Migrant Education Quotes

Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote, make sure he's reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off?

As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond. Some, like Rebeca, share their stories carefully, selectively, finding a faithful ear and then chanting their words like prayers. Other migrants are like blown-open grenades, telling their anguish compulsively to everyone they meet, dispensing their pain like shrapnel so they might one day wake to find their burdens have grown lighter. Luca wonders what it would feel like to blow up like that. But for now he remains undetonated, his horrors sealed tightly inside, his pin fixed snugly in place.

the reality of survival for my Triqui companions shows that it would be riskier to stay in San Miguel without work, money, food, or education. In this original context, crossing the border is not a choice to engage in a risk behavior but rather a process necessary to survive, to make life less risky.

Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote, make sure he’s reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off? Thankfully, Rebeca is flush with insight. “Loads of people from our village used him before. He was recommended. Because you can’t just pick any coyote. A lot of them will steal your money and then sell you to the cartel, you know?

this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

That Black migrant communities were systematically de-skilled upon their arrival is an often-overlooked facet of understanding Black poverty in Canada today. Indeed, it represents the power of anti-Blackness to transcend even economic interests: even in moments when Canada required highly educated professionals, Black migrants meeting those exact criteria were nonetheless largely streamlined into low-skilled work and relative powerlessness.

It started as a youth movement, with educated disgruntled Europeans alienated by the competitive market (or neo-liberal) approach of the European Union project that was urging them on to a life of jobs, flexibility and faster economic growth. But their Eurocentric origins soon gave way to internationalism, as they saw their predicament of multiple insecurities linked to what was happening to others all over the world. Migrants became a substantial part of the precariat demonstrations.

Identity politics forces those who ask for our support to do their jobs: To understand that the self-made man got zoned into a good school district and received a high-quality education, one that wouldn’t have existed if his zip code changed by a digit. To recognize that the woman on welfare with three kids is the product of divorce in a state where she risks losing food stamps if her low-wage job pays her too much. Or that the homeless junkie is an Iraq War veteran who was in the National Guard but lost his job due to multiple deployments and didn’t qualify for full VA care. And that the laborer is a migrant farmworker who overstayed his visa to care for his American-born children. Single-strand identities do not exist in a household, let alone in a nation.

The presence of the migrants “in such large numbers crushed and stagnated the progress of Negro life,” the economist Sadie Mossell wrote early in the migration to Philadelphia. Newly available census records suggest the opposite to be true. According to a growing body of research, the migrants were, it turns out, better educated than those they left behind in the South and, on the whole, had nearly as many years of schooling as those they encountered in the North. Compared to the northern blacks already there, the migrants were more likely to be married and remain married, more likely to raise their children in two-parent households, and more likely to be employed. The migrants, as a group, managed to earn higher incomes than northern-born blacks even though they were relegated to the lowest-paying positions. They were less likely to be on welfare than the blacks they encountered in the North, partly because they had come so far, had experienced such hard times, and were willing to work longer hours or second jobs in positions that few northern blacks, or hardly anyone else for that matter, wanted, as was the case with Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, Robert Foster, and millions of others like them.

As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond. Some, like Rebeca, share their stories carefully, selectively, finding a faithful ear and then chanting their words like prayers. Other migrants are like blown-open grenades, telling their anguish compulsively to everyone they meet, dispensing their pain like shrapnel so they might one day wake to find their burdens have grown lighter.

The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report. “As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.” Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote. “Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.” The

Adding social structural analysis to medical and public health education would move toward a more realistic and balanced version of the biopsychosocial model already explicitly claimed in contemporary health-professional training. More important, this would provide future physicians and public health professionals with the lenses to recognize the societal critiques available in sicknesses and their distributions. With such an awareness of the structurally violent social context of disease, health professionals could move effectively toward acknowledging, treating, and preventing suffering.

There was a time when Indians who had been abroad and picked up some simple degree or skill said that they had become displaced and were neither of the East nor West. In this they were absurd and self-dramatizing: they carried India with them, Indian ways of perceiving. Now, with the great migrant rush, little is hard of that displacement. Instead, Indians say that they have become too educated for India. The opposite is usually true: they are not educated enough; they only want to repeat their lessons. The imported skills are rooted in nothing; they are skills separate from principles ... To match technology to the needs of a poor country calls for the highest skills, the clearest vision. Old India, with all its encouragements to the instinctive, non-intellectual life, limits vision.

Perhaps the most worrying legacy of African slavery in the New World is the persistent oppression of all people of African descent in the Americas. A recent quantitative study shows that up to about 1820, approximately five Africans were brought to the New World for each European migrant (Eltis 1983: 255; Engerman 1986: 318–22). But in the course of the nineteenth century all that changed, as the booming American economies attracted free migrants from Europe. This means that the African slaves did the back-breaking work, but as the fruits of this work began to mature others came in to reap the harvest, with the blacks continuing to be held back in bondage. Even after emancipation, legal and other forms of oppression still blocked black access to power and resources. Thus the process of capitalist accumulation passed them by, giving rise to a black population in the Americas generally characterized by poverty, extreme deprivation, lack of education, disease,

Looking back on all my interviews for this book, how many times in how many different contexts did I hear about the vital importance of having a caring adult or mentor in every young person’s life? How many times did I hear about the value of having a coach—whether you are applying for a job for the first time at Walmart or running Walmart? How many times did I hear people stressing the importance of self-motivation and practice and taking ownership of your own career or education as the real differentiators for success? How interesting was it to learn that the highest-paying jobs in the future will be stempathy jobs—jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being? How ironic was it to learn that something as simple as a chicken coop or the basic planting of trees and gardens could be the most important thing we do to stabilize parts of the World of Disorder? Who ever would have thought it would become a national security and personal security imperative for all of us to scale the Golden Rule further and wider than ever? And who can deny that when individuals get so super-empowered and interdependent at the same time, it becomes more vital than ever to be able to look into the face of your neighbor or the stranger or the refugee or the migrant and see in that person a brother or sister? Who can ignore the fact that the key to Tunisia’s success in the Arab Spring was that it had a little bit more “civil society” than any other Arab country—not cell phones or Facebook friends? How many times and in how many different contexts did people mention to me the word “trust” between two human beings as the true enabler of all good things? And whoever thought that the key to building a healthy community would be a dining room table? That’s why I wasn’t surprised that when I asked Surgeon General Murthy what was the biggest disease in America today, without hesitation he answered: “It’s not cancer. It’s not heart disease. It’s isolation. It is the pronounced isolation that so many people are experiencing that is the great pathology of our lives today.” How ironic. We are the most technologically connected generation in human history—and yet more people feel more isolated than ever. This only reinforces Murthy’s earlier point—that the connections that matter most, and are in most short supply today, are the human-to-human ones.

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

For the mainly Urdu- speaking migrants from India who abandoned home and hearth to make their futures in a predominantly non- Urdu speaking country, Pakistan was the land of opportunity. Better educated than most of their coreligionists in western Pakistan, they expected to get the best jobs. Some of these muhajirs, as the refugees from India came to be known, had sensibly moved their money before partition in the hope of starting up new businesses in both wings of the country. The idea of material gain encapsulated in “Pakistan Zindabad” was a stretch removed from the other more loaded slogan, defining its meaning in vague Islamic terms. But for all their claims dressed up in religious terminology, the protagonists of an Islamic state too had their sights on power and pelf in the Muslim El Dorado.

The knitted web in the Common is based on various pacifist yarn-bombings around the U.S. and the U.K., while the ice children in Nashville have their seeds in the surprise overnight installations of statues, such as the nude Donald Trump statues created by INDECLINE to protest his policies, and the haunting depictions of caged children that were planted by the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) to draw attention to migrant family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border.

theory of the wétiko psychosis, writes that “the responsibility for holding destructive institutions—more broadly systems, and more broadly yet cultures—accountable falls on each of us . . . This means that all of us who care about life need to force accountability onto those who do not; we must learn to be accountable to ourselves, our consciences, our neighbors, and the nonhuman members of our community . . . rather than be loyal to political, economic, religious, penal, educational, and other institutions that do not serve us well.” With regard to our borders and the crises of migrant death and disappearance across the globe, we must thus declare loyalty to human life over shifting and mutable laws and policies, and we must remain attuned to these loyalties so as not to return to indifference.

Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote. “Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.

PORTUGAL’S MIGRANTS HOPE FOR NEW LIFE IN OLD AFRICAN COLONY I assumed, when I started reading it, that it was about Portuguese Mozambicans who had fled Mozambique for Portugal after independence from colonial rule in 1975 and were now going back. An interesting story but not that remarkable: my parents left Uganda for Europe, missed Uganda terribly and eventually returned. I could understand a Mozambican exile in Portugal wanting to do the same thing. But the story wasn’t about Portuguese Mozambicans going back to their country of origin. It was about young, white middle-class Portuguese citizens born, raised and educated in Portugal—a member of the European Union, no less—who were taking one look at the economic state of their own country and saying, “I tell you what, Mozambique looks like a better bet.” I almost fell off my chair when I realized that. I grew up hearing stories about Mozambique being one of the most desperate countries on Earth. A narrow sliver of a nation stretching 1,800 miles down the East African coast, it had experienced three centuries of oppressive colonial rule followed by years of brutal civil war and Marxist misrule. It was the poster child for a continent in chaos: riddled with land mines, haunted by war, entirely dependent on foreign aid.

The glorious world of work stumbles at various obstacles: pregnancy, age, lack of education, desperation (particularly of migrant and illegal workers, the nannies and cleaners who work so that richer women can do the same). The job market continues to differentiate between men and women – the most blatant is the surprisingly resilient pay differential for the same jobs, and the predominance of women in part-time and badly-paid work.

You’re like rented furniture. In the world of higher education, I call adjunct professors—who do the majority of the teaching—”migrant workers with degrees.” Don’t be insulted and don’t fight it. Your talents are used (hopefully not misused) for as long as they’re valuable to others—and then returned to where you came from when you’re no longer of use.

    There are different levels to peace. One is individual – that you are not sick and hungry. Another is mutual understanding, that there is no discrimination. My own life is at peace, but that is not the case for all of us: the individual dimension is often lacking. People are often hungry and sick, they have heavy debts and family conflicts, and that can disrupt peace. Or this twenty-five-year-old male migrant to Musaga, with no education: ‘Peace is when nobody is a victim of injustice. It is also when the entire neighborhood has enough to eat. If your neighbor doesn’t have what is needed you too become vulnerable.’ Or this twenty-nine-year-old mechanic in a better-off urban neighborhood: ‘People must have work and quit poverty: if they don’t, they start thinking badly of each other, because they feel bad themselves.’ For this minority, there is a causal link between poverty and peace.

There are many facets to the decline in fairness and opportunity in American life. Perhaps the worst are the conditions now imposed upon young children born into the underclass and subjected to the recent evolution of the educational system. They are related, and they reinforce each other; their combined result is to condemn tens of millions of children, particularly those born into the new underclass, to a life of hardship and unfairness. For any young child whose parents don’t have money, or who is the child of a migrant agricultural worker and/or an illegal immigrant, prenatal care, nursery, day care, after school, school nutrition, and foster-care systems are nothing short of appalling. And then comes school itself. The “American dream”, stated simply, is that no matter how poor or humble your origins—even if you never knew your parents—you have a shot at a decent life. America’s promise is that anyone willing to work hard can do better over time, and have at least a reasonable life for themselves and their own children. You could expect to do better than your parents, and even be able to help them as they grew old. More than ever before, the key to such a dream is a good education. The rise of information technology, and the opening of Asian economies, means that only a small portion of America’s population can make a good living through unskilled or manual labour. But instead of elevating the educational system and the opportunities it should provide, American politicians, and those who follow their lead around the globe, have been going in exactly the wrong direction. As a result, we are developing not a new class system, but, without exaggeration, a new caste system—a society in which the circumstances of your birth determine your entire life. As a result, the dream of opportunity is dying. Increasingly, the most important determinant of a child’s life prospects—future income, wealth, educational level, even health and life expectancy—is totally arbitrary and unfair. It’s also very simple. A child’s future is increasingly determined by his or her parents’ wealth, not by his or her intelligence or energy. To be sure, there are a number of reasons for this. Income is correlated with many other things, and it’s therefore difficult to isolate the impact of individual factors. Children in poor households are more likely to grow up in single-parent versus two-parent households, exposed to drugs and alcohol, with one or both parents in prison, with their immigration status questionable, and more likely to have problems with diet and obesity. Culture and race play a role: Asian children have far higher school graduation rates, test scores, and grades than all other groups, including whites, in the US; Latinos, the lowest.

Part of visiting the apple orchard involves talking to migrant workers, usually Jamaican men.

the unit are: Who are migrant farmworkers? What is hard about their lives? What rights are they fighting for? After conversations

These bills include hundreds of thousands of economic migrants who, after years in the UK, probably still can’t believe that British taxpayers are stupid enough to give them free housing, free education, free healthcare and £20,000 or £30,000 or even £40,000 a year for producing ever more children without ever having to do a day’s work.

Rapists are created, not born” has become the accepted wisdom.39 But when it comes to migrants and minorities, pointing to cultural explanations for their behavior toward women is taboo. This seems contradictory. Indeed, when you consider how Muslim men are educated about sex—or not—it makes no sense at all.

the migrants would arrive with higher levels of education than earlier waves of migrants and thus greater employment potential than both the blacks they left behind and the blacks they joined.

from 1955 to 1960. “Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident white population.

The migrants, the Taeubers found, “resemble in educational levels the whites among whom they live,” and they tended to be “of substantially higher

Africa, I believe, is embarking upon an era of sharp divergences in which China will play a huge role in specific national outcomes—for better and for worse, perhaps even dramatically, depending on the country. Places endowed with stable governments, with elites that are accountable and responsive to the needs of their fellow citizens, and with relatively healthy institutions, will put themselves in a position to thrive on the strength of robust Chinese demand for their exports and fast-growing investment from China and from a range of other emerging economic powers, including Brazil, Turkey, India, and Vietnam. Inevitably, most of these African countries will be democracies. Other nations, whether venal dictatorships, states rendered dysfunctional by war, and even some fragile democracies—places where institutions remain too weak or corrupted—will sell off their mineral resources to China and other bidders, and squander what is in effect a one-time chance to convert underground riches into aboveground wealth by investing in their own citizens and creating new kinds of economic activity beyond today’s simple extraction. The proposition at work here couldn’t be more straightforward. The timeline for resource depletion in many African countries is running in tandem with the timeline for the continent’s unprecedented demographic explosion. At current rates, in the next forty years, most African states will have twice the number of people they count now. By that same time, their presently known reserves of minerals like iron, bauxite, copper, cobalt, uranium, gold, and more, will be largely depleted. Those who have diversified their economies and invested in their citizens, particularly in education and health, will have a shot at prosperity. Those that haven’t, stand to become hellish places, barely viable, if viable at all.

knitted web in the Common is based on various pacifist yarn-bombings around the U.S. and the U.K., while the ice children in Nashville have their seeds in the surprise overnight installations of statues, such as the nude Donald Trump statues created by INDECLINE to protest his policies, and the haunting depictions of caged children that were planted by the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) to draw attention to migrant family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the nonviolent protests of the Serbian Otpor! movement, Syrian anti-Assad protestors, and other groups, especially as described so vividly in Blueprint for Revolution, by Srdja Popović, sparked the ideas for the cement block and crowbar in Austin, the ping-pong balls in Memphis, and Margaret’s bottle caps, as well as influencing the overall spirit of all the art protests. The struggles of prodemocracy Hong Kongers, particularly against the recent China-imposed “national security” legislation, were always on

Across the North as a whole, the post–World War II migrants “were not [italics in original] of lower average socioeconomic status than the resident Negro population,” the Taeubers wrote in their 1965 census analysis of migrants arriving north from 1955 to 1960.51 “Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident white population.” Against

The reason Black immigrants generally have higher educational levels and economic pictures than African Americans is not that their transnational ethnicities are superior. The reason resides in the circumstances of human migration. Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources. Generally speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful—not because they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but because they are immigrants. In fact, immigrants and migrants of all races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries. Sociologists call this the “migrant advantage.

Studies conducted in the early 1930s found that, after four years in the North, the children of black migrants to New York were scoring nearly as well as northern-born blacks who were “almost exactly at the norm for white children,” wrote Otto Klineberg, a leading psychologist of the era at Columbia University. “The evidence for an environmental effect is unmistakable,” he reported. He found that the longer the southern-born children were in the North, the higher they scored. The results “suggest that the New York environment is capable of raising the intellectual level of the Negro children to a point equal to that of the Whites.” Klineberg’s studies of the children of the Great Migration would later become the scientific foundation of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the school desegregation case, Brown v. the Board of Education, a turning point in the drive toward equal rights in this country.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the U.S. Department of Labor, called the inner cities after the arrival of the southern migrants “a tangle of pathology.” He argued that what had attracted southerners like Ida Mae, George, and Robert was welfare: “the differential in payments between jurisdictions has to encourage some migration toward urban centers in the North,” he wrote, adding his own italics. Their reputation had preceded them. It had not been good. Neither was it accurate. The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report. “As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.” Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote. “Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.” The South had erected some of the highest barriers to migration of any people seeking to leave one place for another in this country. By the time the migrants made it out, they were likely willing to do whatever it took to make it, so as not to have to return south and admit defeat. It would be decades before census data could be further analyzed and bear out these observations. One myth they had to overcome was that they were bedraggled hayseeds just off the plantation. Census figures paint a different picture. By the 1930s, nearly two out of every three colored migrants to the big cities of the North and West were coming from towns or cities in the South, as did George Starling and Robert Foster, rather than straight from the field. “The move to northern cities was dominated by urban southerners,” wrote the scholar J. Trent Alexander. Thus the latter wave of migrants brought a higher level of sophistication than was assumed at the time. “Most Negro migrants to northern metropolitan areas have had considerable previous experience with urban living,” the Taeuber study observed. Overall, southern migrants represented the most educated segment of the southern black population they left, the sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote in 1998. In 1940 and 1950, colored people who left the South “averaged nearly two more years of completed schooling than those who remained in the South.” That middle wave of migrants found themselves, on average, more than two years behind the blacks they encountered

A dramatic ageing of the population. Its effects will start being felt in 2005 (from the retirement of numerous groups). Since the government did not foresee and reform the retirement system paid out of each year’s taxes, we know it is already too late. There will not be sufficient funds to furnish allocations and healthcare to seniors and ever higher taxes will be levied on those who are working. The result will necessarily be a generalised lowering of purchasing power and therefore of economic growth based on consumption. The ageing of the population will also rapidly lead — it is already happening — to another frightening effect: a loss of technological skills. There are not enough young minds. 2)  The massive immigration of new battalions from the Third World to palliate these gaps, so desired by the UN, is an imposture. These migrants are unskilled and need social services themselves. They are mouths to feed, not the brains needed in a post-industrial society. Germany wanted to import more than 30,000 engineers that it needs (already), but got only 9,000 Indians. The immigration-colonisation (of which the entire cost is already more than 122 billion euros a year), which will not stop growing, added to the steadily increasing birth rate of the foreigners — most of them, as everyone knows, are not able to earn a good education — will be one more brake on economic prosperity. The current masses of ‘youths’ from Africa and North Africa will for the most part have a choice only between unemployment supported by welfare payments or participation in the parallel and criminal economy. The professional value of the workforce is going to experience a dramatic decline as soon as 2010.

all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

Jessica uncapped a marker and wrote ILLS at the top of the whiteboard. “Right,” Averman said. “I thought we’d begin with an overview of the problems at hand. This is a brainstorm. There’re no bad suggestions. We’ll prioritize and organize in the second session.” Four men spoke at once and then deferred to Roark. “We’re to list, what? Global pandemics?” “Everything. Like heart disease, for example.” Averman replied. Jessica wrote HEART DISEASE in the top left corner. A voice from the third row. “World hunger?” Jessica wrote WORLD HUNGER. Guy figured he’d come this far. “Jingoism!” JINGOISM. Benatti yelled, “Famine!” “Isn’t that the same as world hunger?” Roark asked. A chorus of assenting murmurs. Wright called up from the second row. “World hunger is a distribution problem. Famine is agricultural.” “Gentlemen.” Averman put his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. “Again, there are no bad suggestions. We’ll sort everything in the second session.” FAMINE. “SIDS!” Mary Ellen yelled. “Malaria!” someone shouted. Momentum gathered: “Alzheimer’s! Influenza! Cerebral palsy! Women’s education! Recidivism! Rising oceans! The migrant crisis! Diabetes! Earthquakes! Wage disparity! Racism! Blindness! Domestic abuse! Nuclear armament! Nuclear stockpiling! Opportunity for the less affluent! Drug patents! Ennui! Urban zoning! High-speed internet access! The Great Barrier Reef! Food deserts! Healthcare reform! Religious extremism! Crohn’s disease! Meningococcemia! Carbon emissions! AIDS! Female genital mutilation! Apathy! Child labor! Deafness! Corporate monopolies! Tax reform! Flesh-eating viruses! Infrastructure! University endowments! River-borne diseases! Mudslides! Marfan syndrome! Wildfires! Sexism! Opioids! Locked-in syndrome! Gambling addiction! Lyme’s! Lack of potable water! Tuberculosis! COPD! Syphilis! Deaths of despair! Mass transportation! High blood pressure! Bee extinction! Monogamy! Pneumonia! Mass incarceration! Mass migration! Pornography! Fibromyalgia! Diarrhea! Cirrhosis! Bacterial infections! Poor hygiene! Illiteracy! E. coli! Car accidents! School shootings! Xenophobia! Holy wars! Preterm birth complications! Sugar! Terrorism! Diabetes! Unemployment! Depression! Norovirus! Fracking! Oxygen depletion in the oceans! Nuclear waste! Mortality! . . .

Achebe recoiled at the notion that achievement should be any kind of gauge of our human obligations to one another. In conversations about the refugee crisis, educated people continue to make the barbaric argument that open doors will benefit the host nation. The time for this outdated colonialist argument has run out; migrants don’t derive their value from their benefit to the Western-born, and civilized people don’t ask for résumés from the edge of the grave.

Zhiqiang was once a migrant rural worker struggling to make a living. He had tried his luck as a vegetable street vendor, a construction worker and a takeout deliveryman. Despite being poorly educated, Zhiqiang had always been interested in computers and the internet. He moved to Beijing’s Zhongguancun area, known as China’s Silicon Valley, where he took on many manual labour jobs for more than six years. By 2006, he had saved enough money to buy a computer, which he took back to his hometown, a small rural farming village in north China’s Shanxi province. After overcoming the challenge of getting the internet installed in his home, he opened an online shop selling just a few local products such as rice and soybeans. His friends and family wondered what on earth he was trying to do. In 2008, while the Olympic Games were in full swing in Beijing, Zhiqiang got the break he needed. He opened ‘Farmville’, not the popular game but an online shop selling all kinds of fresh produce grown by the local