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Today, my baby girl is a migrant.

She is headed four thousand miles away, and she will be gone a year. We've been preparing for this trip for almost as long, since she first decided she wanted to be a Rotary exchange student. Her decision left me proud and excited for her, and not until my last few days with her did I begin to feel the dread of seeing her leave, knowing I wouldn't see her again for a long time. But my sadness at her leaving is tempered somewhat by the certainty, barring any tragedies, that I will see her again, and by the finite amount of time that she will be away.

My ache at being separated from my daughter is eased by something else, too: by the knowledge that what I am experiencing pales in comparison to what thousands of mothers are going through as their children set off on more perilous, less certain, journeys.

David Bacon has an excellent piece on the right to stay home over at New America Media. (sombrero tip to Alternet)

My mother sent me this video and I had to post it.  This is 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki speaking before the UN's 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.



You know something is wrong when a child makes more sense than the leaders of the world.

I don't think U.S. citizens realize how closely the rest of the world is following the U.S. election.  I've spoken to U.S. volunteers in Guatemala and everywhere they go Guatemalans want to ask them them what their feelings are on the candidates.  According to the Christian Science Monitor, it looks as if McCain was met with "skepticism" on his trip to Mexico and Colombia.  One student in Mexico had this to say:

Some Mexicans say they favor McCain, but a zeal for Obama, as a minority, is an undertone across Latin America. "Obama will change everything if he is elected... there will be true immigration reform and not a band-aid because he has African heritage and understands the plight of immigrants," says Marco Polo Herrera, a student in Mexico City. "McCain will be more of the same."

Christian Science Monitor - Sara Miller Llana (3 July 2008)

I am still doubtful over whether or not Obama is the best candidate for those concerned with the migrant plight, but it's interesting to know that there are those in Mexico who feel that way.
  

There's not a person who is passionate about migrant rights that does not believe they have the answer about where the debate should go.  Workers' rights activists believe the answer lies in unions and in targeting exploitative employers.  Others believe the solution is in targeting the racism of the anti-migrant side.  Others believe the solution is in human rights, and the list goes on and on. 

I myself have always believe that the only solution to this problem is to give opportunities to migrants in the countries that they are coming from.  I believe the only solution is to move towards a world where people migrate out of want, and not out of need. 

I'll be posting over the next few days from Vancouver, where I am attending the annual American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) conference.  In Canada, even the buses are polite.  When unavailable, they carry the message "Sorry, Not in Service."  

In the meantime, I have my third and final (for now) guest post up at the DMI Blog.  This one talks about how sealing the border keeps migrants in who might otherwise return home the way migrants always have. 

I always go through a lot of global news on migrants that I'm afraid readers here aren't interested, and I feel like I always end up going with the U.S. migrant story to post on.  Still, I thought I'd give putting together sparse updates a try and readers can weigh in, either in the comments, or the contact us page, about whether or not they like it:

BBC: New EU Plan for Immigrants

BBC: Global Refugee Total Rises Again

CS Monitor: Iraqi Interpreters: Hope Rises to go to U.S.

CS Monitor: South Africa's President Calls Attack on Immigrants Shameful

Last night I went to see two heroes of the progressive blogosphere, Josh Marshall and Matt Yglesias, promoting Yglesias’s new foreign policy book, Heads in the Sand at the Strand bookstore in New York City.

The book is a critique of the gutless, ineffective reaction of the Democratic Party to executive branch overreach, unprovoked war, and demonization of the “other,” all policies the GOP has used effectively to consolidate political power since 9/11. 

Well, “had used effectively” may be more accurate in 2008.  Yglesias, with some satisfaction, predicted last night that the GOP would be “wiped out” in Congressional elections this fall due to their failure to distance themselves from the Bush fiasco in Iraq after the 2006 elections when they had the chance. 

I’ve only just now started the book, but I’ve already learned that the movie Groundhog Day has much in common with the writing of Nietzsche (I see that I’m not the first to make this connection, though it seemed novel to me on the train ride home).  The book looks promising, and Yglesias continues to cogently argue for a return to sanity in U.S. foreign policy, something that can only be achieved if Democrats support a coherent alternative to the failed policies of the last eight years. 

The core of Yglesias’s argument is that the U.S. had a good thing going back in the ‘90s supporting the liberal international institutions that Roosevelt and Truman had built and that the U.S. had supported throughout the Cold War.  Then Bush and the neoconservative opportunists he enabled saw an opening after 9/11 to push forward their vision of a hyperpowerful U.S. that was strong enough to cast aside the shackles of multilateralism.  That promptly led to disaster, but the center-left foreign policy establishment has been too deeply invested in the flawed assumptions Bush was working from to engage in any effective pushback.

But would bringing back the ‘90s really be a return to sanity?  

[Image: AP/Wide World Photos - Donald Rumsfeld and Islam Karimov]

Sabrina Tavernise wrote yesterday in the NY Times about how the U.S. is starting to remember that Uzbekistan is resource-rich and strategically located while starting to forget that its government slaughtered hundreds of its own citizens three years ago at Andijan. 

Western governments say further ostracizing Uzbekistan by extending sanctions — America’s come up for consideration in June — will cause it to close back up, increasing instability in a region of vital energy transportation routes and strategic proximity to the war in Afghanistan.

A newly softened tone has already paid political dividends. After Andijon and a volley of criticism from Washington, Uzbekistan ejected the United States from a military base that was supplying the war effort in Afghanistan. Though there are not yet plans for the base to reopen, the Uzbeks have allowed the Americans limited access to a German base at Termez, and Uzbekistan recently offered NATO the use of its railway to ship goods to Afghanistan.

That highlights the difficult questions that relations with Uzbekistan raise for American foreign policy: How much influence should the United States try to exercise — if any at all — over another country’s behavior? And will that country be receptive, given the abuse, indefinite detentions and closed tribunals that have been part of the United States’ record in recent years?

I posted last week about an Italian man who was locked up by Customs and Border Patrol for 10 days without cause and then sent back to Italy. (We had one commenter with what appeared to be inside knowledge of CBP procedures come to defend CBP’s actions and cast aspersions on the NY Times reporter who broke the story, the detained man, and his girlfriend’s father.)  This story was just one more bit of evidence of our deeply warped immigration policy.  The problematic Postville raid and the disclosure of scores of deaths in immigration detention over the past few years are two more.

But for anyone who thought that nativism and government overreach were strictly American phenomena, the last week has shown otherwise.