Katrin Dölz is one of 385 officials in Germany handling cases of asylum seekers. Her days are filled with tragic immigrant stories and the power to change lives.
Category: Migrant Lives
PARIS — Up to 8,000 Rohingya, a long-persecuted Burmese minority, are still reportedly stranded on rickety boats in deplorable and perilous conditions, weeks after being abandoned by human traffickers in the Andaman Sea. Denied safe passage on the shores of countries in the region, the plight of this Muslim ethnic group is however just one […]
As boatloads of desperate immigrants land in Italy, the debate is highly charged. One writer reminds his countrymen of their own emigrant past.
Young men who left Eritrea, by way of Libya, may have all ended up in Lampedusa, but they took many different paths getting there.
At the border between Serbia and Hungary, the number of illegal arrivals has increased dramatically over the past few months. Syrians and Afghans who take the road in the Balkans cross paths with migrating Kosovars.
On this southern European island, some of the hundreds of corpses have arrived from the latest migrant tragedy. They will be processed and buried without knowing their identity. It is not the first time.
GARABULLI — Two unfinished houses on the sand, facing a Mediterranean sea in shades of grey. So this is where they left from. According to various Libyan sources, the vessel carrying more than 800 people left Libya on what became its fateful crossing between Saturday April 18 and Sunday 19 from this long stretch of […]
-Analysis- TURIN — Thousands of people — calling them people, i.e. men, women and children, is the first step — have died in the Strait of Sicily since 2010. Sunday saw the worst tragedy yet, but it was not the first, and unfortunately it won’t be the last. Many of these people are fleeing the […]
Newspapers around the world featured the tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea on the front pages of their Monday edition, after as many as 700 migrants reportedly died when their boat capsized. Sunday’s tragedy is believed to be the worst maritime disaster in Europe since World War II. ITALY FRANCE GERMANY CHILE U.S.
In southern Tel Aviv, some 50,000 refugees amass on the margins of society. Too many in Israel, once the refuge for European Jews, have turned their back on these migrants.
Hundreds of thousands have left Spain, until recently a land of plenty with a booming real estate sector, to seek work abroad. American countries are favored destinations, even if recession is now raising its ugly head there.
Details emerge of poisonous links between local politicians and organized crime networks in Sicily working together to siphon public funds and exploit migrants arriving via Lampedusa.
Recent beheadings highlight an ongoing exodus of Christians from territories targeted by ISIS. Some have taken refuge in Lebanon.
Surveys show that Germans are much more welcoming toward refugees than they were 10 years ago or even last year. The robust state of the economy helps, and they want young, skilled labor to meet demand.
MUNICH — Dirk Rateike values ecologically friendly living and runs an organic hotel in the north of Hesse. But he’s facing anonymous threats from his own neighbors in the village of Gilserberg, between Marburg and Kassel in central Germany. The intimidation has included warnings that he shouldn’t go out at night lest he should face […]
Countless displaced by the war in Syria include those forced to move from one part of the country to another. Misery tends to follow.
-OpEd- TURIN — Geography is inexorable: Italy can never be isolated from Libya, which is just 300 miles from the coast of Sicily. Still, the Italian public tends to be isolated from the rest of the world. The government knows both these truths. Unlike any other European or Western country, Italy kept its Libyan embassy […]
New restrictions and the plunging ruble change the calculus for visiting migrant workers, who have helped fuel Russia’s past growth. Yet another sign of a fragile national economy.
Animosity towards immigrants is strong in Hungary. Controversial Prime Minister Viktor Orban was particularly blunt during a recent television interview: “We don’t want immigrants in our country.” But it was also notable that Orban was speaking from Paris, where he participated in the Jan. 11 unity march after Islamist terrorists murdered members of the magazine […]
Poles in the United States, Brazil and Britain recount how they’ve tried to adapt to the season in their new homelands. It can be bittersweet, as Polish traditions for them still hold sway.
In a reversal of economic fortunes, Sweden’s under-25s are leaving the high unemployment of their home country to seek more money and secure jobs in Norway.
This neighborhood on the Italian capital’s outskirts has erupted in clashes between longtime residents and undocumented migrants. It is part of a long and toxic history.
The October 2013 shipwreck that killed 366 off the Italian coast moved the world to the plight of Africa’s desperate migrants. A survivor from Eritrea tries to start a new life in Sweden.
A former cook for the Free Syrian Army, Iftikar al Daye is the 100,000th migrant who has arrived in Italy since the beginning of the year, and a symbol of hope for fleeing refugees.
SAJE — Father Kriakosmi, the priest of the village Saje outside Dohuk, doesn’t complain about the inconveniences caused by masses of displaced people arriving here. As he undoes the top button of his black shirt, revealing his white collar, it’s not a sign of fatigue or defeat, simply a reaction to the suffocating heat in […]
ROME — These are the kinds of lives that appear like ships at the mercy of a storm, where salvation will seem like a surprise — if it actually arrives. These are the stories of Eritreans with Italian roots trying, sometimes with the most desperate means, to make it to Italy. First, the history. Italy […]
LA JOYA — Juan Castro is trying to keep it together as he tells me this story, but the tears well up in his eyes. “There was this 11-year-old girl from Guatemala who had been raped. I had to ask her how, where, by whom, why and every single detail that could help build her […]
There was shock after the latest report from U.S. Border Patrol found an explosion of young people being sent northward from Central America. Why it isn’t just about the parents.
Crossing borders in and out of post-Soviet Russia is about to get more complicated, especially for Ukrainians.
A Polish reporter checks out sentiment in the heart of UKIP country after the anti-immigration party’s success in recent European elections.
New data shows high crime rates among children of the millions of rural migrants who moved to Chinese cities – both those brought along with their parents, and the ‘left-behind’ children.
BERLIN — “You’re the ones who created this mess I’m in…” Mohammad points his finger at me, and doesn’t even want to tell me his real first name: “Call me Mohammad, we are all the same to you racist Italians anyway.” His age, though, he does tell me: He’s 47, but looks a bit younger […]
BAGHDAD – Everywhere in the Iraqi capital is an off-limits “red zone” for Westerners except for the American invasion’s legacy known as the “green zone.” This central quarter in Baghdad, accessible only by the right identification document or special permission, is actually a sort of privileged prison for those with valuable blood. But I have […]
Restrictive U.S. entry requirements deprive talented people of work opportunity but also drag down the competitiveness across the Americas.
Some 400,000 people leave the country every year to work abroad, often recruited by agencies that are really human traffickers. A close-up view of the human toll in Katmandu.
Over the past decade, the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa has become one of the main points of European entry for illegal immigrants. Even though the 90-mile open sea journey from Tunisia has already killed thousands, a new wave of refugees from Syria are following the same route. LAMPEDUSA — Two Syrian mothers with young […]
BERLIN — There are a record number of asylum seekers pinning their hopes on Germany this year, and refugees from Russia by far represent the largest group. Of those, some 90% are from the North Caucasus, particularly Chechnya. German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich has characterized the situation as “unsettling.” Germany has more asylum requests than […]
Like other countries, France faces a rising number of young people who arrive illegally into the country, without their parents or other family members. It poses unique questions.
The United States is increasingly a Latino nation, which means the time is ripe to make sweeping immigration reform a reality. A view from Bogota, Colombia.