At that point, I hadn't heard the term "reverse culture shock" - a sense of disorientation you feel when returning to your country after a long stay abroad - but I now know this is what I experienced when I got back to India. Busy work mornings in New York were replaced by dull ones in India for the first few weeks while I waited to start my new job.
The home secretary's new attack on the rights of immigrants and refugees is shocking and disorienting. Shabana Mahmood wants to raise the qualification period for immigrants to achieve indefinite leave to remain in the UK from five years to 10 (and up to 20 for refugees). It looks outlandish. So does her wider assault on asylum seekers, denying them permanent refugee status even if their claims are successful.
With time, as his research led to police intervention, he caught the attention of the city's gangs. In November 2024, during a period of escalating violence in the Haitian capital, gang members entered the compound where Gensley lived. They burned the radio station, my home and many other things in the area. They even killed his dog.
Up to 21,000 asylum seekers who have waited for a year for their claims to be processed could be allowed to enter the jobs market so they can support themselves, the Home Office has said, as part of a package of measures to be announced on Thursday. As the government seeks to empty asylum hotels, claimants who break the law, work illegally or are found to have enough assets to live without support will from June be ejected and lose their support payments.
The Home Office says the changes, due to take effect in June, will restrict accommodation and support payments to "those who genuinely need it". Ministers say the new rules will also remove assistance from asylum seekers who work illegally or break the law.
Shabana Mahmood herself has said that illegal immigration was putting immense strain on the country and undermining the contract between the government and its citizens. This week, Mahmood visited reception and removal centres for asylum seekers near Copenhagen, the Danish capital, to examine how a tougher set of policies were working in practice.
Kiran's* husband was more than 10,000km away from the home she shared with her in-laws in a village in northern India. But despite the vast distance, he watched her constantly through cameras which beamed into a screen in his Brisbane home. He would say: I can always see what you do', she recalls through an interpreter. While her husband was visiting his family home in India in 2017, the cameras were installed in the house
The stats speak for themselves. In 2015's 'A List', out of 418 executives, 79 (19 per cent) were women and only eight (2 per cent) were BAME. Shockingly, in the second decade of the 21st century, it is still possible to go to a leading marketing or communications industry event and only see a handful of black or Asian faces in the room.
The data is based on residency permits, so does not include EU citizens, who do not require a permit in order to live in France. The data shows that the largest groups of non-EU foreigners are Algerians (14.7 percent of the non-French population), Moroccans (13.9 percent), Tunisians (7 percent) - this continues a trend seen for many years. Following them are Turks (5.2 percent) and Brits, who now make up 3.9 percent of the residency permit holders in France.
In a classroom in Chennai, India, around 20 nurses are learning German at breakneck speed. They have six months to become fluent enough to work in Germany. Ramalakshi, one of the nurses, says her family struggled financially, but still managed to pay the equivalent of several thousand euros for her nursing college. Ever since completing her education, she felt the need to give back.
Every evening around 8pm, Faisal Khan locks himself inside his small hostel room at East West Medical College in Nishat Nagar, on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. If there is a knock on the door, he pauses before opening it, listening carefully first for familiar voices. Outside the campus, he avoids crowded tea stalls and markets. He does not speak Bangla fluently, and he knows that his accent could give him away as an Indian an identity he desperately wants to mask these days,
From Senegal to Somalia and Egypt to South Africa, credit alert notifications from fintech apps such as Western Union or WorldRemit often set the mood for the rest of the day, week or even month. Transfers from workers within the continent and the diaspora to their relatives are often referred to as the black tax, whereby one person's salary and relative success can become the safety net for a whole extended family.
