Excerpts from 'A journey to finding me' Eps 16

5th November I watched ‘la Haine’ a movie about Migrants in France. It’s interesting to see how they barely have any rights. I watched it in French without any subtitles so all I grasped was the little understanding of French that I have. What appalled me most was the fact that they do not seem to have any rights concerning what happens to them when they get arrested, and the fact that the French police seemed to terrorize them whenever they were caught. When two of the guys (Said & Hubert) were arrested, it did not seem like there was any hope for them as there was no lawyer to bail them out, and so the only option was to escape from jail after all that torture they had been through. The boys in the story were enraged because of a friend of theirs who had been killed by the police. They had a desire to find justice and justice they thought they would achieve if only they grabbed a hold of guns. At the end of the movie one of them gets killed accidently by a police man who was seemingly threatening him with a gun. It ends with Hubert killing the policeman. But one wonders, has justice been served? How can migrants integrate or assimilate in a society that is seemingly far removed from their own? And should migrants have rights? If so who should enforce these rights? This question may be problematic in France where migrants are becoming a problem. In My ‘Migration and Refugees in International relations’ class, we discuss citizenship, in-groups, and out-groups a lot in the context of migration. As a colleague beautifully summarized, “For yesterday's class we read a chapter from political theorist Bonnie Honig's book Democracy and the Foreigner. The chapter dealt with the love-hate relationship Americans have with immigrants. On the one hand, we have the myth of an America founded on the sheer grit and virtue of immigrants and on the other, we have the view of an "invasion" of "illegals" who steal jobs, form isolated enclaves where "un-American" ideals are fostered, and generally ruin the country for the native-born. Immigrants are seen as both integral to the greatness of America and as a possible force for its undoing. When this tension between xenophilia and xenophobia tilts in the latter direction, as happens during times of economic hardships and war, the "natives" of a country come more rigidly to draw the line between "us" and "them" even when "they" are native-born or have been in the country for years. In circling the wagons, people draw dangerously on insufficient or flawed understandings of that "other" that fuel hatred.”