Author: Migrant Tales

Prior to Finland’s entry into European Union in 1995, there was little written in the English-language media about the Nordic country. Apart from news agencies like Reuters and the Associated Press, a handful like the Financial Times wrote regularly about Finland as well. When I wrote for the FT in the late 1980s and early…

As the US administration debates the closing down of the Guantánamo Bay prison, the stigma of opening such a detention center for enemy combatants, a concept conjured to detain anyone without due process indefinitely, will live on. Erasing the damage to US prestige abroad as a beacon of hope for the word’s oppressed will take…

Possibly one of the interesting matters about the multicultural society debate in Europe is that some don’t grasp what it means or implies. If we look at the etymology of the word, everyone knows that multi derives from the word multus, meaning many or much. Defining culture is a bit more complex. For the sake…

Here’s a snapshot of the sublime landscapes that accompany us north of the 60th parallel. Witnessing such a sunset is magical. It’s like being nowhere but between two great frontiers that meet briefly at a special moment. Those two frontiers are Space and Earth. Here’s wishing everyone a wonderful midsummer if relevant to your region.

It was on a Saturday afternoon in April 1978 when I was locked up in a police cell in Buenos Aires for forgetting my ID at home. The other mistake I made was to accidentally point my camera at the US consul’s home. When I reached the corner, two undercover policemen ran from behind and…

Did you know that one out of 35 people in the world is an immigrant, according to a 2004 United Nations study? In numbers, that translates to 175 million people (2.9% of the world’s population) versus 75 million (2.5%) in 1960. In the United States, the number of immigrants total over 34 million, accounting for…

Some linguists warn that of the world’s 6,000-odd languages that are spoken today, about half will disappear by the end of the century. That means 300 languages become extinct in a year, or about six in a week. A BBC documentary posed an interesting question: When does a language become extinct? Is it when the…

Seen from The Americas, Europe looks like myriad of languages and religions with most of them having a score to settle for some injustice that took place recently or long time ago. In countries like Finland and the Baltic States, the main motive for independence was ethnic. The strife in the breakup of Yugoslavia is…

Para personas como los finlandeses, quienes alguna vez fueron una tribu nómada, y terminaron estableciéndose en este rincón mágico de Europa, el ritual de la despedida sigue siendo una parte importante de nuestra herencia cultural. Las despedidas se notan en todas partes de nuestra cultura. Hasta Väinämöinen, el mítico héroe barbudo blanco del Kalevala, parte…

I was very surprised to hear a while ago that the Argentinean government was breathing life back to the long-overdue Atucha II nuclear plant porject. Even if construction of the nuclear reactor began in 1981, Atucha II was never built. One of the reasons was its ungodly costs due mainly to delays. In 1988, some…