Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'immigration'

Accept Your Lot in Life

October 24th, 2012 · 1 Comment

Whoever was in charge of putting together this orientation handbook (PDF) for St. Petersburg’s migrant workers probably had the best of intentions. Yet their decision to portray those workers as mere tools, as opposed to flesh-and-blood humans like the welcoming Russians, was a revealing faux pas. As a Tajik blogger so forcefully put it: We […]

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The Streets Ain’t Paved with Gold

July 3rd, 2012 · 1 Comment

There is a common and compelling narrative regarding the power of immigrant remittances: A busboy or chambermaid supports their entire native village by wiring money back home. We love these stories because they affirm the economic superiority of our circumstances, as well as the continued robustness of the American dream—through gumption and hard work, anyone […]

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Have Boot, Will Travel

October 11th, 2011 · 3 Comments

Though the Faroe Islands are inhabited by less than 50,000 souls, the Danish dependency boasts its very own professional soccer league—one that includes four separate tiers of prestige, topped by the premier-level Vodafonedeildin. As this excellent photo set demonstrates, even the league’s most elite teams don’t draw enormous crowds—though, granted, the humans in those images […]

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Laissez-Faire

April 1st, 2011 · Comments Off on Laissez-Faire

One of the pluses of travel these days is that it affords me the opportunity to catch up on reading. (The parents in the audience know well that young’uns page-rate down by quite a bit.) On this latest Texas trip, when I wasn’t busy finagling my way into a remote immigration detention facility, I stole […]

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…But Somebody’s Gotta Do It

February 9th, 2011 · 4 Comments

A dozen years ago, this New York Times Magazine story wormed its way into my memory banks by citing a single, jaw-dropping stat: “About 70 percent of all Indian motel owners—or a third of all motel owners in America:mdash;are called Patel, a surname that indicates they are members of a Gujarati Hindu subcaste.” After reading […]

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Promises, Promises

October 7th, 2010 · Comments Off on Promises, Promises

The federal government is becoming increasingly zealous about deporting convicted criminals who’ve completed their sentences. That official enthusiasm has led to some interesting legal conundrums, such as this case of an oil worker down in Texas: A descendant of the Lipan Apache tribe who was convicted this summer of re-entering the United States after being […]

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Give Us Your Cheap Labor

September 13th, 2010 · Comments Off on Give Us Your Cheap Labor

There’s a classic scene at the beginning of The Godfather II in which young Vito Andolini passes through Ellis Island’s immigration line. It is there that, due to an immigration officer’s carelessness, he is given the mistaken surname of Corleone, which is actually the village of his birth. Moments later, frightened young Vito is informed […]

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Off the Books

August 26th, 2010 · 4 Comments

The worst thing about this tale of a Sri Lankan maid’s suffering at the hands of her Saudi Arabian employers is that it’s completely unsurprising. Though the torture the woman endured is notable for its brutality, such abuse is evidently commonplace in Saudi Arabia—to the point that foreign workers are taught to expect beatings: The […]

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The Men With Weathered Hands

April 21st, 2010 · 1 Comment

Given that our stance on immigration tends to dovetail quite nicely with a certain hoity-toity newsmagazine, we can only shake our heads at Arizona’s latest legislative shenanigans. Sure, we probably shouldn’t be surprised by anything that comes out a state that often seems content to go its oddball way (to Chuck D.’s tremendous displeasure). But […]

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Union City Blues

April 20th, 2010 · 2 Comments

We’re still dealing with making sure all’s cool with the kid, so just a quick check-in regarding the 30th anniversary of the Mariel Boatlift. The clip above comes from a local station in northern New Jersey, home to the largest Cuban-American community outside South Florida. Make it to the back half and you’ll see that […]

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A Lovely Place to Say Goodbye To

March 15th, 2010 · 5 Comments

There is plenty of statistical candy to consume in the CIA Factbook‘s latest net migration figures. We had no idea, for example, that people were actually flocking to strife-torn Cyprus, or that Grenadians were so hot to leave the erstwhile Isle of Spice. But what really struck us was a stat that harkens back to […]

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Dyed by Their Own Hands

March 11th, 2010 · 11 Comments

For the umpteenth year in a row, we failed to take advantage of our Atlah locale and check out the annual Phagwah parade in Richmond Hill, Queens. But we got our Guyanese festival kick by checking out these shots, which amply demonstrate the splattery fun that was had by all. More great photos of Phagwah […]

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Carving Out a New World

February 18th, 2010 · 1 Comment

If you haven’t caught it already, The Independent‘s latest dispatch from the jungles of Laos is well worth a read. It’s an eye-opening look at life for the Hmong tribespeople who decided to remain in Southeast Asia after the end of the Vietnam War, rather than take the CIA up on its offer to resettle […]

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Desperation in Action

February 8th, 2010 · 4 Comments

One of our treasured Japanese correspondents just have us a heads up about this tragedy, involving an airplane stowaway who apparently froze to death while concealed in a Boeing 777’s landing gear. Such deaths are actually somewhat common, not to mention quite predictable—at 35,00 feet, temperatures are insanely icy, and oxygen scarce. Yet men and […]

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Renewal to the North

October 6th, 2009 · 4 Comments

Aware of our fascination with the current wave of Bhutanese refugees alighting in the U.S., our favorite correspondent from the Nushagak Bay area alerted us to this great A/V feature from the Anchorage Daily News. Apparently a small group of the Lhotshampas have landed in the Land of the Midnight Sun, after a gobsmacking 17 […]

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A Hole in the Happiness Theory?

September 24th, 2009 · 6 Comments

So many statistical goodies to sift through in the latest report on American asylum cases (PDF). But by far our favorite oddity can be glimpsed in the chart above. What’s going on with the Bhutanese? Only three citizens of the isolated kingdom claimed asylum in the U.S. three years ago, and then none in 2007. […]

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All from the Comfort of Chihuahua

August 10th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Many moons ago at the Bronx Museum, we caught a great bit of satiric video art entitled Why Cybraceros?. We’ll let the artist himself, Alex Rivera, explain the riotous concept: In his second film, Why Cybraceros? (USA 1997), Rivera sarcastically imagined a future in which migrant farm workers (or Braceros) could work in America, but […]

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Where Divorce Dare Not Speak Its Name

August 3rd, 2009 · 1 Comment

In response to our recent string of posts regarding the “Natural Rate of Divorce”, a commenter asked an interesting question: how might an examination of the situation in the Philippines shed some light on the topic? The Philippines, after all, is the only nation in the world, apart from the Vatican, where divorce continues to […]

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The Flag Racket

July 21st, 2009 · Comments Off on The Flag Racket

Once again, we’re gonna use our platform here to highly recommend The Snakehead, Patrick Radden Keefe’s non-fiction account of the 1993 Golden Venture disaster. The book would be awesome enough if it just told the tale of Sister Ping‘s rise and fall as the tsarina of human smuggling in New York’s Chinatown. But The Snakehead […]

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The Western Union Economy

July 13th, 2009 · Comments Off on The Western Union Economy

As we continue to plow through Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent The Snakehead, we’ve been giving tons of thought to the impact of immigrant remittances. We never cease to be amazed by how much working-class immigrants are able to save and then contribute to the families they left behind—so much, in fact, that some economies become […]

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Explaining the Fujian Conundrum

July 6th, 2009 · 6 Comments

Over the holiday weekend, in addition to bidding farewell to our dead-tree labor o’ love, we found a few spare moments to start reading The Snakehead, the new book from Chatter author Patrick Radden Keefe. We’re only 50 pages in, but so far this tome gets Microkhan’s equivalent of an Ebert-ian “thumbs way up” rave. […]

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The “Threat” of Broader Faces

April 20th, 2009 · 4 Comments

A century ago, the Dillingham Commission was charged with investigating the societal impact of immigration, particularly from Eastern and Southern Europe. The Congressional panel duly churned out a 41-volume report that, for all its regal language and intricate graphs, contains some of the vilest pseudoscientific drivel ever committed to print. Of particular interest to Microkhan […]

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