Thursday 10 January 2013

It's only news if someone dies

Asylum-seekers and migrants across Europe are determined to change the inhuman circumstances of their existence.

In his new book Fortress Europe: dispatches from a gated continent, journalist Matthew Carr describes a protest in Lombardy in which five migrants climbed to the top of a crane above Brescia’s new light railway line. ‘For seventeen days they lived and slept on the arm of the crane in an audacious protest that divided Brescia and transfixed Italy’. Reflecting on this and another incident in Milan, where migrants climbed to the top of a smoke stack, he asks whether the only way for Europe’s irregular migrants to escape their invisibility is to climb to a place where they can no longer be ignored.

IRR News spoke to a UK-based freelance journalist, who told us that over the years it has become much more difficult to get asylum protests reported: news has to be different to be newsworthy.

Written by Liz Fekete from the Institute of Race Relations - read her full article here: http://www.irr.org.uk/news/from-despair-comes-resistance/

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