Latest news with #LydiaPolgreen
Washington Post
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Claudia Sheinbaum's Mexico is no shining beacon
In recent weeks, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has received glowing reviews. New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen described Sheinbaum's Mexico as 'a beacon,' especially for the immigrant community. A few weeks before that, in a hagiographic profile also published in the Times, Michelle Goldberg praised Sheinbaum as 'the anti-Trump' — 'a shining exception to the reigning spirit of autocratic machismo.'
New York Times
23-04-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Mexico Is Becoming a Beacon
This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today. We know one type of migration well. It's millions of people from poorer countries traveling mostly to wealthy countries — where they receive, increasingly, a hostile reception — in search of safety and opportunity. But there's another type of migration taking place the world over. Smaller, quieter yet persistent, it involves people from wealthy countries seeking new lives elsewhere, sometimes in other wealthy places but also in poorer countries that have traditionally sent rather than received migrants. Perhaps nowhere on the globe are these two waves of migration converging more starkly than in Mexico City, a vast urban agglomeration that has been transformed over the past two decades. It was once known for violent crime, choking haze and broken infrastructure. For decades, many of its ambitious citizens sought to leave, part of a vast tide of migration across the country's northern border with the United States, a nation many Mexicans saw as a beacon of opportunity. These days, Mexico City is itself a beacon, drawing millions of visitors from across the world. It is a pulsing center of global culture that rivals any of the great European capitals. Its historic parks and plazas have been reborn. It is a culinary juggernaut, where securing a seat at top restaurants requires ingenuity and once-obscure taco stands garner viral, TikTok-fueled fame. The city's economy has thrived, too, driven by the growth of a wide range of businesses. There are bustling factories, high-tech start-ups, banking and insurance companies and even a rapidly expanding global film and television business, making not just Spanish-language content for Latin American audiences and art films but also big-budget streaming shows and Super Bowl commercials. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
10-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
‘This Moment Is a Cataclysm,' but We Can Still Act
In this episode of 'The Opinions,' the New York Times Opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen speaks to the author and activist Sarah Schulman on resistance and solidarity during politically charged times. Below is a transcript of an episode of 'The Opinions.' We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Lydia Polgreen: I'm Lydia Polgreen, and I'm a columnist for The New York Times. In my many years as a journalist, I've never seen anything quite like the swift and relentless attacks on our most fundamental rights and freedoms that we are witnessing under the second Trump administration. News clip: Immigration and Customs Enforcement admitted to an administrative error that resulted in the deportation of an undocumented man to El Salvador. News clip: This letter from the Trump administration and the Department of Education, it orders all colleges in K through 12 schools to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs and initiatives, or they run the risk of losing federal funding. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Problem With Sweden Is Sweden
This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today. On Aug. 12, 2004, celebratory headlines festooned the pages of Swedish newspapers, hailing a huge milestone: On that day a baby would be born as the nine millionth Swede. After years of fretting over declining birthrates, a modest increase in babies born and, crucially, robust migration had pushed that sprawling but lightly populated nation over a longed-for threshold. Twenty years later, almost exactly to the day, the Swedish government trumpeted a very different achievement: More people were leaving Sweden than were migrating to it. By the end of the year, a country that had long celebrated its status as a refuge for people fleeing war and repression was touting the fact that fewer people had been granted asylum in Sweden than in any year since comparable records have been kept. To the government, led by the center-right Moderate Party and backed by the hard-line anti-migrant Sweden Democrats, this retrenchment was nothing but a good thing. The celebration completed a stunning reversal. Sweden was for decades one of the most open and welcoming nations in the world, to the point where its foreign-born population stands at about 20 percent. Now it is among the most restrictive. By hardening asylum requirements and creating an unfriendly atmosphere for new arrivals, it has dramatically stemmed the flow of migrants. Arrivals have fallen year over year. Not satisfied, the government has cooked up new schemes to induce migrants already in the country to leave, offering a $34,000 payment per adult. In much less than a generation, Sweden has gone from safe haven to heavily fortified citadel. In this, Sweden offers some an example to emulate. As wealthy countries across the globe turn against migration and ascendant right-wing parties push harsh restrictions, Sweden stands out as a country that has gone hard and fast to keep migrants out — first under a center-left government and then a more right-leaning one. It is a case study of backlash, where the fantasy of draconian border restrictions has been enacted. The story, on its face, may seem a simple one: After being overwhelmed by an influx of asylum seekers from Syria and other war-tossed Middle Eastern countries in 2015, the country sought to assert control over its borders and its population. Yet when I traveled to the country earlier this year, I found something much more complicated. There is certainly antipathy toward migrants: In a survey last month, 73 percent of Swedish respondents said migration levels over the past decade were too high. But that's of a piece with a society ill at ease with itself. Beset by metastasizing gang violence, stubborn unemployment and strain on its vaunted social welfare system, the country is rife with discontent — a distemper shared by foreign- and native-born alike. The problem with Sweden, it seems, is not migrants. It's Sweden itself. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
11-03-2025
- New York Times
Dubai Is a Vision of the Future
This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today. Laureen Fredah's migrant journey began as something of a lark. She was living in Kampala, the biggest city in Uganda, when she heard from a friend that Emirates, the flagship airline of the Gulf city of Dubai, was looking for flight attendants. The airline, part of the United Arab Emirates' nation-building project, was expanding rapidly into Africa. At first blush, it didn't seem like a great opportunity. She came from a well-connected family, affluent enough to put her through college in Uganda though not so prosperous as to be able to send her to study abroad. She had the prospect of a good civil service position in Uganda, so a service job like flight attendant had not been on her list of attractive career options. But she also had long dreamed of becoming a lawyer and had vague ideas about going overseas. 'I didn't have such a bad life in Uganda, but I just wanted something more,' Fredah told me. The flight attendant job, it turned out, paid pretty well and could help put her through law school. Plus, it offered the kind of jet-age glamour that appeals to young people the world over. The competition was fierce: Hundreds of people tried out for the small handful of available positions. But with her willowy good looks and the silken charm she had honed in a stint as a presenter for the national television news service in Uganda, she made the cut. And so she packed her bags and flew to Dubai, the beginning of a journey that would take her not just to a new city but also to law school and a job as a lawyer for one of the most powerful firms in the Middle East. 'I worked my way to the top,' she told me, a sly smile playing across her face. In our current age of vituperative anti-immigration politics, Western leaders seem to assume that the best and brightest people from poorer countries will always want to build their lives in the West, no matter how many hoops they need to jump through to be allowed in or how unwelcome they are made to feel on arrival. But this attitude fails to understand the experiences of people like Fredah, who 15 years ago joined a relatively new tide of educated, middle- and upper middle-class people from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the wider Middle East who have flocked to the Gulf in search of opportunity. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
