Quartz: One Italian city’s ingenious plan to combat xenophobia with design

This is Talking Hands, a migrant-run design workshop where asylum seekers make and sell furniture, embroidery and textiles. Similar initiatives are popping up around Europe; Green Light in Wien and Venice and Cucula in Berlin are two of them. But Talking Hands defies prejudice and puts forward a grassroots solution to the immigration crisis in one of the most xenophobic areas of Italy.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in the first half of 2017, more than 80,000 migrants arrived on the coasts of Italy fleeing war, poverty and persecution in their home countries. Due to the number of asylum-seekers and the bureaucracy involved in evaluating their cases, the majority of those asking for refugee status end up waiting for months— sometimes years—in overcrowded, privately run “temporary hospitality centers,” some of which take the concept of hospitality to extreme lengths. [...]

Located just outside Treviso, the center where Yaya resides currently hosts 800 migrants, both men and women. Each person there receives a monthly allowance of 75 euros, plus food and accommodation. The worst thing for Yaya is sitting around all day, with nothing to do, a psychological burden he shares with many other migrants, according to a 2016 dossier that Doctor Without Borders released in temporary hospitality centers across Italy. [...]

Talking Hands typically make 500 to 700 euros each time the group participates in a local market. Part of the money from the sales gets reinvested in tools and materials for the workshop. Another part is used to buy food for collective meals, which are also available to undocumented immigrants who don’t receive the monthly allowance from the Italian government. A third portion of the money is designated for those who need to send money home for family emergencies.

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Social Europe: Schrödinger’s Immigrant

When Central and Eastern European leaders try to explain why they do not want to accept refugees, they tend to contradict one another. Some insist that refugees take jobs from natives, which implies that refugees are hard workers; others complain that refugees rely on welfare benefits, which suggests that they work too little. [...]

According to the European Social Survey, there is little agreement in Europe about whether refugees and migrants take existing jobs, or actually create new ones (see chart above). At Odlišnost (Distinction), a collective of academics and journalists, we have reviewed 20 empirical studies to determine the effect that immigrants had on native workers in Europe and the Middle East between 1990 and 2015. All told, we found little evidence to support the claim that accepting a reasonable number of refugees and migrants from developing countries deprives native-born workers of employment. [...]

But high- and low-skill migrants alike contribute to the efficient division of labor in their host countries, because language and other differences make it harder for them to compete with locals. The studies we examined show that, in terms of wages, immigrants from close neighboring countries put a small amount of downward pressure on the wages of low-skill natives. With immigrants from afar, however, this negative effect disappears. [...]

It turns out that asylum applicants typically have little to no knowledge of a country’s labor-market conditions or welfare benefits before they arrive. Rather, they are usually guided by the circumstances of their journey. And when they do consciously choose a country, they tend to look for places where their compatriots or relatives already live, or where they already know the language, owing to past colonial ties.

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Politico: Reality blurs Macron’s eurozone vision

According to the Elysée, Macron will wait until the end of the month to make his detailed proposal public — just a few weeks before the next European Council meeting in mid-October. A preliminary discussion of deeper eurozone integration will take place at the informal meeting of EU finance ministers in Tallinn, Estonia, on Friday and Saturday. [...]

The old German position is that fiscal restraint and structural reforms in the eurozone countries would suffice to avoid a repeat crisis. But most economists, including German ones, note that external shocks to the European economy would hit different member countries in different ways and that some form of pooling of resources and fiscal transfers — that is, the strong helping the weak — would be necessary in times of crisis to avoid another financial panic. [...]

Contrast this with Merkel’s guarded endorsement of the idea at her summer press conference in Berlin a day before Macron’s interview was published. The common budget, she said, could be made up of “small contributions, not hundreds of billions of euros” from eurozone members and be devoted to rewarding countries that implement structural reforms. As for the eurozone finance minister, the person would merely help provide greater “coherence” in the economic policies of different countries.

That’s also the vision outlined by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in his State of the Union speech on Wednesday — although he wants the joint economy and finance minister for the EU as a whole. [...]

Skeptics of Macron’s grandiose plans agree that more needs to be done to make the eurozone safer and more stable. But they say it would be enough to complete the major reforms that have already been launched — such as the EU’s banking union, arguably the most important reform of European institutions of the last 10 years.

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Haaretz: Ben-Gurion Invented the Israeli Right

This is a path that leads with absolute certainty to extreme nationalism, by creating a kind of refusal to make do with non-imperial normalcy, to be a nation like all others. Pretensions to greatness, to the heights of “moral superiority,” drive a nation to grant itself excess privileges.

In Ben-Gurion and his little black-and-white hut in the Negev, the modern Israeli can see its current right-wing leaders. Ben-Gurion never stopped quoting from the Bible, identifying himself with the greatest of the prophets. He claimed the Jewish people was created by the Land of Israel itself (and the organic connection between the people and its land was fascism’s contribution to the 20th century), and that it has a right to the entire land, including the territories conquered in 1967. (He was in favor of ceding those territories in exchange for peace, aside from Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, so we can retroactively conclude that he would have supported the peace agreement with Egypt, but opposed peace with the Palestinians and Syria, just like the Netanyahu government.) He defined himself first and foremost as a Jew. He invented the Israeli right. [...]

Those who insist on establishing a model nation, and who consistently inculcate a feeling in their people that they are meant to be an exalted people, better than others and therefore can’t settle for an ordinary existence, will end up with the seeds of fascism and the belief that God speaks to this nation.

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Social Europe: Economic Sovereignty: A Delusion

It has been Conservative policy in Britain since Mrs Thatcher to reduce the size of the state in pursuit of some golden age where private ownership and management would dominate (see Meek). The scale of the dismantling of the state and the destruction of what Meek calls ‘universal networks’ (the social and technological system deemed essential to all citizens) has been extraordinary. As Meek concludes:

The most absurd paradox of Britain’s privatisation is that it has actually led to the nationalisation of British infrastructure by foreign governments with parts of former British state firms becoming the property of the governments of France, the Netherlands, Sweden, China, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. [...]

It is not that foreign ownership is in itself a bad thing but to argue that Brexit will permit the UK to re-establish economic sovereignty is simply a chimera. The UK is a very open economy with a ratio of Imports and exports to GDP of 61% and rising (51% in 2003). This is one of the highest ratios of any of the G8 countries. How is it possible for an economy so dependent on trade in goods and services to recover its economic sovereignty given this extremely high dependence on imports both for consumption and for production? [...]

The three biggest Eurozone economies (Germany, France and Italy) have jointly presented a paper to the EU Commission calling for a strengthening of powers to control overt political takeovers – especially where these threaten areas of key national interest and security. The Commission would be given the power to review key business takeovers although the ultimate decision making authority would remain at national level.

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