migrants Archives - Iran News Daily

World Becoming Less Tolerant of Migrants; Gallup Poll Says

reporter 1222 — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 09:52:16 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – The world is becoming less tolerant of migrants, according to a poll released on Wednesday as Europe prepared to unveil a new asylum plan in the wake of a blaze at an overcrowded camp in Greece that left thousands without shelter.

Seven European countries, led by North Macedonia, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia, topped the Gallup index of the world’s least-accepting countries.

But the sharpest changes in attitudes were in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, which have seen an influx of Venezuelans fleeing turmoil at home.

Canada was the most welcoming country towards migrants, followed by Iceland and New Zealand, according to the index based on more than 140,000 interviews in 145 countries and regions.

The poll asked people their views about having migrants living in their country, becoming their neighbors and marrying into their families.

Index scores ranged from 1.49 in North Macedonia to 8.46 in Canada, just below the maximum possible score of 9.

Gallup migration expert Julie Ray said the slight global fall in acceptance – 5.21 in 2019 down from 5.34 in 2016 – was driven by marked changes in Latin American countries.

Peru’s score tumbled to 3.61 from 6.33 in 2016, while the number of Colombians who said migrants living in their country was a good thing dropped to 29 per cent from 61 per cent, Reuters reported.

The first Gallup Migrant Acceptance Index was conducted amid the backlash following the 2015 migrant crisis in Europe, when more than a million people headed to the continent fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond.

EU countries have long been at loggerheads over how to handle the influx of migrants, many of whom arrive in Mediterranean countries after perilous boat journeys.

The bloc’s executive will unveil a plan on Wednesday which would legally oblige all members to host their share of refugees – something rejected by Poland and Hungary among others.

The proposal has been brought forward because of a fire on the Greek island of Lesbos a fortnight ago which destroyed a migrant camp holding more than 12,000 people – four times the number it was supposed to.

Among European countries, only Sweden and Ireland made the Gallup top 10 of most-accepting countries.

Ms. Ray said some people would be surprised by the positive attitudes in the United States, where President Donald Trump has made curbing immigration a cornerstone of his policy.

“Despite the fact that immigration is such a hot topic in the US, Americans are mostly very accepting of migrants,” she said.

The United States ranked sixth in the index, just behind Sierra Leone. Ms. Ray said Mr. Trump supporters were far more accepting of migrants than the global average, scoring 7.10.

Worldwide, the index showed acceptance of migrants was greater among younger generations, people with higher levels of education and those living in urban rather than rural areas.

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Boat Capsized near Libya, Dozens of Migrants Presumed Dead

reporter 1222 — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 09:05:36 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – The UN migration agency said Tuesday that a boat carrying migrants bound for Europe capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off Libya, leaving at least two dozen people drowned or missing and presumed dead, the latest shipwreck off the North African country.

Safa Msehli, a spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration, told AP that Libya’s coast guard intercepted three boats on Monday, and one of them had capsized.

She said the coast guard retrieved two bodies, and survivors reported 22 others were missing and presumed dead.

At least 45 survivors on the three boats were returned to the shore. All migrants were men, with a majority from Egypt and Morocco, she said.

“This new tragedy signals yet again the need for increased search and rescue capacity in the Mediterranean. Instead, we are seeing restrictions on NGOs and long, unnecessary stand-offs,” Msehli said.

The shipwreck was the latest maritime disaster involving migrants seeking a better life in Europe.

In August, a boat carrying dozens of migrants capsized leaving at least 45 people drowned or missing and presumed dead, marking the largest number of fatalities in a single shipwreck off the coast of the North African country.

Libya, which descended into chaos following the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed longtime dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, has emerged as a major transit point for African and Arab migrants fleeing war and poverty to Europe.

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Six Migrants Died, Dozens Rescued Off Libya Coast; UN Reports

reporter 1222 — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:39:09 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – A woman who gave birth at sea was among 93 migrants rescued off shores in Libya as they tried to reach Europe, but six others died along the way, the UN’s migration agency said Saturday.

The survivors were brought back overnight to the port city of Khoms, 120 kilometers (75 miles) west of the capital Tripoli, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Twitter.

“Among them was a woman who gave birth on the rubber dinghy” that had undertaken the perilous Mediterranean crossing, it said, AFP reported.

“Migrants reported to IOM staff that 6 people have died along the journey,” it added.

Libya was thrown into chaos after the overthrow and killing of veteran dictator Muammar Gaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.

Traffickers have exploited the unrest to turn the North African country into a key route for illicit migration towards Europe.

The situation of refugees and asylum seekers in Libya worsened after eastern Libya-based military strongman Khalifa Haftar launched an assault on Tripoli in 2019 and the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized the systematic return of migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean to Libya, where they are held in crowded detention centers.

The IOM said those rescued overnight were released after disembarking in Khoms.

The latest operation came just days after French charity boat Ocean Viking, picked up dozens of migrants, including 31 Pakistanis, off the Italian island of Lampedusa after they had drifted from Libya.

Nicholas Romaniuk, who coordinated the mission aboard that vessel, said rescue ships are often out-run by the Libyan coast guard who beat them to intercept migrants and return them to Libya.

Such was the case, he said, with the overnight rescue operation, deploring the lack of coordination.

“We were about an hour and a half from being nearby” when the Libyan coast guard intervened, said Romaniuk.

“There is no coordination, no information sharing for life saving operations. We’re talking about people who were reported to be dying, a newborn baby on board,” he added.

“The fact that, even in this situation, they won’t share information, it’s an absolute disgrace.”

The Ocean Viking, he said, was some 153 nautical miles away from the stricken boat when it received a distress signal.

More than 100,000 migrants tried to cross the Medit

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ILO Says Migrant Workers Need Support for Pandemic Disruption

reporter 1222 — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 13:07:45 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – The UN labor agency appealed to governments on Wednesday to support tens of millions of migrant workers forced to return to their homelands due to the coronavirus pandemic only to face unemployment and poverty.

Governments should include returning workers, many of whom had lost jobs overnight, in their social protection measures and reintegrate them into national labor markets, the International Labor Organization said in a report, Reuters reported.

“This is a potential crisis within a crisis,” Manuela Tomei, director of the ILO’s conditions of work and equality department, told a news conference.

There are an estimated 164 million migrant workers worldwide, nearly half of them women, accounting for 4.7% of the global labor force, according to the ILO. Many work in health care, transport, domestic work, and agriculture.

Their remittances are key for their families and economies back home, Tomei said, citing a report from the World Bank that a $100 billion drop in remittances was forecast by year-end.

Nearly a million migrant workers have returned to South Asia alone, said Michelle Leighton, chief of labor migration at ILO.

They include 500,000 Nepalese who returned from India, more than 250,000 Bangladeshis from the Middle East, 130,000 Indonesians, 100,000 Burmese, and 50,000 Filipinos, mostly seafarers, ILO figures show.

Ethiopia expects from 200,000 to 500,000 migrants to return by year-end, Leighton added.

“There are serious problems with their eligibility for social protection, when they come back, for instance, they are not able to take their social security entitlement and that is a function of the need for cooperation between the sending and receiving countries,” Leighton said.

Large numbers of migrant workers in the Persian Gulf countries are affected by job losses, with more than 90,000 believed to have left Kuwait since April, said Ryszard Cholewinski of ILO’s Beirut office.

But not all left jobless in the region want to repatriate, he said, adding that the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have relaxed restrictions on changing employers.

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Iranian delegation to probe Harirud incident

reporter 1222 — Tue, 26 May 2020 07:06:41 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – A high-ranking Iranian delegation will arrive in Kabul today to conduct investigations on Harirud incident, which lead to the death of a number of Afghan migrants near the Iran-Afghanistan border in early May

The Iranian delegation comprises deputy foreign minister Mohsen Baharvand, foreign ministry Director-General for West-Asia Seyyed Rasoul Mousavi, and the representative of Iranian border guards.

On May 1, some claims surfaced in media reports that Iranian border guards had tortured and thrown as many as 57 Afghans into the Hari River (Harirud) in western Herat province to prevent their illegal entry into Iran. The Khaama Press News Agency said at least 23 of them drowned in Harirud.

Tehran has roundly rejected the claims, saying the incident took place on the Afghan side of the border and Iranian forces had no role in the incident.

Iran has extensive evidence that the incident has not happened on its borders. According to Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyyed Abbas Mousavi, the confirmed reports received from the border guards of the Islamic Republic of Iran show that such an incident has not occurred on the mentioned date and location. He noted that Iran has not been associated with Afghan migrants and the claims of transferring people to camps or inhumane treatment are completely baseless. He added that due to weather conditions of the region, not a single Afghan citizen entered the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran on that date.

The two countries have agreed to hold joint meetings to discuss the matter.

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Iran: migrants incident occurred on Afghanistan’s soil

reporter 1222 — Mon, 04 May 2020 04:51:00 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Seyyed Abbas Mousavi stressed that a recent incident happened to a number of Afghan migrants occurred on Afghanistan’s territory, noting that Iran’s police border guard has denied that the incident took place on Iran’s soil.

Mousavi reacted to some news in Afghan media about a deadly incident that happened to a number of Afghan officials who tried to illegally enter Iran, IRNA reported.

The Afghanistan Foreign Ministry on Saturday said it was investigating allegations that dozens of Afghan migrants detained in Iran were tortured by that country’s border guards and thrown into a river, where many of them drowned, according to Reuters.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesman sympathized with the families of the victims of the incident, saying that the incident happened on Afghanistan’s soil.

Iranian police border guard in a statement on Saturday night strongly denied the recent allegations about arrest and torture of illegal Afghan migrants by its forces on the countries’ common border, IRNA reported.

Following the release of a video by anti-revolutionary channels about throwing the Afghan migrants into the river, Iran’s police border guard immediately launched an investigation, the police statement said.

According to the police’s investigation, such an incident did not happen on the neighbors’ common border and is not true, the statement added.

The Iranian Consulate in the Afghan city of Herat also in a statement on Saturday denied the allegations, saying, “Iranian border guards have not arrested any Afghan citizens”, according to Reuters.

Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry in a statement on Saturday said an inquiry had been launched into the incident.

Up to 2,000 Afghans daily cross the border from Iran into Herat.

Afghanistan shares more than 750 kilometers of border with Iran. About three million Afghans – a mix of refugees and illegal migrants – live in Iran, a large number of them having arrived after their country plunged into conflict in the 1980s.

Young Afghans constantly flow across the border to seek work, many of them smuggled through dangerous deserts, often traveling for a week at a time packed into the back of pick-up trucks.

In recent months, the flow was reversed due to the coronavirus outbreak in Iran. Between January and April, about 240,000 Afghans had returned from Iran.

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Turkey Deploys 1000 Police at Greek Border to Stem Push-Back of Migrants

reporter 1222 — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 16:05:26 +0000

Turkey Deploys 1000 Police at Greek Border to Stem Push-Back of Migrants

According To Iran News,Turkey is deploying 1,000 special police forces along its border with Greece on Thursday to halt the pushback of migrants toward its territory, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said, adding that 164 migrants had been wounded by Greek authorities.

Soylu’s comments come amid a war of words between Ankara and Athens following Turkey’s decision to no longer abide by a 2016 deal with the European Union to halt illegal migration flows to Europe in return for billions of euros in aid.

Since then, thousands of migrants have rushed to the Turkish border with Greece in hopes of crossing into Europe. Ankara has accused Greek authorities of shooting dead and injuring migrants near the border. Athens has rejected this, saying Turkish police were helping migrants cross the border illegally.

Speaking to reporters in the northwestern border province of Edirne, Soylu said Greek police had wounded the scores of migrants trying to cross the border, Reuters reported.

“They wounded 164 people. They tried to push 4,900 people back to Turkey,” he said. “We are deploying 1,000 special force police to the border system… to prevent the push-back.”

Turkey, locked in a military conflict with Moscow and Damascus in northwest Syria, hosts 3.6 million Syrian refugees and has said it cannot handle more. It wants the EU to more forcefully back its military operations in Syria and deliver more funds to care for the nearly one million displaced there.

President Tayyip Erdogan met with EU officials on Wednesday to discuss developments in Syria and the migrants flooding the European borders. Erdogan’s spokesman later said “no concrete proposition” on the migrants was made at the talks.

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Hundreds of Migrants Protest

reporter 1222 — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 15:49:57 +0000

Hundreds of Migrants Protest Conditions on Greek Isle of Lesbos

According To Iran News A procession made up mainly of women and children, with some elderly people, left Moria camp walking towards the port of Mytilene, with demonstrators shouting slogans.

They carried a stretcher covered by a shroud to represent the woman killed in Sunday’s fire at the camp, which sparked riots the same evening. Another 19 people were injured in the blaze, said Greek police spokesman Theodoros Chronopoulos.

The protesters were calling to be moved off the island immediately and for better living conditions, said Chronopoulos.

At the same time, a delegation from Oxfam France visited the makeshift camp that has sprung up outside the Moria camp, where tents and improvised shelters have spilled over into the olive groves.

“It’s worse than I imagined,” Cecile Duflot, the head of Oxfam France, told AFP as she waited to enter the camp.

“We are in Greece, a European Union country. More than 40 percent of those living here are children. We need to ensure that the situation changes.”

People needed to wake up to the burden that Greece and its islands were carrying, she said, adding: “We cannot be satisfied with what are de facto detention camps.”

Moria, Europe’s largest migrant camp, was designed for 3,000 people but currently houses 13,000 after a surge of arrivals in recent weeks from Turkey.

Around 400 migrants staged a fresh protest Tuesday against conditions on the Greek island of Lesbos, police said, two days after a deadly fire at the overcrowded migrant camp there.

Greece announced on Monday it wanted to send back 10,000 migrants to Turkey by the end of 2020 after an emergency cabinet meeting following the fire at the camp.

These returns are provided for in a 2016 agreement between Turkey and the European Union.

The conservative government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has already announced more naval patrols in the Aegean, closed centres for migrants refused asylum, and plans to overhaul the asylum system.

Greece hosts some 70,000 mostly Syrian refugees and migrants who have fled since 2015, crossing over from neighboring Turkey.

There are more than 26,000 people in the five migrant camps scattered across the Aegean islands, which have a capacity to welcome only 6,300 or so, according to the latest government figures.

Migrants at Moria camp, on the Greek island of Lesbos, are angry at the dangerous overcrowding there.

Aid group Oxfam says there are more than 26,200 migrants spread across Greece’s islands in the Aegean.

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Hundreds of Hondurans Set Off toward United States in New Caravan

reporter 1222 — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 13:36:32 +0000

Hundreds of Honduran migrants began the long trek north on Monday, part of new US-bound caravan that hopes to succeed even as a previous wave of Central Americans were unable to quickly enter the United States.

Central American migrant caravans have become a flashpoint in the debate over US immigration policy, as President Donald Trump has remained adamant that the migrants will be barred from crossing the border, Reuters reported.

Television footage on Monday showed several hundred people in the violent city of San Pedro Sula huddled together and waving Honduran flags as they began a journey that will likely take weeks or even months to reach the US-Mexico border.

Between 600 and 800 Hondurans have joined the caravan, according to an estimate provided by Miroslava Serpas, head of migrant affairs with the CIPRODEH human rights research center that is accompanying the group.

Last October, another migrants caravan left Honduras made up of men, women and children, mostly claiming that they were fleeing entrenched poverty and gangland violence back home.

While some 2,500 people from that caravan remain in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, more than 7,000 have returned to Honduras, according to Honduran officials.

“I’m determined to find a good job in the United States,” said 24-year-old caravan member Darwin Perez.

“It’s a difficult road ahead but I hope President Trump’s heart might soften, and that he won’t be so hard and will let us enter,” he added.

Other migrants, some traveling with spouses and children, echoed Perez’s dream to find work in the United States.

Trump has repeatedly vowed to stop the Central American caravans, sending troops to reinforce the border and describing the migrants as an invading force.

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Nearly 400 Migrants Die at US Border in 2018

reporter 1222 — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 08:15:50 +0000

At least 376 migrants died at the US-Mexico border in 2018, according to a UN monitor.

The estimate from the International Organization on Migration’s Missing Migrants Project includes 214 men, 20 women and four children. The other 138 could not be identified from their remains. Others likely died, but their remains have not been found, Anadolu Agency reported.

The vast majority of those who perished were from the Americas. Only two, who hailed from South Asia, did not come from the region.

The data comes amid US President Donald Trump’s hardline approach to immigration, both illegal and legal, including a crackdown on asylum regulations.

Trump’s immigration policies have prompted backlogs at official ports of entry for individuals seeking asylum, leaving many to either wait in Mexico for months while their claims are processed or attempt to cross the border illegally.

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