By Rex Reed 10/30/12 6:37pm

movies

Mistry in Festival of Lights.

Flickers of Inspiration: Festival of Lights’s High-Wattage Narrative Overpowers Shundell Prasad’s Transition to Features

Well-intentioned but so clumsily executed by Indo-Guyanese writer-director Shundell Prasad that whole scenes seem to be missing, Festival of Lights is about the plight of Indian immigrants from the South American country of Guyana in their daunting efforts to assimilate in the U.S. It opens our eyes to a subculture about which most of us know very little, but it is so unsteady in its focus that interest wanes.  Read More

By The Editors 6/20/12 9:58am

opinion

Obama’s Good Call

As a magnet for immigrants, New York City has a vested interest in the nation’s ongoing and long-standing debate about immigration reform. So President Obama’s recent decision to stop the deportation of illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children cannot but help thousands of New Yorkers who currently live in the shadows, fearful that one false move might lead to a one-way ticket to their place of birth.

Mr. Obama’s decision will directly affect the lives of about 800,000 young people nationwide. Read More

By Michael Woodsmall 5/15/12 7:14pm

books

Freudenberger. (David Jacobs)

Strangers Among Us: The Protagonist of Nell Freudenberger’s Novel Is New to America

One of the more recent entries in the annals of literary hype that threatens to overshadow actual achievement is Nell Freudenberger. Back in 2001, when the recent Harvard grad was an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, her short story “Lucky Girls” was published in the magazine, and she soon became known, both in New York publishing circles and beyond, as a wunderkind. She happened to be attractive. “Too young, too pretty, too successful” said the title of an article by Curtis Sittenfeld, in Salon. But then came a well-received first novel, The Dissidents, and a short story, “An Arranged Marriage,” in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction issue, in 2010, and awards, like the PEN/Malamud. And now with her second novel, Newlyweds (Knopf, 352 pp., $25.95), an extended version of “An Arranged Marriage,” comes her most successful effort yet, one that shows a more mature voice and the true triumph of her talent over her hype. Read More

By Aaron Gell 9/24/10 3:53pm

Corny! Stephen Colbert’s Big Gay House Subcommittee Joke (Video)

That was awkward. When Stephen Colbert was invited to testify before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and Border Security, it was bound to be an interesting moment for C-SPAN viewers. And Colbert didn’t disappoint, offering up a spirited in-character attack on undocumented workers that was actually a sly attempt to undermine opponents of Read More

By Jimmy Vielkind 1/27/09 10:16pm

Rivera Backs Off Gillibrand on Immigration, Pending Meeting

ALBANY—After

In Hyde Park on Monday, Gillibrand was asked about the subject as it related to agriculture in the Hudson Valley. She replied:

"My view has always been that we need to right-size immigration," she said. "We need to have the right number of visas to accommodate the right number of workers, particularly for Read More

By Steve Cohen 11/05/08 2:58pm

The Pageant of Democracy

Tuesday morning the pageant of democracy began in earnest.  At 6:15am on West 120th street off Morningside Drive, I stood with my neighbors in the longest polling line I have seen in more than two decades of voting on the Upper West Side. Reading about the death of Barak Obama’s grandmother as I waited in Read More

By Jennifer Rubin 7/15/08 3:44am

McCain's Test Against the Anti-Immigration Right

John McCain has a love-hate relationship with immigration reform. Or rather, he loves immigration reform but the conservative base hates it. That becomes apparent whenever he talks about it.

McCain and his conservative critics learned different lessons from the ill-fated attempt in 2007 to create a comprehensive immigration reform scheme. Conservative opponents of immigration reform Read More