Migration has become one of the most debated, most divisive, most politically charged topics of our time. It has fractured governments and splintered societies, been wielded as a cudgel, a rallying cry, a bargaining chip.
In some ways this makes sense. The movement of people is the movement of our world, touching everything and becoming a proxy for everything in turn. It shapes our politics, our economies, our communities. It transforms our neighborhoods, dictates our state’s bottom line, rearranges the food on our plates. It is both cause and effect, a force that shapes our world even as it responds to it.
And yet on another level the lightning-rod-nature of migration makes no sense at all. We have been doing it forever, and at roughly the same rate. It is a force that for all the noise, for all the coverage and commentary and outrage and worry is something that on a very basic level we all understand, can relate to, can even see ourselves in.
Because at its most fundamental level we move because we want more, because we want better. Because we have something we hope to build, a place to belong, a person to become. We move because we are human.
As long as I can remember I have been drawn to this, to exploring why people move and what that moving does, what it gives and what it takes. As a journalist I have covered migration for nearly 15 years, working across the world for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and many others. I have followed people across the Sahara and the borders of Europe, documented families fleeing war in South Sudan and Iraq and Ukraine, sat with refugees seeking asylum in Sweden and Greece, and watched others throw the dice on perilous journeys across North Africa.
Through all of it I have been uncertain about what kept pulling me back. What was I trying to answer? And it’s only after years of documenting it, living alongside it, sitting with it that I’ve started to understand.
Life is hard. And then it ends. And along the way we are to find meaning. Yet there are no roadmaps, no instructions, and so we do what we can, what we think is best, flailing and striving and loving and losing, all in attempts to make it mean something, to be able to enjoy the trip enough so that when we reach the end we can simply say “I did what I could and that was enough.”
How do other people do this? How do they make it through? How do they balance ambition and time and enjoyment and family and ego and community and health and work and play and money and love and pride and shame and grit and fear?
How do you build a life?
It is the question I keep circling and it is the question migration lays bare. Because moving one’s life may be the single most profound act of self-creation. It is a moment in which we say I want better, I need better, and in pursuing it we strip away distraction, the familiar scaffolding we lean on, until all that remains are the building blocks of a life. Time. Family. Belonging. Aspiration. Identity. What stays, what goes, what you build anew. What is the life I want and what are the steps I need to take to live it? Who is the person I want to be, the family I want to have, the friends I want to keep, and what must I give up to get that?
And it’s in this space that I’m the most interested.
Migration is simultaneously an act that reorients someone’s life, their entire world, but also quietly remakes the world around it. It is an intimate human drama about how to make a life and a vast intellectual jigsaw of power and change.
Waypoints was born out of a desire to explore this space, this intersection. From a belief that this story deserves more than headlines and flash-in-the-pan attention, more than coverage of the extremes. It is too constant for that, too fundamental. It deserves understanding.
We are a publication about how this movement is shaping our world, the big questions and dilemmas it poses for governments and economies and societies. And it is about how this movement shapes individual lives, about how we strive and hope and dream and bet big and take risks and push for something better.
Stories cover the globe. We look at how emerging technologies are transforming the way people cross borders, the networks and systems that make movement possible, the political forces that constrain it and the economic pressures that direct it. Each story explores a larger force shaping migration and a life moving through it, what it costs that life, what it pays out and what it says about our own.
Waypoints is for anyone interested in these broader forces reshaping our countries and communities, and for those fascinated by the very human experience of making a life. This wildly chaotic, difficult and beautiful thing we all wake up every day trying to do.
- Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin
The Team
Waypoints is a collective effort. It was founded by Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin and comprises a core team of four who help with social media, production and generating ideas. They are Karanja Mburu, Elizabeth Chege and Annastacia Musyimi. A wider group of senior journalists and editors from some of the world’s top news publications act as advisors, assisting with editing, story formation and framing.
Just as integral are the journalists and fixers on location whose work and insight is absolutely indispensable for producing these stories. Those people thus far are Shehab Sumon, Saif Hasnat, Deepak Adhikari, Basanta Pratap Singh, Kunda Dixit, Hüsam Yunso, a group that will continue to grow.
