200 miles from Libya, still a major transit country for refugees though no longer as important as Turkey. But the flow to Malta has virtually shut down—and no one knows why. Over 140,000 migrants arrived in Italy by sea in the year to November 10th; in Malta, since the end of January, the number is just 20. Meanwhile, the economy has been thriving. Malta has succeeded in becoming something Viktor Orban, the eurosceptic Hungarian prime minister, might dream of: an EU state with enviable growth figures and almost no migrants.

Malta is not a state to be admired or mimicked in terms of solution of the global refugee issue.

Posted in immigration | Tagged aditus, Adrian Brody, Africa, Algeria, app, archaeology, asylum, Australia, Austria, Austrian, Christian, Democratization, detention, discrimination, doctors without borders, Economics, EFUS, emigrant, emigration, Environment, EU, Eurodac, Family, family story, Frontex, Game of Thrones, ghetto, Global Population, Gozo, History, Hitler, Holocaust, Human Rights, immigrant, immigration, Israel, Italy, Jewish, Joseph Muscat, Libya, Malta, Maltese, Mediterranean, migration, Nazi, Nazis, Palestine, Pianist, Poland, Polish, Population, refugee, refugee camp, refugee center, refugees, Roman Polanski, safety, Safi, Sustainability, Szpilman, tapestry, Tourism, tourist, UN, UNESCO, UNHCR, Vacation, Warsaw, Wladislaw Szpilman, World Population, xenophobia, xenophobic | 1 Comment

Globalization at the Top: Sport and Science

Posted on September 8, 2016 by climatechangefork

Hello all and thank you so much for your patience. I usually try to post my blog on Tuesdays but due to some technical difficulties this week’s entry got delayed. Lately I’ve been alternating between the takeaway from my vacation and issues surrounding the presidential election. This blog goes back to my series on immigration and inequality (starting on June 21), which included two personal stories: my own (July 5) and that of Sofia Ahsanuddin (July 12).

I was born to a Jewish family three months before the Nazi invasion of Poland. I spent my first three and a half years in the Warsaw Ghetto and the two following ones in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. I immigrated to Palestine (now Israel) with my mother when I was six years old – roughly six months after we were liberated by American soldiers.

Both of my parents were lawyers, trained in Poland. My father was murdered by the Nazis in 1943. As for my mother, in post-war Israel, Polish law was useless. Although her English was functional, she didn’t speak the language of the land. That meant that she couldn’t retrain herself in Israeli law or shift to another profession that required an academic degree. Meanwhile, she had to find way to support both of us. She continued writing books and articles in Polish but it didn’t generate much of an income so she became a secretary (officially an Executive Secretary).

When I had to choose a career path, it was natural for me to try to follow in my parents’ footsteps and study law. I was a good student and had played key roles in major simulation trials that took place in my school. Many of these trials were connected – either directly or indirectly – to the Holocaust (e.g. Should Israel accept or reject Germany’s offer of reparations, and the trial of Rudolf Kastner – I served as his defense lawyer).

My mother strongly discouraged this path. She argued that I should choose a more “global” profession: one independent of either local reality or my native language and culture. She invoked her own experience, urging me to prepare for the eventuality of something similar to a “second Holocaust” that would force me to leave my home and find a way to make a living in a foreign country with an unknown language.

Her argument won me over and I took my degrees in science. Two generations later, I am delighted with my choices. I didn’t experience a second Holocaust; I was not forced to leave Israel and immigrate to the United States. I could have been perfectly fine staying and raising my family in Israel. I had choices. I became part of the migration “elite”: I was easily accepted wherever I went and had no culture shock difficulties.

Back to the present – I came back from my recent vacation at the end of July, a week before the Rio Olympics started. I, like millions of viewers around the world, tuned in to the spectacle whenever and however I could. I also watched the 2012 Summer Olympics and wrote a blog on the London event (August 27, 2012) expressing a wish that a similar competition take place to serve the public good.

Back then, I was trying to analyze why significant fractions of the public either denied climate change or opposed mitigation efforts. One of the main factors was NIMBYism – in other words, there are many who don’t refute the phenomenon of climate change but don’t want to do anything about it.

This time, when I watched the Olympics, I focused on migration and globalization. I couldn’t escape the feeling that aside from national symbols such as flags, national anthems, and daily medal counts, almost everybody looked the same – with a few notable exceptions:

Figure 1 – Pita Nikolas Tafatofua carrying the Tonga flag in the 2016 Olympic opening Ceremony

Mr. Tafatofua is a taekwondo practitioner who was born in Australia to Australian and Tongan parents. Obviously that’s not how he dresses in everyday life but it made him stand out from the crowd and celebrated the traditions of his Tongan ancestors.

There were 11,000 participants competing in the games. Unsurprisingly, most medals were won by representatives of developed countries. However, some publications attempted to normalize the medal counts according to each country’s GDP and population – see Figure 2. By the GDP count, the US ranks 55^th.

Alternate-table Figure 2 – Alternative medal count for the Rio Olympics

A recent NYT article showed some amazing statistics about the nationality of the Olympians:

In the last few decades, a migration of table tennis players from China has produced a full-fledged diaspora of athletes on six continents, reshaping the landscape of the sport. There were 44 table tennis players in the 2016 Olympics that were born in mainland China. Table 1 shows the countries that they represented in the Rio Olympics and Table 2 shows the percentages of foreign-born athletes in other sports.

The Olympic charter states that “any competitor in the Olympic Games must be a national of the country of the NOC which is entering such competitor.” That being said, “A competitor who is a national of two or more countries at the same time may represent either one of them, as he may elect. However, after having represented one country in the Olympic Games, in continental or regional games or in world or regional championships recognized by the relevant IF, he may not represent another country unless he meets the conditions set forth in paragraph 2 below that apply to persons who have changed their nationality or acquired a new nationality.”

Table 1 (Based on NYT article)

Country	Mainland Chinese – Born Table Tennis Team Members, 2016
China	6/6
Singapore	5/5
Australia	3/6
United States	3/6
Canada	2/2
Turkey	2/2
Netherlands	2/3
Spain	2/3
Portugal	2/5
Austria	2/6
Germany	2/6
Hong Kong	2/6
Poland	2/6
Luxemburg	1/1
Qatar	1/1
Ukraine	1/2
Republic of Congo	1/3
Slovakia	1/3
France	1/4
Sweden	1/5
Brazil	1/6
Korea	1/6

Table 2

Sport	% Born Outside the Country
Table Tennis	31
Basketball	15
Equestrian	13
Canoe slalom	12
Wrestling	12
Tennis	11
Rhythmic gymnastic	11
Judo	11
Gymnastic	11
Badminton	10
Golf	10
Fencing	10
Track and Field	9
Swimming	9

Eighty-four American Universities trained athletes to become Olympic medalists. The top five in terms of number of medals ever won include: University of Southern California – 309 medals; Stanford University – 270 medals; UCLA – 233 medals; UC Berkeley – 207 medals and University of Michigan – 144 medals.

A significant fraction of these students were not American nationals and were furthermore representing different countries. Once you have the skills to compete on the Olympic level and want to train in a country different than yours or represent a country other than the one where you were born, national legal boundaries quickly begin to melt away.

To put it briefly, the same rule applies to successful scientists. An article in the journal “Nature” (Nature, 490,326 (2012)) details the distribution of the scientific diaspora. The key figure in this article (shown here as Figure 3) includes the main countries from which the scientists have emigrated. The following paragraph, from the same publication, describes the downside of these relatively low immigration barriers:

But some countries worry that they are losing their top researchers. Of the world’s most highly cited scientists from 1981 to 2003, one in eight were born in developing countries, but 80% of those had since moved to developed countries (mostly the United States), according to a 2010 study by Bruce Weinberg at Ohio State University in Columbus. India, for example, loses out, says Binod Khadria, an economist who studies international mobility at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “The best and brightest are kept in other countries.”

Figure 3 – Destination and sources of the science diaspora.

In other words, if you want to be a “global citizen” and see national boundaries magically melt before you, listen to my mother: get the “right” education and be very good at what you do.

Posted in immigration | 8 Comments

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Posted on September 7, 2016 by climatechangefork

Please stay tuned for the next post.

Thanks!

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Global Family Vacation Part 3: Israel: Palestinian and Jewish Refugees, Resettlement, and the Right of Return

Posted on August 30, 2016 by climatechangefork

Figure 1 – A map of refugee camps in the Middle East

Successful resettlement is probably the most important aspect of the global refugee issue. Resettled refugees can make major positive contributions to their host societies. We have seen this happen globally throughout history (notably in both the US and Australia). The striking contrast between displaced and resettled refugees is especially apparent in the Middle East. More precisely, we have seen it pan out as a central, almost unsolvable problem within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As a Holocaust refugee, I was a resettled in Israel. At the time, it was part of Palestine, which was under British control. I grew up and got all of my education in Israel, as well as serving in the army. I hold dual Israeli-American citizenship and try to visit as often as possible. Even though I have issues with current government policies, I love the country and it was an important stopover in my vacation. Two of my elderly friends there, with whom I shared many aspects of the Holocaust experience, are in poor health so I wished to spend some time with them.

I also took the opportunity while I was in Israel to explore the issue of refugee resettlement and all that entails.

The Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948 dislocated Palestinian refugees from their homes and fundamentally decided their fate and prospects within the Middle East. It is a deeply disputed topic, to the point that is hard – if not impossible – to get an unbiased opinion about the discord. That very much includes my own views. The Syrian civil war, the Iraqi state’s disintegration, the rise of ISIS, and Yemen’s civil war have all worsened the magnitude of the Palestinian refugees’ plight.

I remember an incident highly relevant to this discussion: a few years ago, my school held a retreat for a few faculty members to discuss changes to the General Education program. I was already Director of the Environmental Studies program and sort of represented interdisciplinary educational efforts. During one of the meals, I sat near a history professor who specialized in the Middle East. He is a well know Jewish Arabist and is strongly left-leaning on the American political spectrum. I was teaching, then as now, Climate Change. Like many campuses, our student population is a mixture of strongly liberal students – many of them Jewish and an increasing numbers of them Muslim. I asked him how he teaches controversial topics like the Arab-Israeli conflict to such a mixture of backgrounds. He looked at me with a smiling face and responded that he relies heavily on original documents. I returned his smile to indicate that he might have been able to fool the students with that kind of methodology but his strategy didn’t fool me: he is the one who chooses the original documents; his biases are manifested by the documents that he selects.

For my part, I will start with Wikipedia’s descriptions of the Arab vs. Israeli points of view regarding the Palestinian refugees. I’ll continue with a Jewish website’s depiction of the two sides. Lastly, we’ll see a description of the Jewish exodus in the aftermath of the 1948 conflict and I will try to let you decide your own opinion without providing my own, biased take. To include the relevant paragraphs from these sources, the blog is going to be unusually long. My editor will be inclined to just cite the sources without posting the full excerpts. Doing so would mean the reader’s choices would shape the discussion, depending on which links they clicked or ignored. Instead, I want to curate the sources to include the full range. For this I need to quote them directly.

To start with, Wikipedia’s take on the two sides:

Israeli views [edit]

The Jewish Agency promised to the UN before 1948 that Palestinian Arabs would become full citizens of the State of Israel,^[72] and the Israeli declaration of independence invited the Arab inhabitants of Israel to “full and equal citizenship”.^[73] In practice, Israel does not grant citizenship to the refugees, as it does to those Arabs who continue to reside in its borders. The 1947 Partition Plan determined citizenship based on residency, such that Arabs and Jews residing in Palestine but not in Jerusalem would obtain citizenship in the state in which they are resident. Professor of Law at Boston University Susan Akram, Omar Barghouti and Ilan Pappé have argued that Palestinian refugees from the envisioned Jewish State were entitled to normal Israeli citizenship based on laws of state succession.^[74]

Arab states [edit]

The Arab League has instructed its members to deny citizenship to original Palestine Arab refugees (or their descendants) “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland”.^[75]

Tashbih Sayyed, a fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, criticized Arab nations of violating human rights and making the children and grandchildren of Palestinian refugees second class citizens in Lebanon, Syria, or the Gulf States, and said that the UNRWA Palestine refugees “cling to the illusion that defeating the Jews will restore their dignity”.^[76]

Palestinian views [edit]

Palestine refugees claim a Palestinian right of return. In lack of an own country, their claim is based on Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which declares that “Everyone has the right to leave any country including his own, and to return to his country”, although it has been argued that the term only applies to citizens or nationals of that country. Although all Arab League members at the time- Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen– voted against the resolution,^[77] they also cite the non-binding article 11 of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, which “Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return […].”^[71] However it is currently a matter of dispute whether Resolution 194 referred only to the estimated 50,000 remaining Palestine refugees from the 1948 Palestine War, or additionally to their UNRWA-registered 4,950,000 descendants. The Palestinian National Authority supports this claim, and has been prepared to negotiate its implementation at the various peace talks. Both Fatah and Hamas hold a strong position for a claimed right of return, with Fatah being prepared to give ground on the issue while Hamas is not.^[78] However, a report in Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper in which Abdullah Muhammad Ibrahim Abdullah, the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon and the chairman of the Palestinian Legislative Council’s Political and Parliamentary Affairs committees,^[79] said the proposed future Palestinian state would not be issuing Palestinian passports to UNRWA Palestine refugees – even refugees living in the West Bank and Gaza.

In a 2 January 2005 opinion poll conducted by the Palestinian Association for Human Rights involving Palestinian refugees in Lebanon:^[80]

96% refused to give up their right of return

3% answered contrary

1% did not answer

The two sides as presented by the Jewish Virtual Library:

Israel’s Attitude Toward the Refugees

When plans for setting up a state were made in early 1948, Jewish leaders in Palestine expected the population to include a significant Arab population. From the Israeli perspective, the refugees had been given an opportunity to stay in their homes and be a part of the new state. Approximately 160,000 Arabs had chosen to do so. To repatriate those who had fled would be, in the words of Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, “suicidal folly.”

Israel could not simply agree to allow all Palestinians to return, but consistently sought a solution to the refugee problem. Israel’s position was expressed by David BenGurion (August 1, 1948):

When the Arab states are ready to conclude a peace treaty with Israel this question will come up for constructive solution as part of the general settlement, and with due regard to our counterclaims in respect of the destruction of Jewish life and property, the long-term interest of the Jewish and Arab populations, the stability of the State of Israel and the durability of the basis of peace between it and its neighbors, the actual position and fate of the Jewish communities in the Arab countries, the responsibilities of the Arab governments for their war of aggression and their liability for reparation, will all be relevant in the question whether, to what extent, and under what conditions, the former Arab residents of the territory of Israel should be allowed to return.

The Israeli government was not indifferent to the plight of the refugees; an ordinance was passed creating a Custodian of Abandoned Property “to prevent unlawful occupation of empty houses and business premises, to administer ownerless property, and also to secure tilling of deserted fields, and save the crops….”

The implied danger of repatriation did not prevent Israel from allowing some refugees to return and offering to take back a substantial number as a condition for signing a peace treaty. In 1949, Israel offered to allow families that had been separated during the war to return; agreed to release refugee accounts frozen in Israeli banks (eventually released in 1953); offered to pay compensation for abandoned lands and, finally, agreed to repatriate 100,000 refugees.

The Arabs rejected all the Israeli compromises. They were unwilling to take any action that might be construed as recognition of Israel. They made repatriation a precondition for negotiations, something Israel rejected. The result was the confinement of the refugees in camps.

Despite the position taken by the Arab states, Israel did release the Arab refugees’ blocked bank accounts, which totaled more than $10 million. In addition, through 1975, the Israeli government paid to more than 11,000 claimants more than 23 million Israeli pounds in cash and granted more than 20,000 acres as alternative holdings. Payments were made by land value between 1948 and 1953, plus 6 percent for every year following the claim submission.

After the Six-Day War, Israel allowed some West Bank Arabs to return. In 1967, more than 9,000 families were reunited and, by 1971, Israel had readmitted 40,000 refugees. By contrast, in July 1968, Jordan prohibited persons intending to remain in the East Bank from emigrating from the West Bank and Gaza.

Arab Attitudes Toward the Refugees

The UN discussions on refugees had begun in the summer of 1948, before Israel had completed its military victory; consequently, the Arabs still believed they could win the war and allow the refugees to return triumphant. The Arab position was expressed by Emile Ghoury, the Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee:

It is inconceivable that the refugees should be sent back to their homes while they are occupied by the Jews, as the latter would hold them as hostages and maltreat them. The very proposal is an evasion of responsibility by those responsible. It will serve as a first step towards Arab recognition of the State of Israel and partition.

The Arabs demanded that the United Nations assert the “right” of the Palestinians to return to their homes, and were unwilling to accept anything less until after their defeat had become obvious. The Arabs then reinterpreted Resolution 194 as granting the refugees the absolute right of repatriation and have demanded that Israel accept this interpretation ever since.

One reason for maintaining this position was the conviction that the refugees could ultimately bring about Israel’s destruction, a sentiment expressed by Egyptian Foreign Minister Muhammad Salah al-Din:

It is well-known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the Homeland and not as slaves. With a greater clarity, they mean the liquidation of the State of Israel (Al-Misri, October 11, 1949).

After the 1948 war, Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip and its more than 200,000 inhabitants, but refused to allow the Palestinians into Egypt or permit them to move elsewhere.

Although demographic figures indicated ample room for settlement existed in Syria, Damascus refused to consider accepting any refugees, except those who might refuse repatriation. Syria also declined to resettle 85,000 refugees in 1952-54, though it had been offered international funds to pay for the project. Iraq was also expected to accept a large number of refugees, but proved unwilling. Lebanon insisted it had no room for the Palestinians. In 1950, the UN tried to resettle 150,000 refugees from Gaza in Libya, but was rebuffed by Egypt.

Jordan was the only Arab country to welcome the Palestinians and grant them citizenship (to this day Jordan is the only Arab country where Palestinians as a group can become citizens). King Abdullah considered the Palestinian Arabs and Jordanians one people. By 1950, he annexed the West Bank and forbade the use of the term Palestine in official documents.

In 1952, the UNRWA set up a fund of $200 million to provide homes and jobs for the refugees, but it went untouched.

The plight of the refugees remained unchanged after the Suez War. In fact, even the rhetoric stayed the same. In 1957, the Refugee Conference at Homs, Syria, passed a resolution stating:

Any discussion aimed at a solution of the Palestine problem which will not be based on ensuring the refugees’ right to annihilate Israel will be regarded as a desecration of the Arab people and an act of treason (Beirut al Massa, July 15, 1957).

The treatment of the refugees in the decade following their displacement was best summed up by a former UNRWA official, Sir Alexander Galloway, in April 1952: “The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die.”

Little has changed in succeeding years. Arab governments have frequently offered jobs, housing, land and other benefits to Arabs and non-Arabs, excluding Palestinians. For example, Saudi Arabia chose not to use unemployed Palestinian refugees to alleviate its labor shortage in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Instead, thousands of South Koreans and other Asians were recruited to fill jobs.

The situation grew even worse in the wake of the Gulf War. Kuwait, which employed large numbers of Palestinians but denied them citizenship, expelled more than 300,000 of them. “If people pose a security threat, as a sovereign country we have the right to exclude anyone we don’t want,” said Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir Al-Sabah (Jerusalem Report, June 27, 1991). Most of whom were expelled settled in Jordan.

By the end of 2010, the number of Palestinian refugees on UNRWA rolls had risen to nearly 5 million, several times the number that left Palestine in 1948. In just the past three years, the number grew by 8 percent. Today, 42 percent of the refugees live in the territories; if you add those living in Jordan, 80 percent of the Palestinians currently live in “Palestine.” Though the popular image is of refugees in squalid camps, less than one-third of the Palestinians are in the 59 UNRWA-run camps.

During the years that Israel controlled the Gaza Strip, a consistent effort was made to get the Palestinians into permanent housing. The Palestinians opposed the idea because the frustrated and bitter inhabitants of the camps provided the various terrorist factions with their manpower. Moreover, the Arab states routinely pushed for the adoption of UN resolutions demanding that Israel desist from the removal of Palestinian refugees from camps in Gaza and the West Bank. They preferred to keep the Palestinians as symbols of Israeli “oppression.”

The Jewish Exodus (via Wikipedia):

The Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries or Jewish exodus from Arab countries (Hebrew: יציאת יהודים ממדינות ערב‎‎, Yetziat yehudim mi-medinot Arav; Arabic: هجرة اليهود من الدول العربية والإسلامية‎‎ hijrat al-yahūd min ad-duwal al-‘Arabīyah wal-Islāmīyah) was the departure, flight, expulsion, evacuation and migration, of 850,000 Jews,^[1]^[2] primarily of Sephardi and Mizrahi background, from Arab and Muslim countries, mainly from 1948 to the early 1970s. They and their descendants make up the majority of Israeli Jews.

A number of small-scale Jewish exoduses began in many Middle Eastern countries early in the 20th century with the only substantial aliyah coming from Yemen and Syria.^[3] Prior to the creation of Israel in 1948, approximately 800,000 Jews were living in lands that now make up the Arab world. Of these, just under two-thirds lived in the French and Italian-controlled North Africa, 15–20% in the Kingdom of Iraq, approximately 10% in the Kingdom of Egypt and approximately 7% in the Kingdom of Yemen. A further 200,000 lived in Pahlavi Iran and the Republic of Turkey.

The first large-scale exoduses took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from Iraq, Yemen and Libya. In these cases over 90% of the Jewish population left, despite the necessity of leaving their property behind.^[4] Two hundred and sixty thousand Jews from Arab countries immigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1951, accounting for 56% of the total immigration to the newly founded state.^[5] Following the establishment of the State of Israel, a plan to accommodate 600,000 immigrants over four years, doubling the existing Jewish population, was submitted by the Israeli government to the Knesset.^[6] The plan, however, encountered mixed reactions; there were those within the Jewish Agency and government who opposed promoting a large-scale emigration movement among Jews whose lives were not in danger.^[6]

Later waves peaked at different times in different regions over the subsequent decades. The peak of the exodus from Egypt occurred in 1956 following the Suez Crisis. The exodus from the other North African Arab countries peaked in the 1960s. Lebanon was the only Arab country to see a temporary increase in its Jewish population during this period, due to an influx of Jews from other Arab countries, although by the mid-1970s the Jewish community of Lebanon had also dwindled. Six hundred thousand Jews from Arab and Muslim countries had reached Israel by 1972.^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10] In total, of the 900,000 Jews who left Arab and other Muslim countries, 600,000 settled in the new state of Israel, and 300,000 immigrated to France and the United States. The descendants of the Jewish immigrants from the region, today known as Mizrahi Jews (“Eastern Jews”), currently constitute more than half of the total population of Israel,^[11] partially as a result of their higher fertility rate.^[12] In 2009, only 26,000 Jews remained in Arab countries and Iran^[13] and 26,000 in Turkey.^[14]

The reasons for the exodus included push factors, such as persecution, antisemitism, political instability,^[15] poverty^[15] and expulsion, together with pull factors, such as the desire to fulfill Zionist yearnings or find a better economic status and a secure home in Europe or the Americas. The history of the exodus has been politicized, given its proposed relevance to the historical narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict.^[^16] When presenting the history, those who view the Jewish exodus as analogous to the 1948 Palestinian exodus generally emphasize the push factors and consider those who left as refugees, while those who do not, emphasize the pull factors and consider them willing immigrants.

Those who continue to suffer most throughout this conflict are the ones in the camps shown in Figure 1: generations succeeding generations without any hope in sight.

Posted in immigration | Tagged annex, Arab, arab league, Arabist, attitude, Australia, bias, Brooklyn College, camp, choice, Citizen, Citizenship, Civil War, CUNY, document, Egypt, emigrant, emigration, Family, Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Holocaust, home, homeland, Human Rights, identity, immigrant, immigration, Iraq, Iraqi, ISIS, Islam, Israel, Israeli, Jew, Jewish, Kuwait, land, Lebanon, middle east, migrant, migration, muslim, opinion, Palestine, Palestinian, Palestinian National Authority, partition, political, politics, privilege, property, pull factor, push factor, refugee, religion, resettlement, return, right, right of return, Saudi Arabia, security, settlement, Suez, Syria, teach, teacher, treaty, Turkey, UDHR, UN, UNRWA, US, War, west bank, Yemen | Leave a comment

How to Influence Polls and Win Elections

Posted on August 23, 2016 by climatechangefork

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
~Plato

Clinton is well ahead at the polls. Common opinion two weeks ago (August 9, 2016), was that convention bounces were still affecting the polls, meaning that we should wait for those numbers to even out before assuming they corresponded to anything in the long term. The polls haven’t changed much in that time so most believe there is a high chance that the Clinton advantage will prevail until November 8th (Election Day). The Trump team claims that the polls are being rigged by predominantly polling Democratic voters. They also claim that the only way Trump will lose the election is if it is rigged.

Before we proceed, it’s helpful to understand the poll takers’ methodology:

In a four-way race, Clinton has 45%, Trump 31%, Libertarian Gary Johnson 10%, and Green Party’s Jill Stein 6%.

NOTE: Poll conducted Aug. 1-3 of 983 registered voters, margin of error ±3.1 percentage points

Nature of the Sample: McClatchy-Marist Poll of 1,132 National Adults

This survey of 1,132 adults was conducted August 1^st through August 3rd, 2016 by The Marist poll sponsored and funded in partnership with McClatchy News Service.

Adults 18 years of age and older residing in the contiguous United States were contacted on landline or mobile numbers and interviewed in English by telephone using live interviewers. Landline telephone numbers were randomly selected based upon a list of telephone exchanges from throughout the nation from ASDE Survey Sampler, Inc. The exchanges were selected to ensure that each region was represented in proportion to its population. Respondents in the household were randomly selected by first asking for the youngest male. This landline sample was combined with respondents reached through random dialing of cell phone numbers from Survey Sampling International. After the interviews were completed, the two samples were combined and balanced to reflect the 2013 American Community Survey 1-year estimates for age, gender, income, race, and region. Results are statistically significant within ±2.9 percentage points. There are 983 registered voters. The results for this subset are statistically significant within ±3.1 percentage points. The error margin was not adjusted for sample weights and increases for cross-tabulations.

Polls are now being done on a daily basis, a process that will continue until Election Day. As a rule, pollsters are professional organizations that live off their reputations and are constantly tested against both each other and the final results. They would not dare play games with their methodologies to achieve slanted results; they’d be caught in no time and be immediately discredited.

Early polls are important because they provide significant indicators of future polls and election results. One of the most vital pieces of feedback regards how many potential voters will be abstaining on Election Day (for this discussion, based on elements that I explored in the August 9th blog, any decision to vote for one of the minor candidates will be treated as equivalent to abstaining).

As described in the McClatchy-Marist methodology and as is true for all credible polls, polling is conducted only among registered voters. Given that it is only mid-August, we cannot assume that the current polls will play out similarly on November 8^th. The campaigns can still make reassessments that will influence the final outcome.

Hillary Clinton addressed these two points:

“Don’t be complacent, my friends!” she told supporters on Tuesday inside a high school gym in West Philadelphia. “Even though we’re doing fine right now, I’m not taking anyone, anywhere, for granted.”

As Mrs. Clinton seizes polling advantages over Donald J. Trump in essentially every traditional swing state, her team is working to keep supporters energized and engaged, reminding them that winning public surveys in August is worth exactly zero electoral votes in November.

Often sounding as much like a field organizer as a major party nominee, Mrs. Clinton ticked off the particulars of what has become a signature venture of her bid: the registration of three million Americans before Election Day.

The article speaks to the fact that both polls and the election are determined exclusively by registered voters. Clinton’s main effort now is to increase that number by 3 million. Voter registration deadlines vary by state; most of them are somewhere in mid-October. An objective of 3 million new registered voters sounds impressive but one has to keep in mind that due to natural variability, 1.3 of the 3 million will likely be made up of people who will come of age and register on their own.

To put these numbers into perspective we need to go back to something I wrote in March (March 15, 2016). Based on 2012 data, 85% of registered voters in the US vote – but only 55% of eligible voters do so – leaving about 100 million eligible voters in the US that do not participate in this vital decision-making process. This is a huge reservoir to try to engage.

What about time? Does Trump have enough to shift his strategy and affect the polls and the election? Trump is trying. He has just changed his team, once again. The trouble is that almost universal opinion holds that the element that most needs to change is Trump himself, a feat that turns out to be much more difficult than simple firing and hiring. But doesn’t Trump have close to three months left to navigate his campaign? Apparently not. The reason for the rush is that early elections are becoming more and more popular in the US:

Voting actually starts in less than six weeks, on Sept. 23 in Minnesota and South Dakota, the first of some 35 states and the District of Columbia that allow people to cast ballots at polling sites or by mail before Nov. 8. Iowa is expected to have ballots ready by the end of September, as are Illinois and two other states.

The electoral battlegrounds of Arizona and Ohio are to begin voting on Oct. 12, nearly four weeks before Election Day. And North Carolina and Florida will be underway before Halloween.

Early voting has become a critical, even decisive factor in presidential elections: President Obama was sufficiently ahead in the early vote in Iowa and Nevada in 2012 that his campaign shifted resources from those states to others, according to former advisers, who also credited enthusiastic early voting in 2008 for his victory in North Carolina and elsewhere.

Nearly 32 percent of voters cast their ballots before Election Day in 2012, according to census data, compared with 29.7 percent in 2008 and 20 percent in 2004.

In other words, there’s actually not much time left.

Of course, the content of November’s ballots is not limited to Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. The full 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 34 of the 100 seats in the US Senate, 12 state governorships, 2 territorial governorships, and an assortment of local positions are also at stake. Choosing someone for the top of the ticket obviously does not imply that a person will vote down the party line for all public offices. Split-ticket voting is a very real phenomenon but one party’s failed campaign can have a major bearing on all levels of government. We will all have to live with the consequences.

How can the campaigns affect the results? Speeches or debate performances might have some impact. Unsurprisingly, the majority of dedicated Democrats and Republicans will probably vote exclusively for their parties – although this year that dividing line might be shaken. Independent and newly registered voters end up being the key deciding factors in many races, so candidates must actively court their favor. The probability that these people will vote for a particular party or individual is determined by one word – groundwork. In today’s environment most of that work is done electronically.

The issue is not to convince the 100 million passive eligible voters nationwide to register on time and vote. Such a strategy would never work. Nor is the goal to try to convince people in states like mine (NY) to register and vote. Whether or not I vote will not make much difference nationally in terms of the electoral votes that my state will send – they will inevitably go to Clinton. On the other hand, such participation will be key in states such as Florida and Ohio where a few votes can flip the state’s outcome and be instrumental in deciding an election.

Hillary Clinton apparently relies on a combination of Google technology and the remains of the highly successful groundwork laid by President Obama during his 2008 and 2012 campaigns to help establish her footing. It is yet to be seen to what degree the overwhelming support that her Democratic competitor, Bernie Sanders, generated among previously untapped constituencies can be redirected for her benefit.

Nobody that I know talks about similar groundwork efforts by Donald Trump and he’s quickly running out of time to change that.

Posted in Election | Tagged active, America, Arizona, Bernie, Bernie Sanders, candidacy, candidate, Candidates, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Change Deniers, Climate Skeptics, Clinton, constituent, credential, DC, Democrat, disorder, Donald Trump, early election, early voting, elect, Election, election day, eligible, Environment, experience, favorable, FiveThirtyEight, foreign policy, Fremont, Gary Johnson, Gender, Global Warming, govern, Government, governor, groundwork, Hillary Clinton, honesty, house, independent, Iowa, Iraq, Jill Stein, lie, likeable, Marist, McClatchey, methodology, metric, metrics, Minnesota, negative, neutral, Nuclear, nuclear weapons, Obama, Ohio, Olympics, outreach, party, party line, passive, Plato, Policy, political, political party, politics, poll, polls, pollster, positive, president, President Obama, presidential campaign, presidential election, psychology, qualification, quantify, quantity, register, registered, registered voter, relatability, Republican, rig, rigged, Science, senate, South Dakota, split-ticket, Sustainability, swing state, Technology, third party, Trump, trust, truth, unfavorable, US, vote, voter, Washington DC, World Population | Leave a comment

My Global Family Vacation Part 2: England and Brexit

Posted on August 16, 2016 by climatechangefork

Mina Tomkiewicz gravestone London 1

Family grave in Golders Green Jewish Cemetery

I’m going to try to connect my personal history (August 2) and the pieces of my family history that I gleaned from my recent travels with the global refugee issues.

Above is my mother’s grave in London’s Golders Green Jewish cemetery. She passed away on October 1975. My mother’s body and my stepfather’s ashes are buried there, but it was my mother’s wish to make her grave a monument to fallen family members. The front of the gravestone features her name and that of her second husband, while the base (on the left) shows a list – including my father, my uncle and my grandparents on my mother’s side – of those murdered as a consequence of deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto after the ghetto uprising. My other uncle, who survived the war and passed away in Paris in 2003, was added to the list after his death.

My stepfather immigrated to England before the war and had a successful career as a cosmetic chemist at Gala/Mary Quant Cosmetics. My mother moved to England from Israel after marrying him and lived her last years there. I visit Britain often and regard it as a second home.

By chance, it happened that our visit this time came 5 days after the 52-48% Brexit vote to leave the European Union.

Figure 1 shows the geographical distribution of the vote, while Figure 2 looks at some of the main deciding factors.

Figure 1 – The geographic distribution of the Brexit vote

Figure 2 – The main issues in the Brexit vote

Unsurprisingly, the dominant issue in the vote to leave was immigration. The people of Great Britain wanted to control their borders and blamed the European Union (EU) bureaucracy for the “flood” of immigrants and the perceived insecurity that it entails.

The vote itself was an example of the dangers of “direct” democracy as opposed to representative democracy. In a representative democracy you vote for people whom you assume are qualified to govern, while in a direct democracy you vote for individual policies – even if you know very little about them.

In direct democracies you can lie with very few consequences. Obviously, you can also lie in a representative democracy but there are bigger consequences once you are caught. The main lie that helped bring about the Brexit referendum was that you can stop immigration from other EU countries without also losing market access.

Imagine that just before the American Civil War the southern states had voted for “Soxit” (Southern Exit). In a sense, South Carolina did just that. Congress wanted to send the army to squash the “rebellion.” The southern members of congress made that choice easy by leaving the chambers and not taking part in the vote. The situation started to deteriorate quickly, resulting in a bloody civil war where 620,000 lives were lost out of a population of 30 million. (To give some perspective, the present US population exceeds 300 million).

The promises of the Brexit faction were “simple” (as they almost always are with direct democracies): If we leave – we can control our borders. The money that we now pay to the EU will be redirected to the National Health Service (NHS). The subsidies that the EU is paying needed constituencies of the British economy will continue. We will be able to negotiate access to markets that will be as good as the one that we have now.

Clearly, these were convincing arguments and the British voted to get out.

Now – what happened?

Up to now, the most important post-Brexit indicator has been political chaos:

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, resigned and was replaced by Theresa May, a “stay” supporter.
The new Chancellor, Philip Hammond, is also a “stay” supporter.

The two ministers directly in charge of negotiating the exit from the EU – Boris Johnson and David Davis – are Brexit supporters, but as of yet, they have not said much of anything.

The Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was a very silent “stay” supporter and is now facing strong opposition seeking to replace him.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the British Independent Party who was at the forefront of the “leave” campaign, resigned after admitting that the options that he had presented to the voters before the vote were not exactly realistic.
Negotiating terms of the separation from the EU can only take place once the official notification of exit is delivered. That is expected to happen by the end of the year, after which the UK will have a deadline of two years to actually leave.
The possibility of a revote has been mentioned but not seriously pursued.

Up to now the economic ramifications have been minimal:

Depreciation of the Pound by around 13% (From 1.5$/£ – 1.3$/£)
Real Estate (http://bloom.bg/2b9ayvx):
- Separately, Acadata and LSL Property Services said house prices rose just 0.2 percent in July, slowing the annual growth rate to 5.5 percent from as high as 8.9 percent in February. They also reported that transaction volumes are down by 20 percent compared with the second quarter of 2015.
The stock market is at an all-time high
The UK economy contracted by 0.2% in the month after Brexit.

According to BBC, there are several realistic outcomes for a negotiated settlement with the other EU members:

The Norway model: Member of European Economic Area, full access to single market, obliged to make a financial contribution and accept majority of EU laws, free movement applies as it does in the EU

The Switzerland model: Member of the European Free Trade Association but not the EEA, access to EU market governed by series of bilateral agreements, covers some but not all areas of trade, also makes a financial contribution but smaller than Norway’s, doesn’t have a general duty to apply EU laws but does have to implement some EU regulations to enable trade, free movement applies

The Turkey model: Customs union with the EU, meaning no tariffs or quotas on industrial goods exported to EU countries, has to apply EU’s external tariff on goods imported from outside the EU.

No special agreement – follow the World Trade Organization rules.

Bloomberg adequately summed up the present sentiment of the rest of the EU:

What are the 27 other EU countries hoping to get out of Brexit talks? Bloomberg reporters put that question to governments across the continent and came away with a web of priorities and red lines that can’t be crossed.

Several countries including Germany, Portugal and the Czech Republic say the U.K. must accept freedom of movement rules in return for single-market access, writes Bloomberg’s Alan Crawford. France may be ready to go even further and link free movement to Britain’s ambition of keeping the so-called passport rights that allow banks to sell services on the continent

Just three EU members—Denmark, Austria and Bulgaria—cited a shared concern with Britain over free movement.

Other highlights from the survey include:

France and Denmark are concerned with reciprocal access for fishermen to their respective waters

Spain will press for joint sovereignty over Gibraltar

Cyprus and Greece want to avoid further damage to the pound, which could keep British tourists away

Baltic and eastern European states want reassurances about security in the face of Russian aggression

Malta wants to keep preferential access to British universities for its young people

Does the UK have an immigration issue that justified the Brexit vote?

Here are the key points as summarized by the Migration Observatory (a UK site):

Between 1993 and 2014 the foreign-born population in the UK more than doubled from 3.8 million to around 8.3 million. During the same period, the number of foreign citizens increased from nearly 2 million to more than 5 million.
(Total population over this period increased from 57.7M to 64.1M)
London has the greatest number of migrants (3.0 million foreign-born people in 2014) among all regions with comparable data in the UK.
In 2014, the UK population was 13.1% foreign-born (up from 7% in 1993) and 8.5% foreign citizens (up from 4% in 1993).
Foreign-born people constituted 39% of Inner London’s population in 2013 (the highest share among all regions with comparable data).
India is the most common country of birth among the foreign-born, but Poland tops the list of foreign citizens in the UK.

The main conclusions: London, which has experienced by far the largest influx of foreign-born, voted overwhelmingly in favor of staying. Also, interestingly, the most common birth country of foreign-born is India, which will not be affected at all by Brexit.

Here are the comparable numbers for immigration to the US:

Between 1960 and 2013 the foreign-born population in the US increased from 9.7M to 41.3M, with a total population increase from 180.7M in 1960 to 316.5M in 2013.
In 1960, most (84%) of the foreign-born in the US came from Europe and Canada. In 2013, most of the foreign-born came from Mexico (28%), Other Latin American countries (24%), or Asia (26%). Those from Europe/Canada were a mere 14%.

Figure 3 – Makeup of immigrants to the US in 1960 and 2013

The trends are not that different and, in my opinion, the main issue that drove the Brexit vote is bogus.

The Brexit vote in England is perhaps not so important on its own globally but it is symptomatic of the dangerous tendencies of white nationalists both in Europe and the US to use immigration as a red herring, refocusing governments away from global concerns and toward local fear. In the Anthropocene era, when many of the local issues are governed by global trends, this shift justifies major concern.

Posted in Election, immigration | Tagged Adaptation, Anthropocene, anti-immigrant, Asia, Baltic, Boris Johnson, BREXIT, Britain, bureaucracy, Canada, Civil War, communication, Cyprus, David Cameron, David Davis, deadline, demagogue, democracy, Denmark, direct democracy, discrimination, Donald Trump, Economics, Economy, Election, emigrant, emigration, England, EU, Europe, exit, Family, fear, foreign, foreign-born, France, geographical distribution, geography, Global Population, Great Britain, Greece, Holocaust, immigrant, immigrate, immigration, India, Israel, issue, Jeremy Corbyn, Jew, Jewish, Latin America, leave, liar, lie, lies, London, Malta, Mexico, migrant, migration, nationalism, nationalist, Nazi, Nigel Farage, Norway, Philip Hammond, Poland, Polish, political, politics, Population, Real Estate, refugee, representation, representative democracy, revote, Russia, Spain, stay, stock market, Sustainability, Switzerland, symptom, terms, Theresa May, Timeline, trade, trend, Trump, Turkey, UK, US, vote, voter, War, Warsaw, Warsaw Ghetto, World Population, world trade organization, WTO | 2 Comments

The Election: Trust, Likability & Honesty

Posted on August 9, 2016 by climatechangefork

I am finishing writing this blog on Sunday, even though I had a draft ready yesterday. As I read the New York Times today, I came across Nicholas Kristof’s Op-Ed, “Clinton’s Fibs vs. Trump’s Huge Lies.” It coincided almost exactly with my planned theme for this week.

ONE persistent narrative in American politics is that Hillary Clinton is a slippery, compulsive liar while Donald Trump is a gutsy truth-teller.

Over all, the latest CBS News poll finds the public similarly repulsed by each candidate: 34 percent of registered voters say Clinton is honest and trustworthy compared with 36 percent for Trump.

Yet the idea that they are even in the same league is preposterous. If deception were a sport, Trump would be the Olympic gold medalist; Clinton would be an honorable mention at her local Y.

Here’s the latest FiveThirtyEight poll:

Nate Silver is my favorite polling guru and his organization updates its polls on a daily basis. He and others are warning that the current polls may change drastically in a few weeks, once the convention bounces decay and polls become more stable. The Olympics in Rio started on Friday and our collective attention will be glued to the games, which provides an excellent opportunity to freeze these results for a few more weeks. Meanwhile, Donald Trump will likely do something that increases the population’s reluctance to support him as the next president of the United States.

Here is David Brooks’ summary of Trump’s recent policy statement:

Over the past few days, Trump has destroyed this middle ground. He’s exposed the wet noodle Republicans as suckers, or worse. Trump has shown that he is not a normal candidate. He is a political rampage charging ever more wildly out of control. And no, he cannot be changed.

He cannot be contained because he is psychologically off the chain. With each passing week he displays the classic symptoms of medium-grade mania in more disturbing forms: inflated self-esteem, sleeplessness, impulsivity, aggression and a compulsion to offer advice on subjects he knows nothing about.

His speech patterns are like something straight out of a psychiatric textbook. Manics display something called “flight of ideas.” It’s a formal thought disorder in which ideas tumble forth through a disordered chain of associations. One word sparks another, which sparks another, and they’re off to the races. As one trained psychiatrist said to me, compare Donald Trump’s speaking patterns to a Robin Williams monologue, but with insults instead of jokes.

I have no idea if Brooks is a registered Republican but he is certainly the most right-of-center Op-Ed writer for the NYT so his words as to the qualifications of the Republican candidate should count.

To top it all off, there have been reports about Trump’s intention to use nuclear weapons:

Earlier this week, Joe Scarborough offered a pretty striking secondhand account of Donald Trump’s foreign policy acumen — or rather, his lack thereof.

“I’ll be very careful here,” the MSNBC host said, before passing along some hearsay. “Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on an international level went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times, [Trump] asked — at one point, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?'”

This is really scary.

Yet, in spite these prospects, a recent letter to the New York Times immediately following the conventions presented the following perspective:

As a Sanders supporter, I will not be voting for Hillary. At this point, I’m left deciding between Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, who, like Bernie, were both actually against the Iraq war before it started.

Or, perhaps, just staying home. I am not alone. The two major candidates are the least popular in history, and the biggest reason their supporters give for voting for them is that they aren’t the other one.

I’m resigned to having a terrible president starting next January, but there’s no way I’ll be responsible for electing him or her.

The American Presidential elections are, by and large, a binary process. The last third party presidential candidate to win a national election was Abraham Lincoln in 1864. He ran against John Frémont (Republican) and George McClellan (Democrat). It’s a much more frequent phenomenon for third party candidates to attract a little more than 5% of the votes, thus becoming a major factor in a main party candidate’s winning or losing an election.

In terms of outcome, there is not much difference between voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein – or even joining the 100 million eligible voters (March 22, 2016) that abstain. In my book, if you are eligible to vote and decide not to vote, you give up your right to complain.

All of this brings me to my main reason for writing this blog. Why, in spite of all the evidence, do so many people – including the letter writer – rank their dissatisfaction with both candidates on the same level?

I have enumerated the reasons for not wanting Donald Trump to be president of the United States. What about Hillary Clinton?

By almost everybody’s admission, we have never had a presidential candidate with better qualifications. Of course, she is the first woman to be nominated by one of the two major parties, and it is possible that, as a nation, we are not yet ready for a woman president, regardless of her credentials. When directly polling for that, however, almost everybody denies that her gender is the dominating reason for disliking her candidacy. As Kristof mentioned, the vast majority cite her likability, honesty, and trustworthiness as the main reasons. Here is what the Washington Post writes about it:

Two sets of numbers from a Post-ABC News national poll in March starkly reveal the yawning gap between people who like/relate to Clinton and those who think she has the experience to do the job. Asked whether Clinton understands the “problems of people like you,” 49 percent said she does while 50 percent said she does not. But, when asked whether she has the “right experience” to be president, two thirds said she does while just 33 percent said she does not.

Now, compare those numbers to what I believe was the single most important question in the 2012 exit poll. Of the one in five voters who said a candidate who “cares about people like you” was the most important trait in deciding their vote, Obama beat Mitt Romney 81 percent to 18 percent. The election was, literally, won the backs of people who felt that Obama “got” them in a way Romney did not. If Clinton has a likability problem, Trump has a likability epidemic.

That same March Post-ABC poll showed just 30 percent of respondents felt favorably toward Trump while 67 percent had an unfavorable view — including a stunning 56 percent who felt “strongly” unfavorably toward the real estate mogul. (Clinton’s numbers were 46 favorable/52 unfavorable.) Just one in four (27 percent) said that Trump was honest and trustworthy. Twenty six percent said Trump understood the problems of people like them; 26 percent also said he had the right experience to be president.

We can try to quantify this concept by summarizing a recent NBC/WSJ poll of “feelings” toward the candidates:

After normalizing for the distribution of the polling to mimic the distribution of registered voters, the pollsters posed the following “simple” question:

Now I’m going to read you the names of several public figures, groups and organizations, and I’d like you to rate your feelings toward each one as very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, or very negative. If you don’t know the name, please just say so. (RANDOMIZE EXCEPT BARACK OBAMA)

The table below shows the relevant answers.

	Very Positive	Somewhat positive	Neutral	Somewhat Negative	Very Negative
Obama	36	14	10	12	28
Clinton	17	20	10	11	42
Trump	13	15	11	11	50

My own question is this: both Clinton and Trump scored low numbers in the positive/very positive categories, but the query was incredibly broad; what are the metrics here – to whom are they being compared? Given that Clinton and Trump are the two major party candidates, logic would dictate that the follow-up question ought to ask people to compare them against each other. As it stands, the way that the question is being asked doesn’t require any such assessment. Instead, we can only infer that each responder is comparing them to his or her ideal candidate. That is not a particularly helpful metric.

Going forward, I’ll be alternating between a continued discussion of my vacation and a looking at polling practices – including their use (or exclusion) of reference points and the potential ways in which the candidates can play the pollsters.

Posted in Election | Tagged assessment, Bernie, Bernie Sanders, candidacy, candidate, Candidates, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Change Deniers, Climate Skeptics, Clinton, credential, Democrat, disorder, Donald Trump, ego, Election, eligible, Environment, experience, favorable, FiveThirtyEight, foreign policy, Fremont, Gary Johnson, Gender, Global Warming, Hillary Clinton, honesty, Iraq, Jill Stein, lie, likeable, Lincoln, manic, McClellan, metric, metrics, Mitt Romney, Nate Silver, negative, neutral, Nuclear, nuclear weapons, Obama, Olympics, party, Policy, political, political party, politics, poll, polls, positive, president, President Obama, presidential campaign, presidential election, psychology, qualification, quantify, quantity, relatability, Republican, Robin Williams, Science, Sustainability, Technology, third party, Trump, trust, truth, unfavorable, US, vote, voter, War, World Population | Leave a comment

My Global Family Vacation

Posted on August 2, 2016 by climatechangefork

Map of my global family vacation

I have returned from my month-long vacation with my wife. One of the perks of being an academic is that my summers are my own. I show the route of my trip above. Clearly, this vacation was not planned to be relaxing; I had a great time but the many flights made it somewhat vexing. Unlike some of my travels, the purpose of this vacation was not to visit new places. In fact, with the exception of Malta, we have visited each of the areas multiple times before. We were pleasantly surprised by Malta’s quality as a small island state tourist destination and will definitely include it in future itineraries.

My main goal here was to meet up with (mostly elderly members of) family. Given our age group with regards to life expectancy, future opportunities to visit with each other may be limited. We also wanted to exchange and record stories that had never been shared.

Like me, almost all of the older family members were immigrants. Of course, some of their offspring were native born to their chosen homes. These meeting fit easily within my latest series of blogs about immigration. As you might imagine, almost all such stories within my family have their origin – whether directly or indirectly – in the Holocaust. Surviving relatives ended up in Australia, Israel, France, and England. Poland, where most of the elderly family members were born and experienced the atrocities of the Nazis, still plays an important part in many of the stories.

I found a lot of generational dynamics that mirrored my own experiences: the younger generations are too busy living their own lives and do not seem interested in the experiences of their elders. It’s only once those kids get older that they become more interested in such themes (this was the case for me personally), by which time, they are sometimes too late – those important links have already been lost.

In my case, I was fortunate that my mother put our experiences in the form of two books (July 5, 2016) and I was able to read them when I was ready. My interests awakened nearly 15 years after the books were published. Not everyone can write and publish books. Fortunately, technology now facilitates publishing opportunities that didn’t exist for my mother.

A few friends and I have developed a new application called Tapestry. Tapestry is a platform for capturing the human experience and promoting self-expression. It allows people to capture their lives’ adventures. It is not only a way to create a type of family heritage but also a chance to connect with people with whom you shared moments. You can find the platform on www.tapestry.life. I will share the stories that I heard during my vacation there and invite the younger generations to use the app for their own communication needs. In the process, I hope they are exposed to the stories of older generations.

The global immigration picture is the sum of individual, intertwined stories. We arrived in England just a few days after the somewhat surprising Brexit vote, during which the United Kingdom decided to exit the European Union. The strongest driving force behind this outcome was a desire stop the flow of immigrants into the UK. The pro-Brexit side made the questionable promise that such an exit would not hamper the UK’s free market access to the EU but would effortlessly stop free travel from the EU into the UK and also by some magic stop the global flood of refugees. After the vote, while it was made absolutely clear that this premise was a lie, it was also decided that the lie itself was not grounds to overturn the result. The ability to use lies and demagoguery to sway votes in direct democracies (as distinguished from representative democracies) is obviously not limited to the UK. One finds the same appeal in the US elections and in other European countries (See the series of blogs on Democracy vs. Oligarchy starting March 15, 2016).

From England we traveled to Israel. The refugee problem is at the center of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the issue of refugee resettlement vs. their use as a figurative political football. Poland is now part of the European Union and thus party to the EU’s refugee problems but it doesn’t have a unique issue with global ramifications. Malta is also member of the EU. On the other hand, a brief look at the map above shows that Malta is one of the closest gateways between North Africa and Europe. Many of the refugees that are now trying to reach Europe are desperate to escape unstable states in Africa, making Malta a key player in discussion of refugees and immigrants. Finally, in describing the situation in France, I will emphasize the perception that the influx of refugees without proper security screening is a major concern as a contributing cause of internal terrorist activities.

My next series of blogs will focus on separate geographical locations while attempting to combine local refugee issues with global ramifications as well as some aspects of the personal migrant issues specific to my family.

However, we also have an important election going on in the US with major immigration-related components, so future blogs will oscillate between the US election campaigns and the global immigration issues reflected in my vacation.

Posted in immigration | Tagged age, app, application, Australia, BREXIT, communication, demagogue, democracy, Election, emigrant, emigration, England, EU, Europe, Family, flee, France, free market, generation, Global Population, heritage, History, Holocaust, immigrant, immigration, Israel, lie, lies, Malta, migrant, migration, Nazi, North Africa, oligarchy, Palestine, Palestinian, Poland, Population, presidential campaign, presidential election, ramification, refugee, screening, security, Story, tapestry, terror, Terrorism, terrorist, trade, UK, UN, US, World Population | 2 Comments

Immigration: Quantifying Migration

Posted on July 26, 2016 by climatechangefork

The Scope of Present Global Refugee Issues:

Global migration (June 21, 2016) arises from people’s quest to survive and attain better opportunities. More specifically, people leave their homes:

Due to war/civil war
As a result of broken states
In search of better economic opportunities
To escape being a discriminated minority in terms of religion, affiliation, race, etc.
As climate refugees

The people who are primarily looking for better economic opportunities are generally not labeled refugees; they know where they are going and leave for a specific purpose. Refugees are classified as those who are forcibly being displaced and are escaping from acute danger to their or their families’ existence. Figure 1 shows how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) characterizes the tallied 65 million people that are presently classified as forcibly displaced.

Figure 1 – UNHCR global trends – 2015 for forcibly displaced migrants.

Figures 2 and 3 were taken from a recent special report The Economist published on the global refugee crisis. The figures describe the present global distribution of registered refugees and the recent history of major population movements. The data for these figures also originated from UNHCR reports.

Figure 2 – The global distribution of registered refugees

Figure 3 – The recent history of the largest population movements

Migration and Demographics:

Every organization with a role in governance – from local and national governments to international organizations such as the UN – needs reliable estimates of the future demographics of the domain under its control. The first term in the IPAT identity (see June 28 blog) is the expected global population. Population in any territory is derived from the sum of births and deaths and the net balance between immigration and emigration. Estimates of birth rates based on fertility and death rates are usually extrapolated from the most recent statistics. Estimates of immigration and emigration are highly inexact and irregular but they are necessary for nearly every political, economic or social economic discussion. Statisticians from the University of Washington recently published their attempts at statistical assessment of global migration by country/region in one of the most prestigious and selective scientific journals: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Figures 4 and 5 summarize the group’s main conclusions. The shaded areas indicate the enormous uncertainty of any prediction regarding migration.

Figure 4 – Comparison of deterministic projection estimates and the net migration for a few key countries

Figure 5 – Comparison of deterministic projection estimates and the net migration for global regions

Climate Refugees:

Up to now, we have focused on recent past and present factors of global migration. Climate refugees are a relatively new phenomenon, but almost every estimate says they will play an increasing role in influencing our collective action to mitigate the impact of anthropogenic climate change. I will close this blog with a few key paragraphs from a recent New York Times article describing some activities that are already taking place on this front:

In January, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced grants totaling $1 billion in 13 states to help communities adapt to climate change, by building stronger levees, dams and drainage systems.

One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees.

… Around the globe, governments are confronting the reality that as human-caused climate change warms the planet, rising sea levels, stronger storms, increased flooding, harsher droughts and dwindling freshwater supplies could drive the world’s most vulnerable people from their homes. Between 50 million and 200 million people — mainly subsistence farmers and fishermen — could be displaced by 2050 because of climate change, according to estimates by the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security and the International Organization for Migration.

Posted in Anthropogenic, Climate Change, immigration, Sustainability | Tagged Adaptation, affiliation, Afghanistan, Africa, Anthropogenic, Bangladesh, Civil War, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Change Deniers, climate refugee, Climate Skeptics, CO2 emissions, Congo, danger, death, Democratization, demographic, Demographics, discrimination, displacement, DNNer, DRC, Economics, Economy, emigrant, emigrate, emigration, Emissions, Energy, Environment, estimate, Europe, Fertility, figure, forced displacement, forcibly displaced, Fossil Fuels, Germany, Global Population, Global Warming, graph, greenhouse gas, HUD, immigrant, immigration, India, IPAT, IPCC, Iraq, migrant, migration, minority, Mitigation, Physics, Population, Prediction, projection, quantify, quantitative, quantity, Race, refugee crisis, religion, Saudi Arabia, Science, Sustainability, Syria, Technology, trend, UN, UNHCR, US, War, World Population | Leave a comment

Vacation Notice

Posted on July 19, 2016 by climatechangefork

This week I am taking a break from the blog, so there will be no post. Please do come back next Tuesday, when I promise to continue our discussions.

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged Vacation | Leave a comment

ClimateChangeFork

My Global Family Vacation Part 4: Malta

Globalization at the Top: Sport and Science

We are having technical difficulties

Global Family Vacation Part 3: Israel: Palestinian and Jewish Refugees, Resettlement, and the Right of Return

Israeli views [edit]

Arab states [edit]

Palestinian views [edit]

How to Influence Polls and Win Elections

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
~Plato

My Global Family Vacation Part 2: England and Brexit

The Election: Trust, Likability & Honesty

My Global Family Vacation

Immigration: Quantifying Migration

The Scope of Present Global Refugee Issues:

Migration and Demographics:

Climate Refugees:

Vacation Notice

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Israeli views [edit]

Arab states [edit]

Palestinian views [edit]

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber. ~Plato

The Scope of Present Global Refugee Issues:

Migration and Demographics:

Climate Refugees:

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

About Micha

CCF around the Web

My Favorite Climate Change Sites

Publications

Social Media

Meta

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
~Plato