A product of the Medill News Service, ImmHT provides a cross-national perspective on immigration, enhancing exposure to world affairs for Americans, providing public space to air compelling stories about diaspora populations, and serving as a repository of facts and figures in an arena of often misleading information.
BY ELISA MIGNOT, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
"We were living in a truck when the Americans attacked," said the man in a low and shaky voice. "We hid behind the driver's seat."
He was perched on a chair in the refugee service of Amnesty International in Paris, recounting his odyssey with his wife and three children from Iraq to France.
His name is Yeshar, he is an Iraqi Kurd from Baghdad and he said he faces sure death if he has to go home.
"We went all the way to Istanbul," he continued. "We stayed there for five months. Then, we took a boat, next a train and a boat again. We arrived at a big harbor. There were some Arabs, they told me to take another train to go to Paris. It was at this moment, I realized I was in France."
Waves, roads and rails brought him to another confusing landscape, this one made up of offices, wretched papers and endless interviews. Now he winds his way through the halls of French justice, pleading his case for political asylum to judges and bureaucrats who sift through thousands of stories like his every year.
The asylum system in France, as in other western countries, is not like other courts.
BY ELISE BARTHET, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
We stopped the car at an anonymous-looking building just outside Beirut that nearly disappeared behind an enormous yellow billboard. A blue drawing covers half the space of the ad. It pictures an Asian woman in an apron shyly proffering a tray of tea. Her look is submissive, the message eloquent. Even to customers who cannot read Arabic.
Inside, the manager of the company, the Manco Group, is all business, seated in front of an empty desk. A brisk offer of coffee to the visitors, then, she plunges into a sales pitch. "From my experience, Ethiopian is the best," she says. "Sri Lankans run away after two days and Filipinas are too expensive."
The harshness of the declaration sounds strange to an outsider's ears, but we try not to look surprised. After all, in Lebanon, buying a maid is as common as buying a car. And just like cars, maids are imported.
Business is booming in Lebanon for companies that recruit foreign women to work as maids, housekeepers and nannies. In this country, ruined by 30 years of civil war and a never-ending political crisis, running an agency has become a safe and easy way to make money.
In five years, the number of such employment agencies has nearly doubled from 250 to 418. This tiny Middle Eastern nation of only four million people has an estimated 120,000 maids, most of them from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Africa. According to The Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper, one out of every 16 individuals in Lebanon is a foreign maid.
These women are part of a massive global industry that moves manpower from poor developing countries around the world to richer, or in some cases, marginally less poor nations, where they care for children and clean houses.
Workers are exported and imported by means of a sophisticated network of job agencies across the world. Each Lebanese agency has its counterpart in the country of origin of the migrants. One furnishes the maid; the other, the employer. But the business is largely unregulated, notwithstanding that the products being marketed are human beings.
BY ALEXANDER KNETIG, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
Carera always rents
a donkey from his friends
A lonely man is crossing the Savannah in his wooden horse cart, hand-painted in red, yellow and green, the national colous of Senegal. In this wide emptiness burned by the torrid Sahel sun, his unhurried whistling is the only sound one can hear within a radius of several kilometers.
Albert Carera left his hometown of Louga three hours earlier to amble slowly to his farm, located near the River Senegal more than 300 kilometers north of Dakar, close to the border with Mauritania.
Despite his primitive means of transport, the 54-year-old Carera is not a poor man. He is a landowner, thanks to money his relatives have regularly sent him from the United States and Europe. But he represents a new chapter in the old story of immigrant remittances, one built as much on tradition as modernity.
Since 1995, when western money transfer systems started operating in Africa, remittances have reshaped the continent and enriched companies like Western Union, whose first agencies in Louga opened in 1999. Western Union's main global competitor, Moneygram, followed in 2003.
Today, the whole town is full of advertisements offering money transfer services, reflecting the fact that this city of barely 100,000 people has become Senegal's emigration capital. More than half of its population is living outside the country, making Louga extraordinarily profitable for global money transfer agencies.
BY MITCHELL WU, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE Photos by Mitch Wu
Undocumented migrant praying
Calais, France
Neither of us can speak Arabic, but Ashraf knows enough English to get through to us.
"I want to tell [the world] that they should help us," he says. "We cannot stay here."
Every evening, at this empty loading dock in Calais, France, charity workers bring him and dozens of other refugees food and tea.
The weather here is wet and colder than Paris. With winter approaching, it's only getting worse.
Ashraf is still a teenager, but like all the others we talk to, he looks years beyond that. Most of them are from Afghanistan, and in many cases, their stories overlap. They've endured many hardships to get here. They've left families behind and spent all their money. Now they're stranded in Calais.
Cambodia's Vietnamese Community Drawn into Commercial Sex Industry
BY MATTHEW RUSLING, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
Just as there is a pizza shop or deli on every corner in New York City, so too there is there sex for sale almost everywhere you look in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. On the infamous street no. 63, customers meander nonchalantly in and out of local brothels located between busy coffee shops blasting music at ear-rupturing levels even at 9:30 a.m. School-aged girls on this street help out in cafés while classes are in session not far away, or just linger around watching bikini-clad, writhing Asian women on blaring flat-screen TVs.
As a middle-aged woman and some children sell fruit and snacks on the sidewalk under the morning sun in front of a storefront window, one young woman in white jeans and a t-shirt can be seen through the glass taking a male customer, presumably a Cambodian, into a room behind a curtain. Her colleagues, apparently waiting for customers, watch TV on a bench outside.
Men from El Salvador, Honduras
and Mexico approach a contractor's truck
looking for day work in Kenner, Lousiana.
Fernando Saucedo crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on July 4, 2005, headed for Houston. The farmer from Zacatecas joined a constant stream of Mexicans, Central and South Americans who look north for work and wages.
Two months later, Hurricane Katrina crossed the Caribbean into New Orleans, bursting precarious levees to flood large swaths of the historic city and changing the fate of tens of thousands of long-rooted residents and new immigrants like Saucedo.
The suffering, heroism, and unfathomable delay in the city's immediate rescue have been documented, but immigrants like Saucedo represent the longer-term recovery and promise of the city. Before Katrina, New Orleans had a stagnant construction industry and a small 3.1 percent Latino population. Within a few months Latino laborers were gutting water-damaged homes and re-roofing business across the crescent city. Recent census reports suggest the reconstituted city is 9.6 percent Latino.
After a decade long war, many of Sierra Leone's war wounded still slog through life, depending on handouts for survival. These two companion stories contrast the life of one amputee who has made it to the U.S. with the lives of his counterparts - disabled people who are left struggling for survival in his native Sierra Leone.
Surviving: Mohome Sankoh (middle)
lost his leg to a machete-wielding
female soldier when he was in his mid-teens.
Mohome Sankoh, 19, whose leg was hacked off during Sierra Leone's civil war by a female soldier wielding a machete, clutches a pair of crutches by the curb of one of Freetown's unpaved back streets. He begs - for food, money, anything - in front of a ramshackle block of kiosks. The stench of urine permeates the area, wrestling the nostrils in this most destitute of city blocks in one of Africa's poorest cities.
"What a me for do?' he says in his native Kreo, amid the furious honking of sweaty drivers whose beat up Mercedes and BMWs cram into a street built in pre-automotive era. Roughly translated, it means he can't change his lot.
More than five years after the war's end, one still doesn't have to look far to find living testaments to the conflict's unusual barbarity, where armed rebels hacked off the limbs of civilians as a warning to any would-be opposition. In a story that is so very African, the amputees have become an afterthought as the international community has redirected its gaze on the Dark Continent's latest hot spots. But still they linger on, many struggling for their daily survival.(More)
Debolina and Prashant Choudhary are
recent transplants in Kampala,
raising their two-year-old daughter.
A family friend Goswami Debarata, from Calcutta, has been a resident for about ten years and plans to go back in a few years.
Debolina Choudhary had been married only a few weeks when she left Calcutta to join her husband Prashant, who had relocated to Kampala four months earlier. Neither had visited the bustling capital city of Uganda, let alone Africa. Yet, this country, that threw out its entire Asian population not too long before, made sense for their short-term goals.
Asian immigration to Uganda is not a new phenomenon--it dates back more than a century when Indians were brought over to East Africa by the British to work on building railway lines. When the work was done, some remained to fill the vacuum of trade in an agricultural economy and went on to become successful entrepreneurs and eventually big stakeholders in the Ugandan economy.
Eventually, a harsh expulsion order in 1972 by Uganda's infamous Idi Amin Dada removed this population--estimated between 60,000 and 70,000-- in its entirety.
The Asians have trickled back in and it is not unusual anymore to find convenience stores on Kampala Road with proprietors of Asian descent. Or sari-clad women walking into the Hindu temple situated prominently in the heart of the city, while others shop in nearby vegetable markets. Indian restaurants appear quite popular and "chapatti" or bread, a mainstay in North-Indian diets, is as common on any menu as the local favorite "matoke," or cooked bananas.
However, only about 10 percent of the 20,000 Asians in Uganda today are "returnees," or Asians who were expelled in 1972. The majority are new immigrants like Prashant and Debolina Choudhary. Despite the recent history of turbulent race relations, Uganda has once again become a land of economic opportunity for these first generation Indians.
[an earlier version of this story was published by the Associated Press in February 2007, and ran in dozens of news outlets around the world, including the International Herald Tribune]
Milagros Vacas Arlandis had three biological children of her own and a demanding job as a medical doctor, but something was missing.
For 10 years, she and her husband, Jose Antonio Revilla, had wanted to adopt a child, but long waits and complicated legal maneuverings made adopting within their native Spain virtually impossible.
"My husband and I always wanted to provide a home for a child who didn't have a family," Vacas Arlandis said. "We tried to adopt in Spain, but after waiting for years and hearing nothing, we decided to take a different route."
So in 2002 the couple attended an informational meeting and initiated the paperwork to bring a little girl from China to their home in the northern city of Santander.
As once-homogenous Spain digests a newly diverse population, enriched by an influx of some 4 million immigrants over the last decade, it also has one of the world's highest per capita international adoption rates in the world. More than half the adopted children come from China.
Serdar Özenalp arrived in Charlottesville, Va., around midnight after a 20-hour journey from Istanbul, Turkey. He hailed a cab with two friends who were also about to begin their undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia and drove south on Route 29 to University Circle, where he stayed at the cozy International House. It was August 1998 and it was hot.
Eser Turan took a 24-hour trip from Istanbul to San Francisco. An African-American couple she met on the plane gave her a ride to a high school friend's house. It was her first time in California, where she would soon begin her master's in architecture at UC Berkeley. It was a pleasant day in August 1996, with cool breezes welcoming Turan to the city.
Young Turks today are going abroad in ever-increasing numbers for their higher education, just like their predecessors in the 19th century. They seek to explore new horizons and exit Turkey's rigid educational system. For most, the United States is what France and Germany were to their forefathers: a land of opportunities and fresh ideas. And so they come each year, in thousands, looking for knowledge, fresh experience and a taste of the American lifestyle they followed from afar.
Their adventures in the United States are translating to new ideas back home, making their Western-influenced insights on Turkey unique and valuable as the country's democracy moves from its infancy to adolescence. Or, they are shocked upon their return to Turkey, experience difficulties in readjusting to an old way of life and start planning an escape.
North Korea's state of impoverishment has spawned a steadily increasing influx of refugees into South Korea, from about ten a year in the early '90s to 1,894 in 2004 (and a 45.7 percent increase from 2003), according to the Korean Ministry of Unification, a government agency that promotes peace between the two Koreas. Currently, the ministry puts the number of North Koreans living in South Korea at 6,000. Estimates of the number in China vary widely from 60,000 to 200,000. The number slogging their way out of North Korea is unknown, but activists say what was once a trickle has in recent years become a flood. In spite of the numbers, the road to Seoul has not gotten any easier.
Tim Peters, who is head of Helping Hands Korea, an organization that helps North Koreans in crisis, and a Christian activist who has testified on the refugee issue before Congress, said sources tell him the number of North Koreans in China could be as high as 400,000. "Sometimes repatriations (from China back to North Korea) can be 400 a week."
Accordingly, the Chinese have also expanded by two-fold a holding facility by the border to house more than 800 people, he said.
Dong Seok Kim shows the scars
inflicted by North Korean authorities
Photo: Matthew Rusling
With longish hair, strategically torn jeans, and a thin frame wrapped in a blue sweatshirt, Dong Seok Kim easily blends in with any crowd of twenty-something Seoulites amid the noisy clutter of the city's shops, restaurants and cafes. But lifting his shirt to reveal the scars inflicted by North Korean security officers, his origins as a Northerner become glaringly apparent.
Kim, whose name is an alias used to protect relatives in the North from being persecuted for his "crime" of leaving the country, is one of around 6,000 North Koreans in the South, according to the Korean Ministry of Unification, a South Korean government organization promoting peace between the two Koreas.
Muslim women in France 'regain' virginity in clinics
BY ALEXANDRA STEIGRAD, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
[this story was originally published by Reuters on April 29, 2007, and ran in dozens of news outlets around the world, including Washingtonpost.com, Boston.com and NYTimes.com]
Sitting in a cafe near the Champs Elysees, the 26-year-old French-born woman of Algerian descent looks like any other Parisian. But two months ago, she did something none of her friends have done.
She had her hymen re-sewn, technically making her a virgin again.
"I'm glad I had it done," said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I wanted to reconstruct part of my life, to reconstruct myself so that I could feel better about myself."
This 30-minute outpatient procedure, called "hymenoplasty" and costing between 1,500 and 3,000 euros ($2,000-$4,000), is increasingly popular among young women of North African descent in France.
Magdi is different from the other four million Iraqi refugees who have been displaced since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
That he has survived a kidnapping in which he was left for dead may not make him distinct. Magdi was born in Egypt and has returned there with his family. But it is the fact that his children attend Egyptian public school that he and his friends consider miraculous.
For Iraqis who have fled their war-ridden country to seek a secure life in Egypt, accessing education for their children is of high priority. An estimated 80,000 to 150,000 Iraqis now reside in Egypt, but the influx until recently was so persistent that accurate numbers are hard to come by. Most put their children in costly private schools because as far as they know, public schools are off limits to them.
"He made impossible things by putting them into government schools," Rafi said in English of his friend Magdi, who spent six months acquiring the paperwork to prove that his two young children were also Egyptian.
"He got permission from the (education) minister himself," another friend, Ahmad, added, also speaking in English.
An earlier version of this article appeared in The Irish Times on May 30, 2007.
Child of Sarajevo
Zlata Filipovic, author of Zlata's Diary
Photograph: The Irish Times
Zlata Filipovic's childhood was ruined by war in her native Sarajevo, but her diary provided an escape and was published to great acclaim. Now living in Ireland, she has become a leading humanitarian voice, writes Erin Golden
Zlata Filipovic doesn't make five-year plans. Perhaps she would have, if life had been different: if there'd been no war, no diary, no MTV appearances, if the ordinary life of a girl in Sarajevo hadn't been interrupted by politics and gunfire. But now, as an adult, the transplanted Dubliner knows there's no use in pretending life unravels in tidy, simple lines.
The petite, dark-haired 26-year-old is perhaps Ireland's most famous resident from the former Yugoslavia, part of an immigrant community that blossomed in size here in the early 1990s as ethnic tensions in the region dissolved into full-scale warfare.
By the time Filipovic fled Bosnia with her parents in 1993, getting out of the country alive was nearly impossible. Snipers lurked on the rooftops of Sarajevo and soldiers with heavy artillery dotted the mountains surrounding the city. But the 13-year-old had done something remarkable: she'd written her ticket out by keeping track of her thoughts in a diary, a small book that would become the international bestseller Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo .
A slight feeling of dread would creep into Jim Danaher's heart every time his boyfriend, Christof Spiesschaert, left the country. While Christof, a Belgian citizen, had a valid tourist visa, the document did not guarantee he would be let back into the U.S. once he left its borders. Entering the U.S. is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol,a separate department from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services which grants visas.
Early last April when Jim found himself waiting for Christof to come striding into the arrival waiting area long after Christof's plane from Mexico had landed at Chicago O'Hare, Jim knew something was wrong.
The couple had been in a relationship for about a year and a half after meeting in Florida in late 2004 while they were both on vacation. After the two exchanged a few short visits, including a Valentine's Day weekend in Paris, Jim, 47, and Christof, 37, decided to live together in the U.S.
A Minority within a minority: The Portuguese entrepreneurs of Paris
BY ALVARO VILLALOBOS LOPEZ, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
Sitting at a table, he drinks his coffee while talking to two women. His white shirt is spotless. His hair, in place. His words roll slowly. He looks determined. António de Macedo Andrade, Portuguese immigrant, is the owner of the restaurant Paris Madeira, in Paris' 9th district.
Like Andrade, Alberto Alves, Antonia Gonçalves, and José da Silva arrived in Paris between 1968 and 1970. They had to work hard to create their own companies in and around Paris. Affluent and prosperous, they represent a vital minority in France's Portuguese community.
In 1962, 50.000 Portuguese immigrants lived in France. Six years later, there were 300,000. By 1975, 800,000 Portuguese had settled. Since then, the figure stabilized and the community composed of Portuguese and Franco-Portuguese, is now approaching a million individuals. Within Paris, the Portuguese population of 47,000 is the largest foreign community, before the Algerians, Moroccans or Tunisians, according to the latest official census in 1999.
Chechen refugees: The road to asylum passes through Dublin 2
BY MADELEINE LEROYER, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
[A version of this story won third prize in the 2007 Daniel Pearl Award, a competition sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, in collaboration with the Ecole de Journalisme de Sciences Po in Paris, and was published in the Wall Street Journal Online]
After two years of living in fear, a Chechen family that had found refuge in Brest, France, finally obtained legal papers. As with the majority of Chechen exiles, they came through Poland. Arrested and registered there as asylum seekers, according to European legislation, they decided to flee further west. But Europe had already transformed them into illegal migrants.
A balloon explodes. Raissa jumps, her hands pressed hard on her pregnant belly. Another balloon explodes. Her eyes feverishly look for her sons. It's Dec. 26, 2006, in Brest, France. The association, Brest Education Without Borders, that coordinates the different collectives that provide relief to the undocumented migrants living in the city, has organized a Christmas party in the association's house. Children play. Raissa tries to forget the memories, the explosions, the bombs.
It took 17-year-old Mohammad Silah nearly half his life to reach Spain's Canary Islands in December 2005.
Forced to flee Sierra Leone in the midst of its civil war, Silah escaped the Revolutionary United Front's rebels to neighboring Guinea-Conakry. After both his parents were killed, Silah moved to Gambia, Senegal and Mauritania, where a chance encounter with some teenage boys bought him passage on a four-day boat journey from Nouadhibou to the Canary Island of La Palma.
Massar Beng, 14, arrived in Spain's Canary Islands under different circumstances.
People in his village in Senegal were abuzz with news of work opportunities in Europe. Beng knew he would never be able to offer much financial support to his parents with the bleak job prospects in Senegal. The men and women in his village took to the teenage boy's pleasant disposition and offered to be his chaperone as they set out on a risky journey across the high seas from Darkar to Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands.
BY FANNIE OLIVIER, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
[A version of this story won second prize in the 2007 Daniel Pearl Award, a competition sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, in collaboration with the Ecole de Journalisme de Sciences Po in Paris, and was published in the Wall Street Journal Online]
Virginie and Ronnie's apartment is perched at the top of a long and narrow spiral staircase. Located in a popular Paris neighborhood near the Gare du Nord train station, it is mansard-roofed and tiny. A painting is soiled and the walls are moldy. A visitor is struck by the three posters the tenants have pinned to the walls. Like a bowl of fresh air in this contained space, they depict the open space of Quebec. Written in French, a slogan in the center of the posters reads: "Make your life in Quebec." For the young French couple, it is their new mantra to escape the banality of their Parisian life.
Virginie is a 24-year-old business school graduate who could only find a job in Paris as a waitress. Ronnie has an undergraduate degree in English but dreams of becoming an illustrator. They want to abandon a country they think has no future. Or rather that has no future for them, professionally.
Next September, they will take off for Montreal, the economic capital of Quebec, to try their luck, as so many of their French compatriots did before them, in French-speaking America. Their ticket is one-way. They hope to resettle in the Canadian province of their dreams though neither has ever been to Quebec before.
Each year, 3000 to 4000 French decide to emigrate permanently to Quebec, according to the figures of the Quebec Immigration Ministry. Moreover, 7000 others arrive with temporary work visas, and 5000 more as exchange students. But the dream of Quebec sometimes turns into a nightmare since hundreds of them come back to France every year.
Creating a network: religious groups give spiritual and practical guidance to Chinatown immigrants
BY ERIN GOLDEN AND CHRISTINA MARIA PASCHYN, MEDILL NEWS SERVICES
The Sunday service had already begun when 23-year-old Thomas Lai slipped into a pew near the back doors of the Chinese Christian Union Church. At the front of the South Side congregation of nearly 200 mostly youthful--and mostly Chinese--faces, a young woman and three young men in matching khakis and white T-shirts turned to their guitars and drum set for a new song.
Behind the band, lyrics about devotion to God projected onto the wall. In front, the packed crowd raised their arms heavenward and sang along like a slightly sedated crowd at a rock concert. Just a block down the street, in a small storefront with a cluttered gift shop, a considerably smaller crowd of Buddhist men and women, some in black robes with their heads shaved, chanted together as the smoke and smell of incense filled the room and wafted onto the street outside.
The catch with French egalite: Fraying the educational lifeline
BY AURELIE TOULEMONDE, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
Two versions of this articles are availlable English French
"B612!"
Twelve high pitched voices holler in unison as fingers shoot to the ceiling. Sitting in the back row, Yassine, a 12-year-old boy, in hallmark baggy pants and hooded jumper has leapt to his feet. His body now stretches across his desk, his arm reaching towards Madame Peltier, the teacher standing at the front of the classroom. His extra effort does the trick. He is rewarded by a disapproving glare but gets the right to answer.
"The Little Prince came from planet B612," he stammers in French. The words sound like rocks in his mouth but he smiles, clearly pleased with himself. And he should be. Only four months ago, Yassine barely spoke any French. Today, he is reading Antoine de Saint-Exupery's famous novel.
Madame Peltier's students may already look like typical French school students, but none of them are. They all come from overseas and have been in France for no more than a matter of months, some of them only weeks.
During the past school year, 40,000 non-French speakers, like Yassine, have joined the ranks of France's schools. Newly arrived migrant children may represent only 0.4% of the student body, a number which has remained steady for the past half-decade, but the challenge for the French education system is significant. The issue of whether the move goes well is obviously critical to the wellbeing of these children but also to that of the country. School is nothing less than the frontline of integration and the riots which rocked the country in November 2005 were proof of how essential it is that immigrant populations find their place.
Whether searching for jobs, looking to reunite families or fleeing war-torn countries, people are crossing borders, and they're taking their children with them. Morocco, Algeria, Cuba, Portugal, Romania, Poland, South Korea, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the United States and Bolivia: 11 nationalities out of 12 students. Mme. Peltier's 'classe d'accueil' in this middle school in Paris' 15th arrondissement mirrors what most developed countries are experiencing today.
Mozambican Monday: A ride on the deportation train
BY KABUIKA KAMUNGA, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
I decide to ride the deportation train to Mozambique, which runs every Monday. Each year, an average of 80,000 Mozambicans are deported, according to South Africa's Department of Home Affairs.
By the time I arrive at the center at noon, the Mozambican detainees are already being rounded up. The deportation process began at 6 a.m. by serving them their last meal of porridge and bread.
Some Mozambicans happily wave at my video camera and shout in an African language.
"They say they'll come back [to South Africa] tomorrow," an immigration officer translates.
It's a cycle. The South African government deports the illegal Africans, who then turn right back and re-enter the country.
During a 7-year period, 900,000 migrants were deported by South Africa; 80 percent of which were from Mozambique. Several human rights organizations say the South African migration policy has not reduced clandestine migration at all.
Trade in human eggs thrives as infertile couples travel the world seeking donors
BY EMILY WITHROW, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
[an earlier version of the story was published by the Associated Press on Jan. 27, 2007, and ran in dozens of news outlets around the world, including USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times]
Chemotherapy beat back her ovarian cancer, but took Sophie Valot's fertility with it. Her doctor said she had just one option to start a family of her own: Find an egg donor, have children and get a hysterectomy -- in five years or less, or risk relapse.
But French fertility clinics were in crisis, unable to meet the demand for donated eggs. Strict egg donation laws have caused a severe shortage of donors, and backlogs at clinics reach five years. So Valot took her search abroad.
After two trips to Spain in 2002 and 2003, Valot has two young boys and the family she always desired. She is among thousands of women and couples willing to travel and pay for eggs. A thriving global fertility industry welcomes them with open arms, promising babies.
Belgian, Spanish and Greek clinics court women on the Internet, flashing images of pregnant bellies, nursing mothers, and frolicking families. They boast large donor pools and competitive rates.
Online forums buzz with women discussing the reputations of foreign clinics and offering advice and support. Associations have sprung up across France that, for a small annual fee, help women connect with clinics abroad and provide discounts to certain centers.
American women use seasoned French organizations to hook them up with clinics in Greece or Spain. Even with air fares and hotels, the costs can be just 10% of treatments in the United States.
"Ba droits ya ba refuge" - African Migrants in South Africa
BY KABUIKA KAMUNGA, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
Kabuika Kamunga reports from South Africa about the treatment of immigrants from Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Her work highlights the surprising similarities with western countries in the treatment of immigrants. Plagued by corruption and inefficiencies, South Africa processes asylum seekers' applications in no less than 4 to 5 years, on the average. In the meantime, applicants are left to themselves, without the right to work and without any social structure to help them. Their situation is made even worse by the anti-immigrant atmosphere within portions of South African society.
Seida Karabasic can think of no other explanation for the beginning of the Balkan wars, which, in 1992, turned neighbor against neighbor in Prijedor, her municipality.
"Because it happened so quickly, a lot of people don't trust those of other ethnicities anymore," said Karabasic, who is ethnically Muslim or Bosniak. "They feel [the fighting] could happen again at anytime."
Across Bosnia, this distrust is evident not only in civilians' attitudes but in the ethnic makeup of communities as well. Many areas that were ethnically diverse before the war are now home to ethnically homogeneous communities.
The shift has been facilitated in part by the large number of Bosnians who were killed during the war or chose to flee the country. But another significant contributing factor has been the relocation of many Muslims, Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats to different areas of Bosnia.
When the guerrillas barged into Sofia Uwea's house and took her husband into the mountains, she screamed. When the commander told her to take her children and leave, or they would be next, she listened.
Three years ago, Uwea and her husband sold the coffee, yucca and avocados harvested on the farm they owned. Today, Uwea sleeps in a tiny, windowless room with her three young children. They share a bathroom with 15 other people and she wakes up worried everyday that her children will go without food.
Instead of being surrounded by grass and farm animals, the path to her current home is lined with broken glass and assorted trash.
Uwea's eyes well with tears as she thinks of when she first arrived in Bogota, almost three years ago. She's 32 years old but looks 45. Gray hairs are starting to show and she has prominent wrinkles lining her forehead.
Uwea moved to the city shortly after her husband was killed. Everything she owned, besides a few articles of clothing for her children, she will never see again. Her home town of Mapiripan is at least a twelve hour bus ride from Bogota. She was lucky to have a sister who could take her in for the first few weeks but after that, Uwea was on her own. Every night after their arrival, her youngest son would wake up screaming for his father. The other two children handled it better but were both traumatized by the experience, Uwea recalls.
"The first time I stood at a street light with my children and had to beg for food I couldn't even look the people in the eye. I was so embarrassed and ashamed," she said. "But it was the only way I could feed my children."
Uwea is just one of the estimated three million internally-displaced people living in Colombia. After Sudan, Colombia has the highest internally displaced population in the world. In the months of July, August, and September 2006 alone, more than 8,000 people were forced to leave their homes, according to CODHES, a Colombian group that keeps track of the displaced.
Armed with a cybernetics engineering and computer systems degree, Mexico City native Angel Camacho arrived for his first day on the job as an engineer in California's Silicon Valley and was immediately given an assignment by another engineer: Take out the trash.
"I said to him, 'Hey, did you see my badge?'" Camacho said. "And he said 'Oh, sorry.' I think I was the first Mexican he ever saw in a professional capacity."
South of the border, Mexican engineers face other problems. There are so few challenging high-tech jobs, and so many well-trained professionals, that a typical starting Mexican salary for an engineering graduate from the nation's top university is just $15,000 a year -- far less than many Silicon Valley janitors.
Tzvi Khaute, a native of a remote area near India's border with Myanmar, thanks God every day for allowing him to return to his ancestral home here in this West Bank settlement.
Khaute is one of about 1200 immigrants claiming descent from the lost Jewish tribe of "Bnei Menashe," or "Children of Menashe," a group of Indians who have to come to Israel and its settlements to reconnect with their spiritual roots.
The community was reinforced in late November 2006 by the arrival of 218 new immigrants, the largest group of the community to come in one fell swoop. Their plane tickets and initial expenses were paid by American Christian evangelicals who believe they will be blessed for helping to fulfill the biblical prophecy of returning the Jewish people to their homeland.
Their immigration, for the first time, was also sanctioned by the government. But their ordeal is far from over.
Lost and found: Euskara reemerging as the language of the Basques
BY KATHERINE BOYLE & SARA GOODMAN, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
"Mus!" With that, the speaker, a weathered cowboy wearing a black beret and cowboy boots, grins as he high-fives his partner and lays down his hand. He and three other men are sitting at a picnic table outside a tiny log cabin at the top of the Bighorn Mountains right outside of Buffalo, Wyo., playing a card game. At a glance, it seems like any other group of American cowboys gathered together for a game of poker. But it's not.
This game is being played entirely in a foreign language, one that isn't familiar to most Americans. They're speaking Euskara, a language with no known ties to any other language around the world.
The cowboys are Basque-Americans and they are part of a thriving community in the western United States. They come from the Basque Country: seven provinces in the Pyrenees of western Europe that make up the northwest corner of Spain and the southwest section of France. In Buffalo, most Basques are of French descent, and their relatives immigrated here in the early 1900s, seeking political freedom and economic advantage. At a time where many immigrant groups are wrestling with questions of nationality and identity, the Basque culture is flourishing.
Heber Oliveira is not a typical immigrant. He's 24, middle class and a college student.
Yet, he's an immigrant, migrating for opportunity, rather than necessity -- a 21st century global citizen with hopes to reap the spoils of globalization. Flying to Europe and paying college tuition abroad is a luxury otherwise reserved for the developing-world elite or middle-class North Americans or Europeans, but now Oliveira too is one of the privileged.
A strong Brazilian currency, cheap communication and a notoriously loose Italian citizenship law allow him to immigrate without much sacrifice.
The unlikely person most deserving of his thanks? Oliveira's Italian great-great-grandfather.
With proof of one direct ancestor, Italy is by far the easiest country in the European Union to get citizenship. It is virtually impossible to lose Italian nationality and more than 25 million people are eligible for Italian citizenship worldwide, according to Guido Tintori of the International and European Forum on Migration Research, or FIERI.
"Sale Arabe!" shrieked the furious middle-aged French woman to the heavy apartment door in front of her. The expression - commonplace in France nowadays - means, literally, "dirty Arab." "You turn down the music! You should stay in your country! Here in France we don't listen to our music that loud ..." She went on and on.
Fed up by the loud pop tunes blaring from the Bordeaux flat where Moroccan-born college student Meryem Laachi lived, the woman went next door and started shouting racial slurs without even knocking. If she had bothered to confront the offender face to face, the woman would have been surprised to see that Meryem wasn't home. Inside the apartment were two of Meryem's friends, two porcelain-skinned Caucasian French girls.
"Susanne was crying," Meryem says of her friend's reaction to the insults. As she sits in her new apartment in Rennes, a medium-sized city in the northwestern French province of Brittany, Meryem seems to let the incident roll off her back. "I just think my neighbor in Bordeaux was unhappy. She was living alone, she was 40 - I was thinking she had psychological problems."
That was about two years ago. Meryem, 22, has since finished her coursework in Bordeaux and is working on a finance degree at a specialized college in Rennes. She is tall, well-dressed and in fact, not dirty at all. What she doesn't have on her side, at least not according to French society, is shoulder-length coarse, dark hair and a long face shape that comes to a point at her chin. In other words, she looks Arabic, which in France automatically earns her a label as "the other." Compared with other instances of discrimination she's faced, however, being called "dirty Arab" isn't so bad. Especially compared with the hardships faced by French-born youths of Arabic descent, Meryem's situation is downright tolerable.
In East Ham, a small, bustling neighborhood in east London, the fragrant smells of Indian and Sri Lankan cooking drift out from restaurants. Colorful saris are displayed in the windowpanes of the fabric stores that line the main road.
These reminders of home, along with the cheap rent and proximity to local hospitals, are what perhaps draw the hundreds of junior doctors from India to this largely immigrant corridor.
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