The Park51 controversy isn’t really about a building. It’s about erasing individuals. Let me begin with a question: Who is a Muslim? Virtually everyone who has commented on the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy claims to know the answer to the above question. As Leon Wieseltier once put it, “On September 10, 2001, nobody in America …
BEIJING — China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years — a transformative event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come. The government, often by fiat, …
There has not been “an incident in Byzantine history with which the church of St. Sophia is not associated.”[1] Hagia Sophia represents the very essence of the history of Turkey and the continuous transformation it has undergone throughout the ages and even today.[2] Turkey, and especially Istanbul, the former Constantinople, is a country of great …
In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government. The referendum, which passed …
The Swiss voted to ban the construction of new minarets — against all expectations and although their government and most political parties had rejected a ban. But this referendum had, in truth, little to do with minarets. The surprising vote reveals rather a growing unease in Switzerland, which traditionally has been one of the most …
“Documented” is the new immigration documentary from Jose Antonio Vargas that is the centerpiece film at this year’s AFI Docs festival in Washington, D.C., and it tracks the one-time Washington Post reporter’s personal story as an undocumented immigrant (he revealed his undocumented status in a New York Times magazine piece in 2011). “To me, immigration …
In July of 2013, 100 asylum seekers burned their shelters down in an Australian refugee processing center on Nauru Island. The incident drew attention to a new law made the same day in Australia banning “boat people” from living in the country. The government started an ad campaign in multiple pan-Asian languages to warn of …
In 2013 an official probe was launched into claims that the Home Office “Go Home or Face Arrest” advertisement campaign targeting illegal immigrants is racist and offensive. There was a formal investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) into the controversial posters, which are being driven around on two vans in six London boroughs. …
Advertising in connection with migration and refugees is not the first thing that comes to mind, but the connection goes back to the beginnings of modern migration in the 18th century. In recent years, unlike the advertising of the past in which trading ships and companies extolled the virtues of “the new world” to would-be …
It reads like the website of a travel agency. “A trip to Italy next week in a big fast tourist yacht,” says the Facebook post beneath a picture of a luxury ocean liner. “Two floors, air-conditioned, prepared for tourists. Recommended for families.” But a package holiday this is not. It is the Facebook page of a …
The global money-transfer industry makes huge profits by charging a fee to transfer money to another country as well as off of exchange rates. For illegal immigrants who don’t have proper identification, it’s almost impossible for wire transfer companies to “know their customers.” Globalisation has created a demand for a cheap and mobile labour force, …
There is a wide-ranging effort by Australia to discourage refugees from going to Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. On the shores of Indonesia, billboard messages written in Dari let ‘boat people’ know that all illegal routes to Australia are closed to Afghans. Can these campaigns work on would-be migrants, when the conditions causing them to leave …
The language of advertising to recruit, and more recently, to de-recruit, immigrants provides a mostly unexamined aspect of the rationales provided for why people move. Negative advertising about one’s own country as a means to deter refugees and migrants from seeking asylum there is a new development in the ongoing story of human migration and …
Through powerful footage and intimate access, THE STATE OF ARIZONA focuses on the controversial “papers please” law, SB1070. The feature-length, verité documentary interweaves the volatile themes of immigration and race portrayed through a mosaic of characters and their responses to the law. The film’s three-act structure is built around the turbulent arc of the law, …
Lilja 4-ever (2002)Lilja 4-ever is a 2002 Swedish-Danish drama film directed by Lukas Moodysson. Lilja 4-ever is an unremittingly brutal and realistic story of the downward spiral of Lilja, played by Oksana Akinshina, a girl in the former Soviet Union whose mother abandons her to move to the United States. The story is loosely based …
No Fear, No Die (1990) Working from a script co-authored by Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, No Fear, No Die directly confronts the personal politics of race, capital, and especially masculinity, as they are marked by colonisation and its pathologies. While plot matters little in the work of Denis, the film follows the tragic consequences of …
Black Girl (1966) “Black Girl is a 1966 film by the Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembène, starring Mbissine Thérèse Diop. Its original French title is La Noire de…, which means “The black girl of…”, as in “someone’s black girl”. The film centers on a young Senegalese woman who moves from Senegal to France to …
A clinically presented series of stark white, unembellished placards illustrates the sobering statistical data for the overwhelming public sentiment against the abolition of the death penalty as an off-screen narrator (Nagisa Oshima) provides a snide, but impassioned rebuttal to popular opinion by presenting a objective documentary of the austere and impersonal milieu associated with the …
Reminiscences of a journey to Lithuania (1972) After a twenty-seven year absence, Adolfas and his brother Jonas returned to their birthplace in Lithuania. They had left Lithuania as young men, destined for a German labor camp. Now they came home for a visit, Adolfas with his wife, the singer Pola Chapelle. “The film consists of …
The Silence of Lorna (2008) Sokol and Lorna, two Albanian emigrants in Belgium, dream of leaving their dreary jobs to set up a snack bar. They need money, and a permanent resident status. Claudy is a junkie – he needs money to satisfy his addiction. Andrei, the cigarette smuggler, must hold up for a while …
La promesse is the breakthrough feature from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, who would go on to become a force in world filmmaking. The brothers brought the unerring eye for detail and the compassion for those on society’s lowest rungs developed in their earlier documentary work to this absorbing drama about a teenager (Jérémie Renier) gradually …
The Undocumented (2013) Marcos Hernandez lives and works in Chicago. He came to the United States from Mexico, after a life-threatening border crossing through the Sonora Desert in southern Arizona. Each month, he sends money to his mother in Mexico City to buy medicine for his brother, Gustavo, who needs a kidney transplant. The Undocumented, …
During the Colonial period, the English dominated settlement in New England, the Dutch in New York and New Jersey, the Germans in Pennsylvania, the Scandinavians in Delaware, and the French along the lake and river system of what was then the Western frontier. The patterns of westward migration of these groups established paths of architectural influence throughout the region. “The English established …
Two decades ago, when Shanghai’s leaders looked out over the new New China born of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, it seemed history had gone off the rails. It wasn’t Shanghai, the city that invented Chinese capitalism, but Deng’s new experimental instant metropolis, Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong, that was brimming with factories and …
Stranger Than Paradise (1984) Rootless Hungarian immigrant Willie (John Lurie), his pal Eddie (Richard Edson), and visiting sixteen-year-old cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) always manage to make the least of any situation, whether aimlessly traversing the drab interiors and environs of New York City, Cleveland, or an anonymous Florida suburb. With its delicate humor and dramatic …
How Democracy Works Now: Twelve Stories (2010) The documentary contains multiple, in-depth portraits that are weaved together to illustrate the full-blown social movement. It offers a window into the process of social change in a democracy, into the roots of immigration’s place in our culture and national identity and into the ability of the machinery …
The House of Sand and Fog (2003) Academy Award winners Ben Kingsley (Gandhi) and Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind) deliver stunning performances as two strangers whose conflicting pursuits of the American Dream lead to a fight for their hopes at any cost. What begins as a struggle over a rundown bungalow spirals into a clash …
The Godfather Part II (1974) Francis Ford Coppola took some of the deep background from the life of Mafia chief Vito Corleone–the patriarch of Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel The Godfather–and built around it a stunning sequel to his Oscar-winning, 1972 hit film. Robert De Niro plays Vito as a young Sicilian immigrant in turn-of-the-century New York …
Fast Food Nation (2006) Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear)-a marketing executive at Mickey’s Fast Food Restaurant chain, home of “The Big One”-has a problem. Contaminated meat is getting into the frozen patties of the company’s best-selling burger. To find out why, he’ll have to take a journey to the dark side of the All-American meal. Leaving …
Lost Boys of Sudan (2003) Lost Boys of Sudan follows two teenage Sudanese refugees on an extraordinary journey from Africa to America offering a gripping and sobering peek into the myth of the American Dream. In the late 80s Islamic fundamentalists in Sudan waged war on the country s separatists leaving behind over 20,000 male …
In Between Days (2007) A quiet specimen of personal storytelling at its most exciting, In Between Days intimately portrays the joys and risks of first love and burgeoning adulthood with bracing and undeniable honesty. Aimie (Jiseon Kim) is a teenager recently transplanted from her native South Korea to a snowbound North American city. Disconnected from her single …
Man Push Cart (2005) Every night while the city sleeps, Ahmad, a former rock star in his native Pakistan, drags his heavy cart along the streets of New York. And every morning, he sells coffee and donuts to a city he cannot call his own. One day, the pattern of this harsh existence is broken …
Well Founded Fear (2000) This 2000 documentary is an unprecedented inside look at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), award-winning filmmakers Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini take their cameras behind locked doors, where bureaucrats decide the fates of thousands of asylum-seekers each year. To be granted asylum, applicants must demonstrate a “well-founded fear” that their …
DETROIT’S IMMIGRATION SOLUTION THE NEW YORK TIMES FEBRUARY 5 SWISS IMMIGRATION: 50.3% BACK QUOTAS, FINAL RESULTS SHOW BBC NEWS FEBRUARY 9 STUART HALL OBITUARY THE GUARDIAN FEBRUARY 10
IMMIGRATION: ROMANIAN OR BULGARIAN? YOU WON’T LIKE IT HERE THE GUARDIAN JANUARY 27 TECH FIRMS PUSH TO HIRE MORE WORKERS FROM ABROAD THE NEW YORK TIMES APRIL 11 A CONVERSATION WITH: AUTHOR AND FILMMAKER VIVEK BALD THE NEW YORK TIMES: INDIA INK MAY 31
For many across the globe, Stuart Hall’s name is synonymous with Cultural Studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that he helped establish. An immigrant from Jamaica to Britain in the early 1950s, Hall’s work was deeply immersed in the political and cultural climate of his adopted country throughout his long career as scholar and teacher, …
About the film. Based on a National Science Foundation-funded study of over 700 Mexican households, The Other Side of Immigration asks why so many Mexicans have left home to work in the United States and what’s happened to the families and communities they’ve left behind. Structured around social science theory and the director’s academic research, …
David Turnley’s powerful and moving documentary, Shenandoah, tells the story of a small, coal mining Pennsylvania town of that name in which an illegal Mexican immigrant was attacked and killed by a group of white teenagers in 2008. An exploration of the uneasy admixture of fear and hate with patriotism and group loyalty, the film …
For anyone studying immigration into the United States today, “the lower East Side” of New York has a recognizably hallowed status, so celebrated has it become as a site for commemoration of immigrant arrival and settlement for a century and more. While other neighborhoods, such as Chinatown, have a similar past, it is “the lower …
