Film review : Amreeka (2009) May 11, 2010
Posted by Dan Herman in Film, Immigration, Middle East.Tags: Film, Immigration, Middle East
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I don’t do film reviews, this one, however, deserves one.
Part documentary, part tragic comedy, Amreeka follows the travails of a Palestinian mother and her teenage son as they travel from the battle-hardened streets of the Palestinian Territories to small-town America.
This isn’t just a film about the difficulties and intricacies of cultural adjustment and integration. Nor does it focus too much on the usual subtext of unrecognized experience and the taxi-driving doctors (or in this case burger-flipping bank employee).
It’s much more than that.
It digs into the subconscious of a mother who wants desperately a better, safer, and less-hassle filled life for her son. And subsequently taps the veins of the vast divide that separates Arab and Jew in Israel and Palestine; the insecurities, fears and bitterness of both painted through the interrogations at check points leading in and out of Bethlehem.
Once arrived in the US, the film jumps into the immigrant experience – one that is shaped by economic, social and cultural insecurities and that marks a generational tug-of-war between traditional and adopted values, between a desire to remain different and a desire to become the same.
Simultaneously, the film delves into the nascent racism and hostility stirred in the US by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the backlash against American Muslims and Arabs, and the subsequent challenges of multiculturalism in the world’s melting pot. Perhaps purposeful, those who display an openness towards these newcomers are portrayed as societal outcasts – the divorced Principal, the blue-haired clerk, the beautiful and intelligent geek. A sad reminder perhaps of how limited our liberal attitudes towards those who don’t resemble us really is.
In doing so, the film quietly ponders several questions that transcend geography and historical conflict related to belonging, injustice and ultimately of our definitions of cultural and social identity.
This is a deep movie. Without a doubt the best movie I’ve seen this year, if not in ages.
Go see it (it also won a prizes at Cannes which testifies that critics far less naïve than I thought it worth seeing).
Skills-based remittances April 23, 2010
Posted by Dan Herman in Economics, Government, Immigration.Tags: Africa, Economics, Immigration
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Stay, go and come back.
Economic development is often thought of in two simple terms: trade and aid. If one doesn’t work, the other will. Yet increasingly, with prolonged poverty and weak-GDP growth performance in many developing countries, we find that perhaps neither works as well as it should.
(I’ve previously reviewed Dambisa Moyo’s work on half of this topic, and my Masters thesis might explain the rest.)
So why then do some countries seem to be emerging from sub-Saharan Africa’s economic slumber? In particular, the West African countries of Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria. Is it the consequences of decades of aid? Free trade? Or it because they have the right policy and institutional framework?
While it’s hard to disconnect any of the above metrics from eachother, I’d like to propose that growth in these, and other, countries is actually in large part linked to a concept of skill- and capital-repatriation that could be the “remittances” of the future.
Immigration as innovation January 25, 2010
Posted by Dan Herman in Demographics, Government, Innovation.Tags: Economics, Government, Immigration
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The modern world is replete with examples of how immigration from outside of a nation’s border has contributed to dramatic increases in the stock of human ingenuity within. Historically, the tolerance for diversity present in Northern Europe during the reformation is often equated as one of the factors that allowed the region to enjoy a head start economically, culturally and socially compared to their more single-minded Southern neighbours.
A tad more recently (1999), research by AnnaLee Saxenian of the University of California at Berkeley showed that foreign-born scientists and engineers were at the heart of a massive boom in jobs and wealth creation for the California economy. Her research (more…)
(re)Defining the social contract? January 1, 2009
Posted by Dan Herman in Current Events, Economics, Politics.Tags: Immigration, Values
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18th century French philosopher and one of the fathers of the Enlightenment and industrial revolution once wrote, “L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.” Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Rousseau believed that a true citizen was one that put aside his or her private interests in reverence to the will of society. Man was, in essence, chained to his fellow man. And so developed society through this period of moral and social enlightenment.
Such societies, however, were by and large ethnically, racially and linguistically homogeneous. The following two centuries saw further dissolution of the remaining empires in Europe, and outside of our more recent moves towards integration, saw a steady return to small, individualistic nation states which used such social and cultural cohesion to develop strong national identities.
But how does this concept of a social contract evolve in countries where the composition of the population, notably its ethnic, racial, religious and linguistic participants begins to become more heterogeneous. Do the ties that helped create national identity and social cohesion in its former form become weaker in this multi-cultural model?
Or, given our insistence on unfettered freedoms, is a social contract a realistic possibility in today’s global world? Rousseau feared chaos would takeover should man operate without one but perhaps times have change. (more…)
