Week 8 discussion

How does Kwon’s exploration of “the work of waiting” impact the way that we think about immigration policy in a specific country? What kind of map of global migration patterns would be adequate to express the range of labors that people engage in to support one migrant worker?

From the piece “Everybody is gone,” which Kwon included in the piece, we can extract the ideas of how he believes travelling/immigrating to a different country causes grief from separation and a sense of incompleteness. In my opinion, travelling is merely an act of someone spending resources, whether it be money, time, or both, to enjoy in a place the locals are fed up with. Kwon believed that immigration is an act of leaving a place with less future into one where the immigrant could succeed better. The consequence, however, is the grief and loneliness of the immediate relatives. This sense of being left behind couldn’t have been clearer when we have just experienced separation from our family due to Covid. Due to the contagious nature of the disease, individuals working or studying in a foreign country experiences a sense of “forced separation” which closely resembles what Kwon described in her piece. Regarding the map of migration patterns, I believe it would be the map of wealth gaps for each country. The map would describe the difference between the wealth and the poor and the tendency for each class to either leave or choosing to reside/immigrate to a certain country.