#2

QSPTAG #294 — 22 septembre 2023
▻https://www.laquadrature.net/2023/09/22/qsptag-294-22-septembre-2023

Loi SREN : un catalogue de mauvaises nouvelles Le projet de loi « visant à sécuriser et réguler l’espace numérique » (SREN), voté en juillet dernier par le Sénat mais actuellement en discussion à l’Assemblée, est dans son état…

#Que_se_passe-t-il_au_Garage_ ?

The Dazzling Dvorak You’ve Yet to Hear ~ The Imaginative Conservative
▻https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/09/dazzling-antonin-dvorak-terez-rose.html

https://eadn-wc04-4478098.nxedge.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Screen-Shot-2022-09-07-at-4.59.14-PM-e1662588199258.png

Classical Girl’s Top 10 Dvorak Faves

Klid (“Silent Woods”)
Romance in F minor
Quartet #12, “The American”
Slavonic Dances #2 in E minor and #4 in F major (op. 46 and not op.72)
Violin Concerto in A minor
“In Nature’s Realm”
Cello Concerto in B minor
Symphony No. 8
String quartets 10 – 14
Serenade for Strings

#music #Dvorak

#journée_sans_voitures #2023
▻http://carfree.fr/index.php/2023/09/20/journee-sans-voitures-2023

Une journée #sans_voiture vise à expérimenter dans le #monde ce que peut être la #Vie_sans_voiture. Cette journée est pour les piétons, les cyclistes et les transports en Lire la suite...

#Alternatives_à_la_voiture #Fin_de_l'automobile #Marche_à_pied #Ressources #Transports_publics #Vélo #2000 #Belgique #carfree #france #Québec #Suisse

Total : 2539 voix en 15 jours, réparties sur 250 pétitions.

La majorité des voix (1813) vont aux 6 pétitions qui en ont collecté plus de 100.

⭐ 250 pétitions (sur 500) ont collecté des voix en 15 jours
⭐ 116 en ont collecté une seule
⭐ 61 en ont collecté 2 seulement
⭐ 6 en ont collecté plus de 100
⭐ 3 en ont collecté plus de 200

Festival Technopolice 2023 – Marseille, édition #2
▻https://www.laquadrature.net/2023/09/18/festival-technopolice-2023-marseille-edition-2

Aujourd’hui, nous sommes heureux de vous annoncer l’organisation par le collectif Technopolice Marseille de la deuxième édition du Festival Technopolice qui aura lieu du 28 septembre au 1er octobre 2023 à Marseille, avec le…

#Surveillance

QSPTAG #293 — 15 septembre 2023
▻https://www.laquadrature.net/2023/09/15/qsptag-293

Au Garage cette semaine, on a publié un gros article sur la loi SREN (on en reparlera la semaine prochaine) et on vous propose pour les quinze jours qui viennent un agenda rempli de rendez-vous : –…

#Que_se_passe-t-il_au_Garage_ ?

QSPTAG #291 — 25 août 2023
▻https://www.laquadrature.net/2023/08/31/qsptag-291

Mouchards partout : le contrôle à distance des appareils numériques est légalisé

C’est une pratique de police judiciaire et des services de renseignement : retourner un téléphone contre son utilisateur, pour en faire une balise GPS ou un…

#Que_se_passe-t-il_au_Garage_ ? #que_se_passe_t_il_au_garage

QSPTAG #292 — 8 septembre 2023
▻https://www.laquadrature.net/2023/09/08/qsptag-292

La VSA marseillaise fait de la résistance Voilà trois ans déjà que nous agissons contre l’installation à Marseille de caméras de surveillance « augmentées », dont les images sont analysées en direct par des algorithmes de reconnaissance des…

#Que_se_passe-t-il_au_Garage_ ?

[Talk From Homografía] Talk From Homografía #23
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/talk-from-homografia/talk-from-homografia-23

Proposé par les acoolytes Prinzessin & King Baxter, avec Suzy Q à la réalisation, Talk From Homografía est VOTRE talk show et safer zone mensuel sur Radio Panik ; iels y reçoivent chaque mois des invité.x.s pour y aborder la nuit et ses créations, l’art et les récits qui font les communautés LGBTQIA+. Interviews, morceau emblématique du dancefloor, reportage, musique live et agenda culturel et festif.

artistes invités.e.x.s : Joëlle Sambi & Sara Machine Agathe Dananai Nour Beetch Marco Labellarte Rescue : [60:00]

▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/talk-from-homografia/talk-from-homografia-23_16439__1.mp3

[Drache Musicale] Episode #227 NEW SEASON
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/drache-musicale/episode-227-new-season

https://www.radiopanik.org/media/cache/e0/75/e0751406e0eb86c79b7a775c1b04131c.jpg

Encore un temps d’avance sur les vacances de la toussaint.

Et un de retard sur la rentrée.

NEW season, new sounds, new voice, new visu, new life blablabla ...

tracklist

Intro

Ireke – Petit à petit

Djingo Typical Band - Vini Ouais

Iko Cherie - Lepidoptera

Kombo – Mazinasyon

Raz Olsher - Vamonos Cocos

GUME - Súcubu

Jantra – gedima

Dudu Tassa, Jonny Greenwood - Taq Ou-Dub

Nana Benz du Togo - Ago

Ground - Gorogoro valley -ゴロゴロ渓-

Butch - Bepsi

Pablo Fierro – Yallah

Françoise - J’écoute de la musique saoûle (Woody Braun Remix / French )

visu by @antek

▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/drache-musicale/episode-227-new-season_16444__1.mp3

QSPTAG #292 — 8 septembre 2023
▻https://www.laquadrature.net/2023/09/08/qsptag-292-8-septembre-2023

La VSA marseillaise fait de la résistance Voilà trois ans déjà que nous agissons contre l’installation à Marseille de caméras de surveillance « augmentées », dont les images sont analysées en direct par des algorithmes de reconnaissance des…

#Que_se_passe-t-il_au_Garage_ ?

Série #Assassinées (par @lesjours)

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Tous les trois jours, en France, une femme meurt. Tous les trois jours, un homme tue son épouse, sa compagne ou son ex. Tout au long de #2023, « Les Jours » recensent ces meurtres et enquêtent sur ce qui porte un nom : les « féminicides ».

▻https://lesjours.fr/obsessions/feminicides-2023
#recensement #femmes

–---

Août 2023, neuf féminicides, neuf de trop

Partout en #France, dans tous les milieux, des femmes sont tuées par leurs compagnons. Chaque mois, « Les Jours » documentent ces #meurtres.

▻https://lesjours.fr/obsessions/feminicides-2023/ep16-aout-2023
#féminicide #féminicides

QSPTAG #291
▻https://www.laquadrature.net/2023/08/31/291

Mouchards partout : le contrôle à distance des appareils numériques est légalisé

C’est une pratique de police judiciaire et des services de renseignement : retourner un téléphone contre son utilisateur, pour en faire une balise GPS ou un…

#Que_se_passe-t-il_au_Garage_ ? #que_se_passe_t_il_au_garage

I dati sull’accoglienza in Italia, tra programmazione mancata e un “sistema unico” mai nato

Ad agosto in Italia sono “accolte” quasi 133mila persone, per la maggioranza nei centri prefettizi. Il sistema diffuso, e sulla carta ordinario, pesa ancora poco. Un confronto con gli anni scorsi smonta l’emergenza e mostra i nodi veri: dalla non programmazione al definanziamento, fino allo squilibrio provinciale tra #Cas e #Sai.

Al 15 agosto di quest’anno le persone in accoglienza in Italia sono 132.796: 95.436 nei Centri di accoglienza straordinaria che fanno capo alle prefetture, 34.761 nei centri diffusi del Sistema di accoglienza e integrazione (Sai) e 2.599 negli hotspot. Tanti? Pochi? Spia di un’emergenza imprevedibile? Un confronto con gli anni scorsi può aiutare a orientarsi, tenendo sempre la stessa fonte, cioè il ministero dell’Interno, lo stesso che per conto del governo lamenta una situazione “scoppiata” tra le mani, impossibile da programmare e quindi non gestibile per le vie ordinarie, tanto da dichiarare lo stato di emergenza.

Facciamo un salto indietro alla fine del 2016, quando gli sbarchi furono oltre 180mila. Le persone in accoglienza in Italia allora erano 176.257, il 32,7% in più di oggi. La stragrande maggioranza, proprio come oggi, era nelle strutture temporanee emergenziali (137mila), seguita a distanza dall’accoglienza diffusa e teoricamente strutturale dell’allora Sistema di protezione per richiedenti asilo e rifugiati (Sprar) con 23mila posti, dai centri di prima accoglienza (15mila circa) e dagli hotspot (un migliaio). A fine agosto 2017, anno in cui gli sbarchi alla fine sfiorarono quota 120mila, erano 173.783, di cui nei soli Cas 158.207. Un terzo in più di oggi.

Un anno dopo, il 31 agosto 2018, erano scesi a 155.619. Attenzione: quell’anno, anche a seguito degli accordi del 2017 tra Italia e Libia e delle forniture garantite a Tripoli per intercettare e respingere i naufraghi con missioni bilaterali di supporto (farina Minniti-Gentiloni), gli sbarchi crolleranno a 23.370.
Ed è proprio in quell’anno che per decreto (il cosiddetto “Decreto Salvini”, 113/2018) il Governo Conte I smonta il già gracile e incompiuto sistema di accoglienza, pubblicando schemi di capitolato dei Cas che premiano le strutture di grandi dimensioni, riducendo gli standard di accoglienza e mortificando l’operato del Terzo settore. Per non parlare del forte impulso, già in atto da qualche tempo, alla prassi “svuota centri” rappresentata dalle revoche delle misure di accoglienza da parte delle prefetture. È bene infatti ricordare che tra 2016 e 2019, come ricostruito da un’inchiesta di Altreconomia, almeno 100mila tra richiedenti asilo e beneficiari di protezione si sono visti cancellare le condizioni materiali di accoglienza, finendo espulsi dai centri, a discrezione delle singole prefetture e senza che venisse tenuto in minima considerazione alcun principio di gradualità.

L’anno che ha fatto registrare il dato più basso di sbarchi dell’ultima decade è il 2019: 11.471. A metà agosto di quattro anni fa le persone in accoglienza erano 102.402, di cui 77.128 nei Cas e 25.132 nell’ormai ex Sprar, svuotato della sua natura originaria e rinominato in Siproimi. “Perché immaginare di costruire un sistema di accoglienza per soggetti ritenuti non graditi dalle istituzioni?”, è il ragionamento non detto.

Ecco perché al 15 agosto 2020, anno di leggera ripresa degli sbarchi (34.200 circa), le persone nei Cas, nel Siproimi e negli hotspot non superano quota 85mila. La metà rispetto al 2016. Crollano i posti nei centri prefettizi (da 77mila del 2019 a 60mila del 2020) così come quelli nel Siproimi (da 25mila a 23mila).

Ma si è riusciti a far di peggio, riducendo il sistema al lumicino dei 76.902 “immigrati in accoglienza sul territorio”, come li indica il Viminale, del 15 agosto 2021 (anno che registrerà 67.477 sbarchi). Nei centri prefettizi vengono infatti dichiarate 51.128 persone presenti, quasi un terzo di quante erano accolte nel dicembre 2017. Nel circuito del Siproimi c’è una flebile ripresa che però non oltrepassa quota 25mila posti.

È una sorta di “età di mezzo” (siamo a cavallo dei Governi Conte II e Draghi). Nonostante il positivo intervento della legge 173/2020 che ripristina la logica dello Sprar, denominandolo Sai (Sistema di accoglienza e integrazione), i due esecutivi che precedono l’attuale non riescono a (o non vogliono) frenare la diminuzione dei posti. Si fa finta di non vedere che il sistema di accoglienza è nei fatti sottostimato e che da un momento all’altro può dunque implodere rispetto alle necessità. I capitolati dei Cas vengono di poco corretti ma non in maniera adeguata, e continua a non essere elaborato e tanto meno attuato alcun piano di progressivo assorbimento e riconversione dei Cas (emergenza) nel Sai (ordinario). Il Sistema di accoglienza e integrazione torna debolmente a crescere ma in modo modesto. Perché non è lì che si punta: a occupare l’agenda sono ancora gli accordi con la Libia, che vengono infatti rinnovati, e la direzione politica non cambia rispetto a quella precedente, è solo meno “urlata”.

È in questo quadro che arriviamo all’anno scorso, quello dei 105mila sbarchi, con le persone in accoglienza che a metà agosto 2022 sono 95.893, di cui 64.117 nei Cas e 31mila circa nei centri Sai.

Pian piano quella quota è cresciuta fino ai citati 132.796 “accolti” del 15 agosto 2023. Non si tratta, come visto, di un inedito picco ma di un già vissuto trascinarsi di difetti strutturali. Uno su tutti: il Sai, la fase di accoglienza concepita come ordinaria, non riesce ad andare oltre il 30% del numero complessivo dei posti disponibili.

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“Se immaginiamo che tra il 20 e il 30% della popolazione presente nei centri rapidamente li abbandona e lascia l’Italia per andare in altri Paesi dell’Unione europea, l’impatto generale degli arrivi e delle presenze è quanto mai modesto -osserva Gianfranco Schiavone, presidente del Consorzio italiano di solidarietà di Trieste e tra i più esperti conoscitori del sistema di accoglienza del nostro Paese. Nulla giustifica l’ordinario e diffuso allarmismo”. “La popolazione italiana nel solo 2022 è diminuita di 179mila unità, un numero pari a più di tre anni di arrivi (2022, 2021, 2020) -fa notare ancora Schiavone-. Ma di che cosa stiamo parlando?”.

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A questa lettura se ne aggiunge un’altra che riguarda la disomogeneità territoriale dell’accoglienza su scala provinciale. Il ministero dell’Interno rende infatti pubblici ogni 15 giorni i dati aggiornati sulle “presenze di migranti in accoglienza” distinguendoli però solo su base regionale. Così gli squilibri del sistema non emergono nel dettaglio.

Altreconomia ha ottenuto dal Viminale i dati suddivisi per Provincia al 30 giugno 2023, appena prima che scoppiasse l’ultima “emergenza accoglienza”, quando le persone in accoglienza erano 118.883 di cui 3.682 negli hotspot (Lampedusa su tutti), 80.126 nei Cas e 35.075 nei centri Sai. Il carattere che emerge è la sproporzione. Vale tanto per la distribuzione dei posti del Sai quanto per il “collegamento” tra il sistema emergenziale Cas e l’accoglienza diffusa.

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Schiavone fa qualche esempio pratico. “In alcune Regioni e province le presenze nel Sai sono bassissime, specie se rapportate alla popolazione residente. Veneto, Toscana, la stessa Lombardia. Il divario Nord-Sud è critico. La peggiore si conferma in ogni caso il Friuli-Venezia Giulia, dove peraltro il ministero segnala 63 posti in provincia di Udine senza tenere conto che il progetto Sai che fa capo al Comune di Udine ha chiuso a fine dicembre del 2022. È palese la carenza forte di posti al Nord dove ci sarebbero le maggiori possibilità di integrazione socio-lavorativa”.

Di fronte a questi dati sorge un interrogativo che il presidente dell’Ics di Trieste riassume così: “A che cosa serve un Sistema di accoglienza integrazione, che ora con la legge 50/2023 è destinato ai soli beneficiari di protezione, così squilibrato, sia per aree geografiche sia in relazione al sistema dei Cas? Trasferiamo i richiedenti asilo appena diventano rifugiati da Nord a Sud per trovare lavoro? Appare evidente che il sistema come è oggi configurato, se si intende mantenere l’irrazionale scelta di avervi sottratto l’accoglienza dei richiedenti asilo, non ha alcun senso e andrebbe interamente riconfigurato con drastiche chiusure di progetti Sai nelle aree interne, specie al Sud, che erano importantissimi in una logica normativa che prevede l’accoglienza diffusa dei richiedenti asilo ma che perdono senso in un nuovo sistema che attribuisce al Sai la sola funzione di sostenere l’integrazione socio-economica dei rifugiati”.

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A riprova del fatto che la vera emergenza in Italia non sono i numeri quanto la non programmazione ministeriale sull’accoglienza, c’è anche la risposta che il capo della Direzione centrale dei servizi civili per l’immigrazione e l’asilo (Francesco Zito) diede al nostro Luca Rondi a inizio gennaio 2023. Alla richiesta di aver copia del “Piano nazionale di accoglienza elaborato dal Ministero dell’Interno”, il Viminale glissò sostenendo che “i trasferimenti dei migranti avvengono in base a quote di volta in volta stabilite tra le diverse province, anche in base ai posti che si rendono disponibili sul territorio”. Come dire: il piano è non avere un piano.

Chiude il cerchio la cesura netta che c’è tra i posti emergenziali nei Cas e il Sai. “Facciamo l’esempio di Piacenza -riflette Schiavone-. A fine giugno c’erano 505 posti Cas e 34 posti Sai. Se ad esempio ogni anno devo trasferire 200 ex richiedenti asilo divenuti beneficiari di protezione dai Cas di Piacenza al Sai di quella provincia, come si fa? È evidente che le persone verranno trasferite da una delle province a maggior dinamicità economica magari ad Avellino o Cosenza dove ci sono rispettivamente 900 e 1.100 posti SAI. Questo non-sistema produce nello stesso tempo sradicamento delle persone dai percorsi di primo inserimento sociale e totale sperpero di denaro pubblico. A guardare fino in fondo il non-sistema non produce neppure alcuna integrazione sociale, magari con grande lentezza e spreco di energie”.

La progressiva riduzione dei Cas a parcheggi dove non verrà insegnato neppure l’italiano -come prevede la legge 50/2023 che ha eliminato anche l’orientamento legale e il supporto psicologico- farà il resto. “Il processo è in atto da tempo ma tende ad accelerare sempre di più -dice Schiavone allargando le braccia-. In questo modo anche i sei mesi di accoglienza Sai rischiano di rivelarsi pressoché inutili se non sono un completamento di un percorso di integrazione già avviato. Ma in questo non-sistema il beneficiario di protezione che accede al Sai parte da quasi zero”. Verso una nuova, prevedibile, “emergenza”.

▻https://altreconomia.it/i-dati-sullaccoglienza-in-italia-tra-programmazione-mancata-e-un-sistem
#données #statistiques #chiffres #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Italie #accueil #Sistema_di_accoglienza_e_integrazione #hotspot #2023 #Siproimi #urgence #2022 #2019 #2020 #arrivées #cartographie #Italie_du_Sud #Italie_du_Nord

Migrants Dying in the English Channel: The French Government Is Guilty — The Spark #1183
▻https://the-spark.net/np_1183602.html

This article is translated from the August 18 issue #2872 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.

Migrants drown every day trying to reach Europe on makeshift boats. Those who die off the shores of Tunisia, Greece, Italy, and Spain join those who perish in French waters, under the watch of the French government and by its fault.

Six Afghans died this way on August 13 when a boat sank carrying 65 migrants trying to reach England. Six deaths following hundreds of others resulting from the criminal policy pursued for years by French and British governments on both sides of the English Channel.

Thousands of people try to cross every year in rubber dinghies on waters loaded with tankers and giant container ships. French authorities systematically closed all the other ways across.

Millions of migrants have been swallowed up by patrols in and around Calais in France. Its walls bristle with barbed wire, infrared cameras, drones, carbon dioxide detectors, and so on. Monitoring of trucks in the port of Calais alone costs eight million dollars per year, above and beyond the manhunt at the Channel Tunnel. Authorities have done everything possible to make life impossible for migrants. They even put fences under bridges in downtown Calais to prevent migrants from sheltering there.

But nothing deters these thousands of refugees who have already risked their lives several times over travelling thousands of miles from places like Afghanistan, Syria, or Sudan. The only effect this war on migrants has is to push them back to sea. Networks of smugglers are ready to offer attempts at extremely dangerous crossings.

Now again the French and British governments pass the buck and focus their rhetoric on these networks of smugglers which they themselves foster. These governments show no lack of cynicism. No matter what they claim, their policy turns the English Channel into a graveyard.

#Livret juridique

https://cfcv.asso.fr/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Capture-de%CC%81cran-2022-11-24-a%CC%80-16.19.37.jpg

Ce livret vous informe sur ce que dit la loi concernant les droits des victimes de #viols et d’#agressions_sexuelles et le déroulé des #procédures.

►https://cfcv.asso.fr/ce-que-dit-la-loi

Pour télécharger le livret en pdf :
▻https://cfcv.asso.fr/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/livret-CFCV-web-2022-def2-OK.pdf

#droits #loi #brochure

ping @_kg_

[Émissions spéciales] Transhumance #2
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/emissions-speciales/transhumance-2

Pour ce deuxième épisode de Transhumance, les jeunes sont entièrement aux commande de l’émission !

Pour sa troisième édition, le camp climat du CNCD-11.11.11 devient itinérant. Du 20 au 25 août, au gré des paysages d’Ardenne et de Gaume et des étapes insolites, quinze jeunes issu.es de toute la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles se rencontrent, découvrent des initiatives locales et s’outillent ensemble sur les enjeux socio-climatiques et mondiaux. Au fil de la semaine, les jeunes apprivoisent l’outil radio et réalisent des carnets de bord du camp à travers deux émissions encadrées par Comme un Lundi asbl avec le soutien du Gsara (...)

▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/emissions-speciales/transhumance-2_16333__1.mp3

La drammatica condizione dei migranti in arrivo a Trieste: “500 persone abbandonate in strada”

I trasferimenti dei richiedenti asilo in arrivo nella città dalla rotta balcanica sono fermi, mentre gli arrivi aumentano (quasi 8mila tra gennaio e luglio). Crescono i casi di famiglie e i minori soli costretti a dormire all’addiaccio. Le istituzioni restano immobili, negando servizi di bassa soglia. La rete solidale cittadina fa il punto della situazione

La situazione dei migranti a Trieste, principale punto di passaggio delle rotte balcaniche nel nostro Paese, è sempre più drammatica: a fine agosto sono quasi 500 i richiedenti asilo costretti a vivere all’addiaccio, mentre i trasferimenti si sono completamente azzerati. Lo evidenzia il nuovo rapporto stilato dalla rete solidale cittadina, network di realtà che operano nel capoluogo giuliano nel campo dell’accoglienza e dell’assistenza alle persone in transito e che comprende la Comunità di San Martino al Campo, il Consorzio italiano di solidarietà (Ics), la Diaconia valdese (Csd), Donk humanitarian medicine, International rescue committee Italia e l’associazione Linea d’Ombra.

Il documento fa seguito al report “Vite abbandonate”, predisposto all’inizio dell’estate, che rendeva noti i dati raccolti dagli attivisti e dagli operatori nel corso del 2022. La necessità di un aggiornamento deriva dal grave inasprimento della situazione, ormai di estrema emergenza, dovuta alla carenza dei servizi a fronte di un’elevata richiesta di aiuto. Il numero di migranti a Trieste è in aumento -sono 7.890 gli arrivi dall’inizio di gennaio alla fine di luglio, contro i 3.191 dello stesso periodo dello scorso anno- con una presenza sempre maggiore di nuclei familiari, donne sole o con bambini e minori non accompagnati. Questi ultimi sono saliti dell’11% rispetto al 2022, con un’età in calo.

Alcuni dei ragazzi incontrati dalle realtà autrici del report sono sotto i 14 anni e in alcuni casi ne hanno anche 10 o 11. Nel solo mese di luglio sono arrivate nel capoluogo giuliano 2.277 persone, il 20% delle quali non era ancora maggiorenne; solo in questo periodo sono giunte 55 famiglie, molte delle quali di provenienza curda.

A questa impennata di presenze non è corrisposto affatto un incremento dei servizi di bassa soglia. Anzi, l’amministrazione comunale ha deciso di chiudere, a inizio luglio, il progetto “Emergenza freddo”, che garantiva una sessantina di posti letto in più per le persone vulnerabili costrette a vivere per strada. Per l’accoglienza temporanea dei nuclei familiari e delle donne sole, un grande lavoro è stato fatto dall’hotel Alabarda, struttura di proprietà del Comune gestita dalla Caritas; oggi, tuttavia, l’albergo si trova in una situazione di tale saturazione -dovuta anche all’aumento di minori stranieri non accompagnati- che risulta difficile trovare posto per nuove persone. “L’altro giorno c’era una famiglia curda con quattro bambini, di cui la più grande aveva sei anni e il più piccolo tre mesi -ha raccontato nella conferenza stampa del 24 agosto Gian Andrea Franchi di Linea d’Ombra-. Sono andato alla parrocchia più vicina, che risponde al sontuoso nome di ‘Santissimo cuore immacolato di Maria’, ho suonato, abbiamo parlato un po’ e mi hanno detto di andare alla Caritas, che però era chiusa. Alla fine un amico ha dato ospitalità a suo rischio a questo nucleo familiare”.

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Il rapporto evidenzia, così come il precedente, la mancanza strutturale di servizi di bassa soglia e “suggerisce” al Comune di Trieste di prendere atto della realtà in cui è inserito e del periodo storico che stiamo attraversando. La città, infatti, essendo il punto di ingresso su suolo italiano delle rotte balcaniche, dovrebbe prepararsi agli arrivi di persone migranti e intervenire aumentando l’assistenza e i posti letto disponibili. L’incremento nel numero di ingressi dipende in larghissima parte dalle condizioni di vita nei Paesi di partenza ed è quindi pressoché inevitabile. La maggiore responsabilità della situazione drammatica che si è delineata nel capoluogo giuliano, tuttavia, va ricercata nell’azzeramento totale dei trasferimenti verso altre Regioni; il rapporto mette infatti in evidenza lo strettissimo rapporto tra la quantità di spostamenti organizzati e il numero di richiedenti asilo segnalati senza accoglienza. Se a gennaio c’erano 132 trasferimenti e 313 persone rimaste in strada, ad agosto, con zero trasferimenti, i migranti costretti a vivere all’addiaccio sono 494. Di questi, almeno 74 sono in attesa di un posto nel sistema di accoglienza da più di tre mesi.

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“Nel momento in cui il ministero fa un programma, i richiedenti asilo devono essere considerati tutti uguali e devono essere tutti ricollocati -ha aggiunto Gianfranco Schiavone, presidente del Consorzio italiano di solidarietà (Ics) e tra le anime della rete RiVolti ai Balcani-. Ci dovrebbe essere una quota da ripartire per area di ingresso. A Trieste se prima questa quota era bassa e avevamo persone in strada, adesso siamo a zero. Questo territorio è completamente abbandonato, lo Stato è sparito. Per questa situazione catastrofica ci sono delle responsabilità su cui la magistratura dovrà indagare”. Come messo in luce dall’associazione Donk humanitarian medicine, chi vive in situazioni critiche di abbandono ha più probabilità di sviluppare patologie.

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Le persone che si ammalano, tuttavia, dopo esser state visitate dal pronto soccorso, tornano sulla strada, spesso a dormire nel silos accanto alla stazione, in un ambiente estremamente malsano e precario e certamente non adatto a un periodo di convalescenza o alla cura di una malattia. Gli operatori segnalano, inoltre, che da giugno si sono verificati alcuni episodi di violenza, dovuti all’arrivo di un gruppo di individui che parrebbe lavorare in rapporto con i passeur. La situazione di stallo che caratterizza la città è ormai nota anche alle persone in arrivo: rispetto all’anno scorso è aumentato il numero di coloro che dichiarano di non volersi fermare in zona per chiedere asilo (dal 59 al 72%). La maggior parte degli ingressi (77,1%) sono di cittadini provenienti dall’Afghanistan, che spesso preferiscono continuare il proprio viaggio. Chi invece tende a fare maggiori domande di asilo nell’area sono i cittadini pakistani, che rappresentano il 51,3% dei richiedenti asilo in attesa di accoglienza a Trieste. Lasciati lì.

▻https://altreconomia.it/la-drammatica-condizione-dei-migranti-in-arrivo-a-trieste-500-persone-a

#Trieste #asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontières #frontière_sud-alpine #Italie #Slovénie #SDF #sans-abris #hébergement #route_des_Balkans #Balkans #statistiques #chiffres #accueil #vulnérabilité

Règles : une étude utilise du sang pour la première fois pour tester des protections périodiques
▻https://www.ouest-france.fr/sante/regles-une-etude-utilise-du-sang-pour-la-premiere-fois-pour-tester-des-

Unpicking the notion of ‘safe and legal’ routes

Introduction

The last ten years have brought a growing recognition of the need to address the issue of mixed and irregular migratory movements through the introduction of pathways that enable people to move from one country and continent to another in a safe and legal manner. As well as averting the need for refugees and migrants to embark on dangerous and expensive journeys involving unscrupulous human smugglers, such routes promise to mitigate the negative perceptions of states with respect to the impact of such movements on their sovereignty, security, and social stability.

This essay examines the context in which the discourse on safe and legal routes has emerged and identifies the different types of organised pathways that have been proposed by states and other stakeholders. Focusing particularly on population movements from the global South to the global North, it discusses the opportunities, difficulties, and dilemmas associated with this approach to the governance of cross-border mobility. More specifically, it scrutinises the increasingly popular assumption that the introduction of such routes will lead to significant reductions in the scale of mixed and irregular migration.
The context

In the mid-1980s, the world’s most prosperous states began to express concern about the growing number of foreign nationals arriving irregularly on their territory, many of whom subsequently submitted applications for refugee status. Regarding such movements as a threat to their sovereignty, and believing that many of those applications were unfounded, over the next two decades those countries introduced a range of restrictive measures designed to place new physical and administrative barriers in the way of unwanted new arrivals, especially those originating from the global South.

The limitations of these measures were dramatically exposed in 2015-16, when up to a million people, initially from Syria but subsequently from several other countries, made their way in an unauthorised manner to the European Union, many of them travelling via Türkiye. Reacting to this apparent emergency, the EU adopted a strategy pioneered in earlier years by Australia and the United States, known as “externalisation”. This involved the provision of financial and other incentives to low- and middle-income states on the understanding that they would obstruct the outward movement of irregular migrants and readmit those deported from wealthier states.

At the same time, governments in the developed world were beginning to acknowledge that mixed and irregular movements of people could not be managed by exclusionary measures alone. This recognition was due in no small part to the efforts of human rights advocates, who were concerned about the negative implications of externalisation for refugee and migrant protection. They also wanted to highlight the contribution that foreign nationals could make to destination countries in the global North if they were able to move there in a regular and orderly manner. The common outcome of these different discourses was a growing degree of support for the notion that the establishment of safe and legal routes could minimise the scale and mitigate the adverse consequences of mixed and irregular movements.

This was not an entirely new approach. As then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan had argued in the early 2000s, international migration, if governed in an appropriate manner, could have “win-win outcomes”, bringing benefits to countries of origin, countries of destination, and migrants alike. But to attain those outcomes, certain conditions had to be met. In the words of the Global Commission on International Migration (GCM), a body established by Mr. Annan:

It is in the interest of both states and migrants to create a context in which people migrate out of choice and in a safe and legal manner, rather than irregularly and because they feel they have no other option. Regular migration programmes could reinforce public confidence in the ability of states to admit migrants into their territory on the basis of labor market needs. Programmes of this kind would also help to create a more positive image of migrants and foster greater public acceptance of international migration.

Migration governance initiatives

In recent years, and especially since the so-called “European migration crisis” of 2015-16, this notion has been taken up by a number of different migration governance initiatives. Focusing primarily on labour migration, the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration (GCM) cited “enhanced availability and flexibility of pathways for regular migration,” as one of its key objectives. Endorsed by the majority of UN member states, the GCM extended this approach to the realm of forced migration, encouraging the international community to “develop or build on existing national and regional practices for admission and stay of appropriate duration based on compassionate, humanitarian or other considerations for migrants compelled to leave their countries of origin.”

At the same time, the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), also adopted in 2018 and which was even more widely endorsed by the international community, underlined the necessity for people who were fleeing persecution and armed conflict to have access to safe and legal routes. “There is a need,” it said, “to ensure that such pathways are made available on a more systematic, organised and sustainable basis, that they contain appropriate protection safeguards, and that the number of countries offering these opportunities is expanded overall.”

Similar approaches have emerged in the context of regional migration governance initiatives. The EU’s 2011 Global Approach to Migration and Mobility, for example, acknowledged the importance of “preventing and reducing irregular migration and trafficking in human beings” by “organising and facilitating legal migration and mobility.” The more recent EU Pact on Migration and Asylum also “aims to reduce unsafe and irregular routes and promote sustainable and safe legal pathways for those in need of protection.” “Developing legal pathways,” it says, “should contribute to the reduction of irregular migration.”

In 2022, the Summit of the Americas, a meeting of states that focussed on the issue of human mobility in the western hemisphere, endorsed the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. Using language similar to that of the EU Pact, it committed participating states to “a shared approach to reduce and manage irregular migration,” and to “promoting regular pathways for migration and international protection.” Signatories expressed their commitment “to strengthen fair labor migration opportunities in the region,” and “to promote access to protection and complementary pathways for asylum seekers, refugees and stateless persons.”

As indicated by the declaration’s reference to “labor migration opportunities”, the recognition of the need for safe and legal pathways to be established is closely linked to another recent development: a growing and global shortage of workers. In many industrialised states, members of the existing labour force are aging, taking retirement, quitting, or changing their jobs. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted those countries to introduce new border controls and stricter limits on immigration. Taking advantage of these circumstances, employees have been able to demand better wages and working conditions, thereby pushing up the cost of producing goods and providing services. Confronted with these threats to their profitability, the private sector has been placing growing pressure on governments to remove such restrictions and to open the door to foreign labour.
Safe and legal routes

As demonstrated by the migration governance initiatives described in the previous section, there is now a broad international consensus on the need to provide safe and legal routes for people who wish or feel obliged to leave their own country. There is also an agreement, supported by a growing volume of academic research, that the provision of such routes has a role to play in reducing the scale of mixed and irregular migration and in boosting the economies of destination states. But what specific forms might those safe and legal routes take? The next section of this essay answers that question by describing the principal proposals made and actions taken in that respect.
Labour migration programmes

One such proposal has been labour migration programmes established on a permanent, temporary, or seasonal bases. The rationale for such programmes is that they would allow people from poorer countries who are in need of employment to fill gaps in the labour markets of more prosperous states. As well as boosting the economies of destination countries, such programmes would allow the migrants concerned to enhance their skills and to support their countries of origin by means of remittances.

Until recently, for example, there have been only limited legal opportunities for the citizens of Central and South American countries, especially those with lower levels of skill, to join the US workforce. At the 2022 Summit of the Americas, however, President Biden indicated that he would introduce a package of measures designed to manage northward migration more effectively, including the establishment of safe and legal routes for Latin Americans. According to one US spokesperson, “we will have announcements related to labor pathways as part of the Los Angeles Declaration, designed to ensure that those pathways meet the highest labor standards and are not used for abuse or for a race to the bottom.”

Mexico, another signatory to the declaration, has already taken steps in this direction, offering border worker visas to Guatemalans and Belizeans wishing to work in the country’s southernmost states—an initiative intended to meet the labour needs of the area while reducing the number of people from those two countries arriving and working in an irregular manner.

Turning next to Germany, in 2015-16, at a time when the country was receiving large numbers of new arrivals from the Western Balkan states, most of whom submitted unsuccessful asylum claims, a new employment regulation was introduced. This opened the labour market for nationals of those countries, on condition that they had a valid job offer from a German employer.

Since that time, EU member states more generally have begun to acknowledge the need to recruit employees from outside the bloc. Thus in April 2022, the European Commission launched what it described as “an ambitious and sustainable legal migration policy,” including “specific actions to facilitate the integration of those fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine into the EU’s labour market.” In the emphatic words of the commissioner for home affairs, “legal migration is essential to our economic recovery […] while reducing irregular migration.”

A more preemptive approach to the issue has been taken by Australia, whose Pacific Labour Mobility Scheme allows businesses to recruit seasonal and temporary workers from ten Pacific island states. The purpose of the scheme is to meet Australia’s domestic labour market needs, to promote regional cooperation and development, and, in doing so, to avert the kind of instability that might provoke unpredictable and irregular movements of people.
Refugee-related programmes

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, large numbers of people displaced by the hostilities began to make their way to neighbouring and nearby member states of the European Union. While the EU has made vigorous and often inhumane efforts to exclude asylum seekers originating from other parts of the world, even if they had strong claims to refugee status, in the case of Ukraine steps were quickly taken to regularise the situation of the new arrivals. Refugees from Ukraine were allowed to enter the EU without a visa, to enjoy residence and work rights there for up to three years, and to move freely from one member state to another.

This arrangement, known as “temporary protection”, was based on a number of considerations: the geographical proximity of Ukraine to the EU, the great difficulty that the EU would have had in trying to obstruct the movement, a humanitarian concern for people who had been obliged to flee by the conflict, and a particular readiness to support the citizens of a friendly country that was suffering from the aggression committed by Russia, a state with a long history of enmity to the EU and NATO. While it remains to be seen how effectively the Ukrainians can be absorbed into the economies and societies of EU member states, in the short term at least, the temporary protection system provided a means of channeling a very large and rapid movement of people into routes that were safe and legal.

Looking beyond the specifics of the Ukrainian situation, UNHCR, the UN’s agency for refugees, has in recent years made regular calls for governments—predominantly but not exclusively in the global North—to establish and expand the scale of state-sponsored refugee resettlement programmes. Such efforts enjoy limited success, however, partly because of the serious cuts made to the US resettlement quota by the Trump administration, and partly because of the restrictions on movement introduced by many other countries as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the aftermath of the 2015-16 “migrant crisis”, moreover, European countries were reluctant to consider the admission of additional refugees, even if they were to arrive in an organised manner.

In a more positive development, the decade since the beginning of the Syrian refugee emergency in 2012 has delivered a new focus on the establishment of privately- sponsored resettlement programmes, enabling families as well as neighbourhood, community, and faith-based groups in the global North to sponsor the reception and initial integration of refugees from countries of asylum in the global South. Canada has taken a particular lead in this respect, establishing private sponsorship programmes for Afghan, Syrian, and Ukrainian refugees, with Australia, the US, and some European countries also experimenting with this particular form of safe and legal route.

A similar approach can be seen with respect to the notion of “humanitarian corridors”, an initiative taken by Italian church-affiliated groups. Self-funded but closely coordinated with the government in Rome, this programme has enabled religious communities in Italy to welcome hundreds of refugees from Ethiopia, Greece, and Lebanon. Discussions are currently underway with a view to expanding this model to other European states.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the notion of labour mobility for refugees, arrangements whereby refugees with specific skills and qualifications are allowed to leave their country of asylum in order to take up pre-arranged employment opportunities in another state. An approach first proposed more than a decade ago but largely unimplemented since that time, the potential of such initiatives has now been recognised by Australia, Canada, and the UK, all of which have recently established pilot programmes of this type.

In similar vein, humanitarian organisations have promoted the notion that refugees in developing countries of asylum should be able to benefit from scholarship programmes in states that are better equipped to provide them with appropriate education at the secondary and tertiary levels. The implementation of this approach has been boosted considerably by the emergencies in Syria and Ukraine, both of which have prompted universities around the world to make special provisions for refugee students.

When people move from one country to another in the context of a refugee crisis, a common consequence is for family members to be separated, either because some have been left behind in the country of origin, or because they lose contact with each other during their journey to a safer place. In response to this humanitarian issue, the international community has for many years supported the notion of family reunification programmes, organised with the support of entities such as the International Organization for Migration, UNHCR, and the Red Cross movement. Most recently, there has been a recognition that such programmes also have a role to play in reducing the scale of irregular movements, given the frequency with which people engage in such journeys in an attempt to reunite with their relatives.
Relocation and evacuation programmes

Other arrangements have been made to enable refugees and migrants to relocate in a safe and legal manner from countries that are not in a position to provide them with the support that they need. In the EU, efforts—albeit largely unsuccessful—have been made recently to establish redistribution programmes, relocating people from front-line states such as Greece and Italy, which have large refugee and migrant populations, to parts of Europe that are under less pressure in this respect.

In a more dramatic context, UNHCR has established an evacuation programme for refugees and migrants in Libya, where they are at serious risk of detention and human rights abuses, and where escape from the country by boat also presents them with enormous dangers. A safe and legal alternative has been found in an arrangement whereby the most vulnerable of these people are transferred to emergency transit centres in Niger and Rwanda, pending the time when other countries accept them as permanent residents.

Finally, proposals have been made with respect to the establishment of arrangements that would allow people who are at risk in their country of origin to move elsewhere in a safe and legal manner. For individuals and families, this objective could be attained by means of humanitarian visas issued by the overseas embassies of states that wish to provide sanctuary to people who are threatened in their homeland.

On a larger scale, orderly departure programmes might be established for designated categories of people who feel obliged to leave their own country and who might otherwise have no alternative but to move by irregular means. An important—but as yet unreplicated— precedent was set in this respect by a 1980s programme that allowed some 800,000 Vietnamese citizens to relocate to the US and other western countries with the authorisation of the Hanoi government, sparing them from the dangerous journeys that the “boat people” had undertaken in earlier years.
The potential of regular pathways

It is not surprising that the notion of safe and legal routes has attracted so much attention in recent years. They are in the interest of refugees and migrants, who would otherwise have to embark on difficult and often dangerous journeys. They are in the interest of states, who have much to gain from the orderly and authorised movement of people. And they are in the interest of international organisations that are struggling to respond to large-scale and unpredicted movements of people, and which are trying to ensure that human mobility is governed in a more effective, human and equitable manner.

At the same time, there is a need to scrutinise the popular assumption that such measures can substantially reduce the scale of mixed and irregular migratory movements, and to address the many difficulties and dilemmas associated with the establishment of such pathways.
Scaling up

Despite all of the rhetorical support given to the notion of regular pathways in recent years, the number of people who are able to access them is still very modest. And there are a number of reasons why they might not be scaled up to any great extent. First, the Covid-19 pandemic, which erupted unexpectedly not long after the GCM and GCR had been negotiated, caused many governments to act with a new degree of caution in relation to the cross-border movement of people. And while the pandemic has subsided, states may well prefer to retain some of the immigration restrictions they introduced in the context of the pandemic.

Second, and more recently, the need for states in Europe and beyond to admit large numbers of refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine seems certain to limit their enthusiasm and capacity for the establishment of safe routes for people from other parts of the world. With many thousands of people from those two countries left without jobs and in temporary accommodation, the introduction or expansion of other pathways would simply exacerbate this problem.

While the admission of overseas workers appears to be a way of addressing the demographic deficits and labour market needs of the industrialised states, are the citizens and politicians of those countries ready to acknowledge the need to admit more foreign nationals, even if they arrive in a managed manner? Immigration has become a toxic issue in many of the world’s more prosperous states, and few governments or opposition parties are willing to run on electoral platforms that advocate an increase in the number of new arrivals from other parts of the world.

In the context described above, it should come as no surprise that most of the orderly pathway initiatives introduced in recent years (such as privately sponsored resettlement, humanitarian corridors, evacuation, and relocation programmes) have all operated on a modest scale and have often been established on a pilot basis, with no guarantee of them being expanded.

For example, when in 2021 the British home secretary introduced a new labour mobility programme for refugees, she boldly announced that “those displaced by conflict and violence will now be able to benefit from access to our global points-based immigration system, enabling them to come to the UK safely and legally through established routes”. In fact, only 100 Syrian refugees from Jordan and Lebanon will benefit from the programme over the next two years.

And the UK is not an isolated case. According to a recent study, in 2019 the OECD countries provided complementary pathways to fewer than 156,000 people from seven major refugee-producing countries. Two-thirds of them were admitted on the basis of family reunion, with the remaining third split equally between people granted visas for work and for educational purposes. That 156,000 constituted just 0.6 percent of the global refugee population.
Reducing irregular migration

Even if safe and legal routes could be established and expanded, what impact would that have on the scale of irregular migration? That is a difficult question to answer, partly because the evidence on this issue is so limited, and partly because it is methodologically challenging to establish causal linkages between these two phenomena, as demonstrated by two recent studies.

With respect to the German labour programme in the Western Balkans, one analyst has suggested that although the number of asylum applications from that region did indeed drop after the new initiative was introduced, “one cannot credibly single out the exact effect the Western Balkan Regulation had on reducing irregular migration from the region to Germany”. The author goes on to say that “the regulation was only one of many policy measures at the time, including many restrictive measures and faster processing times of asylum applications as well as the ‘closure’ of the Western Balkan route.” Consequently, “it is not possible to isolate the exact causal role the Western Balkan Regulation may have played.”

A case study of Mexico and the US reaches a similar conclusion, suggesting “there is evidence that lawful channels for migration between Mexico and the US have suppressed unlawful migration, but only when combined with robust enforcement efforts,” including the intensification of border controls that facilitated the apprehension and return of migrants crossing the frontier in an irregular manner. This conclusion on the close relationship between safe pathways and enforcement, shared by both studies, is ironic, given that some of the strongest NGO advocates for the former are most vocal in their opposition to the latter!

A more general review of the evidence on this matter also casts doubt on the notion that an expansion of safe and legal routes will necessarily lead to a reduction in irregular movements. Looking specifically at labour migration programmes, the study says that they are often proposed “on the basis of an assumption of a rerouting effect, whereby migrants who would otherwise arrive and enter the asylum system or stay in a country without legal status will be incentivised to try and access a legal work permit from home rather than migrate illegally.” But the validity of that assumption “will depend on the capacity of legal pathways to accommodate the number of low-skilled workers who want to migrate, but lack permission to enter their desired destination.”

That statement concerning the number of people who would like to or have been obliged to migrate but who have been unable to do so in a safe and legal manner is readily substantiated in numerical terms. Most estimates suggest that around 15 million irregular migrants are to be found in the US and Europe alone, with millions more in countries such as India, Libya, Malaysia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. According to UNHCR, there are some 30 million refugees worldwide and more than 4.5 million asylum seekers who are waiting for their applications to be processed. A worldwide survey undertaken in 2018 concluded that some 750 million people, 15 percent of all the world’s adults, would move to another country if they had the opportunity to do so.

Given the growing demand for migration opportunities in poorer regions of the world, coupled with the general reluctance of the industrialised states to facilitate the large-scale admission of people who want to move there, it is difficult to see how this square can be circled. The most likely scenario is that the supply of opportunities for regular migration will be unable to meet the demand, meaning that aspirant migrants who are not selected for regular entry will still have a strong incentive to move in an irregular manner.

Indeed, it can also be argued that the establishment of safe and legal routes intensifies the social networks linking countries of origin and destination, enabling those migrants who move in a regular manner to inform the compatriots they have left behind of the opportunities that exist in the countries to which they have moved and to send remittances to people at home that can be used to pay the costs of a clandestine journey to the same location. In this respect, instead of reducing levels of irregular migration, the establishment of safe and legal routes might actually contribute to their growth.
Selection criteria and processes

In addition to the scale of the routes that might be established and their potential impact on levels of irregular migration, a number of other issues must be considered in the context of this discourse.

First, the notion of safe and legal pathways is based on the idea that states should control the arrival of foreign nationals on their territory, determining how many should be admitted, what countries they should come from, why they wish or need to move to another country, what their demographic profile is, and what skills they should have. In other words, for safe and legal routes to work effectively, states and other stakeholders have to establish selection criteria and processes that allow the admission of some people who would like to move, while refusing entry to others. This is not a principle accepted by some refugee and migrant advocates, for whom the notion of safe and legal routes has become a disguised proxy for “open borders”.

Almost inevitably, moreover, different constituencies within receiving states will be pushing for priority to be given to certain categories of people. Humanitarians will want the emphasis to be on refugees. Diaspora families and communities will favour family reunification programmes and community-sponsored resettlement. The private sector will argue the case for the admission of people with the skills and capacity to fill gaps in the labour market in a cost-effective manner. Universities will argue the case for visas to be granted to refugees and other foreign citizens with the necessary qualifications or academic aptitude. The selection process is therefore likely to be a contested and controversial one, potentially limiting governmental enthusiasm for the notion of safe and legal routes.
Status and rights

Second, as the attempt to regularise migratory movements proceeds, some important questions will have to be addressed in relation to the status and rights of the new arrivals and the organisation of such programmes. In the context of labour migration programmes, for example, would people be admitted on a temporary or permanent basis, and in the latter case would they eventually be able to acquire permanent resident rights or citizenship? Would they be tied to a single employer or allowed to move freely in the labour market? Would they enjoy the same pay, rights, and working conditions as citizens of the countries in which they are employed?

A somewhat different set of issues arises in the context of labour mobility initiatives for refugees. Will they be allowed to leave their countries of asylum by the governments of those states and, more importantly, would they be able to return to it if employed abroad on a temporary basis? As some refugee lawyers have mooted, would they be at risk of being deported to their country of origin, and thereby be at risk of persecution, if their country of first asylum refused to readmit them? And if they were readmitted to their country of first asylum, would they have full access to the labour market there, or find themselves returning to a refugee camp or informal urban settlement where only informal and low-income livelihoods opportunities exist?

With respect to privately sponsored resettlement, there is some evidence, especially from Canada, that refugees who arrive by this route fare better than those who are admitted by means of state-sponsored programmes. But there are also risks involved, especially in emergency situations where the citizens of resettlement countries are, for good humanitarian reasons, eager to welcome refugees into their homes and neighbourhoods, and where the state is only too happy to devolve responsibility for refugees to members of the community.

A particular case in point is to be found in the UK’s sponsorship scheme for Ukrainian refugees, in which some of the new arrivals have found themselves matched with inappropriate sponsors in isolated rural locations and with few affordable options available with respect to their long-term accommodation.
State manipulation

Third, the establishment and expansion of safe and legal routes could have adverse consequences if misused by destination countries. With respect to resettlement, for example, UNHCR has always insisted that refugees should be selected on the basis of their vulnerability, and not in terms of what the organisation describes as their “integration potential”.

That principle might prove more difficult to uphold in a context where alternative pathways are being discussed, specifically targeted at people on the basis of their skills, qualifications, language abilities, family connections and value to the labour market. Rather than expanding their refugee resettlement programmes, as UNHCR would like them to do, will destination countries prefer to make use of pathways that enable them to cherry-pick new arrivals on the basis of perceived value to the economy and society?

At the same time, there is a risk that states will use the establishment of organised pathways as a pretext for the exclusion of asylum seekers who arrive in an independent manner and by irregular means. That has long been the approach adopted by Australia, whose policy of interception at sea and relocation to remote offshore processing facilities is justified by the government on the grounds that the country has a substantial refugee resettlement programme. Rather than taking to boats and “ jumping the queue”, the authorities say, refugees should wait their turn to be resettled from their country of asylum, however difficult that might be in practice.

Taking its cue from Australia, the UK is in the process of establishing a formalised two-tier asylum system. On one hand, “bespoke” admissions programmes will be established for refugees from countries in which the UK has a particular geopolitical interest, most notably Afghanistan and Ukraine. On the other hand, the asylum claims of people arriving in the UK in an irregular manner, such as by boat across the English Channel (including those from Afghanistan and Ukraine) are now deemed inadmissible, and many of those arriving in this way are detained and liable to deportation to Rwanda without the possibility of returning to the UK, even if their refugee claim is recognised by the authorities in Kigali. At the time of writing, however, there is no evidence that this policy will have its intended effect of deterring irregular arrivals, nor indeed whether it will ever be implemented, given the legal challenges to which it is being subjected.
Regularisation

Finally, while much of the recent discourse on irregular migration has focused on the extent to which its scale and impact can be minimised by the establishment of safe and legal pathways, it must not be forgotten that many destination countries already have substantial populations of people who are officially not authorised to be there: so-called “illegal immigrants”, unsuccessful asylum seekers, and foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas, to give just three examples.

No serious attempt to address the issue of irregular migration can avoid the situation and status of such people, although questions relating to their regularisation, whether by means of amnesties or by other measures. have not featured at all prominently in the recent discourse on international mobility.

Interestingly, the GCM avoids the issue completely, presumably because it is deemed to be a matter that lies within the jurisdiction of sovereign states. If an attempt had been made to include the question of regularisation in the compact, it would almost certainly have been endorsed by fewer states. Nevertheless, any discussion of irregular migration must involve a consideration of those people who are living and working in countries where they do not have a legal status, as countries such as Spain, Ireland, and Italy have started to recognise. It is an issue that warrants much more attention at the national and multilateral levels, irrespective of its controversial nature.
Conclusion

A strong case can be made for the introduction and expansion of safe and legal migratory routes, as has been recognised by a plethora of recent initiatives relating to the governance of international mobility. But expectations of them should be modest.

While such routes may have a limited role to play in reducing the scale and impact of mixed and irregular movements, they appear unlikely to have the transformative effect that some participants in the migration discourse have suggested they might have. Such routes are also likely to be a contentious matter, with some states using the notion of safe and legal routes as a pretext for the introduction of draconian approaches to the issue of irregular migration, and with migrant advocates employing the same concept as a means of avoiding the more controversial slogan of “open borders”.

As indicated in the introduction, this essay has focused to a large extent on mixed and irregular migration from the global South to the global North, as it is those movements that have prompted much of the recent discourse on safe and legal routes. But it should not be forgotten that most migratory movements currently take place within the global South, and that some 85 percent of the world’s refugees are to be found in low and middle-income countries.

Looking at the migration and refugee scenario in the developing world, there are perhaps greater grounds for optimism than can be found by focusing on the industrialised states. With some exceptions (South Africa being a prime example), countries in the global South are less exercised by the issue of irregular migration.

Two regions—South America and West Africa—have established rather successful freedom-of-movement arrangements for their citizens. And despite some restrictive tendencies, encouraged in many instances by the externalisation policies of the global North, developing countries have kept their borders relatively open to refugees, as demonstrated by the presence of so many Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in Bangladesh, South Sudanese in Uganda, Syrians in Jordan and Lebanon, and Venezuelans in a host of neighbouring and nearby states.

In an ideal world, the cross-border movement of people would indeed take place in an exclusively voluntary, safe, and orderly manner. But that scenario cannot be envisaged in an era that is characterised by failures of global governance, widespread armed conflict, growing regional inequalities, intensifying environmental disasters, and the climate crisis, not to mention the general unwillingness of politicians and the public to countenance large-scale immigration and refugee arrivals. Looking to the future, there is every reason to believe that large numbers of people will have to move out of necessity rather than choice, in an unpredictable and irregular manner.

▻https://mixedmigration.org/articles/unpicking-the-notion-of-safe-and-legal-routes

#migrations #asile #réfugiés #voies_sures #voies_légales #frontières #1980s #menace #2015 #externalisation #refugee_compact #pacte_migratoire #global_compact_for_safe_orderly_and_regular_migration #global_compact_on_refugees #global_compact #relocalisation #régularisation #ouverture_des_frontières #Jeff_Crisp #safe_routes #legal_routes

#Sénégal : au moins une quinzaine de morts dans le chavirement d’une pirogue au large de Dakar (#24_juillet_2023)

https://scd.infomigrants.net/media/resize/my_image_big/6d89687eee36a3ec4b8d435bcf18f1057b695d81.jpg

Lundi matin, au moins 15 corps sans vie ont été retrouvés au large de #Dakar, très probablement des candidats à l’exil selon le maire adjoint du quartier de Ouakam. Ce drame de la migration est le dernier d’une triste série qui a endeuillé le Sénégal ces dernières semaines.

C’est un nouveau drame de la migration qui touche le Sénégal. Lundi 24 juillet, au moins 15 corps ont été retrouvés au large de Dakar. Selon Samba Kandji, maire adjoint du quartier de Ouakam, il s’agirait de candidats à l’exil qui cherchaient à rejoindre l’archipel espagnol des #Canaries en pirogue.

« Ce matin, aux environs de 3h30, on nous a alertés pour un chavirement de pirogue au large de #Ouakam. Immédiatement, on a dépêché sur les lieux deux équipes de plongeurs, quatre ambulances et on a démarré les opérations », a indiqué l’édile.

Une embarcation en bois, à bord de laquelle se trouvaient les migrants selon plusieurs témoins sur la plage, flottait sur l’eau, près de la côte. Un journaliste de l’AFP a vu les sapeurs-pompiers repêcher un corps et le déposer sur une bâche sur la plage.

« On a dénombré au total 17 victimes, donc 15 corps sans vie et deux rescapés », a déclaré à la presse Martial Ndione, commandant du groupement des sapeurs-pompiers de Dakar, qui n’a pas donné de précisions sur la provenance de l’embarcation, le nombre de personnes encore recherchées ou les circonstances.

« La marine a obligé l’embarcation à accoster et des gens se sont enfuis. Certains ont sauté mais ne savaient pas nager », avait affirmé plus tôt à l’AFP Samba Kandji.
« L’horizon est bouché ici »

Durant les opérations de secours, quelques dizaines de badauds sur la plage regardaient le déroulement des opérations, a observé un journaliste de l’AFP. « C’est pénible tous ces morts qu’on voit », a estimé l’un d’entre eux, Amndy Moustapha Sène, 23 ans, qui rêve de devenir footballeur professionnel.

« Je rêvais d’aller en Europe parce que l’horizon est bouché ici. J’étais prêt à embarquer dans une pirogue mais maintenant j’ai décidé d’émigrer par la voie légale quand l’opportunité se présentera. Je ne veux plus prendre une pirogue pour partir. Ça n’en vaut pas la peine », assure le jeune homme.

La route migratoire des Canaries, porte d’entrée vers l’Europe dans l’océan Atlantique, connaît ces dernières semaines un net regain d’activités au départ des côtes du nord-ouest de l’Afrique.

Plusieurs drames ont été recensés ces deux dernières semaines. Au moins 13 migrants originaires des environs de Dakar sont morts dans le naufrage de leur embarcation il y a environ une semaine au large du Maroc. Un autre bateau a chaviré à Saint-Louis, dans le nord du Sénégal, faisant au moins 15 morts. Trois bateaux de migrants partis fin juin des côtes sénégalaises en direction des Canaries sont également toujours portés disparus, selon l’ONG espagnole Caminando fronteras. Quelque 300 personnes se trouvaient en tout à bord.

La récente crise politique au Sénégal, après la volonté du président de Macky Sall de briguer un troisième mandat, n’est pas un facteur permettant d’expliquer à lui seul ce phénomène migratoire, estiment les spécialistes. La contestation, bien que violemment réprimée, a été relativement courte et le chef de l’État a finalement renoncé à son projet.
« Beaucoup de gens n’arrivent plus à joindre les deux bouts »

La situation économique du Sénégal est en revanche une des causes largement mise en avant par les chercheurs. Comme d’autres États dans le monde, l’inflation, liée notamment à la guerre en Ukraine, plombe l’économie du Sénégal. Le prix des matières premières s’envole. À titre d’exemple, un kg d’oignons se vendait environ 300 francs CFA (soit 0,46 centimes d’euros) avant la crise, contre 1 000 francs CFA (1,52 euros) aujourd’hui.

Les tarifs de l’électricité, aussi, s’emballent. Moustapha Kebe, responsable du Bureau d’accueil et d’orientation des Sénégalais de l’extérieur (BOAS) de Louga (nord du Sénégal), explique que sa facture a augmenté de 30 000 francs CFA par mois (soit 45 euros). « Le coût de la vie est de plus en plus chère, beaucoup de gens n’arrivent plus à joindre les deux bouts », signale le fonctionnaire.

Boubacar Seye, président de l’association Horizons sans frontières qui lutte contre l’immigration clandestine, partage la même analyse. Pour lui aussi, la situation économique du Sénégal explique en partie l’intensification des flux migratoires. Boubacar Seye assure que l’extrême pauvreté s’est accrue avec la pandémie de Covid-19. « La crise sanitaire a plombé toute l’économie du Sénégal et rien n’a été fait pour aider les gens. Depuis deux ans, le pays ne fonctionne plus », constate-t-il.

Le secteur informel, qui fait vivre la majorité de la population, a été touché de plein fouet par les restrictions liées au coronavirus. Les domaines du commerce ou de l’artisanat ne sont pas parvenus à se relever. Les jeunes, largement représentés dans les pirogues, ne trouvent pas de travail. Même ceux qui occupent un emploi pensent à partir, par peur du lendemain.

Jeudi en conseil des ministres, le chef de l’État Macky Sall « s’est incliné devant la mémoire des personnes décédées, suite aux récents accidents relevés en mer ». Il a « demandé au gouvernement d’intensifier les contrôles au niveau des zones et sites potentiels de départ, mais également de déployer l’ensemble des dispositifs de surveillance, de sensibilisation et d’accompagnement des jeunes » en renforçant les programmes publics « de lutte contre l’émigration clandestine ».

Ce lundi, le président sénégalais a de nouveau exprimé sa « douleur » face au nouveau drame survenu au large de Dakar.

▻https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/50585/senegal--au-moins-une-quinzaine-de-morts-dans-le-chavirement-dune-piro
#décès #mourir_aux_frontières #morts_aux_frontières #asile #migrations #mourir_en_mer #naufrage

Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t
▻https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

28 July 2023 - After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with people on the very impure Bluesky, where I had seen people casually talking about Mastodon being confusing and weird.

My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space.
what I did

I posted a question on Bluesky (link requires a login until the site comes out of closed beta) for people who had tried/used Mastodon and bounced off, asking what had led them to slow down or leave. I got about 500 replies, which I pulled out of the API as a JSON file by tweaking a bash script a nice stranger wrote up on the spot when I asked about JSON export, and then extracted just the content of the replies themselves, with no names/usernames, IDs, or other metadata attached. Then I dumped everything into a spreadsheet, spent an hour or so figuring out what kind of summary categories made sense, and then spent a few more hours rapidly categorizing up to two reasons for each response that contained at least one thing I could identify as a reason. (I used to do things like this at a very large scale professionally, so I’m reasonably good and also aware that this is super-subjective work.)

None of this is lab-conditions research—sorry, I meant NONE OF THIS IS LAB-CONDITIONS RESEARCH—and I hope it’s obvious that there are shaping factors at every step: I’m asking the question of people who found their way to Bluesky, which requires extra motivation during a closed beta; I heard only from people who saw my question and were motivated to answer it; I manually processed and categorized the responses.

I didn’t agonize over any of this, because my goal here isn’t to plonk down a big pristine block of research, but to offer a conversational glimpse into what real humans—who were motivated to try not one, but at least two alternatives to Twitter—actually report about their unsatisfactory experiences on Mastodon.

Lastly, I’ve intentionally done this work in a way that will, I hope, prove illegible and hostile to summary in media reports. It’s not for generalist reporters, it’s for the people doing the work of network and community building.

A note on my approach to the ~data and numbers: It would be very easy to drop a bunch of precise-looking numbers here, but that would, I think, misrepresent the work: If I say that I found at least one categorizable reason in 347 individual replies, that’s true, but it sounds reassuringly sciency. The truth is more like “of the roughly 500 replies I got, about 350 offered reasons I could easily parse out.” So that’s the kind of language I’ll be using. Also, I feel like quoting short excerpts from people’s public responses is fine, but sharing out the dataset, such as it is, would be weird for several reasons, even though people with a Bluesky login can follow the same steps I did, if they want.
got yelled at, felt bad

The most common—but usually not the only—response, cited as a primary or secondary reason in about 75 replies—had to do with feeling unwelcome, being scolded, and getting lectured. Some people mentioned that they tried Mastodon during a rush of people out of Twitter and got what they perceived as a hostile response.

About half of the people whose primary or secondary reasons fit into this category talked about content warnings, and most of those responses pointed to what they perceived as unreasonable—or in several cases anti-trans or racist—expectations for content warnings. Several mentioned that they got scolded for insufficient content warnings by people who weren’t on their instance. Others said that their fear of unintentionally breaking CW expectations or other unwritten rules of fedi made them too anxious to post, or made posting feel like work.

Excerpts:

Feels like you need to have memorized robert’s rules of the internet to post, and the way apparently cherished longtimers get hostile to new people
i wanted to post about anti-trans legislation, but the non-US people would immediately complain that US politics needed to be CWed because it “wasn’t relevant”
I don’t know where all the many rules for posting are documented for each instance, you definitely aren’t presented them in the account creation flow, and it seems like you have to learn them by getting bitched at
Constantly being told I was somewhat dim because I didn’t understand how to do things or what the unwritten rules were.
I posted a request for accounts to follow, the usual sort of thing, who do you like, who is interesting, etc. What I got was a series of TED Talks about how people like me were everything that was wrong with social media.
sooooooo much anxiety around posting. i was constantly second-guessing what needed to be hidden behind a CW
the fact that even on a science server, we were being badgered to put bug + reptile stuff behind a CW when many of our online presences are literally built around making these maligned animals seem cool and friendly was the last straw for me

What I take from this: There obviously are unwelcoming, scoldy people on Mastodon, because those people are everywhere. I think some of the scolding—and less hostile but sometimes overwhelming rules/norms explanation—is harder to deal with on Mastodon than other places because the people doing the scolding/explaining believe they have the true network norms on their side. Realistically, cross-instance attempts to push people to CW non-extreme content are a no-go at scale and punish the most sensitive and anxious new users the most. Within most instances, more explicit rules presented in visible and friendly ways would probably help a lot.

In my experience, building cultural norms into the tooling is much more effective and less alienating than chiding. The norm of using alt-text for images would be best supported by having official and third-party tools prompt for missing alt-text—and offer contextual help for what makes good alt text—right in the image upload feature. Similarly, instances with unusual CW norms would probably benefit from having cues built into their instance’s implementation of the core Mastodon software so that posters could easily see a list of desired CWs (and rationales) from the posting interface itself, though that wouldn’t help those using third-party apps. The culture side of onboarding is also an area that can benefit from some automation, as with bots on Slack or Discord that do onboarding via DM and taggable bots that explain core concepts on demand.
couldn’t find people or interests, people didn’t stay

A cluster of related reasons came in at #2, poor discoverability/difficulty finding people and topics to follow, #4, missing specific interests or communities/could only find tech, and #7, felt empty/never got momentum. I am treating each group as distinct because I think they’re about subtly but importantly different things, but if I combined them, they’d easily be the largest group of all.

It’s probably a measure of the overall technical/UX sophistication of the responding group that several people explicitly referred to “discoverability.”)

People in the “poor discoverability” group wrote about frustration with Mastodon features: how hard it was to find people and topics they wanted to follow, including friends they believed to already be on Mastodon. They frequently also said they were confused or put off by the difficulty of the cross-server following process as secondary reasons. Several people wrote about how much they missed the positive aspects of having an algorithm help bring new voices and ideas into their feeds, including those that they wouldn’t have discovered on their own, but had come to greatly value. Another group wrote about limited or non-functional search as a blocker for finding people, and also for locating topics—especially news events or specialist conversations.

The “missing specific interests or communities” group wrote about not finding lasting community—that the people and communities they valued most on Twitter either didn’t make it to Mastodon at all, or didn’t stick, or they couldn’t find them, leaving their social world still largely concentrated on Twitter even when they themselves made the move. Several also noted that tech conversations were easy to find on Mastodon, but other interests were much less so.

The “felt empty” group made an effort to get onto Mastodon, and in some cases even brought people over with them, but found themselves mostly talking into a void after a few weeks when their friends bailed for networks that better met their needs.

Excerpts:

For me, it was that Mastodon seemed to actively discourage discoverability. One of the things I loved most about Twitter was the way it could throw things in front of me that I never would have even thought to go look for on my own.
I feel like every time I try to follow a conversation there back to learn more about the poster I end up in a weirdly alien space, like the grocery store on the other side of town that’s laid out backwards
It seemed like it needed to pick a crowd, rather than discover new ones. Fewer chances at serendipity.
I also remember trying to follow instructions people posted about “simple” ways to migrate over your Twitter follows/Lists, & none of them really worked for me, & I got frustrated at how much time I was spending just trying to get things set up there so I wasn’t completely starting from scratch
Mastodon was too isolating. And the rules made me feel like the worst poster.
Quote-replies from good people giving funny/great information is how I decide are important follows.
Discoverability/self promo is limited & typing out 6 hashtags is annoying. # being in the actual posts clutter things (unlike cohost/insta).
Difficulty in finding new follows was high up for me. But even once I got that figured out, it was a pain to add new people to follow if they weren’t on my instance.
finding people you want to follow is hard enough. Adding in the fact that if you joined the wrong server you might never find them? Made it seem not worth the trouble.
I couldn’t really figure out how to find people and who was seeing what I posted; I was never sure if I had full visibility into that
the chief problem was an inability to find a) my friends from Twitter who were already there and b) new friends who had similar interests, both due to the bad search function
Just didn’t seem active enough to feel worth learning all the ins and outs.

What I take from this: Mastodon would be much friendlier and easier to use for more people if there were obvious, easy ways to follow friends of friends (without the copy-paste-search-follow dance). Beyond making that easier, Mastodon could highlight it during onboarding.

Making it easy to search for and find and follow people—those who haven’t opted out of being found—would also be tremendous help in letting people rebuild their networks not just when coming from elsewhere, but in the not-that-rare case of instances crashing, shutting down, or being defederated into oblivion, especially since automatic migration doesn’t always work as intended.

Missing replies also feed into this problem, by encouraging duplicate responses instead of helping people find their way into interesting conversations and notes—a social pattern that several people mentioned as something they prize on more conversationally fluent networks.
too confusing, too much work, too intimidating

The next big cluster includes group #3, too confusing/too much work getting started, group #5, felt siloed/federation worked badly, and group #7, instance selection was too hard/intimidating.

A lot of people in the responding group found the process of picking an instance, signing up, and getting set up genuinely confusing. Others understood how to do it, but found it to be too time-consuming, or too much work for an uncertain return on investment. A couple of people had so many technical errors getting signed up to their first instance that they gave up. Several mentioned that they were so flooded with tips, guides, and instructions for doing Mastodon right that it seemed even more confusing.

Many found the idea and practice of federation to be confusing, offputting, or hostile; they cited difficulties in selecting the “right” instance and shared stories about ending up on an obviously wrong one and then losing their posts or having migration technically fail when they moved. Several explicitly used the words “silo” or “siloed” to describe how they felt trying to find people who shared their interests and also, I think crucially, people who didn’t share special interests, but who would be interesting to follow anyway. (This is obviously intimately tied to discoverability.)

Several brought up patchwork federation and unexpected or capricious defederation. Side conversations sprang up over how difficult people found it to pigeonhole themselves into one interest or, conversely, manage multiple accounts for multiple facets of their lives.

Excerpts:

My Twitter friends joined various Mastodon servers that didn’t talk to each other and I gave up on trying to figure it out.
I’m tech savvy and have found mastodon simply opaque. I’ve set up 4 accounts, each on a different server, and don’t know how to amalgamate all the people I’m following everywhere (assuming all those servers federate with each other).
It was the thing where people had to make whole twitter threads just to explain how to sign up
the federation model is a mess and it’s impossible to use. i’ve been using computers all day every day since the 90s and mastodon makes me question whether i’m actually good at them
discovered I was on some kind of different continent from my friends, and could not follow them, nor they me. Immediately felt frustration and disgust and never looked back.
I’m tech savvy and have found mastodon simply opaque. I’ve set up 4 accounts, each on a different server, and don’t know how to amalgamate all the people I’m following everywhere
I was told picking a server didn’t matter. Then it turned out it actually mattered a great deal for discoverability. Then I’m told ‘migrating is easy’, which is just a straight up lie.
Just 100 tiny points of friction for little return

What I take from this: I agree with these people, and I think all fedi projects meant for a broad audience should focus on fixing these problems.
too serious, too boring, anti-fun

People in this category talked about a seriousness that precluded shitposting or goofiness, and a perceived pressure to stay on topic and be earnest at all times.

It felt like the LinkedIn version of Twitter - just didn’t have any fun there
It feels overly earnest and humorless — I don’t consider myself a particularly weird or ironic poster but I want some of those people around saying funny stuff, you know?
And in the occasional moments where I do feel like being a little silly & humorous, I want to be in a crowd that will accept that side of me rather than expecting a constant performance of seriousness!
it just didn’t have as much fun or joy as early Twitter and Bluesky
ultimately, I just bounced off of the culture, because it wasn’t banter-y and fun. It feels too much like eating your vegetables.

What I take from this: Honestly, I think this is the most obvious culture clash category and is less something that needs to be directly addressed and more something that will ease with both growth and improved discoverability, which will help people with compatible social styles find each other. I think the other piece of this is probably the idea of organizing people into interest-based instances, which I think is fundamentally flawed, but that’s a subject for another time.
complicated high-stakes decisions

There’s a meta conversation that is probably unavoidable, and that I’d rather have head-on than in side conversations. It’s about what we should let people have, and it shapes the discourse (and product decisions) about features like quote posts, search, and custom feeds/algorithms—things that are potentially central in addressing some of the problems people raised in their replies to my question on Bluesky.

Broadly speaking, in the landscape around and outside of the big corporate networks, there are two schools of thought about these kinds of potentially double-edged features.

The first, which I’ll call Health First, prefers to omit the features and affordances that are associated with known or potential antisocial uses. So: no quote-posts or search because they increase the attack surface afforded to griefers and nurture the viral dynamics that drive us all into a sick frenzy elsewhere. No custom algorithms because algorithms have been implemented on especially Facebook and YouTube in ways that have had massive and deeply tragic effects, including literal genocide affecting a million adults and children in Myanmar whose lives are no less real than yours or mine.

The second, which I’ll call Own Your Experience, states that people, not software, are responsible for networked harms, and places the burden of responsible use on the individual and the cultural mechanisms through which prosocial behavior is encouraged and antisocial behavior is throttled. So: yes to quote-posts and search and custom feeds, and just block or defederate anyone using them to do already banned things, like harassment or abuse or the kind of speech that, given the right conditions, ignites genocide.

A thing I think about all the time is the research showing that people would literally rather self-administer painful electrical shocks than be bored. You can make the most virtuous and intentionally non-harmful network in the world, but if it doesn’t feel alive, most people will pick something worse instead.

At their simplest, I don’t like either of these positions, though they both get some things right. The Own Your Experience school doesn’t really grapple with the genuinely terrifying dynamics of mass-scale complex systems. And I don’t think the Health First school has come to terms with the fact that in an non-authoritarian society, you can’t make people choose networks that feel like eating their vegetables over the ones that feel like candy stores. Even most people who consciously seek out ethically solid options for their online lives aren’t going to tolerate feeling isolated from most of their peers and communities, which is what happens when a network stays super niche.

From where I stand, there are no obvious or easy answers…which means that people trying to make better online spaces and tools must deal with a lot of difficult, controversial answers.

If I had to pick a way forward, I’d probably define a target like, “precisely calibrated and thoughtfully defanged implementations of double-edged affordances, grounded in user research and discussions with specialists in disinformation, extremist organizing, professional-grade abuse, emerging international norms in trust & safety, and algorithimic toxicity.”

If that sounds like the opposite of fun DIY goofing around on the cozy internet, it is. Doing human networks at mass scale isn’t a baby game, as the moral brine shrimp in charge of the big networks keep demonstrating. Running online communities comes with all kinds of legal and ethical obligations, and fediverse systems are currently on the back foot with some of the most important ones (PDF).
this post is too long, time to stop

Right now, Mastodon is an immense achievement—a janky open-source project with great intentions that has overcome highly unfavorable odds to get to this point and is experiencing both growing pains and pressure to define its future. If I were Eugen Rochko, I would die of stress.

I don’t know if Mastodon can grapple with the complexities of mass scale. Lots of people would prefer it didn’t—staying smaller and lower-profile makes it friendly to amateur experimentation and also a lot safer for people who need to evade various kinds of persecution. But if Mastodon and other fedi projects do take on the mass scale, their developers must consider the needs of people who aren’t already converts. That starts by asking a lot of questions and then listening closely and receptively to the answers you receive.

#Mastodon #réseaux_sociaux #internet

[vide&co] Poux-voir #24
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/vide-co/poux-voir

https://www.radiopanik.org/media/cache/65/f0/65f09c95da329152e2481f351d8d219f.jpg

Dans le creux du cratère de la colère, la lave s’écoule des heures de labeur avec le corps trop usé trop fatigué trop répété ; il ne peut plus. Il se sent comme dans un sas duquel il ne peut plus sortir, il ressasse alors sa longue carcasse jusqu’à l’aube de la fin du monde. Quand les seules races de charognards resteront. vautours, chats, gros dinosaures ou encore requins, grignotent beaucoup plus les bouts de chaires qu’ils ne rongent les os. Pour en faire quoi ? Un château d’os ? Et si être enfant ou adulte n’était pas important ? Et si réconcilier les deux, c’était ça le vrai pouvoir ? Quant au vouloir, celui-ci s’est barré de l’autre côté du pont et attend de se motiver à retraverser la Manche, la Méditerranée à pieds ou à la nage, la cafetière, le monastère, le repère. Tout ce qui apprtera avec le (...)

▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/vide-co/poux-voir_16244__1.mp3

[Indiedrome] Indiedrome du 1/8/2023
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/indiedrome/indiedrome-du-182023

Cray - 4Mari « VA. 3 Year Itch Birthday Session v.2 » (Modulisme)

Alan Courtis : #2 « Buchla - Guitar » (Firework Edition)

Alberto Boccardi : Arenaria 2 « Petra » (Room 40)

Alberto Boccardi:La testa cade a piombo « Petra » (Room 40)

Mads Emil Nielsen + Chromacolor : #2 « Constellation » (Arbitrary)

Cole Peters : Reassertion « A Certain Point Of Inertia » (Room 40)

Jana Irmert : Stratum « What Happens At Night » (Fabrique)

▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/indiedrome/indiedrome-du-182023_16239__1.mp3

[Daydream Nation] POST #dour FESTIVAL #2023
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/daydream-nation/post-dour-festival-2023

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Daydream Nation est partie à la conquête de #dour_festival le samedi 15 et dimanche 16 juillet, et a ramené quelques petits micro-trottoirs sympa avec les interventions des zicos d’Infected, de Fitz Roy, de Warm Exit, Cosa Mentale et du photographe Ralfagram et de notre camarade Vincent de RCV Lille.

Et au programme de ce podcast, une petite sélec de groupes qui seraient bien à Dour en 2024... Sans oublier ceux des micro-trottoirs !

1. Les dernières 10 secondes de Wyatt E. - Dour 2023 2. Micro-trottoir avec PL d’Infected - Dour 2023 3. La Bestia de Gevaudan - Caracal (le 24/08/23 au Café Central) 4. Fitz Roy - Glorify 5. Avant dEUS sous la pluie avec François de Fitz Roy et les copains - Dour 2023 6. dEUS - Roses (was at Dour 2023) 7. Billions Of Comrades feat. Mike Watt - Our Hours 8. Naked (...)

#dour,2023,dour_festival
▻https://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/daydream-nation/post-dour-festival-2023_16233__1.mp3