Recently in Majority World Category

"If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name."

I get confused when people talk about "World Music."  I don't know what that is.  All music comes from some place.  Sometimes music can have influences from more than one place.  Sometimes a musician has traveled a lot and picked up musical threads from many cultures. 

But "World Music" reminds me of nothing so much as this.

It could be, however, that the World Music of the 1990s was just a pale prelude to the music of a global culture that is emerging.  Sri Lankan refugee Maya Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A., embodies this music as well as anyone.  

Chris Bertram asks:

[W]hat sort of conclusions about the world would you expect well-paid American liberal intellectuals to reach when they came to think about global justice? I guess I'd expect the following. I'd expect a good deal of hand-wringing about the relationship between patriotism and universal morality, and I'd expect them to discover a legitimate role for patriotism. They'd find out that it is perfectly permissible to have a limited preference for one's fellow citizens (especially poor and minority ones) over outsiders. They'd therefore agonize about issues such as immigration but accept the right of states to control their borders, reject the notion that justice requires any kind of global redistributive principle but favour some limited doctrine of "assistance" to those suffering desperate poverty overseas. And I'd expect them, being smart people, to come up with some varied and ingenious arguments to support such conclusions. John Rawls, Michael Blake, Samuel Freeman, Richard Miller, Thomas Nagel, Elizabeth Anderson ... even (or especially?) Michael Walzer, end up in the same place. Kind of a coincidence huh?

Um, yes. 

Award-winning author and photojournalist David Bacon spoke here in D.C. last night at the AFL-CIO about his new book Illegal People: How globalization creates migration and criminalizes immigrants.

Bacon is emphasizing the need to frame the immigration debate in this country within its larger context (economic globalization).  It's globalization that is the cause of so many people having to migrate in the first place.  If earlier migrants (i.e. people already here in the U.S. whose families migrated in previous generations) understand the reason why people in other countries are having to come here now, I think we will be able to have a more rational debate about how to create more humane policies and reduce human suffering all around.  Globalization and immigration are different parts of the same story.  To speak of one without the other is to give only a partial telling of that story. 

I'd like to introduce a new feature here called "Musical Monday" - at least until I think of another name. Some of the music I like ties in to migration in one way or another, and I've been wanting to share it more widely. As information, goods, and (sometimes) people flow more freely than ever before across borders, musicians are writing about it.

In remembrance of those who've died in Haiti in recent weeks, and in the hope that those who need help can be reached in time, the first Musical Monday is Arcade Fire's Black Wave / Bad Vibrations. Arcade Fire co-founder Régine Chassagne's family migrated from Haiti to Canada to escape the Duvaliers, like some of my former clients. She has sung about her family's homeland on the band's first album, Funeral, and on last year's Neon Bible. This song is very meaningful to me now that I've gotten to know some Haitians who went through some truly horrific experiences before coming to the U.S.

You have to watch this video:

Hilarious cartoon from Inkcint:

Watch this video (sombrero tip Latina Lista):

In the U.S. the federal government terrorizes migrants.  In South Africa, the federal government sends in the army to protect migrants from terror.

This was written for the Choose Or Lose Street Team '08:

Picture from Reuters.

Matchstick thin limbs, swollen bellies, sunken eyes, buzzing flies, if you know what I'm talking about, chances are you are familiar with development pornography.  It's a term critics use for some of the shocking images aid organizations exploit to encourage donations.  These are images usually taken by "first world", white, photographers to portray "third world" problems.  In fact, chances are these are the first images that pop up in your mind when you think of the entire continent of Africa. 

It's part of a larger problem that I'm very familiar with.  Though I report from Massachusetts for the Street Team, I was born and raised in Guatemala, a country that suffers from the worst malnutrition indicators in Latin America.  Coming from that country, I find that most people I interact with on a daily basis have no concept of what it means to be an average person on this earth.  About half of the world's population lives on less than $2 a day, but if you're reading this, it's going to be very difficult to conceptualize what that means.  For example, way back in 2005, I wrote this for an Opinion Focus in the Harvard Crimson about Poverty about the simple ability to read and write: