The Monthly Memo
December 2023

Politicians from California to Germany regularly rationalize concerns about immigration through economic theory, but as people move across the world, modern economists have been able to track and quantify the actual fiscal impact of immigration, and the results may surprise you.

In a study that compared refugee arrivals between 2016 and 2020, the annual percentage fell by 86% because of various restrictive measures taken by the Trump administration. These “missing refugees,” as they are labeled, allowed economists to measure the economic impact without refugee arrivals against the hypothetical economic impact were the political measure not actually put in place. The equation looked something like this:


    actual situation (with 86% decrease)
–  hypothetical situation (with normal percentages)
=  economic impact

With that, economists found that the typical net tax value (or revenue for the government) for each refugee was $6,844 and $3,215 for asylum seekers (refugees being those approved by the asylum system; asylum seekers being anyone who enters a country intending to seek asylum and hopefully receive refugee status.)

These are figures contrary to all economic fears that refugee resettlement is a burden on taxpayers. Even when asylum seekers are faced with an arduous wait of 150 days, or about 5 months, to apply for a work permit (in the US context), they still maintain a positive economic effect on the host country.

Stoking economic fears in the host country is in the end harmful—we have the data to prove it—and that goes for all people, whether they are on the move or are native citizens. Everyone is affected when asylum or a work permit gets moved out of reach.

When it is, as many in our own MotM migrant community can attest, people are often forced to resort to the black market while the eligibility for a work permit lingers. This also affects those staying with illegal status. Drug sales are a common, albeit unfortunate, last resort. Yoro (Gambia) has spoken about it openly.

“It’s from pocket to mouth,” said Yoro, in Naples, Italy in October 2021. “That's why many are entering [illegal work] situations in life. It's not that they are willing to enter, but they see people who are gaining 1,000, 2,000 [euros] a day." He was imprisoned for selling drugs for two years, in Italy, an economic and punitive reality he never thought he’d face.

Many workers without documentation may be able to find jobs in farm fields or other areas of agriculture, or even kitchens, but it is often exploitative labor where they are paid below the minimum wage for long, back-breaking hours. By contrast, people can make in a single exchange selling illicit products or drugs what they would make in a day or even a week's worth of labor in a field. It begs the question what choice you would choose when you are unintegrated in the system.

Yoro would work 8-9 hours for 30 euros, sometimes less. “Sometimes the market price goes down,” Yoro said, noting the effect on even black market wages when the market falls. These are also seasonal roles, making stable employment even more far-fetched. Yoro says that when he worked at farms, he would rotate among locations depending on the season. Even if someone would never have considered drug sales to survive before, the lack of options without a work permit forces people into this equation.

There are so many ways that resourceful people in the migrant community try to stay afloat. Many sell cheap goods on the street—gadgets and selfie sticks, or souvenir bracelets—or get hired for the day loading boxes in produce markets across Europe.

In Paris, we’ve seen street vendors who resell fruit bought from a friend or a wholesaler. Others roast corn in a makeshift setup using a metal grocery cart. In Rome we met Prince (Nigeria) who cleaned litter on the street while accepting donations. In a city as notorious for sanitation issues as Rome, these kinds of services are much needed, and even if the city infrastructure isn’t maintaining cleanliness, Prince is.

While there are a lot of people struggling to make ends meet, and sometimes by any means necessary, there are also success stories. After moving from Syria to Lebanon and facing discrimination, Khalid made Dutch friends in a theater group in Beirut who inspired him to move to the Netherlands. He traveled to Belarus, then Poland, Germany, and finally to the Netherlands. By the time he finally made it within the borders of the Netherlands, his SIM card was spent. Dutch transport accepts only digital currency. He tried to board a bus, cash in hand, to connect to the city and make his asylum claim, but the bus driver stopped him short.

For him it was almost comical. He was so close to home, but one more barrier  stood in his way. The decrease in the use of cash for many services has become particularly difficult for people on the move, especially those with even fewer resources, even as the virtue promised of increasing digitization is increased access.

Khalid had two holes in his shoes by the time he crossed the Dutch border. “I walked from 11:00am till eight o’clock in the night, one way,” he said. They were the same pair he started with in Belarus. He reached Maastricht and got help from a friend to travel by train to Amsterdam, to be processed by immigration officials.

In the end, Khalid’s is a success story, in spite of a complicated asylum system, given he has been granted residency documents and now lives and works in the country. But for every success there are so many more that are not. For those who lack valuable connections within a country to navigate the system, the likelihood of successfully settling in the host country decreases further.

The political rhetoric around immigration and labor is a Catch-22. If an immigrant is able to work and does so, they are considered to be stealing jobs from locals. If, however, people in the migrant community find themselves unable to work (for a host of reasons likely out of their control), they are considered lazy or entitled.

To get past this paralyzing binary, we must look at the lived experiences of people in the migrant community through a personal lens. Humanitarian Storytelling allows us to understand the reality of how people within the immigration system are set up to fail, giving us the chance to move beyond reductive political rhetoric.

Because when we see people in human terms and help them in their most vulnerable state, we help the entire community—inclusive even of ourselves.

–Isa Rosario-Blake

"This isn't anyone's dream."

–Yoro (Gambia), on black market work in Italy.

The ingredients to survival are simple: money and desperation. Yoro encountered a series of economic challenges during his journey from Gambia to Lampedusa. From chopping trees in Agadez for a meager wage to enduring labor exploitation in Libya, his story exposes the harsh choices forced upon people in the migrant community seeking a better life. He was called a "slave" in Bani Waled, Libya. Other times, he was beaten as leverage for ransom payments. There, Yoro’s life meant little compared to a few glistening coins.

In southern Italy, years later, he was offered the job of picking produce under the scorching sun for a few euros an hour. Which would you pick, hours of hard labor under the southern sun for as little as 3 euros an hour, or 300 euros in a single hour by selling a packet of drugs. “This isn't anyone's dream,” he said. Yoro's choice to sell drugs in Naples was fueled by the realities of a world where people in the migrant community are paid pennies for black market work. When we are little kids and are asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” It's the cruelty of the world that molds the answer into one Yoro never imagined could be.

–Nora Alkhudhiri

How does history unfold?
One person at a time.

Working on a personal scale has been the key component to our migration reporting at MotM from the beginning. It’s a unique effort that straddles journalism and oral history-making, done on a one-to-one basis that has the ability to create an unshakable bond of trust between the subject and correspondent. Some of the people we have been working with in the migrant community we’ve known for over seven years. With that much time and shared history, it has the possibility to create a familial sense of belonging.

Gone is the concept of “parachute journalism,” where a non-local reporter drops in to get a few quotes for a migration story then leaves; rather, with Humanitarian Storytelling (what we formally call our documentation methodology), we stick together. For as long as our friends in the migrant community wish to stay in touch and continue developing their stories, we’re there.

The effect is that the records we keep, the stories we write, the catalog of details we track are intimate, textured and authentic to the lived experiences of the people in our community. It’s the kind of human-level information you can rely on to understand the migration phenomenon—no matter where it occurs.

This year our goals at the organization put increased emphasis on defining the finer points of the methodology, a strategic move to ensure the reporting we bring you in the Journey Story Archive is guided by consistency, and care.

You can see it in the stories we reported this year as well, starting with Khalid (Syria) in the Netherlands, who met our Lead Correspondent (and founder), Pamela Kerpius, on the platform of the train station in his new hometown, Waddinxveen in February. He shared the remaining details of his Journey Story as they spent the afternoon touring the town and getting a glimpse into his new life. Since their first meeting in 2022, Khalid’s day-to-day has shifted a lot.

Then, he was still staying at a temporary men’s shelter for people in the migrant community; now, he has his Dutch residency documents and has rented his first apartment. Khalid has a serious following on TikTok and Instagram, where he shares satirical reels (in Arabic) that rabidly mock Assad and his regime. We saw his workspace at home where he brings it all to life. There still wasn’t much furniture in the room, but he promised that when there was he’d have us over for an authentic Syrian meal. “Just forget about your diet for the night,” he had to say about that.

Later, in May, Kerpius met with Moussa (Mali; pictured above) in his home city, Milan, Italy. It was another breakthrough meeting. The last they had together was in May of 2018—pre-pandemic, of course—when he was still waiting for a response on his asylum application. The mood then was heavy, because it was impossible to know when he’d get a response.

By this year, he was in higher spirits, and truly moved with a firmer stride. He was home in Milan by now. He has had Italian residency documents for years, as well as a stable job at the European shipping company DHL. Throughout the pandemic he was in touch with our correspondent, updating her with news from his first return trip home to Mali to visit his family. (His return flight to Milan, on the other hand, was canceled in February 2020 for COVID restrictions, keeping him grounded there months longer.)

But it is not just the time we share with our friends in the migrant community that sets our work apart. It is also the attention we pay to detail. Italy-UK Correspondent, Chiara Iacuzio laid it out from top to bottom.

“Making connections with the people we profile, traveling to towns, cities, countries or continents to meet them; going for a meal or a walk together, actively listening to their stories, asking questions, digging for details and clarifications, building up a chronological narrative, and double-checking the content's accuracy, dates, and locations. Then, proofreading, editing, translating, publishing, and promoting,” she said about our long and careful process, which happens behind the scenes for every story you see in the archive. “All this is to spread awareness and compassion,” Iacuzio said, “all this is to collect and narrate history.”

The MotM approach is also trauma-informed, continued Iacuzio. “We are conscious that for most of the people we profile, this is the first time their story is being narrated, that their experience is being believed and even celebrated. We aim to break cross-societal power dynamics,” Iacuzio says. “Instead, we become the facilitators of a story that is led by the narrator and not by the writer.”

At each stage we are reminded of our mission, to move beyond dangerous political rhetoric and two-dimensional media reports, and instead get at the heart of migration.

“The work we do is delivered on the back-drop of a broadening anti-immigration political ideology reliant on numbers in headlines we see in the news. We redirect attention to the names and the faces, to the stories of life, the experiences of discrimination and isolation, but also the love, the hope, and the kindness we see in the eyes of those that we meet.”

Iacuzio’s forthcoming piece of reporting with a family of young girls from Somalia and their collective Journey Story is in development now—keep your eyes peeled for its release in early 2024. It is essential reporting and stories like hers, and from what you see from every dedicated correspondent at MotM, that is only possible with the generous donations from readers and supporters like you.

Help us make 2024 our most compassionate year yet. There’s still time to get your tax-deductible donation in for the 2023 Holiday Fundraiser—any amount you can chip in gets us closer to our goal. Donate now.

A Look at US-Mexico.
MotM attends the Arizona Community Foundation
annual "Border Convening."

On December 7, MotM went to the southern border city of Sonoita, Arizona for the Arizona Community Foundation’s annual Border Convening in exploration of our first steps toward expanding Humanitarian Storytelling to the US-Mexico region. This is a pocket of the country made up of rolling patches of desert, prickly with native flora, and far removed from the bustle of any city—yet it is richly connected by a community of “borderlanders” and dedicated NGOs doing important work at the border on behalf of humanity in need. Our new friends and colleagues were instantly inclusive of us and we look forward to learning more about life and logistics in this unique geographical space, and examining how we may collaborate together.

The warm welcome we received was equally matching the true tone of the US-Mexico border—no invasion in sight, no police chase or chaos, as the news leads us to believe is the norm. Instead, we found a whole lot of compassion, care and peacefulness. You can look forward to more on this regional development in 2024.

After concluding a successful partnership with Occidental College in Los Angeles, Calif., MotM received $15,000 from the college to boost our Humanitarian Storytelling efforts—and that’s just what we’re slated to do in the very first week of 2024. Our lead correspondent will report from Naples, Lecce and Rome, Italy, with the possibility of additional visits to areas in the Lazio and Tuscany regions to reconnect with friends in the existing MotM migrant community.

We will also remain open to opportunities at first-reception hotspots, as local bureaucracy allows it, in cities where newly arriving people are taking their first steps on European soil, and indeed finding their first footings in the European asylum system. We hope to be at peoples’ sides to capture each story, to dignify their journeys, and to bear witness to the trauma that they have had to endure.

Just who and how many people we meet can never be sure; what is for certain is that when you seek out humanity, you will find it—we know this truth, now with over 7 years of reporting in the ever-changing field, and over 100 stories in our Journey Story Archive.

The best place to watch for updates as they happen are on Instagram or Facebook, and on LinkedIn, where we’ll also be sharing exciting organizational developments. See you there!

GIFT REMINDER:
‘Tis the season to support Humanitarian Storytelling!

Make your tax-deductible gift before midnight Dec. 31st to Migrants of the Mediterranean to help us continue the essential work of Humanitarian Storytelling. We’re counting on friends and subscribers like you to help us start the new year off strong. Your gift can help us keep capturing the stories of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Thank you for any amount that you are fortunate enough this year to give.