The Forced Migration Count

Kelly O'Donnell and Kathleen Newland, both of the Migration Policy Institute, have just released a new report on the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. The facts and figures are grim:
► Between September and December 2007, over 45,000 Iraqis returned from Syria to Iraq. Almost 70 percent returned not because of improved security, but because they could not afford to live in Syria, as they faced stricter visa policies and difficulty finding work.
► As reported here, Syria introduced visa restrictions for Iraqis in October 2007. Prior to these restrictions, an estimated 2,000 Iraqis entered Syria each day. Jordan closed its borders in 2005, and Saudi Arabia is building a 560-mile border fence with Iraq to keep out undocumented immigrants. In Lebanon, Iraqis have no legal status; the government detains them indefinitely until they agree to return to Iraq.
► Of an estimated 2.2 million externally displaced, only 5,000 Iraqis had been resettled in third countries by December 2007. Although the United States allocated space for 7,000 Iraqi refugees and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) referred over 10,000 Iraqis to the U.S., only 1,608 Iraqis were resettled to the United States during fiscal year 2007.
► Iraqi asylum claims in the 36 industrialized countries that report data to UNHCR more than doubled in the first six months of 2007 compared to the first six months of 2006.
► UNHCR estimates that 60,000 Iraqis per month, or just over 80 people each hour, are being displaced within Iraq.
► Due to restrictions on internal movement within Iraq, many of the 2.3 million internally displaced are forced to return to neighborhoods plagued by the sectarian violence they were trying to flee. Former employees of the US government are particularly at risk. (photo credits here and here)
In the words of Newland (right) and O'Donnell, "the international response to the humanitarian crisis resulting from the war in Iraq is, thus far, wholly inadequate . . . [U]rgent action, beginning today, is needed to build toward an enduring, comprehensive solution . ..."
'Nuff said.

On January 25, ...

... 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London. She grew up in a literary household -- her father was an editor who once had been married to the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the novel Vanity Fair. After studying at Kings College she became part of the Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and took his surname to become Virginia Woolf (right). Under that name she would write many novels and other works. Personal favorite: her 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own," "a discussion of women’s writing and its historical economic and social underpinning." Afflicted with psychiatric disorders throughout her life, she died in 1941, drowning herself in a river near her country home.
... 1996, a judge in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, awarded a judgment of $750,000 to Leilani Muir, 50, whom the province's Eugenics Board had sterilized without her knowledge in 1959. Having spent her early life in foster homes, the orphan Muir was placed at age 10 (below right) in the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives, where she was "declared a "moron"" -- as it turned out, a false diagnosis -- "and approved for sterilization." Then a teenager, Muir was told the surgery was for removal of her appendix; only later in life did she learned she had been sterilized. Her successful lawsuit opened the door to many more such actions. This Alberta heritage website elaborates on the extent of the province's sterilization program during the 20th century:

Many thousands of people endured similar experiences under Alberta's Sterilization Act. In 1928, Alberta became one of two provinces and twenty-eight states in North America to pass such legislation. The Act was based on the principals of eugenics, meaning "good birth". It was believed that if only those people with desirable genes bore children, the human race as a whole would improve. The Alberta government and pressure groups including the United Farm Women of Alberta sought to limit the reproduction of many kinds of people, including visible minorities and the "feeble-minded". They attributed much of the rise of crime, poverty, alcoholism and other vices to these people.
Almost 3 000 people were sterilized under Alberta's Sterilization Act. Many more were not released because they would not consent to sterilization. Even in 1972, the year the Act was finally repealed, fifty-five people were sterilized for their "danger of transmission to the progeny of mental deficiency" and for being "incapable of intelligent parenthood".

For readers in the United States, the case calls to mind the similar challenge that Carrie Buck (left) brought before the Supreme Court in 1927. Her unsuccessful suit prompted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to comment on behalf of 8 of the Court's 9 Justices: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."