Migration – www.globalcitizenspress.com

Consumers Continue to Pay for Nail Service from Trafficked Technicians

May 14, 2019

BY MIRA SEYAL – Lien Glankler, born in Laos and raised in Vietnam, held a focus group of potential customers in the summer of 2017 to test her new business plan: a nail salon in Sacramento, California that would break with the increasing dependence on human trafficking to supply workers in the nail salon industry. The reaction to that plan was an unpleasant surprise. The potential customers didn’t find the…

Echoes of Cuban History Still Ring in the Ears of Long Time Cuban Refugees

April 10, 2019

BY JORDAN KISSANE – The walls of Gema Sanchez’ small home in Miami are decorated with crosses and Catholic rosaries, and on this day, Sanchez was thinking of another house in Cuba years ago when she spent Sunday mornings in church and Sunday afternoons cooking arroz con frijoles with her Abuela, or grandmother. They always sang Celia Cruz songs, she said. “She was like today’s Beyoncè,” Sanchez laughed, remembering the…

Refugees Resettled in Small Cities and Suburbs Face Transportation Challenges

April 8, 2019

BY LAUREN HARRIS – Salah Kamal, a 30-year old Syrian refugee, has a love-hate relationship with the public bus of his hometown, Grand Rapids, Mich. When he was resettled in 2016 in Grand Rapids, a mid-size Michigan city, the local bus system was his only connection to food, healthcare, work and important immigration appointments. Though riding the bus made such things possible, Kamal says, it didn’t necessarily make them easy….

Somali Refugee Family hides 16 Years in Nairobi Before Living Freely in Buffalo

April 4, 2019

BY YILUN CHENG – The Ali family finally received news after 16 years of staying illegally in Nairobi that their resettlement applications had been approved. Refugees from Somalia, they faced more than seven months of intensive interviews that had paid off at last. They now had a flight to Buffalo, an American city that they had never heard of. Mustafa Ali, now 28 and the lead case manager of Buffalo’s…

View from Bay Ridge: Syrian With Asylum Looks Toward Home

April 1, 2019

BY TAMARA SAADE – On a warm Friday evening in Damascus in early February 2019, the Al Nahlawi family celebrated a daughter’s engagement with a festive dinner with the fiancé’s family. Far away in New York, through a few family selfies and pictures shared on WhatsApp, Ahmad Al Nahlawi, the father of the soon-to-be bride, could almost pretend he was with them. Having obtained asylum in the U.S., the 55-year-old…

Once Jailed in China, Human Rights Lawyer Still Fighting For Justice in NJ

March 31, 2019

BY RONNIE LI – Biao Teng, a Chinese human rights lawyer, was walking on a street near his home one day eight years ago when someone came up behind him suddenly, took off his shirt and covered his eyes with it, and then forced him into a car before he could make a sound. Teng was taken into custody and held for about 10 weeks in solitary confinement in retaliation…

No Easy Path to Canadian Citizenship For Some Syrian Refugees

March 27, 2019

BY YEJI LEE – Canada has received international attention for an innovative program that has brought 56,800 Syrian refugees into the country by pairing one refugee family with five volunteer Canadian sponsors for a year. Now, in early 2019, close to 25,000 of those refugees are eligible to apply for citizenship. For those refugees looking to become Canadians, however, more obstacles lie ahead. “I would say around 90 percent…

Without a Country of Their Own, Stateless People Remain in Limbo

March 26, 2019

BY MIRNA ALSHARIF – Karina Ambartsoumian Clough was just three years old when her parents started preparing her and her little sister for what was going to be a long trip. “I remember my mother putting multiple layers on us to minimize packing,” said 30-year-old Clough, a Philadelphia resident. “I also distinctly remember a train, a plane, and a boat. The train took us to Germany, where my dad…

Do Afghans Forced to Flee After Working for the US Receive Fair Compensation?

March 26, 2019

Reshad landed a job with the U.S. government as a quality control manager. His job required him to travel around remote areas in Afghanistan and oversee the quality of U.S. development projects. Although the job allowed him to support his family financially, it risked attracting Taliban attention.

Yemenis Yearn for Home After Fleeing War

March 16, 2019

Kawthar Abdullah was 19 when she fled her home country of Yemen in July of 2015. She left with her sister, who was 15 at the time, on a boat from Aden, a port city on the southern end of the red sea, to Djibouti, a country on the horn of Africa. Her parents, who were in New York, payed $3,000 to smuggle their daughters out of Yemen. Abdullah is 22 now. “We were really on the verge of drowning,” Abdullah said softly in a cafe in downtown Manhattan, while a top 40 pop song played on the speakers behind her. “People took their entire livelihood with them on that boat.”

African Migrants in Israel Face Deportation to Brutal Homelands

June 11, 2018

BY KATHERINE NOEL — Bluts Iyassu Zeru is one of thousands of African migrants living in Israel illegally who have been at the center of national debate since the beginning of the year, when the government declared that all “infiltrators” must leave the country by March 31 or face imprisonment. Though the highest Israeli court halted the deportation plan in mid-March after human rights organizations widely criticized it, the Israeli government has remained unwavering in its push to force the African migrant population out. An estimated 38,000 African migrants have crossed into Israel through Egypt’s Sinai desert in the last 5-10 years, fleeing persecution and ongoing conflict. The vast majority of these migrants arrived from Eritrea and Sudan before 2013, when the Israeli government completed construction of a 152-mile border fence.

#Metoo Movement in Kenya

Christian Colon When she is not selling tomatoes and kale around her hometown of Kakuma, Kenya, Jane Indeche is working as a housekeeper cleaning and cooking for additional income to take home for her five-month old baby girl. The 5,000 extra Kenyan Shillings, about $50 U.S Dollars, were not enough to compensate the pain Indeche would feel after one of her male employers groped and verbally harassed her for over…

May 24, 2018

Slave or Family: Child Domestic Service In Haiti

May 9, 2018

BY MONIQUE LeBRUN — In Haiti, children from poor families become restaveks, which means to stay with in both French and Creole, because their parents can’t afford to take care of them or send them to school. Often families from rural parts of Haiti send their children to live in the city with a distant relative, family friend or a stranger. Families agree to take care of restaveks and pay for their education. But the agreement is almost never kept, according to Haitian activists, NGOs and former restaveks. The estimated 300,000 children are turned into domestic servants and abused, a situation some have compared to slavery.

Desperate Family Escapes Brutal Gang Violence in El Salvador, But May Have to Return

May 8, 2018

BY CRISTINA SARNOFF — On a hot, humid, summer afternoon four years ago in the village of Apopa in El Salvador, a middle school teacher arrived home after classes to find her teenage daughter’s body draped across her front door with 13 bullet holes. This was the mark of a notorious and deadly gang. “I never thought this could happen to me,” the schoolteacher said in tears recently. “I’ve witnessed families losing a child to gang crimes before but somehow thought I was immune to it. I’m a schoolteacher and combat nurse. Some of my students even belong to the gangs. God help my children.”

Puerto Ricans Say Feds Treat Them Like Refugees Not As US Citizens

April 16, 2018

BY NICOLE LAFOND — Katia Marie Ramos is experiencing depression for the first time in her life. It’s not been fueled by the loss of her home, which, last she saw it, stood in the suburbs of San Juan, Puerto Rico, with nothing left but a few upright walls, loose wires and a tangled tarp for a roof. It wasn’t ignited by the panic she experienced while she rode out Category Four Hurricane Maria in her friend’s home, clutching her four-year-old daughter to her chest. It’s not because she lost her job after the building where she worked as a security guard was destroyed in the storm, or the fact that she had to sell all of her belongings, including her car, in order to purchase a plane ticket to evacuate to the mainland after the storm. Ramos is one of 4,000 Puerto Rican families being put up in hotels in 41 states by the federal government after their homes were destroyed or deemed unlivable by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) when Hurricane Maria struck on September 20. She and her daughter are also one of hundreds of families who will be further displaced when FEMA cuts off their federal transitional assistance next month.

An Egyptian Photographer’s Journey From Chronicling Revolution to Exile in U.S.

April 16, 2018

BY CECILIA BUTINI — Each Sunday, in a co-working space just a few blocks from the Capitol in Washington, DC, half a dozen men and women from Egypt meet to discuss the current state of their country and to brainstorm ideas to make an impact from afar, or to help their fellow citizens there. Mostafa Bassim, a 28-year-old with thick curly hair, lounged on a couch in the wood-floored space on a Sunday afternoon, a grave expression on his face as he started to recount the day his life changed. In November 2013, as Egypt transitioned from Mohammad Morsi’s brief presidency to the military rule of general Abdel Fattah El Sisi after a coup, Mostafa was in the middle of a protest in Alexandria, on Egypt’s coast. He wasn’t there to protest, but to take photos for a national publication named Veto. As he got closer to take photos of two police officers arresting and beating a protester, one officer turned to Bassim and started beating him too, he said.

Victim of Political Violence in Bangladesh in 1990s Still Fears Going Home

April 16, 2018

BY MARIE CENTRIC — It’s been 26 years since Osman Chowdhury was almost killed by a gang in Bangladesh and fled to the United States. Chowdhury said he is still scared of being killed when he goes back to his native country. Chowdhury was 24 in 1991, when seven young men attacked him in Chittagong, in Southern Bangladesh, surprising him in second floor government office. They broke his nose and tried strangle him with his tie, he said. Chowdhury managed to escape, ran out to the streets and made it to a police station. “I had to save my life,” Chowdhury, now 52, said with a trembling voice. But the seven attackers pursued him inside the precinct, and officers were afraid of them and refused to press charges, Chowdhury said.

Bronx Soccer Club Doubles as Legal Service Provider for Immigrant Athletes, Their Families

May 8, 2017

BY KYLEE TSURU — Like the community where South Bronx United is based, the club’s demographics are diverse. Players come from 23 countries, nearly all from Latin America or West Africa— and frequently need legal assistance to navigate immigration laws in the United States.

Syrian Refugees with Disabilities and the Scramble to Accommodate Them

May 4, 2017

BY KYLEE TSURU — “When people are on the move, or really fleeing, they enter a new environment that is busy and different. It is especially hard for that individual and family to cope if a disability is involved,” said Mica Bevington of Handicap International, an organization that provides aid to people with disabilities and other vulnerable populations living in conflict and disaster zones.

Not Welcomed Home: Pakistan’s Ahmadi Community

May 2, 2017

BY HANIYA JAVED — There are as many 5000 Ahmadi Muslims living in the tristate area of New York. Seventy percent of them are Pakistanis, according to Ahmadiyya Muslim Communtiy, USA. The highest numbers of asylum seekers are from Pakistan because of the anti Ahmadi laws and constitutional amendments introduced in 1974 that declared the community non Muslims and made it a criminal offence for them to pose as Muslims.

A Refugee Law for India: A Dream or a Soon-to-Be Reality?

April 28, 2017

BY SHIBANI GOKHALE — Although India is home to over 300,000 refugees, it is not a signatory to the United Nation’s Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and has not enacted a law specifically protecting their rights.

From Kyrgyzstan to Google: A Gay Man Finds Asylum in New York

April 28, 2017

BY DANIEL BEREZOWSKY — In a country with an 80 percent Muslim population, homosexuality is considered by many to be dishonorable. But in 1990s, when Sayid was growing up, it was also a crime. As a newly independent state, Kyrgyzstan kept many of the laws of the Soviet Union, including the sodomy prohibition that penalized homosexual acts with up to two years of prison.

African Refugees Fleeing Persecution, and Arriving at Yemen’s War

April 26, 2017

BY DAVID JEANS — Since 2013, smugglers and human traffickers have lured almost 300,000 Ethiopian and Somali refugees to cross the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden with promises of security and economic opportunities. More than 400 people have died during the journey since 2013, according to the United Nations. But the inflow of refugees poses a complicated exigency for humanitarian efforts working to stabilize the country — as Yemeni’s flee their own country in the opposite direction toward the Horn of Africa.

Welcome Nowhere: The Plight of the Rohingya and the Fear of Relocation

April 26, 2017

BY LOUIS BAUDOIN-LAARMAN — For the past two months the Rohingya refugee community in Bangladesh has been anxious and unsettled after the country’s prime minister restated Bangladesh’s intention to relocate the refugees to the barren 30,000-hectare island of Thengar Char in the Bay of Bengal.

From Damascus to Germany: A Long Journey To Work

BY MARIA MARTINEZ — Samer woke early each morning to go to work, like most people. But each day, Samer feared that he might be killed on his way to his job at the Arab bank in the rebel-held section of Damascus. Each day, Samer was stopped at six government checkpoints. At each stop, the fear of death hung low over his head. It was a long journey to work.

April 26, 2017

A Syrian Refugee’s Difficult Path to a New Home in US

April 25, 2017

BY SUMMER LIN — Mohamed, a former chef from Syria, can still remember the moment he received the call from the UN telling him that he and his family had been approved to move to the United States. “They said ready or not, you’re going to America tomorrow,” he said in Arabic, through a translator.

Zimbabwe Activist Held on Treason Charges

April 25, 2017

BY TANYA NYATHI — Evan Mawarire remembers receiving a harrowing call in May of last year. The person on the other end of the phone spoke in Shona, a dominant dialect among Zimbabweans. “Do you know that that very flag that you have around your neck could strangle you to death?”

For Yemenis Abroad, Helplessness Looms as the Yemen Economy Faces Collapse

April 25, 2017

BY CHRIS GELARDI — Money from loved ones working abroad has helped many Yemeni families survive a civil war that has left their country on the brink of famine. But without peace, the future looks bleak