Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'immigration'

Dyed by Their Own Hands

March 11th, 2010 · 10 Comments

For the umpteenth year in a row, we failed to take advantage of our Atlah locale and check out the annual Phagwah parade in Richmond Hill, Queens. But we got our Guyanese festival kick by checking out these shots, which amply demonstrate the splattery fun that was had by all.
More great photos of Phagwah parades [...]

Carving Out a New World

February 18th, 2010 · 1 Comment

If you haven’t caught it already, The Independent’s latest dispatch from the jungles of Laos is well worth a read. It’s an eye-opening look at life for the Hmong tribespeople who decided to remain in Southeast Asia after the end of the Vietnam War, rather than take the CIA up on its offer to resettle [...]

Desperation in Action

February 8th, 2010 · 4 Comments

One of our treasured Japanese correspondents just have us a heads up about this tragedy, involving an airplane stowaway who apparently froze to death while concealed in a Boeing 777’s landing gear. Such deaths are actually somewhat common, not to mention quite predictable—at 35,00 feet, temperatures are insanely icy, and oxygen scarce. Yet men and [...]

Renewal to the North

October 6th, 2009 · 4 Comments

Aware of our fascination with the current wave of Bhutanese refugees alighting in the U.S., our favorite correspondent from the Nushagak Bay area alerted us to this great A/V feature from the Anchorage Daily News. Apparently a small group of the Lhotshampas have landed in the Land of the Midnight Sun, after a gobsmacking 17 [...]

A Hole in the Happiness Theory?

September 24th, 2009 · 6 Comments

So many statistical goodies to sift through in the latest report on American asylum cases (PDF). But by far our favorite oddity can be glimpsed in the chart above. What’s going on with the Bhutanese? Only three citizens of the isolated kingdom claimed asylum in the U.S. three years ago, and then none in 2007. [...]

All from the Comfort of Chihuahua

August 10th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Many moons ago at the Bronx Museum, we caught a great bit of satiric video art entitled Why Cybraceros?. We’ll let the artist himself, Alex Rivera, explain the riotous concept:
In his second film, Why Cybraceros? (USA 1997), Rivera sarcastically imagined a future in which migrant farm workers (or Braceros) could work in America, but never [...]

Where Divorce Dare Not Speak Its Name

August 3rd, 2009 · 1 Comment

In response to our recent string of posts regarding the “Natural Rate of Divorce”, a commenter asked an interesting question: how might an examination of the situation in the Philippines shed some light on the topic? The Philippines, after all, is the only nation in the world, apart from the Vatican, where divorce continues to [...]

The Flag Racket

July 21st, 2009 · No Comments

Once again, we’re gonna use our platform here to highly recommend The Snakehead, Patrick Radden Keefe’s non-fiction account of the 1993 Golden Venture disaster. The book would be awesome enough if it just told the tale of Sister Ping’s rise and fall as the tsarina of human smuggling in New York’s Chinatown. But The Snakehead [...]

The Western Union Economy

July 13th, 2009 · No Comments

As we continue to plow through Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent The Snakehead, we’ve been giving tons of thought to the impact of immigrant remittances. We never cease to be amazed by how much working-class immigrants are able to save and then contribute to the families they left behind—so much, in fact, that some economies become [...]

Explaining the Fujian Conundrum

July 6th, 2009 · 6 Comments

Over the holiday weekend, in addition to bidding farewell to our dead-tree labor o’ love, we found a few spare moments to start reading The Snakehead, the new book from Chatter author Patrick Radden Keefe. We’re only 50 pages in, but so far this tome gets Microkhan’s equivalent of an Ebert-ian “thumbs way up” rave. [...]

The “Threat” of Broader Faces

April 20th, 2009 · 4 Comments

A century ago, the Dillingham Commission was charged with investigating the societal impact of immigration, particularly from Eastern and Southern Europe. The Congressional panel duly churned out a 41-volume report that, for all its regal language and intricate graphs, contains some of the vilest pseudoscientific drivel ever committed to print. Of particular interest to Microkhan [...]