“The expectation projected upon the refugee is that the past is less relevant than the future…”
Book Review The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Abrams Press, 2018. Viet Thanh Nguyen has become perhaps the most eloquent voice of the past decade of the immigrant experience in the United States. Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer (2016) stakes out a very particular angle on the Vietnam war and…
Americans want to help refugees…
At a panel discussion on the global migration crisis held last week at Washington, DC’s Newseum, many of the questions from the audience requested practical guidance on how we Americans can help with resettlement. The panelists were less than totally able to answer these questions satisfactorily, a fact that captures at some level the vague…
Calais Jungle
Switzerland, July 22, 2016 Yesterday, while attending a forum on European migration issues, I learned that in the town of Calais on France’s northwest coast, a growing shanty-town known as Calais Jungle populated by migrants and asylum seekers, now has a population of 7,300 and is likely to reach 10,000 by September. This deteriorating situation…