For people tracking, half-Indian's website is the online Mecca

But for a growing number of followers, it has become an important read.

Every moment has its magazine, and for the age of migration it is the Migration Information Source, a weekly (more or less) online journal followed worldwide by scholars, policy makers and the occasional migrant in distress.

Many readers discover the Source simply by googling the word “immigrant” and finding a link to migrationinformation.org among the millions of citations.

At the site’s helm is an American-born editor, Kirin Kalia, 32, who describes herself as “half Dutch, half Indian, 100 percent American and total migration geek.” Kalia thrives on hybridity— devouring Indian-American novels and Dutch-Moroccan films — and finds no migration topic too obscure. To know the fate of Latvian mushroom pickers in Ireland is, for her, to glimpse the world in a grain of sand.

With conflicts rising over immigration to the United States, interest in the Source has surged. Readership has doubled in the past three years, Kalia said, to about 140,000 unique visits each month.

If the Source has a unifying theme, it is that migration is a defining force nearly everywhere. There are about 200 million migrants in the world, probably a record, demographers say, in both relative and absolute terms, and more than 80 per cent live outside the United States.

The Source has focused on Tajik construction workers in Russia, farmhands from Burkina Faso who pick Ghanaian crops and the Peruvians who take jobs left behind by Ecuadorean workers who have migrated to Spain.

Other themes of the coverage include the speed with which migration has grown (Spain’s immigrant population has risen nearly sixfold in 10 years) and the conflict it brings, within both nations and living rooms. Political parties rise and fall. Economic interests win and lose. Family relations change.

“None of this is easy,” Ms. Kalia said.

Nor is the process of tracking it, with migration studies a nascent field and data on many countries scarce. But the magazine has won praise from a roster of A-list scholars who read it, write for it and assign it to their students.

... contd.