December 21, 2024
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Introduction
Participants Global Perspectives |
For many refugees, home has two meanings - what they left, and where they are. Some will never go back, but find it difficult to create a new home. Others must go back, but would prefer to stay. And then there are those who settled, and their children or grandchildren, raised in the new country, are considering returning. Seven international broadcasters present portraits of refugees who are looking for home.
Programs
Dream Deferred produced by SOUNDPRINT staff
Each year 5,000 refugee children arrive in the U.S. penniless and alone, seeking asylum and freedom. A third are locked up - some alongside violent offenders. Many are deported back to traumatic home situations. The U.S. government does not provide them with lawyers, yet whether they can stay legally is decided in court. Dream Deferred follows two of these children, Juan Pablo from Honduras and Jimmy from Punjab, India. Why did they leave? What dreams are they chasing? How did they get here and where are they today?
Gyzele Osmani is an Albanian woman who fled East Kosovo in 1999 with her husband and five children to find refuge in Australia. When the Australian Government decided that Kosovo was safe, they refused to go back. The family reasoned that nowhere could be worse than their village, which was still without the protection of the United Nations. They was arrested and taken into the infamous and isolated Port Hedland Detention Centre. Gyzele and her family spent seven months there. Gyzele's story is contextualized by Marion Le, a migration agent and human rights spokesperson, who intervened to have the family released from detention, and by Melanie Poole, an 18-year-old school student who interviewed Gyzele and wrote a prize-winning account of her story.
In 'Making a Home for Refugees' BBC producer Esther Armah reports from Hull in the north east of England. Traditionally Hull has had only a very small ethnic community numbering some 300 Chinese, so there was considerable suspicion when the local council agreed to accept around 250 Iraqi Kurds, under the British government's dispersal program. In fact between 1,500 and 3,000 arrived in the city, as a result of a deal done by private landlords. Initially there were incidents of violence and racial abuse, even today there are occasional attacks. But as Esther discovered, despite lingering prejudice, there is a growing acceptance of these refugees and asylum-seekers.
Welcome to the small mining town of Flin Flon of Manitoba, Canada, founded in 1915 and swept by a wave of immigration a decade later with the arrival of the Canadian railway and miners from around the world. Eighty-five years later, the mine is mechanized. Wal-Mart has come to town. The wave of immigrants has been replaced by the arrival of the occasional foreigner. Now Flin Flon's immigrants are people the town desperately needs: doctors from South Africa, an accountant from Pakistan. This is the story of Loida and Johanna, two young Filipino nurses who come to Flin Flon.
Immigration issues currently dominate discussions in the Dutch Parliament and media. The assassination of the anti-immigration politician Pym Fortuin led to sweeping changes in the way requests for asylum are handled. The result is that the Netherlands now turns away thousands of applicants for asylum - many of them children. Last year 6,000 unaccompanied minor refugees requested asylum in Holland. In the past, most of these arrivals were integrated into society and given citizenship. Now 80 percent will be returned to their home countries. On their 18th birthday, they have 28 days to leave the Netherlands. In the meantime, they wait out their time in asylum centers where they are discouraged from taking part in Dutch society. In this program we tell the stories of two Rwandan girls in the midst of their 28 days.
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