Never before have so many people crossed borders to get to new countries. And never before has there been as much upheaval and turmoil about these travelers. Immigration is a bedrock issue in the U.S. But so is it in Mexico and across Europe and Africa and Russia and its former satellites.
As more people travel, some receiving countries are searching for ways to keep them out, and some of the senders are struggling to find ways to keep their workers from leaving. It is a global problem with global dimensions and solutions and it puts what is happening in the U.S. and elsewhere in a new perspective.
So, here is a way to do it.
You take a 24 hour period and tell the tale of immigration’s mark on the globe as the sun moves west. You don’t depend on chance to find folks caught up in the reporting situations, but plan out the characters or scenes so that there’s little chance of not finding people to write about. The stories will segue seamlessly from one scene to another to build an impression of the world on the move and how that moves the planet. But to explain this all, you write separate boxes or sidebars that appear on the web only. You can, for example, imbed footnotes that would jump to the webpages when you are reading online. That is, the narrative alludes to the issues involved and ties them together. But to find out more, readers have go to the web where they will find charts and profiles, video and audios, that give them the details. This reporting has to be done in advance and must back up the thrust of the reporting.
Where do you go?
You look at the places that are sending — A Bolivian mountain village or Honduran village where the banana industry is fading and which raises money to send its workers in the hope that they will benefit their community. More offbeat would be Senegal or Egypt or the Dominican Republic, which uses Puerto Rico as its landing base. Egypt, where many of the immigrants risking their lives on small boats headed for Europe are college graduates who cannot find good paying jobs.
You look at the places trying to clean up and clean out the immigrants. The U.S. and Russia are examples of this, but so too you can use Belgium or Italy or another European country trying to limit these outsiders.
You look at countries that need their immigrants to leave so they can send money back this would be the Philippines or any of a handful of Asian countries or Central America. You can include here then the countries where the disappearance of immigrants means that there are no doctors or nurses or few educated elite and you can pick one of the poorer African countries for this.
You look at the traffickers, who have stranded thousands on the French shores, telling them they will be able to go to England, or the coyotes in Mexico who are getting more money today or the people who run the boats from Africa to Europe. Here, too, you can include the fixers in Iraq who have moved thousands out of Iraq and, or, who have found them homes at a price in Jordan and Syria and Egypt, And here likewise, you go to a refugee camp in Uganda which is full of thousands from five different countries and their own wars, and talk about the people who are feeding and caring for them.
The reporters take small video cameras with them to record the scenes, but there’s an overall video that links this with a detailed status of an immigrant bound world. All of this is linked online to a page about the immigration battle here in the U.S.
Capture the moment
You write about the moment they are leaving: what are they thinking. What are they carrying. What do they say in their first note home. What is like to walk at night in the desert, fearful of being capture; to be known as an educated person but to drive a taxi or to clean hotel rooms in the new country. What is it like to shepherd someone, to take their money and move them about the world. Explain the exchange of money. What is it like to stand at an embassy, waiting to get a visa, realizing you may never go home. What is like to make the trip and suddenly, wonderfully to find a new life with no barriers. Make the scene a picture, a poem, a sound portrait, a movie. Make it come alive.
What do you think?19718093.swf
Here is an example of good reporting on immigrant construction workers in Dubai:
An excellent series of stories on abuses suffered by workers in China, and explanation how the reporter did the work