Last week after some newspapers reported on slave albour conditions migrants working as strawberry pickers in greece, the migrants in the rural area of Manolada went on strike. The workers from South Asia and the Balkans demand that their daily wage be increased from €23 to €30 (based on 12 hour work day and having rent for living in makeshift tents deducted by their employers). It is the first time that migrants in rural Greece are going on strike. Their employers have denied to give in to these demands (they are claiming that this would ruin them). Subseqeuntly 400 of the striking migrants were attacked by attacked by farmers and hired thugs. 3 trade unionists have been hurt and received treatment in hospitals. So far the poice have arreted 1 framer and 60 of the striking migrants.

The non-existence of any legal entry to Europe for Asylum-seekers produces a market of illegal transport facilities, a prospering business at the EU-borders. The closed borders have produced this market and the criminalising the market's actors at the same time. Draconian penalties against - as the border regime calls it - “people trafficking” increases the prices for transportation on one hand, and makes the market more attractive on the other hand, as well as making a secure arrival at the aimed destination impossible. Migration from areas which have become impoverished, plundered and unliveable through war and/or through electronic/textile/raw material production and disposals are one way to defy the world order. Our protest's aim is to support the interests of the people who have decided to take this hard and dangerous path.

While the number of migrants and refugees is rising everywhere, the European Union is implementing a more and more restrictive border regime to limit, control and "manage" migration according to its own interests. The result is violent exclusion of migrants and refugees, leading to thousands of people dying every year outside the walls of Fortress Europe, in the desert, in the Mediterranean sea or in the Atlantic ocean, leading to enforced mass deportations, leading to millions of "undocumented migrants" and asylum seekers who are deprived of fundamental Human Rights and Labour Rights. FRONTEX, the "European Border Agency", plays a crucial core role for this racist european border regime and has achieved rapidly growing importance and budget since its foundation in 2005.

On the 15th and 16th of march 2008 about 200 people attended a meeting on migration and deportation in the Malian capital Bamako organised by the AME, a grassroots organisation of deportees. This 'Association Malienne des Expulsés' wanted to pass on the experiences of the deportees from European and African countries to the 'candidats au départ' and discuss the repression of the sans-papiers in Europe and the almost complete sealing off of Africa by to the extended European border control. The AME meeting tied the struggle against deportation and for freedom of movement in Africa to this struggle in Europe. Bamako is one of the ten stations of the Transnational Chain of Migrationrelated Actions.