With the traffic to this migration blog stalled in the very high single digits, we thought it might be time to jumpstart our visitor statistics through the radical means of posting an entry. Through this means, we hope (1) to push our traffic into the double digits, and (2) to tell you a little about ourselves and what we intend with this blog.
If you are reading this, our first goal is already accomplished -- publishing nothing got us 9 visitors -- so let's move to our second aim. We are Michele Pistone and John Hoeffner. Now, given that, in our internet age, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a new book in search of an audience must be in need of a blog, it will surprise few to learn that we are the authors of a new book. The book is called Stepping Out of the Brain Drain: Applying Catholic Social Teaching in a New Era of Migration. It is scheduled to be published on May 28, 2007 by Lexington Books. We readily admit that the primary impetus for starting this blog now is to attract attention to our book.
But our aims for this blog do not begin AND end with publicizing our book. In our view, migration is as important a policy issue as there is, and one which demands consideration from many different perspectives. A blog, international in reach and interactive in design, is the perfect vehicle for presenting and examining multiple perspectives on migration. Our longer term aim for this blog is, therefore, for it to contribute positively (through our posts and our readers' comments) to the worldwide discussion about migration.
An initial obstacle we have to overcome in order for this blog to fulfill our hopes for it is the authors' staggering technical ineptitude. For example, if you happened to be our tenth visitor, you would have noted that our blog was pretty bare, with nothing at all on our sidebar. If that tenth visitor happened to be our publisher, he or she might additionally have fixed upon the fact that we failed to provide a hyperlink for our book. It is our expectation that our 100th visitor will have a different experience. If you are that tenth visitor, however, please understand that the bareness and the absence of links are not matters of considered choice but, rather, a measure of our technological ignorance. We hope to correct these problems soon, but we need to learn how to do so.
We expect to learn what we need to in the next week and to begin frequent posting on migration (and occasionally other topics) by early May. Please join us then. In the meantime, if you know of any other migration blogs we might highlight, please let us know.
Michele and John
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