From Immigrants to Migrants: Spell of Misspelling
src: https://www.redbubble.com/people/contoured/works/24746043-im-silently-correcting-your-grammar
What’s the difference between immigrant and migrant? Well, for one thing, no one ever heard about birds immigration while birds migration is a quite natural phenomenon. In this podcast we point out subtle shifts of meaning, such as this, in the political terminology, symptomatic in sustainable development programmes, one of which is by now, for mostly the wrong reasons, notorious UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, about to be presented for signing on behalf of UN member states on December, 11. in Morocco.
In contrast to usual KT method of close reading, we’ll keep things short and simple by pointing out one or two peculiarities in the wording of this document; also we stress the importance of knowing the context – a paper trail of UN documents going back to the Eighties of previous Century – which are necessary prerequisite for understanding the purpose of Global Compact.
The main mistake in approaching sustainable development is to understand it piecemeal, because this doctrine is anything but. Unfortunately, most of those who react against it for various reasons do it precisely in this way.
We’ll try to remedy this and in the process demonstrate that the main purpose of “non-binding frameworks” such as this is to change the language of media, politics and civil society in order to make them liable to infection by broader sustainable development politics, which is in itself far from non-biding.
Three words, and the whole world of meaning, are, in our opinion, under attack: ‘immigration’, legality’ and ‘illegality’.
(If for some reason the Mixcloud presents you with problems, the podcasts are available on Kali Tribune’s Youtube channel. Podcasts can be downloaded via this link )
Notes:
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Branko Malić
