Migration Archives - Public Seminar

Love and Theft in a Drowning City

On Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief

February 24, 2026 • by Katya Wack

A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 2025), the new novel by Megha Majumdar, unfolds over a single week in a not-so-distant future. Kolkata has been devastated by flooding and famine; Ma, a middle-class shelter manager, is preparing to flee the city with her father and two-year-old daughter to join her ...

Migration

Immigration Is Imperative

Without migrants, the US would be in dire economic straits

September 25, 2025 • by Purushottam Bhandare and Katerina Canyon

Donald Trump's accusation, in the 2024 presidential debate, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were "eating pets" may have quickly proven false, but it still led to sweeping policy action. Soon after Trump was inaugurated, the administration abruptly terminated the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) humanitarian parole programs, pulling the ...

Europe & Central Asia

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

In an ancient forest, tourists and people on the move walk parallel paths

June 26, 2025 • by Inga Hajdarowicz

On the narrow roads of the Białowieża Forest, the last primeval forest in Europe, military vehicles occupy the space with the roar of their engines. A line of cars on the forest road signals the presence of a mobile police checkpoint at the Polish-Belarusian borderland. A border guard carefully stares ...

What’s Lost Along the Polish-Belarusian border

Migration

Border Time

Policing movement in the Rio Grande Valley

February 24, 2025 • by Victoria Hattam

The southern border of the United States has been policed intensively for over half a century. Donald Trump and many other global political leaders have narrowed their policy focuses from bordering more generally to building walls. Even short trips to the US-Mexico border make clear that the wall is not ...

Migration

Migrants Are Parents and Children

New York parents are using mutual aid networks to welcome migrant families

October 31, 2024 • by Mónica Salmón Gómez

Although New York can be a violent, unequal, and segregated city, radical acts of solidarity through mutual aid groups shape the experiences of those who live there and strive to transform it into a more livable place—especially for new arrivals. In the winter of 2023, just as the migrant shelter ...

Migration

“Blame It on the Immigrant”: The Housing Crisis Edition

Meet the infamously deep-pocketed, undocumented construction laborers building and then stealing American homes

October 18, 2024 • by Achilles Kallergis

Here’s a tip from the US political playbook: if your campaign is struggling, if you don’t have actual policies but “concepts of a plan,” if you secretly or openly wish for the “good ol’ days” when black people did “black jobs,” if you “forgot” to declare the lavish perks from ...

“Blame It on the Immigrant”: The Housing Crisis Edition

Migration

Social Research on Exile

Banishment, “refugeedom,” and the political problem of our time

September 4, 2024 • by Social Research

In the latest issue of Social Research (Vol. 92, No. 1), scholars explore the nature of exile. Some essays reflect on exile forced by war and political persecution, others on the difference between being an exile and being a refugee. TABLE OF CONTENTS Avishai Margalit, "Internal Exile and Politics"This essay has two ...

Literature

Very Far From the Homeland

On contemporary readings from Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, and Alice Oswald exile in the Iliad

September 4, 2024 • by Lyndsey Stonebridge

One of the cruelties of the Iliad is how alive each person is made to appear just before they are killed. That is the point of Homer's long, detailed lists of Greeks and Trojans: names, deeds, parents, brothers, spouses, children, lovers, skills, bad hair, swift feet, words, and weapons. The poem about ...

Multi-Verse

Philip Metres’s Nostalgia

Episode 15: “Here I am, in midlife, thinking about what is home—and knowing that all homes are sandcastles, in a way”

July 2, 2024 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

An oasis, as poet Philip Metres points out in Episode 15, is evanescent by nature. There, and then not there. What does it mean to seek refuge when the oasis is impermanent?...

Middle East & North Africa

Palestine and the Subversion of International Law

How the UNRWA paradox underpins Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing

June 17, 2024 • by Widad Tamimi

For Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, freedom of movement is non-existent. But to flee is to lose one’s right of return. International law underpins Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing....

Palestine and the Subversion of International Law

East Asia & Pacific

How Vanessa Chan Came to Write a Global Bestseller, The Storm We Made

A graduate of The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing shines a light on a rarely discussed period of Malaysian history

June 5, 2024 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In the lonely period of the pandemic, Vanessa Chan could not get home to her family. In those years, she lost her mother. She sheltered in place. And she wrote her first book, The Storm We Made....