Refugees

The Juarez police lieutenant was recovering from three gunshot wounds, the result of an assault by hit men for a drug cartel. His name was on a death list brazenly posted at a monument for fallen peace officers. Lt. Salvador Hernandez Arvizu didn't like his odds of surviving in Mexico. So he fled his hospital bed, hoping to take refuge in the U.S. At a border post in El Paso, he filled out immigration paperwork, made a formal request for political asylum -- and was taken directly to jail.

Re "Payback for a tax refugee," Opinion, May 16 In calling for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin to be exiled from the United States, Bruce Ackerman seems to argue that people should not be able to move freely around the world, even as our policies embrace free trade. Ackerman ignores that Saverin has always had two national loyalties and now lives in a third country. Such "third culture kids" are increasingly common today, and many are not super-rich. Rather, their statuses reflect a beneficial global market of talent moving across borders.

Re "Payback for a tax refugee," Opinion, May 16 In calling for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin to be exiled from the United States, Bruce Ackerman seems to argue that people should not be able to move freely around the world, even as our policies embrace free trade. Ackerman ignores that Saverin has always had two national loyalties and now lives in a third country. Such "third culture kids" are increasingly common today, and many are not super-rich. Rather, their statuses reflect a beneficial global market of talent moving across borders.

Is citizenship a commodity, to be bought and sold when the price is right? Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook, thinks so. After becoming an American 14 years ago, he has traded his citizenship in the country that helped make him rich for the low-cost Singapore product. According to the New York Times, he denies making the switch for pecuniary reasons, but it's hard to believe. He stands to gain $4 billion from Facebook's imminent public offering, which has to make Singapore tax laws enticing.

Just before the Ludus Athletics models began parading down the runway at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills, Vincent Cochetel, North America's representative to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, suggested people imagine an area the size of California under five to eight feet of water for two and a half months. That is the scope, Cochetel said, of last summer's disastrous Pakistan floods, which affected an estimated 20 million people. With Pakistan hosting 1.7 million refugees, primarily from Afghanistan, the U.S. association for UNHCR paired up with Ludus Athletics to raise awareness and funds for these refugees.

During the holidays, Phuong Pham is reminded of a Vietnamese proverb: Whatever tree you eat from, remember the one who planted it. More than 30 years ago, on the day Saigon fell to Communist forces, Pham and his family scrambled aboard a South Vietnam ship bound for the South China Sea. Pham, carrying only some photos and a small bag with clothes, thought he had lost everything. But after arriving at a U.S. refugee center in Pennsylvania, Pham was matched with a nearby parish that became his family's sponsors.

Bomb blasts, torture and years of exile had all but ruined the Azeez family of Iraq. So the news sounded promising: Their refugee application had been approved. Abdul, his wife, Haifaa, and their four adult children were coming to America. The family of Mandeans, a persecuted religious minority in Iraq, had left behind almost everything in their Baghdad home but planned to create a new life in El Cajon. One year later, Abdul, 49, fiddles with worry beads as he paces in his two-bedroom town house.

Holding her baby above her head, Rihanna Mohammed tumbled out of a boat in rough seas and swam to the Yemeni shore. "It is a wicked, wicked journey," said the refugee from Somalia, her feet wrinkled and yellowed, her face speckled white with sand. "Waves were crashing over us the whole way. We were terrified." But she was lucky. Mohammed, her 1-year-old daughter and 48 others made it alive, fleeing the war and poverty of their native land for the uncertainties of a new one. Thousands make the journey every week in fleets of battered fishing boats sailed by smugglers.

The alarm clock's 3 a.m. ring awakened Rudra Kuikel and his eldest daughter, Thagi, in their lightly furnished south Philadelphia apartment. An hour later, they were headed to a packaged-food plant where father and daughter chopped lettuce for eight hours, netting $50 each after taxes and paying $5 each for transportation. The Kuikel family, ethnic Nepalese Hindus who once lived in Bhutan, includes wife Jasodha; son Indra, 19; daughter Tulasha, 13; Thagi, 22; and Rudra, 51. The family fled Bhutan in 1992 after new citizenship laws made it impossible for them to stay in the nation of 691,000 citizens, which straddles India's border with China.

Moammar Kadafi's loyalists appeared to have strengthened their grip on the Libyan capital, while chaos roiled much of the country and spilled over its borders in a wave of frightened refugees. The unrest in Libya has left hundreds dead and nearly frozen the country's oil-based economy. The United Nations reported Monday that more than 100,000 refugees, many of them laborers from nearby countries, have fled to Tunisia and Egypt over the last week to escape destitution and an outbreak of violence that has drawn international condemnation.

Prospects for a cease-fire in Syria further dimmed Monday when fighting spilled over the border into Turkey and Lebanon, leaving at least three people dead, opposition activists said. An additional 160 people were killed within Syria, activists said, as forces loyal to embattled President Bashar Assad continued to shell buildings and shoot at residents of rebellious cities on the eve of a proposed halt to the hostilities. Government troops and tanks were due to be withdrawn Tuesday from cities and towns, but that seemed increasingly unlikely as the violence has only escalated in the last week and on Sunday the Assad government demanded written guarantees from all opposition groups, a proposal that the rebel Free Syrian Army dismissed.

Um Eddine shudders as she describes the icy night she and her four children reached the barbed-wire fence that marks the border between her native Syria and Jordan. She pushed her two youngest children through and continued to run, hoping that the ordeal of leaving her troubled homeland, where her husband had been jailed for protesting against President Bashar Assad, was almost over. But she soon noticed that her eldest two children, ages 6 and 7, were no longer behind her. She suppressed a mother's urge to call out for them in the dark, remembering the family had been warned against making noise during their escape, lest they alert government snipers hiding in the hills who would open fire at any cracking branch.

During a pause in the shelling, Um Mahmood and her 9-year-old son ducked out of their house together in Baba Amr, the most contested neighborhood in the Syrian city of Homs. Their entire family of nine had been waiting for a chance to flee the government onslaught, and rebels had just sent word that they should use the lull to get out. But as Um Mahmood and her son hurried along a dirt road, several shells landed nearby, knocking them to the ground. Other family members scattered.

Even as it recovers from its recent civil war, Libya is fast becoming a place of sanctuary for thousands of refugees fleeing the bloodshed in Syria. Buses from Damascus, crammed with Syrian families, are arriving daily in the eastern city of Benghazi, the cradle of the effort to oust the late Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi. "Up to 4,000 Syrian families have sought refuge in Libya in the last weeks, and the numbers are increasing every day," said Mohammed Jammal, a Syrian community leader in the city.

Chu Sung-ha says he knows for sure that some of the people shown sobbing on television over the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il are faking it. Once, he was one of them. As a 20-year-old student at Pyongyang's prestigious Kim Il Sung University in 1994, when North Korea's founder and the school's namesake died, Chu and his fellow students were used to illustrate the nation's grief. Television cameras were rolling when the students were ushered into an auditorium to be told the news.

Richard Chong's first reaction was skepticism. "Why are they releasing this information so easily," wondered the Koreatown resident, after hearing reports that North Korean strongman Kim Jong II had died. "Hopefully this is true, but in a country like this, you never know. In grocery stores, shopping plazas and all-night diners in L.A.'s Koreatown, the news of Kim's death was greeted with both happiness and a deep sense of caution and unease. Residents and visitors, many of them of Korean descent, said they have long viewed the North Korean leader as a divisive and erratic ruler who put his own whims ahead of the good of a country and a shadowy figure capable of using body doubles and fake news reports to throw off the rest of the world.

To save themselves, Rahmo Ibrahim Madey and three of her children escaped on foot this month from southern Somalia's Bakol region — a drought-racked land controlled by the Islamist militants of the Shabab group. Less than 20 miles from their destination, the battered capital of Mogadishu, Madey's 1-year-old daughter, Fadumo, died of starvation. Days later, under a shelter of plastic sheeting and castaway fabric at one of the makeshift refugee camps in the capital, the 29-year-old mother spooned small helpings of porridge into the mouth of her 4-year-old daughter, Batulo.

He buried his children and fled west across the border to a new country. Young soldiers with rifles pass as Mohamed Abdul walks in the clothes of a refugee, a man who once owned several houses and a kiosk in that whitewashed and bloodied city by the sea: Mogadishu, Somalia. Things taken, life whittled, and suddenly he is in Kenya, angry and lost amid tents and huts. Girls in candy-colored dresses run along barbed wire, and a tanker truck called the Sewage Buster rumbles beneath the blue flags of the United Nations.

Penny Puckett came to Slab City and fell in love. After four years of "bumming around and hopping freight trains," the 25-year-old from Kansas City arrived at this hardscrabble section of the Imperial Valley desert and immediately embraced its sense of liberation from society's rules and norms. What others might view as desolation and deprivation, Puckett saw as a way to reduce life to its essence: water, food and shelter (plus Internet and cellular phone service). PHOTOS: Slab City "Slab City people have a great need to live with just the bare necessities and are happy about it," she said.

In a rocky valley at the northern tip of Lebanon, three generations of a Syrian farming family cluster around a small gas heater in the derelict schoolhouse that has become their refuge. When there is electricity, they are glued to the television, which transmits grainy amateur video of chanting protesters and bloodied bodies just across the border in their strife-torn home province of Homs. Interrupting one another in a rush to be heard, family members describe communities under siege by an iron-fisted state, and village turning against village in a chilling cycle of abductions, beatings and killings.