(By Alberto Esquit Choy, guest author) | Lea la entrada de blog en español The following phrases capture a linguistic phenomenon expressed by Maya Kaqchikel youth in Guatemala: “My parents know and speak Kaqchikel, but they didn’t teach me.” “I don’t understand anything.” “I understand, but I can’t speak it.” “Now I want to learn it.” These expressions are heard from people mostly between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. The Kaqchikel population is located within the central highlands of Guatemala and, according to the 2018 census in Guatemala, the total Kaqchikel population is approximately 1,068,356. With respect to linguistic demography, the Inter-American Development Bank (2021) in its study about Indigenous Nations in Guatemala, titled, Demographic Challenges, Linguistic and Socioeconomic: A Comparative Analysis of the 2002 and 2018 Censuses , found that 72% of the population aged 80 or older speaks Kaqchikel, while just 27% of the population between the ages of 5 and 9 speaks
Asylum Text Analytics as an Algorithmic Silver Bullet: The Impossible Quest for Automated Fraud Detection
(By Jeremy A. Rud, guest author) What do Donald Trump, George Santos, and every migrant applying for asylum in the United States have in common? They’ve all recently been charged with fraud. Rather than defaming abuse victims , defrauding campaign donors, or lying to Congress , asylum seekers face much subtler accusations: that their stories are untrue and their experiences insufficient to deserve life in the United States as refugees. Our global system of rigid national borders does more than divide territories. It also restricts access to resources and human rights by categorizing people. In many ways, our political and social institutions make this unavoidable. An immigration system that legally distinguishes refugees from other migrants requires categorization. Categorization requires a comparison between an individual’s claim and a legal definition, which results in an asylum adjudication—an official decision about whether that individual does or does not belong to the category of