Passport to Purgatory: How the Humble Citizenship Test Became the World’s Most Politicized Pop-Quiz By Our Man in the Queue, Watching the World Fill Out Form 47-B in Triplicate LONDON—Somewhere between the multiple-choice question about the national tree and the oral recitation of a centuries-old poem, the modern citizenship test stops being an exam and…
Every month, like a grim bingo caller in a fluorescent-lit purgatory, the U.S. Department of State releases the Visa Bulletin—an Excel sheet that quietly decides whether your cousin in Manila will see her fiancé this decade or whether that software engineer in Bengaluru can finally stop pretending he enjoys “team-building” Zoom calls. Across time zones,…
Aric Almirola: The Cuban-American Whose 200-mph Commute Became a Global Parable By the time Aric Almirola eased his No. 10 Stewart-Haas Ford into retirement at the end of last season, he had logged exactly 460 starts in NASCAR’s top flight—roughly the distance from Havana to Pyongyang if you could drive on water and had a…
**The Blue Ticket Phenomenon: How a Scrap of Paper Became the World’s Most Exclusive Passport** In the grand theater of human absurdity, nothing quite matches the blue ticket—a humble slip of colored paper that has become the modern world’s equivalent of a golden ticket, except instead of a chocolate factory, it leads to something far…
**BIBIMBAP AND HANDCUFFS: HOW A GEORGIA IMMIGRATION RAID BECAME KOREA’S LATEST EXPORT** *The global economy works in mysterious ways—Samsung builds your phone, Hyundai builds your car, and apparently, the Korean government builds your immigration enforcement policies.* In a delightful twist of globalization that absolutely nobody asked for, South Korean immigration officials recently descended upon the…
Immigration Appeals Court: Where Hope Goes to Get a Number and Wait in Line Forever By the Global Affairs Correspondent who has watched passports change hands more often than a €500 note in a Bulgarian nightclub. Walk into any immigration appeals court on the planet and you’ll find the same décor: fluorescent lighting that flatters…
Hyundai’s Alabama Plant Gets a Surprise Visitor: The Department of Homeland Security By Dave’s Locker International Desk Montgomery, Alabama—Nothing says “good morning, Vietnam” quite like a pre-dawn immigration raid on a factory floor. At 5:43 a.m. last Tuesday, while the rest of the planet debated whether AI would steal their jobs, Agents of the U.S….
Toronto, the city that can’t decide whether it’s New York with healthcare or Cleveland with delusions, has become the world’s polite laboratory for the question: “What happens when global capital, global talent, and global anxiety all collide in a place where the sidewalks apologize for your own bad mood?” From an international vantage point—say, a…
