I had moved to Cape Town on the principle that all places are not the same, and that there was something to be witnessed in Africa I couldn’t witness in America. But Cape Town struck me as a multicultural jumble. Sushi restaurants were everywhere. And the foreigners I met often seemed like users.
And so I gave up—temporarily—on finding a deep understanding of South Africa among the people of Cape Town. I would have to look for what made South Africa South Africa somewhere else. It turned out to be right under my feet.
Welcome to GOOD 027: The Migration Issue! In it, we go from point A to B to back again. We don’t just travel, we shift our perspective. We relocate. We migrate.
An old college roommate, the kind of globe-trotting girl who styled herself a “citizen of the world,” had once told me that “the most significant part of travel is the return,” and I hoped if I left honestly—with a one-way ticket, return date unknown—that when I came back I would see my home more clearly, with some of the perspective of a stranger.
What happens the day you’re deported? In the first article from GOOD 027: The Migration Issue, writer Seth Freed Wessler takes a look at the lives on the other side of the border, where recent deportees are often strangers in the country they came from.
Who is David Edwards? In a photo on his site, he appears seated at a table in front of a kind of culinary bong. His mass of wavy inventor hair is glossy brown, his stubble silver, his spectacles round, lips turned down, eyes smiling. A drinking glass with a gray fog curling out of it is tipped delicately between three fingers in his right hand.
Edwards, who is 51, has been called a Willy Wonka, a mad scientist, a Nutty Professor. He has the eccentricity of these characters, coupled with the institutional support of Harvard and his own deep pockets. Like them, he’s found a way to pursue his most outlandish ideas.
From our Migration Issue: You Can Take the Girl out of Iowa
My dad grew up in the town where I was raised, a place that’s 94 percent white and 83 percent Catholic. My mom grew up in a slightly smaller town three hours down the Mississippi. They like Iowa. They never yearned for anywhere else. Certainly not for the city.
Among those of us who grew up where the tallest building tops out at three stories, there are the people who left and the people who stayed. Let’s talk about those of us who decamp to the sparkle of the coasts, of the cities. Those of us who decide to seek our fortunes among other people who vote for Democrats and eat sushi and don’t want to get married until we’re juuuust about ready to start having kids.
There’s a reason we call successful people movers and shakers. In the United States, our economic golden eras generally coincide with movement—the westward pioneers who built a continent-wide agricultural economy, or the waves of European immigrants who drove the Industrial Revolution. Free markets, it turns out, benefit from free movement.
Today, of course, we aren’t in a golden era, and not coincidentally, Americans aren’t moving. More than half of Americans live in the state where they were born, and the Census Bureau reports that the percentage of people changing their residence in the United States is dropping—just 11 percent of Americans moved between 2010 and 2011, the lowest level since 1948.
One of the most depressing developments is the lack of movement among young college-educated adults—the most likely group to migrate and the lifeblood of our labor market—at the same time businesses are having trouble finding highly trained workers. Unemployment is too high across the United States, but people aren’t moving to where the jobs are. The question is, why?
Besides being a professional boxer, Manny Pacquiao is a Philippine congressman. He used his international fame to win elective office in one of the country’s poorest regions, where he was born and raised, then began to fight for economic justice, health care, and education.
Sports, meet the political left; the left, meet sports. You used to know one another so well. Half a century ago, on April 16, 1947, Jackie Robinson desegregated baseball and never stopped fighting for civil rights. The greatest boxer in history fought racism and the Vietnam War. Tommie Smith and John Carlos celebrated their medals in the 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics by giving the black-power salute in a silent protest for human rights.
Sports is one of the great pleasures of civilization, one that naturally inclines enthusiasts to impose grand narratives on simple physical contests. Yet its political consciousness is AWOL during the greatest economic upheaval in almost a century.
Molly McCloskey is weighing her options for chipping away at $20,000 of student loan debt. The way she sees it, she can put her degree to use (easier said than done), apply to grad school, or wait tables—the kind of gig many of her former classmates have. Others don’t have a job at all. Nationwide last year, more than half of bachelor’s degree holders under 25 were jobless or underemployed, the highest rate for young college graduates in more than a decade.
As they’re confronted with crushing debt and few job prospects, many young Americans like McCloskey have suspended their plans to succeed in their own backyards. Instead, they’re biding their time abroad, working in countries where decent pay, a prestigious title, a pension, and affordable health care aren’t just wistful aspirations. Often, there’s no experience needed.
New Orleans is transforming from a stagnant backwater struggling with white flight, brain drain, and urban blight—not to mention two hurricanes, an oil spill, and a recession—into a city where the number of people starting businesses is 28 percent higher than the national average. Tax credits have brought in video game, bioscience, and tech companies, diversifying an economy long dependent on tourism, shipping, and oil. The city’s $600 million film scene ranks right behind Los Angeles and New York City. Business leaders and economic developers are hustling to rebrand New Orleans as a destination for the young and creative, talking up its reputation for small business, great food, and unique music.
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