Immigrants in the United States during the pandemic faced the same discrimination, disenfranchisement, violence, and terror as before—only intensified.
Tag: Refugees
Refuge: Denied. Asylum: Pending
The United States originates in settler colonialism, slavery, empire, and a long history of giving refuge to some while refusing refuge to others.
The Perspective Is the Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction is an attempt to grasp the underlying precariousness of our sense of identity and belonging.
“Create a Different Language”: Behrouz Boochani & Omid Tofighian
“Just do something. Just do something. Just a very small thing. I’m not an ideological person, really.”
Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront ...
The Future of Migration
In 2008, in a town of about 2,000 people, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 389 workers and charged them with civil immigration violations and identity theft. The Bush ...
“We Forgot Our Names”
“Most of the time, they changed your name into a number—they called you ABC1, ABC2,” explains Hani Abdile about the time she spent interned in one of Australia’s notorious immigration detention camps ...
In the Desert You Can’t Remember Your Name
“If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place? … If I didn’t obliterate cities, who would build refugee camps?” War’s futility, absurd bureaucracy, and ...
“Remembering and Forgetting”: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Since the 2015 publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen ...
The Right to Have Rights
Since the election of Donald Trump, sales of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism have soared. Driving the new attention to this three-volume work of political theory published in 1951 is ...
Chaucer and Humanitarian Activism
Refugee Tales, a recent adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is more than a retelling of one of our “great books” of English literature ...
Somalia and Italy across a Century
The United Nations Refugee Agency has calculated that, by the end of 2016, there were almost 68 million “persons of concern” (refugees, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable groups) living on this ...
Zombie Guts and Border Walls
In Season 2 of the zombie apocalypse show Fear the Walking Dead, Nick, a gringo junkie from Los Angeles, survives separation from his family by slathering himself with zombie guts and walking ...
No Peace for Refugees
This past June, the Supreme Court temporarily reinstated a version of President Trump’s ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries. The “Muslim ban” made good on Trump’s campaign promise to ...
Our Migrant World
Within the rhetorical toolbox of contemporary political discourse, the language used to characterize international migration, refugee crises, and border crossings might fairly be called impoverished ...
Refugee Stories for Young Readers
Today, more than half of the world’s refugees are children under the age of 18. That’s nearly 50 million young people, making this the worst child refugee ...
Against Despair
Despair is everywhere, and for good reason. Huge numbers of refugees are fleeing warfare and violence, while unceasing terrorist attacks are feeding the right-wing populist surge all across Europe ...
Wolves at the Door?
In the past month we’ve seen two different versions of the same phobic imaginative scenario. In it, a precious and vulnerable space, a space that must be protected, is invaded by an imposter, one in ...