Third
Critical Studies Conference
"Empire , States and
Migration"
Name
of the Session VII:
Migration and Issues of Justice
Every year on the 19th of February, some
Americans get together to celebrate the Day of Remembrance. “Is it like any
other calendar day earmarked for some social event?” one might ask. Not really.
The incident that triggers this occurred on the 19th of February 1942
when President Roosevelt issued the infamous Executive Order 9066 enabling the
U.S. Army to forcibly remove any and all persons of Japanese ancestry from areas
of strategic importance on the West Coast of the United States and send them to
the numerous internment camps. Truly speaking, the Japanese internment
experience during World War II is a subject that has not received adequate
attention in India, although a significant amount of work has been done on it in
the U.S. and Canada.
My proposed paper will contextualize and briefly reiterate some well-known
historical facts behind this incident and its aftermath. On December 7, 1941,
the country of Japan bombed the United States military base at Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii. As a result the United States entered World War II against Japan,
Germany and Italy. Though the people of Italian and German ancestry were allowed
to remain, those of Japanese ancestry were required to leave their homes in
California and parts of Washington, Oregon, and Arizona. Thus from 1942 to 1945
began an epochal American tragedy when the United States incarcerated behind
barbed-wire fences almost an entire ethnic group living within its continental
borders. Without formal charges, trials, findings made, or sentences passed
nearly 1,20,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, including children and the
elderly, were held in crude prison camps situated in the dusty and desolate
areas of the United States. For decades after the war, official information and
documents about the Japanese internment camps were difficult to obtain. Many
U.S. agencies involved with the operation of such camps placed security
classification on their files, thereby hampering access to information. Only
recently has it become possible to examine some of these materials. Also, former
internees were reluctant to speak about their experiences. Only now, with the
passage of time, has some of this reluctance waned. Perhaps with the passage of
time, like many refugees of the partition of India, they have been able to
overcome the shock, the grief, the psychological trauma of incarceration.
Referring to historical documents, fiction, non-fiction and film documentaries,
my paper therefore proposes to reexamine this major incident of human rights
violation. The Japanese American Internment saga is an American story; the
majority of those imprisoned were American citizens, the decision to imprison
them were made by other Americans, the imprisonment sites were located within
the United States, and the U.S. government transferred persons of Japanese
ancestry from other countries and confined them in the Americas. This larger
context is vital to recall because the imprisonment experience is part of the
warp and weft of U.S. race relations history. Seeing things in the light of the
American ideals of freedom, democracy and human dignity and thereby provide a
new perspective on it becomes even more necessary after 9/11, where issues of
minority rights remain unresolved and a nation goes overboard again.
Bionote
Somdatta Mandal is Associate Professor and current Chairperson, Department of English and Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. A recipient of several prestigious fellowships like the Fulbright, Charles Wallace, Rockefeller Residency and Salzburg Seminar, she has been published widely both nationally and internationally. Her areas of interest are contemporary fiction, film and culture studies, Diaspora studies and translation. She has also received a Sahitya Akademi award for translating short fiction. She is at present translating a series of women’s travelogues from Bengal. She can be contacted at somdattam@gmail.com
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Migrant smuggling and human trafficking are separate phenomena, which in turn are only components of the wider concept ‘irregular’ migration. People trafficked or smuggled across borders probably comprise a relatively small proportion of irregular migrants worldwide, but they deserve separate attention in the discussion on irregular migration for a number of reasons. First, both processes, but in particular human trafficking, expose migrants to special vulnerabilities, even compared to other forms of irregular migration. As a result, secondly, there is almost universal consensus that both processes should be stemmed. Consequently, thirdly, considerable progress has been made in developing a normative framework, addressing the issues in regional consultative processes, and implementing national laws and policies. It may not be possible absolutely to eradicate migrant smuggling and human trafficking, but there appears to be genuine political will to reduce them to a minimum. The proposed paper will recommend four steps to further strengthen policy responses to migrant smuggling and human trafficking. The first is to reinforce the normative framework applying to these processes. The second is to enhance political will on the part of all stakeholders to develop and implement national laws and policies, especially in response to migrant smuggling. The third is to build capacity to respond, including international cooperation. The final step is to develop responsiveness to new challenges as they arise, for example as migrant smuggling operations evolve into transnational businesses.
Bionote
I am a Fourth year student of law at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow and am associated with Youth Initiative Network (YIN) as Youth Coordinator. I have worked extensively on Migration and Trafficking issues and was part of the Civil Society Days of 2nd Global Forum on Migration & Development held at Manila, Philippines where I presented my paper titled “Trafficking in women and children – An insight in to the world of sex slavery”. Presently, I am working on the “legal and Policy aspects of Trafficking in South Asia” and preparing a case study on the “plight of migrant labourers working in Leather Tanneries of Kanpur”.
Critical Climatic, Forced Migration and Social Justice - Arun G. Mukhopadhyay [ Full Paper]
AbstractUnited Nations Secretary General, declaring 2009 as the year of Climate Change, has called for ‘responsibility to protect’ in the realm of human rights and ‘responsibility to deliver’ in larger sphere of common international action.Anthropogenic climate change leads to biophysical transformation on the global scale engendering localised stresses in the forms of coastal erosion, ice melt, infertile land and deteriorating water sources.These stresses threaten critical minimum basic needs of vulnerable socities without the capabilities of adaption and resilence. Neither the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, nor its Kyoto Protocol has any provision of protection or rehabilitation to numerous affected poor people of less developed world.Refugee Convention does not confer refugee status for environmental persecution. Northern knowledge-power had set the norms to reinforce dominance over the international system that can not reflect on the environment in a broader political and cultural context of a region or a country. The twentieth century has spanned through two world wars, post-war recovery-boom-burst and emergence of neo-liberal globalisation .The treadmill of production is founded on classical Say’s law of capitalist circulation -supply creates its own demand and drives the expansion of production and consumption synergistically. The industrialised North has emitted massive greenhouse gases, with increasing energy- and chemical-intensive production since the ‘outbreak’ of cold war, and has polluted the environment to a catastrophic extent that is largely irreversible.The zero-sum game has its obvious toll on wretched teeming millions of ‘other’ world as the ‘development of underdevelopment’ diversifies with deadlier dimensions. The victimised populations become uprooted from their habitats and forced to migrate, even to foreign countries to join the researve army of lobour there and get entrapped in new conflicts and crises. The citizens of a bordered territory are entitled to fundamental rights which their fellow human beings, the irregular migrants, can never be provided. As with capabilities approach by Sen and Nussbaum, if outcome of climate degradation potentially undermine fundamental rights and human security, enshrined as global norms, policy as well as national policies of the industrialised countries, the concerns about justice should be the prime mover of global climate governance. The emancipatory ideas about rights, justice and responsibility should transcend the ‘bordered’ confines with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This insight has definite resemblance with Derridan concepts of ‘new international’ and ‘democracy to come’. Ultimately, a successful adaptation process has to reflect on how the command of natural resources and environmental goods has forged the plunder of climate and human habitats by the interplay of a host of historical, ecological, social and economic factors. An internationally agreed measure of ecological debt would clarify “over-polluting” countries’ contribution towards climate change-enforced human vulnerabilities.Beyond the refugee definition contained in the Refugee Convention, the pertaining issue is to be addressed by a new legal instrument -a Protocol on Recognition, Protection, and Resettlement of Climate Refugees to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Bionote
I had been an academic at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.Initially, I had been engaged in institutional research/consultancy projects.Subsequently, my reseach interest had shifted towards critical studies, political ecology, biopower, public health, etc. About 15 papers have been acceped by international Conferences in Europe and North America since 2006, apart from published papers. Presently an independent researcher, my on-going studies are on (1) Critical Climatics and Human Vulnerabilities and (2) Climate Engineering and Outer Space Security.