Emigration

Eight years ago, the prospect of a George W. Bush administration so distressed some famous American liberals that they threatened to move to Canada. Members of that momentary Chicken Little brigade included Alec Baldwin, Barbra Streisand and Eddie Vedder -- none of whom, by all reports, ever budged. Four years later, Robert Redford and a host of other angry Democrats insisted that a second Bush administration would force them over the world's longest undefended border.

Naqi Shakir sits on a sagging mattress pushed against a wall. His wife and two daughters perch on tattered sofas and chairs crowded into the one room of the house with signs of family life: personal photographs tacked to the wall, a TV, books, and knickknacks on dusty shelves. Except for a folding table and chairs in the kitchen, nearly everything has been sold so the family can bolt as soon as someone rents the two-story home in a relatively safe Baghdad neighborhood.

It's a story of frail human hopes pitted against harrowing dangers. When West African composer Ze Manel collaborated on an opera about the young and the desperate of Africa seeking better lives in the West, he also was telling his own story -- and that of many African artists. Some, like Manel, who is from Guinea-Bissau, leave because dictatorships and war stifle creative and political life. Others are pushed out because paintings and sculptures are luxuries many Africans can't afford.

Eid Shaaban drowned along the Italian coast with borrowed money in his pockets. The unemployed 37-year-old mason and father of three set out from this village for the Egyptian port of Alexandria several weeks ago. There, he paid smugglers the equivalent of $4,500 and boarded a small fishing boat to cross the Mediterranean. The vessel capsized near a beach in Sicily. On Monday, Shaaban's body was returned home and buried in the village graveyard.

Yonatan Cooper had a hot new sports car, a swank apartment near Beverly Hills and a job he loved in politics. But this week, the 24-year-old New Jersey native plans to trade it all in for a choice that has startled some of his closest friends and family: He has decided to emigrate to Israel and aims to serve as a paratrooper with the Israel Defense Forces. Along with more than 200 other North American Jews, Cooper will board a plane today in New York and prepare to make Israel his new home.

From an office near the traditional birthplace of Christ, Mayor Hanna Nasser frets about the prospects for Christians in his slice of the Holy Land. The outbreak of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians more than four years ago has accelerated emigration by Palestinian Christians that began years earlier.