America, the deeply troubled superpower – TheCable

In less than two months from now Americans will vote in presidential elections considered by many as a Hobson’s choice. Donald Trump, the erratic and abrasive incumbent President from the ruling Republican Party (the Grand Old Party, GOP) will come up against former Vice President Joe Biden the avuncular, everyone’s favourite joke figure of the American political establishment, representing the opposition Democratic Party.

It is a Hobson’s choice because while many Americans, including even those who voted enthusiastically for President Trump four years ago want to see him walk the plank, there are however deep seated misgivings about how America will fare under a Joe Biden presidency. President Trump has proven to be a divisive figure to the mosaic of races, cultures and interests that make up America. And to many around the world, he sums up the perfect picture of the central character in the novel “The Ugly American” by Graham Greene. Trump’s brash ways (some would say unpresidential ways) in pursuit of America’s international interests against both America’s allies and opponents alike has resulted in a growing negative perception of the country in the world.
But in Joe Biden and his unserious, gaffe-prone ways, discerning Americans do not see him as the perfect fit to help redirect America from the looming abyss of potential self-destruction internally, and continuing loss of influence externally.

This existential leadership crisis could not have come at a most inopportune time for America. As the country faces unrelenting challenges to its global leadership position by emerging powers like China, Russia, Turkey, North Korea and Iran, there is to be seen a corresponding widening in the existential fault lines of the American society.

In the International scene, President Trump’s response to this is to ramp up America’s China containment policy by deploying aggressive economic, commercial, military and strategic measures calculated to remind China that America will not accept being knocked off its perch as the preeminent global power.

A similar message is being sent across to Russia although Trump probably careful of his alleged untoward connections to Russia has prudently allowed the phalanx of Generals and apparatchiks in the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and NATO to take the lead in this regard.
Internally under President Trump, the response to the challenge to America’s global pre-eminence is to pander to the viewpoint of extreme groups and forces that attribute the country’s problems to the non-white racial groups whose very image and values they consider as anathema to the foundational values of America.

As so happens when America faces existential challenges from abroad, the resort to look for scapegoats internally kicks in. In the Trump era, it is the African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans prominently and other non-white Americans who are racially profiled and targeted by extremist white groups. Encouraged by President Trump’s tendentious statements about people of colour these groups, who style themselves the defenders of the moral values of America, take it upon themselves to perpetrate these actions. This is a throwback to the days of the so called ‘’Red scare’’ in the early 1940s when America faced with a communist challenge, began to look for communists everywhere leading to the arrest, imprisonment and sentencing to death of prominent Americans suspected in this regard. There was even a committee of so called “UnAmerican activities’’ in the US Senate headed by Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin which was detailed to handle what came later to be admitted as unfair witch hunt of fellow Americans driven mainly by vindictiveness.

Essentially America faces these existential contradictions principally because from its beginnings, America has held itself to the world as an ideal and last frontier of freedom and equality of man. But even with these ringing proclamations at its foundation America was unabashedly a republic govern by consideration of the racial and cultural origins of its population. Among the white population of America, pride of place went to those who traced their origins to northern Europe with Protestantism as their faith. The Irish who are Catholics in the main, Italians who are both Catholic and of southern European origin like Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese, Poles and other people of East European origins, were all discriminated against and considered not American enough to deserve the full graces of the new republic of freedom and equality.

In a number of ways this has persisted to this day. During the presidential campaigns between the senior George Bush and Governor Michael Dukakis, there were adverts alluding to the fact that being of Greek origin, the highly cerebral Dukakis less deserved to be President than George Bush whose forebears were from England and Netherlands.

As for Africans who were slaves then working in various plantations across America, there was a debate as to whether they were even deserving of being considered and accorded the right to be called humans.

Since its founding to date, America has been facing the contradiction between the ideal it set itself out to be and its existential reality. Being an intrinsically embedded feature in its DNA, I do not think America will ever be able to overcome its racialist contradictions. Racism is more American than apple pie and just as it played a prominent part in the formation and sustenance of America over the years, it is also one of the factors that will eventually and inevitably see to the collapse of America.

On the global scene, it is clear that American policy planners did not consider the script on the rise and fall of empires when America emerged as the global superpower after the Second World War. If they did, they would have realised that America as global superpower was not going to last ad infinitum. Even when the Soviet Empire its competitor for global influence collapsed as a result of internal and external contradictions in late 1980s, the lessons were lost on American policy planners. On that occasion, Henry Kissinger and Francis Fukuyama, in a moment of unrestrained exultation declared that the end result of all struggles of mankind from evolution to our contemporary world had ended in favour of America which should be seen as the pinnacle of political, social and economic attainment of mankind.

The rise of new global powers and the corresponding decline in American global influence brings home the lessons of the rise and fall of empires and America is bound to follow suit eventually. Neither Rump nor Biden as president can stop that.

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New U.K. survey: 4% of Catholics will not return to church after pandemic

MANCHESTER, England (CNS) — Only a small minority of British Catholics said they would not return to worship in church when the coronavirus pandemic is fully over, according to a new survey.

Just 4% of people interviewed in the study, conducted between May 19 and July 26, said they would abandon going to church when restrictions are finally lifted.

The findings of the poll of 2,500 people by Catholic Voices, a group set up in the U.K. in 2010 to improve communications between the church and the media, contradict the predictions of some Catholics that the COVID-19 crisis would irrevocably accelerate the decline of collective worship among the faithful.

Brenden Thompson, CEO of Catholic Voices, said he was “pleasantly surprised by many of the findings.”

“Catholics miss their parishes and church buildings and seem eager to return, not just content with ‘virtual church,'” he said in a statement.

“Many, it seems, by and large, have backed the bishops, been grateful for the efforts of clergy to livestream, and many have even felt at times closer to God and been more prayerful than usual,” he said.

“That said, the challenges ahead are real, so if we want to capitalize on this goodwill, we need to start thinking seriously about the conversations that need to happen as more and more begin returning to parishes,” he added.

                        <aside><hr/><hr/></aside><!--Ad2--><!--Ad2-->In early September, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, president of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union, said many Catholics in Europe would not return to Mass or parish activities once the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, which demonstrates the urgency of a new evangelization based on Catholics actually living their faith.

The British study revealed that 93% of those interviewed worshipped by watching Mass online during lockdown via streams provided largely by dioceses and parish churches, and that 66% appreciated the virtual services.

But 61% of those interviewed said they wished to revert to regular Mass attendance when the churches fully reopened, with 35% saying they would worship online only occasionally at that point — if the service remained available.

“It seems that virtual worship during the lockdown has been generally well received,” said the study, published Sept. 9.

“While it may remain something that some people might dip into in the future, few would stop attending church altogether,” it said.

In a statement, Catholic Voices said the study, called “Coronavirus, Church & You,” was intended to explore the experience of the lockdown of both clergy and laity.

It found that 61% agreed that the temporary closure of churches was right. Results showed 80% agreed church buildings were essential to “faith witness” and 84% disagreed with the statement that church buildings were an unnecessary burden and expense.

A total of 53% said they believe the Catholic Church had responded well to the crisis, compared to just 22% who offered the same opinion for the performance of the government.

Nearly two-thirds of Catholics had some contact with clergy during lockdown, the survey found, while exactly half of those interviewed said the crisis made them feel closer to God. More than 50% said the lockdown made them more prayerful.

The survey was carried out by Francis Davis of the University of Birmingham, Andrew Village of York St. John University and Leslie Francis of the University of Warwick.

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A journey into Europe’s “dreamer” generation

“Why do you sound so British?” the immigration officer asked 15-year-old Ijeoma Moore as she followed orders to pack her and her 10-year-old brother’s clothes. Officers had entered their North London home as they were eating breakfast that morning in 2010, getting ready to leave for school. “Because I am British,” the teenager retorted. 

What else could she be? She had lived in the UK since she was two years old. She loves tea and toast, the Royal family and “stupid telly.” But technically, Moore was an undocumented migrant. Her Mum had been sinking money into application after application to the Home Office, but they had all been rejected. 

Moore was bundled into the back of the officers’ van with her brother and Dad. Still wearing her school uniform, she felt like she was watching someone else’s life on TV. They were taken to an immigration detention centre, where she narrowly avoided deportation three times until their father was sent to Nigeria and the children were released to foster care. “I had to grow up really quick and become like a Mum to my brother,” Moore says. 

A decade later, Moore is still not a British citizen. Unless the rules change again, or she runs out of money to pay the soaring fees, or she loses a document from the required stack of evidence, or the Home Office does, she will officially become British when she turns 33 — 31 years after she arrived in the UK and picked up a cockney accent at an East London nursery. 

Europe’s Dreamers 

In the UK and across the rest of Europe, millions of young people who grew up feeling British or French or Italian or just European, live in a state of limbo, the threat of deportation hanging over them. 

In the US, they are known as the “dreamers.” Over two decades, a movement led by young undocumented youth has become associated with the American Dream, winning broad public and bipartisan political support. While the DREAM Act, which would give them legal status, has languished in Congress since 2001, many received temporary protection from deportation under the Obama Administration’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme. “They are American in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper,” Obama said at the time.

Europe has its own “dreamer” generation, but their stories are largely unknown. Across the continent, public fear of and draconian measures toward undocumented migrants are fueled by perceptions of a faceless mass of short-term opportunists.  It is not well understood that the majority of Europe’s undocumented population are young people*, many of whom grew up in Europe, some of whom were even born here. 

Over the coming weeks, we will profile these European dreamers and investigate the policies that trap them in an undocumented limbo. On their 18th birthday, they are barred from working or going to university, from traveling or voting, and face the real and present risk of detention or deportation. Some live from one temporary permit to the next, in fear of losing them. Others have scant prospect of ever being allowed to stay legally. 

Tired of being invisible, some of Europe’s dreamers are risking everything to speak out about their immigration status and build a movement that echoes America’s dreamers incalling for a future for themselves in Europe.

Inspired by America

Ijeoma Moore’s first trip abroad after getting a temporary, renewable immigration status in 2015 called “Limited Leave to Remain” (LLR) was to Houston, Texas. Hundreds of undocumented young activists were gathering for ameeting of the largest network of dreamers in the US, United We Dream. Moore had come with British campaign Let Us Learn, supported by the charity Just for Kids Law, which was inspired by a visit from a founding American dreamer two years earlier.

“The idea behind the dreamers putting themselves at the forefront is that you can deny figures and statistics but you can’t deny that I experienced this in this way,” said co-founder Chrisann Jarrett. Head girl and school debating champion, Jarrett was headed to LSE to study law until she was informed she was a foreign student. She was confused — her family came from Jamaica when she was eight — but the Home Office appeared to have lost her paperwork.  

Moore and Jarrett’s lives were changed by a tightening of immigration rules over the past decade, which not only saw them initially refused student loans and made to pay international fees, but also extended waiting periods to apply for citizenship to 10 or even 20 years; more than tripled the associated fees; and slashed legal aid to help families navigate the new rules. “I felt like every time I took a step forward I had to take 10 steps back,” says Dami Makinde. (Last year, she and Jarrett launched a new, independent organisation called We Belong).

And so Britain’s hostile environment – rebranded as the “compliant environment” – undermined its own stated goal: reducing the undocumented population.  “They not only made it harder to live here if you’re illegal, they made it much harder to go from being illegal to legal,” says Anita Hurrell, head of the Coram Children’s Legal Centre’s migrant rights project. “Even if you’ve got a strong claim to stay, you can’t get to the next stage. It seems to increase illegality.”

After she returned from Texas, Moore told the story of her detention and struggles to get legal status in front of thousands of people attending hustings for the 2016 London Mayoral election. “Ijeoma, you are a Londoner,” Sadiq Khan, the eventual victor, told her. Moore was elated. But it meant even more to her that her Mum was there. They are close, but had not talked much about her detention. “Your parents are going through the same thing and you don’t want to feel like you’re more of a burden on them by sharing so many emotions, or that you’re ungrateful” Moore said. During the coronavirus pandemic, she’s been calling her Mum daily. “Have you touched anything?” Moore grills her Mum, a carer and security guard who is classified as a key worker. “Have you eaten?”

Born in Europe

Europe’s undocumented children are not all migrants, but also children born in Europe to migrant parents. Like Giannis Antetokounmpo, the nearly 7-foot-tall international basketball star affectionately known as the “Greek freak.” He was among tens of thousands of children born in Greece effectively excluded from citizenship because of their parents until reforms in 2015. It had taken nine years of advocacy by Generation 2.0, a movement led by second-generation immigrants. They’re still campaigning, as Greek-born children are still falling through gaps in the law, or face years waiting for papers in some localities. 

In Italy, similar efforts have been repeatedly blocked amid a fierce backlash by right-wing nativists. “When we started speaking out, MPs and political leaders looked at us as if we were martians,” said Paula Baudet Vivanco, the impassioned spokesperson of Italiani Senza Cittadinanza (Italians Without Citizenship).  Vivanco arrived in Italy aged seven  in the early 1980s, after her Chilean dissident parents escaped the regime of Augusto Pinochet. When she became a journalist, she was classified as a foreign correspondent. Vivanco did not obtain Italian citizenship until she was 33. “They didn’t know we existed: that there were adults who had grown up in Italy, lived through all these situations, and were claiming their rights,” she said. “But Italy is our country.”

Finding Family

Europe’s dreamers also include children who arrived alone and began to feel at home for the first time in their lives, only to be cast out by immigration rules. Like Shiro [name changed], who was abused by every family she had known since being trafficked into domestic slavery from Ethiopia to the Gulf and then the UK. The UK passed internationally-lauded anti-slavery legislation in 2015, but it does not protect trafficking survivors from deportation. 

For three years, Shiro could not convince the Home Office she was a child; the age on her passport had been forged to facilitate her trafficking. It was a dark period of her life. She lived with “scary” people, could not register for English classes and was terrified of being returned to Ethiopia.  Now she has joined a group of trafficking survivors who campaign with the charity ECPACT UK (Every Child Protected Against Trafficking) for a path to immigration status. “We all have no family, but we can share our stories with each other,” she said. “We have to stand up for each other, we don’t have any other option.” 

The Regularization Taboo

Last November, United We Dream co-founder Cristina Jiménez met with young undocumented activists in Ireland who’d started the campaign Young, Paperless and Powerful in 2015. They had won overwhelming public sympathy and support from across the political spectrum. Earlier that month, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar compared them to American dreamers. “They have grown up here and speak with Dublin, Cork or Donegal accents,” he said. “They will not be deported.” But he was careful to stress that Ireland would not offer amnesty to the undocumented . “It has been agreed at EU level that there will not be amnesties,” he said. (Since then, inconclusive elections have put reforms on hold.)

Tired of being invisible, some of Europe’s dreamers are risking everything to speak out about their immigration status and build a movement that echoes America’s dreamers incalling for a future for themselves in Europe.

For over a decade, amnesty has been a dirty word in Brussels. In the 10 years leading up to 2008, as many as 6 million undocumented migrants were granted a legal right to remain in European countries through measures to “regularise” their status, before a backlash made regularization a political taboo.  Some European countries have quietly proceeded regardless. In Spain — which launched Europe’s last large-scale regularisation in 2005 — grassroots groups have mounted a new campaign in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. 

The crisis is teaching us “you can’t afford to neglect people who are vulnerable: if you don’t treat the whole population, then the whole population will suffer,” said Michele LeVoy, director of the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants. “This pandemic has given more visibility to those who are really the most vulnerable in society.”

In Belgium, campaigners are hoping to reprise a campaign led by undocumented youth, who took to the streets in 2013 calling themselves the Kids Parlement. “It would have higher chances of success than a campaign for the regularisation of all sans-papiers,” said lawyer Selma Benkhelifa, who is considered the movement’s “godmother”. 

European advocates insist undocumented children should have a route to legal status that is independent of their parents, without exorbitant fees, minimum income thresholds, or bureacratic hurdles. It should be based on the child’s “best interests” and time spent in the country during the formative years of their life. “Just three years is already a long time in the life of a child,” says LeVoy.

Deporting the Dreamers

In the summer of 2017, hundreds of young Afghans camped out in one of Stockholm’s main squares for almost two months to protest deportation of children to Afghanistan. They called themselves Ung I Sverige (Young in Sweden). “We want to build a life here and make this country stronger,” their mission statement reads. 

That summer, Nabi Eskanderi swam as often as he could. The 17-year-old grew up in an arid region of land-locked Afghanistan. Finding himself surrounded by water on the Swedish island of Öland, he took swimming lessons. Eskanderi came to Sweden by land and sea in 2015. He had fled Afghanistan for his life when he accidentally damaged a Quran. After his asylum application was rejected, swimming helped him sleep at night. 

One day at the pool, he asked a girl if she wanted to join a game of water volleyball. They became friends, and things slowly grew serious. Eskanderi met Jennifer’s parents, then grandparents. He went to stay with them for Christmas and was thrilled to be included in family meals and gift-giving. 

The Ung I Sverige protests didn’t stop deportations to Afghanistan. Eskanderi was at his girlfriend’s house when the police arrived. They reassured her he would be released soon. But after a few weeks in detention, he was put on a flight to Afghanistan. The Afghan mountains and desert made him for Sweden’s seas, trees and flat landscape. It was the first time he had ever been to Kabul. After four years in Sweden, he missed the bathrooms and the traffic laws, the stable internet and liberal attitudes to religion. 

This was not a homecoming. He went into virtual hiding, in a shared house supported by Swedish activists. It is still too dangerous to return to his family; even in Kabul he fears suspicions and hostility towards people returning from Europe. He gets upset when Jennifer tells him how much she misses him. They talk about whether she could help him get a visa to return, but Eskanderi doubts Swedish immigration authorities would allow that. If nothing else works, he wonders how to make enough money to pay a smuggler. 

“I changed a lot in Sweden, I felt I belonged to that society,” he said. “Even though many people wanted me to stay in Sweden — they even called me part of their family — there was nothing I could do, and no one could help me.” 

Francesca Spinelli and Giacomo Zandonini contributed reporting.