Hello there! I know today’s MashUp is really late and honestly, there isn’t that much news to report on. A quick run down of all the daily newspapers reveal that the most pressing issues on everybody’s mind is of course the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Iran sanctions, the North/South Korea conflict and for the rest of world outside of North America, the World Cup.
I did, however, come across this interesting piece from Vue Weekly, and the Tyee which aren’t of my usual sources for human rights news (although it will be now–bloggers are awesome!). The two interesting stories found this week came from Vue Weekly and the Tyee respectively.
No Easy Answers: Somali-Albertans face barriers to necessary services
Vue Weekly has a really excellent article on the challenges faced by Somali-Albertans (although this is really more like a Somali-Canadian issue) in particular regard to a) the disturbingly high murder-rate of Somali-Canadian youths and b) the lack of political motivation to actually do anything about it. The crux of the article is this:
Somali-Canadian youth who are being murdered are not immigrants but rather Canadians of Somali descent (technically, second generation immigrants although this would imply that they immigrated with their parents and sometimes this is not the case), which makes the murders a “Canadian” problem not an “immigrant/Somali”problem. It also means that a lot of services that the government puts into place for situations like this, i.e. extra support for immigrant children, ESL classes etc, don’t apply to these youth because they are Canadian born. But the systemic racism and the implicit/tacit lack of opportunities for youth whose parents might still be struggling, hampers the ability to recognize the issue as a systemic racist one as opposed to an immigrant issue.
This article is well worth the read, especially on its call to action on creating a task force to research the causes and solutions to why Somali-Canadian youths are so susceptible.
What do we owe our Guest Workers?
The Tyee article focuses on the issue of temporary foreign workers, which has fallen off the media radar since the recession began in late 2008. There is no denying that a considerable number of temporary foreign workers have been abused by the Canadian bureaucracies, employers and others, facing systemic racism. The Tyee article looks over the debate on whether or not foreign temporary workers should be allowed to stay and what the barriers are regarding their employment terms, their situation and what needs to be done to rectified to make this more just (if that is possible).
That’s it for your Friday MashUp. It’s going to be a busy weekend in Edmonton, seeing as how the Pride Parade is tomorrow so hopefully the weather stays nice and we’ll see you next week!
