Migration and Immigration Forum Begins
“We are freezing, but we are very excited to be here” was the reaction of the first group of American, African and European TFMI participants descending from the airport shuttle bus and pulling their suitcases across the gravel to Castle Hotel Pommersfelden. The organizing team who rushed to great them handed over the conference material, the TFMI T-Shirt and - hot tea.
After 18 months of preparation, TFMI was finally becoming real.
55 emerging leaders representing more than 20 countries have arrived to participate in the first annual Transatlantic Forum on Migration and Integration (TFMI). They are a diverse group: from the business sector, governments, media, academia, and the nonprofit sectors. They come from both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific. They have diverse views on the challenges and opportunities presented by ongoing migration flows. And they venture to start something totally unique in the next four days: a transatlantic learning community of young leaders who work on migration and integration issues around the globe.
TFMI hopes not to be a normal conference. With its variety of contents and formats, it aims to challenge perspectives and views. The range of issues to be discussed will be broad: starting with a general introduction by Dr. Joseph Chamie on the first night, participants have the opportunity to engage in focused workshops on Thursday: on local integration policies, migration control, migration and the media, migration and development, national identity and asylum and refugees.
We hope that TFMI 2008 in Pommersfelden is going to be the beginning of a long-lasting global network on migration and integration issues.
I want to invite all participants to comment on this post on anything you would like to say about TFMI.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
The Transatlantic Forum on Migration and Integration turns out to be as great an opportunity as it promised to be to get to hear both different and similar stories on migration and integration form around the globe.
Somehow every perspective is so unique and still it holds universal patterns. The story of the immigrants and especially their kids is, that everyone wants to feel like they belong somewhere. But by leaving their home they loose the connection to where they came from and still get not accepted where they go to, where they work, live and give birth to a new generation.
In a world that accepts the idea of being global the concept of territory, culture and community is no longer valid. People find new alliances. The homecountries of their ancestors might mean nothing to them and the community that they are belived and said over and over again to belong to, might be a horror to them.
Even though Germany has improved over the last years and we can see from the presentations of politicians and people that are working in the field of integration, things are developping. However, it is shocking repeatedly how the discrimination of immigrants and there descendants is not an issue at all In Germany. This is different in the US, where ethnic minorities have found many ways of adress these prolems and this is only one of the important issues that come up in many disscussions during the workshops and informal meetings in the forum.
And though the degree of phenomena, the measures against integration problems and number of immigrants might be different in every represented country, we are finding the same issues to be important everywhere: language skills, sense of belonging, media debates and campaigns against migration, fear of the others, lack of education and paticipation, controlling immigration and emigration, evaluating the success or failure of policies etc.
Hoping to continue…
July 11th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I am absolutely delighted to hear about the proposed visit of Barack Obama to Europe. Of most interest to me is Germany where I am currently attending the first Transatlantic Forum on Migration and Integration which is being held in Nuremberg. Since Wednesday that I arrived here I have come to a conclusion that Germans terribly failed to integrate immigrants that came to their country in the last Century. Last night (Thursday) we were addressed by Honourrable Joachim Hermann, Minister of Interior, Free State of Bavaria. Before I say what I think of the current situation in relation to the integration of immigrants as proposed by the minister and other politicians, I would like to mention that we also met with senior officials at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, based in Nuremberg. I am very sorry to say that Germans have not learned enough from their past mistakes. The message I personally got from all the meetings is that the onus is on immigrants to integrate - Yes it is a one-way process here in Germany. Sadly, I do not expect much good to come out of the present German integration strategy.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Teaching history is teaching national belonging
One issue that has not been an explicit part of the program of TFMI but popped up again and again is history and the way of dealing with as well as the way of teaching history. Migration poses a great question to this topic. One of them is: how is it possible to include immigrants in history: the history of immigration, the history of immigrants and their descendants and last but not least the history of the country. The narrative of the past is the narrative about the future and thereby the concepts of history are the key to the tapestry of nations and their states. This means, immigrants will only be included on the level of a feeling of belonging when this issue is addressed.
The history of the building, which is standing for the changing history of the country, has been brought up in the BaMF. And it was underlying many conversations which I had with several groups during the conference.
I want to reflect a little on one conversation that we had in this morning. The history of the BaMF-building in the time of the NAZIS brought us to the issue of the feeling of guilt and the contention of the past. So the question came up, how German children of immigrants can grapple with the German past. And this is as difficult as it is because Germans are still struggling with their past. The dominant idea seems to be, that immigrant children could somehow not relate to German history, that the past as horrible as it is belongs to Germans, to people who had family members involved. Even though, the two world wars that Germany started affected people around the globe and started migration over the globe and they prepared the dominant patterns of discourse that not only Germany is struggling with – one of them is the concept of purity.
On the other side, immigrants carry the question of how to let their children know of their history, a question most difficult if they came as refugees, like our friend from Ruanda. Better to let them know the reasons for migration, the history of the family, the burdens that migration was supposed to safe them from - what lays behind? Or let them find out themselves? Feel an oddness and alienation once they realize that their parents didn’t share something that important with them? Letting a taboo emerge concerning all matters of the past? But how can an immigrant family embrace both its own past and the past of the nation it belongs to now? And how can a nation come to terms with its history and the histories of old-established and newcomers which bring in a global history and by that challenge the concept of a national history, of a national narrative?