The movement of the people

Last week I received the call for which I’d been waiting a year. If I were more dramatic, I’d write that I’d been waiting for the call my entire life.

Life with a passport from a country like India is interesting. A couple of friends told me that getting a visa to India, unless you’re going with a hoity-toity tourist group, is quite hard. Getting visas to other countries if you have an Indian passport is even harder.

Getting to Canada even for the arguably noble endeavor of undergraduate studies required a tonne of forms about where I’d been and what I’d been doing over the past 19 years. Having been on the move across countries and continents since I was three months old, I was fairly used to this rigmarole.

You can imagine then the jubilation with which I greeted this call in which my lawyers told me that I was finally getting my landed immigration papers to Canada. I’ve spent five years learning/working in Canada, and 19 years living as a stranger in my city of birth – Dubai, UAE. All the time, I’ve had a visa for this and a visa for that. A visa for travel and a visa to work. A visa to leave so I could cancel my visa and get a different visa to re-enter the country to apply for yet another visa.

My paternal family were wandering nomads, so I didn’t too much expect this semi-hereditary lifestyle of mine to change anytime soon. I’d gotten used to standing in lines to get from A to B. Passport, visas, stamps aplenty.

To be truthful, the paperwork alone that I will avoid from here on makes it worthwhile to have that little bit stamp in my passport. Not to mention having some kind of country to belong to that I’ve actually lived in (I’ve spent less than a year altogether in India), and that accepts me (being born in the UAE did not earn me the right to citizenship).

The second thing that went across my mind, after the flood of thoughts that I’ve listed above, is the similarity between my own situation and that of millions of others around the world. Around six million souls in Canada as of 2006 are foreign-born. That is a substantial number of Canada’s 33 million total population.

Walk into Vancouver, and you will see thousands and thousands of those that migrated here from around the world, and hear their stories about why. People come here to avoid war, resettlement, redistribution and even jealous in-laws. They are also here for work, a better quality of life, and what I’ve been told is the oldest reason of all – love.

After writing for a year or so for the Guerrilla News Network about world politics, I decided to switch topics to one I’m far more familiar with. It’s a topic that has millions of stories associated with it, some of which will never escape the lips of those who have been silenced from ever telling. It’s a topic very close to my heart: one that is as local as can be to my current city of residence (Vancouver, where 100,000 people every year try to get through the red-taped door), quintessential to my hometown (Dubai, where a million migrant workers live like slaves to build modern-day architectural marvels), and also undeniably global.

According to predictions, as far as predictors can be believed, the world’s population could hit a staggering nine billion by 2050 given current rates of growth and consumption. With this global booming population, we are seeing greater numbers of people moving, migrating and wandering. For a myriad of reasons, people are crossing borders (sometimes multiple borders at a time) en masse. This feature is not surprising, since we’ve been emigrating since around Australopithecus.

Of course, immigration policies are not the same now as they were back then. The FBI terrorist watch-list recently hit one million entries. That’s one million people who are seen by the US as potential threats (looking at the way the FBI does business, most of these entries may very well be trouble-making ideologues more than terrorists). The US is also being tricky with Guantanamo detainee files. The files in question, known as “returns” contain charges made against detainees that are kept at the infamous prison. The US government is doing its very best to keep the document classified i.e. not released to detainees’ lawyers.

Guantanamo was very recently added to the repertoire of spooky stories that Arab parents tell their children. “Talk with that dirty mouth of yours as you go into the US, and they’ll put you in Guantanamo.” You didn’t have to give them a reason to be put there. Walk through customs with a goatee and a name like Abdul – that’s all it would take. How close to the truth this is, I don’t know. What I do know is that until very recently when I met someone who introduced me to the wondrous hippie city that is Portland, I never wanted to chance it and go across the border to the States. It just was not worth it.

It’s also worth mentioning that the US is still reticent to accept refugees from its troubled colony in the Arabian Gulf – Iraq. The lucky few who do manage to get into the US thank their stars that in 2007 the nation finally obliged a meager number of the five million displaced people fleeing Iraq.

Further away from the metropolis of Washington, the hinterland that is Pakistan looks ready to boil over once again. Throwing former President-by-coup Pervez Musharraf off the throne did not heal the country as needed. Instead, the hasty alliance between the two main parties (forged to fight Musharraf) is now in tatters. Musharraf’s successor Asif Ali Zardari is being called the most corrupt man in the country. A group of lawyers last week tried to protest Zardari’s slower-than-haleem pace at reinstating Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry (who was unseated by Musharraf). With Pakistan’s main opposition party getting on-board with the protest, the government looked for a quick way out, and finally decided to try and block the protesters. The ensuing clashes between protesters and police bolstered the opposition, led by former just-as-corrupt-as-anyone-else PM Nawaz Sharif, to call the government an elected dictatorship. Zardari and co. finally relented and agreed to reinstate Chaudhry, but not before accusing Sharif and his nepotistic party of inciting race-based tensions in the eastern Punjab province. Punjab may be the least of the Pakistan’s troubled provinces; hard-line Islamic parties rule the roost in the tribal north-west provinces, almost ignoring the authority of the central government and its army. The recent attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team showed in Tet Offensive fashion that militants could strike far closer to home than just at the border provinces.

These items are merely tips of the iceberg. Israel continues it degrading practices (a step up from its genocidal practices a month ago) in the Palestinian Territories, tearing down olive trees – aged symbols of the Palestinian struggle – to make way for more settlers. Sudan’s President Al Bashir, after having been charged for genocide by the International Criminal Court, is threatening to evict all aid groups in the country in favor of local groups that will not tattle on his genocidal actions against the people of Darfur. Chinese gangsters have taken to kidnapping Vietnamese women to be sold as brides in their country that is starting to pay the price for decades of infanticide-driven sex selection.

This semi-consistent column that I’ve dubbed the Passport Report will cover these and other topics at length. It’s a report about migration in all its forms; its causes and its effects. To describe it aptly, this report is about the movement of the people.

I’d like to end this first report with a song by Arab hip-hop artist Shadia Mansour, with an outro by post-colonial theorist Edward Said. It’s about Palestine.

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