YAM2008: Project description

Youth and Migration - YAM - is part of the Stavanger2008 - European Capital of Culture programme. The project  will provide young people with a basic knowledge of migration to help them understand the processes behind this phenomenon and enable them to see the connection between the European emigration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and immigration taking place today. This knowledge will stimulate debate between young people from the various European cultures and other parts of the world (USA, Latin America, Africa and Asia), and so contribute to better understanding, openness and tolerance between the native inhabitants and the immigrants of Europe.

BEFORE: Emigrations from Europe to America and other parts of the world constituted the most important global scale human migrations during the century following the Napoleonic Wars. More than 50 million Europeans, among them some 900,000 Norwegians, were directly affected by a process that had fundamental consequences for both the countries from which, and to which, the migrations took place. To some, the motivation to emigrate was a desire for freedom from religious and social oppression, while others fled wars and persecution. Most of them had a dream of economic betterment.

TODAY: The number of asylum seekers to Western Europe increased from 116,000 in 1981 to 695,000 in 1992. In the period between 1980 and 1995 more than 5 million refugees applied to be admitted into Western Europe. At the same time hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe and North Africa attempted entry into Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. They arrived without the necessary documents and were given jobs that no one else wanted, as seasonal agricultural labourers or as street cleaners. Their arrival provoked a wave of racist violence and the political mobilization of extreme right-wing groups in several Western European countries. Increasing numbers of would-be immigrants are being shut out.

The whole written can be downloaded here: Youth and Migration ReportB.pdf