Not long ago, the world awoke to the news that BioNtech, the German bio-tech company, has developed a successful COVID-19 vaccine. The owners, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, are proud “Prussian Turks,” or German citizens of Turkish descent. Both are the children of Turkish migrants, according to the Guardian. It’s unclear if the pair’s parents came through the official German guest worker program, which brought hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens to Germany to work in various industries. The program was supposed to be temporary, but many guest workers stayed on.
Citizenship and Nationalism in Germany
Until 1999, however, German nationality law locked Turkish immigrants out of German citizenship. German law rejected the idea of Germany as a nation of immigration. In 1999, legal reforms offered a pathway to naturalization for immigrants who could establish they could integrate into German society. Children born in Germany to long term residents automatically became German citizens until they turned 23, when they must opt for German citizenship. The children of Turkish immigrants do not have the right to dual citizenship, forcing them to choose, and loss of their German passports was automatic. As a result, almost 50,000 German Turks lost their German nationality when they turned 23. The question of national identity in Germany continues to be fraught, particularly today with the resurgence of the German far right. …
The UK government plans to banish people to an island where “nothing makes sense”…
Ascension island today is known among botanists as an island taken over by invasive species and among space buffs as a former, possible landing place for the space shuttle. As the BBC reports, nobody lives there permanently. The island burst into the news this week as the UK government announced it was considering an Australia-style immigrant prison on the island. Outrage ensued, but unfortunately, as long as Australia’s “deterrence system” of immigrant prisons appears to be successful, other wealthy countries will see torturing immigrants as a way to deter immigration. …
Media executives were charged with incitement in Rwanda and Nuremberg — what about today?
Following the conclusion by the International Court of Justice that Myanmar is committing genocide, the International Criminal Court continues to collect evidence for trial. The ICC is looking at generals and other high-level persons in the Myanmar government. Yet genocides are not created only by soldiers and politicians. The media plays a critical role in disseminating genocidal content and indoctrinating communities in genocidal thinking. Charges were brought against both the creators and those responsible for the dissemination of genocidal content at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Nuremberg trials. …
Update: A Federal Judge has now blocked the order: https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20441250-sdny-icc-eo-preliminary-injunction
This week, the Trump Administration announced sanctions against the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, and the head of one of the Court’s divisions, Phakiso Mochochoko. The sanctions block their financial assets and prohibiting US citizens from “having any dealings with them.”
Such sanctions are normally used for criminals and terrorists. Using them against a court is the international relations equivalent of a horse head in a bed. …
Some Things Are a Matter of Debate…But Others Are Made-Up Nonsense. Can the media tell the difference?
For years now, some conservative think tanks have hired armies of so-called “legal experts” to create fog around the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. The point of this fog is not to educate the public on constitutional law, or clear up mistakes in constitutional interpretation, but to cast doubt on the legitimacy of citizenship for millions of Americans. The media can choose to participate in these efforts, or it can just stop.
The 14th Amendment says that:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. …
The Right to Enter Your Country is a Founding Principle of Citizenship
For something so important to the lives of so many, there is a remarkable level of disagreement about what citizenship is. Is it a status? A package of rights and duties? The International Court of Justice says its “a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection…,” whatever that means. Philosophers and lawyers have been arguing about what citizenship forever, but for the rest of us, citizenship means belonging to a community, a passport so we can come and go and, for many, voting. A lot of experts do agree on one thing. No matter what citizenship is, being a citizen means that you have the right to enter and reside in your country of citizenship. …
Since the 1960s, scientists and other experts have been in a panic about global population growth. Fueled in part by racist pseudo-research and anti-immigrant think tanks, the concerns about “population explosions” have cycled in and out of the news each time the world’s population adds another billion people. Is population growth a problem? Surely, it’s bad for the environment, conservation and climate change. Climate change is such an emergency, some people are limiting the number of children they have.
But we may never know for sure, because new research shows that the global population may be about to peak and will then begin to decline. The reason? As a recent study in the Lancet put it, “continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception.” …
In the world of TV, we hold these truths to be self-evident:
Today, the Democrats released a substantial report on global migration. This report gives some clues to how they might fix migration if they were in charge. As someone who works on statelessness, I was interested to see what the Democrats would say about the connection between statelessness and displacement. The answer: not a lot.
If you read the report, statelessness is mostly regulated to one of those break-out, shaded boxes where report writers put information they don’t want to leave out, but don’t quite know what else to do with. …
Many people rightfully look to the end of the Trump administration as the answer to our collective prayers for a kinder, more decent America. We do not look to Joe Biden for greatness, we do not expect him to make history, but we do expect him to make small, gradual progress on issues as diverse as abortion rights, racial justice and health care access. We hope that he will again put us on the path to climate mitigation. We expect him to make some good Supreme Court picks. …