Jeune Street

Internet hipsters will already know about Stuff White People Like, a website that satirizes liberal white elite culture (examples: iPhones, camping, Mad Men, Moleskine notebooks — guilty on all four counts). Now there’s Stuff Nigerian People Like. It’s very funny if you have spent any time in Nigeria or around Nigerian friends. The post on ‘Praise Songs’ is especially good:

Nigerian people love church. They love going to church, boasting about which church they go to, which church they started, how many uncles they know are pastors – and of course – singing praise songs any chance they can get. As a Nigerian, you already know this: any function is a function fit for God, so at your wedding, at your birthday, and at your graduation, you better be prepared for some worship.

The Globe and Mail finally provides some historical perspective to the prejudice-tinged discourse about the passengers aboard the MV Sun Sea:

Canada’s first boat people were the Norse who came ashore a thousand years ago in Newfoundland. They fit the refugee pattern: farmers and simple artisans, maybe a few fierce Vikings among them known for terrorizing Europe, people driven out of their homeland by population pressures and political unrest…

The primal fear of the stranger, the Other, seems edgiest when they arrive by sea.

They can be watched, coming across the blank, huge canvas of the ocean, moment by moment growing larger and more ominous on the horizon, carrying alien stuff. Hence the noisy narrative of the MV Sun Sea’s progress over the Pacific into Canadian territory with its Tamil cargo.

Reports indicate that the 500-odd passengers are Sri Lankan Tamils, with some analysts connecting them to the terrorist-listed LTTE organization. The media has been relatively ineffective at providing wider context for this particular event, and it has remained generally fixated on Canada’s ‘broken’ refugee system which is ‘taken advantage of’ by opportunistic migrants.

This is one of the first articles to mention that boat people have featured in crucial moments in Canada’s history. Canada’s rejection of the MS St. Louis, carrying 907 German Jewish refugees in 1939, remains a moment of enduring national shame: many of those turned away died in Hitler’s gas chambers. By contrast, the open welcome offered to tens of thousands of Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s and 1980s has been a social and economic boon for Canada.

The problem is not Canada’s refugee system. The problem is an approach to migration policy informed by the belief that we can globalize everything except for human mobility. No matter how many detention centres or extra border defenses we build, people will continue to come. We must look at the issue of migration through the lens of global interdependence, where movement is arises out of greater social and economic integration. It is an irrepressible impulse that will continue to intensify in the coming century.

The essential questions are not How do we stop people coming? or How do we toughen our migration policies? They are: How do we create systems that accommodate cross-border mobility?  How do we mobilise social institutions to  support migrants? How do we harness the aspirations and ambitions of migrants for the common good?

The answers to these questions will help us to show greater hospitality towards those who cross great oceans to join Canadian society.

From John Maynard Keynes, quoted in an interesting article about the influence of 17th century ideas on our modern economy:

The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

It’s been quiet on Jeune Street lately, but it’s worth breaking the silence to highlight this fascinating peek at the changing Chinese migrant labour market:

The supply of workers 16 to 24 years old has peaked and will drop by a third in the next 12 years, thanks to stringent family-planning policies that have sharply reduced China’s population growth.

In Zhongshan, many factories are operating with vacancies of 15 to 20 percent, compelling some bosses to cruise the streets in their BMWs and Mercedeses in a desperate hiring quest during crunch time.

The other new reality, perhaps harder to quantify, is this: young Chinese factory workers, raised in a country with rapidly rising expectations, are less willing to toil for long hours for appallingly low wages like dutiful automatons.

Todd May offers a simple, sophisticated, and perceptive meditation on friendship in an age of economics:

We might say of friendships that they are a matter not of diversion or of return but of meaning. They render us vulnerable, and in doing so they add dimensions of significance to our lives that can only arise from being, in each case, friends with this or that particular individual, a party to this or that particular life.

It is precisely this non-economic character that is threatened in a society in which each of us is thrown upon his or her resources and offered only the bywords of ownership, shopping, competition, and growth. It is threatened when we are encouraged to look upon those around us as the stuff of our current enjoyment or our future advantage. It is threatened when we are led to believe that friendships without a recognizable gain are, in the economic sense, irrational. Friendships are not without why, perhaps, but they are certainly without that particular why.

May, following Aristotle, identifies three types of friendships: pleasure friendships, entrepreneurial friendships (think ‘networking’), and true friendships. I think the hallmark of ‘true friendship’ is its orientation to the other. In the first two types, one is self-serving, while true friendship is concerned with the welfare of others. This reminds me of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s description of the ideal relationship in a marriage:

They are two helpmates, two intimate friends, who should be concerned about the welfare of each other. If they live thus, they will pass through this world with perfect contentment, bliss, and peace of heart, and become the object of divine grace and favour…

The past week has brought a couple of excellent posts on higher education in Africa. Thabo Mbeki delivered the Africa Day Lecture at the Thabo Mbeki Leadership Institute, calling for more intellectual production in Africa. Here’s Alex de Waal’s take on some of the main themes:

As with material goods, Africa is a primary producer of intellectual resources, and also a consumer of finished intellectual products, but makes little contribution to the value that is added in between. Much (perhaps most) African intellectual production occurs under northern (American and European) contracts. Consequently, Africa’s intellectual agenda is set outside the continent, with African scholars are co-opted as consultants and primary researchers, while the ablest of them are provided with careers in western universities, research institutes and policy institutions. The final product is then re-exported, its value having been multiplied many times over, to Africa for consumption by African people, governments and institutions. The fact that African names appear as authors of these products does not necessarily mean that they are more “African-owned” than a mobile phone containing African coltan is an African product. Meanwhile African leaders have become so estranged from the structures of intellectual production that they overlook the strategic importance of paying for domestic universities and research and hence owning the processes of generating and refining ideas.

The next generation also speaks: Iyinoluwa “E” Aboyeji, a Nigerian student at the University of Waterloo:

The current system where African higher education receives little or no support while universities in the west launch multi-million dollar “Development Research Centres” they don’t need is not only clearly unsustainable, but highly self serving. It pushes an imperialistic mindset that allows western institutions to serve as command centres for Africa’s economic and political systems without the proper context and it leaches Africa’s best academic minds, leaving young Africans not fortunate enough to afford an expensive international education largely clueless and underesourced with respect to international development issues in their own countries (HT: Chris Blattman).

It all makes David Strangway’s proposal for Africa Research Chairs sound like an opportunity for far-sighted donors to invest in long-term Africa’s development.

June 12 is the scheduled trial date for the seven imprisoned Baha’i leaders in Iran. They were incarcerated without charge for 20 months, and have now been imprisoned for more 32 months (Thanks for the correction, Leila).

While news of the court date is not yet available, people around the world are sending the same message: ‘you are not alone’. Today, there were 87 cities participating in the Global Day of Action for human rights in Iran. Many of these demonstrations drew attention to the condition imprisoned Baha’i leaders, with Amnesty International calling them ‘prisoners of conscience’.

For another day, our thoughts and prayers remain with Fariba Kamalabadi, Jamaloddin Khanjani, Afif Naeimi, Saeid Rezaie, Mahvash Sabet, Behrouz Tavakkoli, and Vahid Tizfahm

.

As always, updates are available at Iran Press Watch.

My real life friend, Chloë Filson, has launched a terrific new blog: Real Life Artist. Together with two friends, she has struck up an “unapologetic marching band against the forces of darkness!”

Chloë set the tempo by excerpting her very funny publication in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, “Rap Lyrics of the (17)90′s”. Ever wondered what Vanilla Ice or Will Smith would have rapped out 200 years ago? Chloë has:

“Birthed and reared in West Philadelphia, the days of my childhood and early youth were spent in the wildernesses just beyond our village, where my companions and I passed many an hour roaming free and frolicking, oftentimes playing ball sports in the proximity of the schoolhouse. I recall a certain occasion on which two wastrels came upon us, interrupted our pursuits, caused a general ruckus, and incited a fray. Upon my honour, had I not been bested by these mongrels, no doubt my loving mother would not have laid her heavy hand and decided my future in such an immovable manner as she then did. Her words, as I recollect, were ‘Get thee to Bel Air forthwith, where you will live with your aunt and uncle in peace, and whence you will return only when you have become a man, noble as any other.’ Alas! What choice had I, but to summon a cab and depart from that dear childhood home? How strange it was to see that the approaching buggy appeared to be painted with nonsensical lettering and festooned with the symbols of gambling and sin. Yet I disregarded it and considered it a rarity. ‘To Bel Air, if you please’ said I to the cabbie as together we heaved up my trunk. At perhaps seven or eight of the clock, after some hours of evening travel, the buggy came to a halt at the entrance of a grand house. After bidding the driver farewell, I regarded my new lodgings. Here would I be educated. Here would I learn my place in the family. Here would I reign, in a sense, as the new prince of Bel Air.”

Katherine Marshall, Executive Director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, calls for more religious laughter:

In questioning where humor is cruel or kind, it is worth remembering two key elements of good comedy. The best humor is often directed at oneself. And timing is everything. Many of the best religious jokes have a punch line that returns to the teller’s own faith: the rabbi tweaks Judaism and the Presbyterian minister ends the joke with a surprise insight into his sober faith. In the current global environment where we so badly need to build and cement a nuanced and thoughtful appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of all religions, Islam included, and to turn our commitment to human rights into something that that truly enhances the human condition, the timing and tenor of jokes need wisdom more than legislation, good timing more than bans.

Cue Omid Djalili:

A new Gallup poll finds that — surprise! — most people in the world would prefer to live in the US. Greg Scoblete thinks this is a good thing:

If everyone who said they wanted to move to the United States actually did so, the population of the U.S. would grow by 60 percent. The ability to attract immigrants is not all good, of course, but it does speak to the country’s capacity to regenerate itself and stave off a decline in population. America’s two major great power rivals – China and Russia – can boast of no such attraction.

While I agree with Greg’s point, it’s also worth saying that just because about 180 million people want to migrate to the US, most of them would not be able to even if it were legal. Many could not afford it, most do not have the social resources/networks to successfully relocate, and even more would ultimately choose to remain close to family, friends, and familiarity. Still, the survey is a good indication of the type of migration pressure that will be growing in the years to come, especially as economic growth in developing countries advances — giving more people the resources and will to move.

HT: Andrew Sullivan