In recent decades, millions of people from across the globe have been uprooted from their homes by poverty, wars, and repression. Some flee to save their lives, others risk them to escape destitution. Most end up in refugee camps or in the slums of Third World Countries, with a lucky few finding a better life in an affluent country far from their own. All of these people, in different ways, are at the mercy of economic and political forces beyond their control.

The global economic change is deepening rural poverty in much of the Third World, and peasant migration is creating gargantuan, ungovernable cities.

Almost everything that happens on earth is somehow connected. We are all affected by the widening gap between the rich and the poor, population growth, the mechanization of agriculture, the destruction of the environment, bigotry exploited for political ends... The people wrenched from their homes are simply the most visible victims of this global convulsion.