Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"Something else must hold them back— we will return to this puzzle later."

"Moreover, among the people given the financial support who chose to make the trip, only around half went back during the next monga season, despite their personal experience of finding a job and making money."

"When the NGO provided a randomly chosen group of people with information about the availability of jobs (but no incentive), the information alone had absolutely no effect. "

"As a result, the families who sent an extra migrant consumed on average an amazing 50 percent more calories; these families went from near starvation to a comfortable level of food consumption."

"The offer encouraged about a quarter (22 percent) of all households who would not have otherwise done so to send out a migrant."

"Of course, one possibility is that poorer people are simply unaware of the opportunity to improve their economic situation by moving."

"Being forced to move seemed to have loosened their moorings and made them more adventurous."

"This is what economists call an identification problem. To be able to claim a difference in wages is caused by the difference in the location and nothing else, we need to establish an exact connection between the cause and the effect."

"An important general problem in assessing the benefits of migration is that we usually only focus on the wages of those who chose to move, and not on the many reasons that made them do so, and the many things that made it possible for them to do so successfully."

"And then there are the people in the middle, the vast majority who don’t face extreme internal or external compulsions to move."

"Of course, there is also the opposite: the ambitious migrant who needs to get out at all costs."

"They were running from the mouth of the shark.'

" A study from Nepal found that even bad years in agriculture didn’t drive many Nepalis out of the country."

"Those trying to get out of such places probably don’t face the grinding extreme poverty the average Liberian or Mozambique resident faces. It is more that they find life intolerable because of the collapse of everyday normality: the unpredictability and violence brought upon them by the drug wars in Northern Mexico, the horrible military Junta in Guatemala, and the civil wars in the Middle East."

"you only leave home when home won’t let you stay."

"there is no credible evidence that even relatively large inflows of low-skilled migrants hurt the local population, including members of the local population most like the migrants in terms of skills."

"While there are obviously many people desperate to get out from wherever they are, as we will see, the enduring puzzle is why so many others don’t move when they can."

"Simply thinking about migration makes people more parochial. The facts aren’t allowed to get in the way."

"When they were told the true numbers, their sense of the facts changed, but not their bottom-line views on immigration."

"Politicians stoke these fears by abusing the facts."

"They believe immigrants are less educated, poorer, more likely to be unemployed, and more likely to live on government handouts than they actually are."

"Racist alarmism, driven by a fear of the intermingling of races and the myth of purity, doesn’t heed facts."

"It is less visible in the developing world, but the fights over Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa, the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh, and the citizenship bill in Assam, India, have been equally frightening for those who are its targets."

"it may be the single most influential political issue in the world’s richest countries. Even politicians from the mainstream European parties are struggling to reconcile the liberal traditions they want to uphold with the threat they see across their shores."

" 'আমি জানি না' এই শব্দটি অবশ্যই গুরুত্বসহকারে নিতে হবে। কারণ 'আমি জানি না' অনেক বেশি প্রশস্ত 'আমি জানি' থেকে। 'আমি জানি' স্পষ্ট এবং দ্ব্যর্থহীনভাবে সীমাবদ্ধ একটি শব্দ, কিন্তু 'আমি জানি না' এই শব্দটি অনেক কিছুর জন্য উন্মুক্ত একটি শব্দ যার থেকে আমরা অনেক কিছু খুঁজে পাওয়ার চেষ্টা করতে পারি।"

"কারণ আর ফলাফলের উপরে
যে ঘাস বেড়ে উঠে
তার উপর কাউকে শুতে হবে
মুখে ঘাসের একটা ফলক ধরে
মেঘের দিকে তাকিয়ে।"

"আমি বেশি পছন্দ করি সংবাদপত্রের প্রথম পাতা থেকে গ্রীম ভাইদের রূপকথা।"

"আমি অতিসাধারণ একজন নারী
যে শুধু জানে
কখন
অন্যের গোপন কথা প্রকাশ করতে হয়।"

"সূর্যের এই তৃতীয় গ্রহে,
পরিষ্কার বিবেক
পশুর মতো আর কারো নেই।"

"সব থেকে পুরনো তিনটি শব্দ

আমি যখন ভবিষ্যৎ শব্দটি উচ্চারণ করি, তারপরই শব্দটি অতীত হয়ে যায়।
আমি যখন নীরবতা শব্দটি উচ্চারণ করি, আমি তখনই তাকে ধ্বংস করি।
আমি যখন কিছুই না; শব্দটি উচ্চারণ করি আমি কিছু একটা সৃষ্টি করি, যা কিছুকেই অস্তিত্বহীন করে না।"