“In the last two years,” writes Willa Glickman in a report for NYR Online on migrant housing in New York City, “hundreds of thousands of people around the world fleeing violence, political repression, collapsing economies, and natural disasters have taken an overland route from Latin America to the United States to surrender themselves to border authorities and request asylum.” For public officials and private citizens in the United States and Europe, the question of how to accommodate refugees has become urgent.

Below, alongside Glickman’s report, we’ve collected several recent essays about the crisis faced by asylum seekers and migrants around the world.

Willa Glickman
‘People Are Not a Crisis’

“The reason that the current wave of migration is attracting attention is that recent arrivals are entering the shelter system at higher rates than in the past…. This is thought to be largely because people are fleeing crises rather than moving for opportunity.”

Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Emma Ramadan
Exiles

“Chosen exile, forced exile, migrants, displaced persons, refu­gees, deportees; it is certainly not anger or divine will that decides the exodus of a man or an entire people, but rather the chaotic upheavals of history.”

Aida Alami
The Land of Dust and Plastic

“Most of the laborers I spoke to told me they earn four or five euros an hour, considerably less than the legal minimum wage. They work in the sweltering heat under the greenhouses’ plastic coverings.”

Immigration and Naturalization

a poem
by Amit Majmudar

…Nobody spoke
To us, either, though our tongues
Could parrot, palate the sounds.
Yes. Yes, that was my family,
Awed by leavened bread, turnstiles,
Drinking fountains…

John Washington
Journey to the North

“The northward march, mostly from Mexico and Central and South America into the US, is one piece of what is now the largest human migration in world history. Due to war, political instability, hunger, and climate crises, more than 100 million people across the globe have been forcibly displaced from their homes.”