Immigration Here and There

About the Immigration Here & There Project

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.


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Feature Stories

Medill News Service stories

Breaking the siege

BY ERIN GOLDEN, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

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 .



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06-01-2007 | 08:49:30
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Profiles

Compelling stories of immigration & diaspora

To the Canary Islands and back: Going nowhere in Senegal...Yet

BY MAKIKO KITAMURA, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE



Click on picture to enlarge



Momar Ba is back where he began, with little more than a harrowing story to share. He is alive but still desperate. He has traveled from his native Senegal to Germany, Switzerland, Tunisia, and most recently, Spain's Canary Islands, each time hungry for work.

The father of eight children, Ba saved up $1,200, selling used refrigerators to pay a smuggler. That allowed him to join about 20 other Senegalese in early September on an eight-day boat trip from Dakar to the Canary Islands.

"I was willing to sacrifice my life to get on that boat to go to Spain," the 34-year-old Ba said in his apartment in the working-class Dakar suburb of Parcelles Assainies.   (More)

02-08-2007 | 06:41:01
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Interactions & Dialogue

Tell your stories of immigration & diaspora

Share Your Story



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We value your personal account of your diaspora or immigration experience. Tell it here for others to read by leaving a comment. If you're not comfortable with putting it in writing or identifying yourself, email us (j-doppelt@northwestern.edu or f-blanc@northwestern.edu) and we'll assign a journalist to report on your story for our profile section.
























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02-05-2007 | 10:33:26
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Interactions & Dialogue

Tell a personal story of your diaspora or immigration experience, or read the accounts of others

Here

Facts and figures in the United States

From 1990 to 2005, Tennessee experienced the fourth fastest rate of immigrant growth of any state in the country. Nashville experienced a three-fold increase in foreign-born residents - from 12,662 to 39,596 - according to the last U.S. Census Report.

New research shows that immigrants in California are far less likely than U.S.-born Californians are to commit crime.

More than 80 foreign-born widows across the U.S. face possible deportation because their immigration paperwork was not approved before their American husbands' deaths (Associated Press, August 2007)
Permanent residency (a "green card") is also generally denied to immigrants whose U.S. citizen spouse dies within two years of the marriage (Associated Press, August 2007)

Here Archives

There

Facts and figures from around the world

16,700 immigrants arrived by boat in Lampedusa and the coast of Sicily in 2007
Many of them came from Nigeria, Morocco, Somalia, Tunisia, Eritrea, Ghana, and other African countries, and usually take a boat to Lampedusa from Libya.

1/3 of the 82,000 immigrants who took Britain's citizenship test in 2006 failed (London Sunday Telegraph, Oct. 15, 2006)

US have received 25.500 asylim applications (19%) followed by France (16.400), the UK (13.900), Germany (10.600) and Canada (10.100) (UNHCR, Sept 2006)

There Archives


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