Migration has always been a hot topic among various nations of the world. Humanitarian disasters, famines and war have brought waves of people across continents and oceans in search of better and easier lives.
But such waves of immigrants have not always brought about positive changes. In many cases, they’ve significantly and permanently altered countries’ demographic compositions and brought with them disease, orphaned children, criminal elements and unwelcome habits that have interfered with or negatively impacted their destination countries.
Many can point to the Mariel Harbor refugees from Cuba as the primogenitors of drug-related violence in South Florida in the 1980s or the mostly Korean-immigrant composition of the Japanese Mafia.
The darker sides of the migration story have not been given nearly as much coverage in the media as the plights of supposedly innocent strangers. But certainly, these stories exist, and they need to be told.