MIGRATION AND THE FAR RIGHT – YouTube
A WIN Zoom Discussion June 2023. Huge numbers of migrants are being driven from their homes by wars, civil wars, state repression, climate emergency and other manifestations of capitalist decay. This year alone, over a quarter of a million desperate migrants have sought refuge in Europe, including 26,800 who reached Italy by sea in its first three months – a fourfold increase over the whole of 2022. This is in spite of the obstacles put in their way by ever more stringent legal barriers, and of the fact that in the last ten years at least 20,000 men, women and children have drowned making their perilous journey across the Mediterranean – not counting those that died crossing the Aegean or by other routes.
Our speaker this week is a veteran of the worker and student protest movements of 2010-11 in London who has lived in Palermo in Sicily since 2015. There he has been active in the migrant solidarity movement, working with Italy’s largest secular civil society ARCI. He is also the translator of several Italian books, including those from left-wing political traditions.
Richard Braude spoke about how the arrival of African and Asian workers in Europe has affected Italian politics, and how explicitly racist far-right parties have exploited the opportunity to gain control of the state and impose a raft of economic and criminal laws that effectively amount to a system of apartheid.
Photo – “Illegal maritime migration is dangerous and deadly” by Coast Guard News is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/2.0/jp/?ref=openverse.