Immigration | Migration
From the War in Ukraine to the US-Mexico Border, Who Gets Welcomed? Who Gets to Move?
And who gets pushed back to Mexico or Rwanda or Libya or left to die in the desert or at sea?
This episode of Witness Radio is a mind-blowing treat. Executive Producer Camilo Perez-Bustillo and I join Professors Nandita Sharma and Reece Jones to explore the question:
From the war in Ukraine to the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond: Who gets welcomed? Who gets to move?
We conclude with ideas about how to create a more inclusive world, one better able to confront such challenges as climate change, global pandemics, capitalist greed run amok, and the hardened, racialized borders throughout the world that have given rise to violent exclusionary tactics.
Our conversation first aired as a webinar hosted by Witness at the Border on March 31, 2022. So, some of the numbers cited have since changed. But we felt the discussion was too important not to republish in audio format. We hope you agree.
Meet the speakers:
Activist scholar Dr. Nandita Sharma is a professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research addresses human migration, migrant labor, nation-state power, ideologies of racism, sexism, and nationalism, processes of identification and self-understanding, and social movements for justice. Nandita is the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants.
Dr. Reece Jones is a professor of geography and environment at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of White Borders, Violent Borders, and Border Walls. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Geopolitics and co-editor of the Routledge Geopolitics Book Series. His next book, Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, is available for preorder from Counterpoint Press.
Camilo Perez Bustillo is the current chair professor of human rights at National Taiwan University’s College of Law. He is also a fellow at both the Institute for the Geography of Peace, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and El Paso, Texas, and Norway’s University of Bergen Global Research Program on Inequality; co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Task Force on the Americas; co-founder of the International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement; and lead author of Human Rights, Hegemony and Utopia in Latin America.
Sarah Towle is a London-based author, educator, and human rights defender, sharing her journey from outrage to activism one Witness Radio episode and story at a time in her forthcoming book, The First Solution: Tales of Humanity from the Borderlands (2023, She Writes Press).
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