Every year, thousands of short-tailed shearwaters, or mutton birds, descend on Victoria's coastline at the end of September or early October after a mammoth journey from the northern hemisphere, but so far this year they haven't shown up.

AnA Wojak's deeply moving and motivating mixed-media installation, stepping stones at Lismore Regional Gallery is surprising and somewhat overwhelming in its scale.

Printmakers across the country are raising awareness of our most endangered group of birds and their non-stop, eight-and-a-half day journey home from their Artic breeding grounds.

Some parent visas cost up to $40,000 while others have a 30-year waitlist, making them completely out of reach for many migrant families. But advocates say rather than being a drag on the system, elderly family members could actually boost the economy.

After a trip to Venice, West Gippsland artist Anita George was inspired to turn off her computer and write and draw with brush, pen and paper once again. Her passion has resulted in the exhibition Ink Talks, dissecting words, language and intent.

A quirky, German-styled house at Orange in central west New South Wales tells of the city's heritage of migrants and their close ties with the Electrolux refrigeration factory.

Step inside one of the beautiful open gardens on show during the Renmark Rose Festival. Artemis and Harry Ppiros are Greek immigrants who kept their green thumbs busy after retiring from their Riverland fruit block.

Minister for Population Alan Tudge said "the temporary migrant system is an important part of our economy".

Labor's Home Affairs spokesperson Kristina Keneally has sparked controversy after declaring the COVID-19 crisis should force a revamp of the temporary migration program.

With so much of Australia's allure to tourists based on our oceans and waterways, a charity founder has launched a campaign he'd like to see played in airports and pushed via visa applications.

The recurring political debate about immigration tends to ignore the demand and employment that new communities create, writes Daniel Ziffer.

A magistrate has apologised to a man who spent months behind bars waiting to be dealt with by the courts for minor theft charges.

Children of post-war European migrants call for permanent monument at Greta Migrant Camp in the NSW Hunter Valley.

Before moving to Tasmania, Malak Abdou was a veterinarian in Egypt. Now working on a farm, he's one of the lucky ones.

The You Ask, We Answer election project has received dozens of questions about immigration with many concerned about how Australia can care for new migrants.

The Western-style wedding dress worn by a Japanese war bride in 1956 is on display at the National Museum as part of a wider exhibit about immigration.

In the middle of the Australian outback, an unlikely safe haven has emerged for birds migrating across the southern hemisphere. Now, the odorous oasis is helping keep Australian birds alive.

Manal Aqrawe is a doctor with more than 20 years of experience, but she can't get a job in Australia even outside medicine. Her story is sobering, but far from isolated.

With 11 voyages and 300,000 recorded observations under his belt, population ecologist Eric Woehler has dedicated his life to building a dataset to help monitor and track bird populations in a changing world.

A Canberra brothel owner who was charged with allowing an unlawful citizen to work and gain entry to Australia will spend no further time behind bars after the court found she did not underpay or exploit her employees.

Researchers say an online tool to help understand where Australia's Bogong moths have disappeared to is starting to show promising results.

To encourage more migrants to work in regions, the Government is relaxing long-held restrictions on temporary workers.

They travelled across the world in the 1950s and '60s to build a new life cutting cane in the steamy paddocks of north Queensland. Now Basques return to learn the story of their ancestors.

Pro-refugee activism and the travel history of a Tamil father could see a Biloela family at the centre of an immigration row deported, an experienced immigration lawyer says.

Whale watchers spot hundreds of humpbacks, with the population looking healthy, on annual migration census day.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull once described Australia as an 'immigration nation'. What do you think he meant by that? Do you agree?

Watch four very different people speak about their experiences as first- and second-generation migrants. What were some reasons they or their parents migrated to Australia?

Following World War II, thousands of children were sent from Britain to Australia. Most of the children were orphans or unable to be cared for by their parents. In this clip, Hildi describes being taken from her grandmother’s home and secretly put on board a ship to Australia. Frankie Lewis describes the sense of isolation and anonymity wrought by not having a birth certificate.

Amnesty advocates are working overtime to portray illegal migrants as heroic essential workers in the national campaign to contain China's coronavirus.

A Chechen migrant was arrested in the commune of Montereau-Fault-Yonne after dragging a police officer 60 feet with his vehicle while trying to escape a Wuhan coronavirus lockdown checkpoint.

Hungary's parliament has passed a declaration against signing the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women because it smuggles in provisions declaring gender a "social construct" and allowing "gender-based asylum claims".

An Italian nurse working on the frontline against the Chinese coronavirus was brutally sexually assaulted by an African migrant after finishing her shift and heading to her home.

Immigrant advocates are working with Colorado lawmakers to provide relief to vulnerable families during the coronavirus crisis.

Immigrant advocates are working with Colorado lawmakers to provide relief to vulnerable families during the coronavirus crisis.

The U.S. Justice Department can not withhold millions of dollars in federal funding to Colorado law enforcement agencies by attaching immigration-related terms and conditions to securing the grants according to a federal judge's ruling.

The story of one Mexican mother and her young son reminds us that migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border (and everywhere) are individuals driven by their own unique and desperate stories.

He blames Mexico for “sending” illegal immigrants.

More than 155,000 people born in countries such as Somalia, Bhutan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, and Mexico now call Columbus home. Their struggles are many, from employment to language to education and mental health. All of that has been exacerbated by COVID-19.

IBM et Holcim France Benelux annoncent la migration vers Windows 7 des postes de travail de 2500 utilisateurs sur 286 sites en seulement trois mois grâce au savoir-faire d’IBM Global Technology Services.

It may be tempting at the start of a new project to create the first database tables manually, or write SQL scripts that you run manually, especially when you first have to spend a significant amount of time on sifting through all the migration libraries and then some more to get it working properly.

Going through this process did slow me down at the start of the project but I was determined to use a migration tool because hunting inexplicable bugs that only happen in production just to find out there is a definition mismatch between the production and development databases is not fun. Using such a tool also motivates you to write both the setup and teardown steps for each table while the current design is still fresh in your mind.

At first I considered a standalone migration tool because I expect them to be very good at that single task. However, learning the idiosyncrasies of a new tool and trying to make it fit seamlessly into my development workflow seemed like more trouble than it is worth.

I decided to stick with a Common Lisp library and found the following seven that work with PostgreSQL and/or Postmodern:

• Postmodern-passenger-pigeon
• database-migrations
• cl-migrations
• Mito
• Crane
• Orizuru-orm
• cl-mgr

I quickly discounted Crane and Mito because they are ORM (Object Relational Mapper) libraries which are way more complex than a dedicated migration library. Development on Crane have stalled some time ago and I don't feel it is mature enough for frictionless use yet. Mito declares itself as being in Alpha state; also not mature enough yet.

I only stumbled onto cl-mgr and Orizuru-orm long after making my decision so I did not investigate them seriously. Orizuru-orm is in any case an ORM which I would have discounted because it is too complex for my needs. CL-mgr looks simple, which is a good thing. It is based on cl-dbi which makes it a good candidate if you foresee switching databases but even if I discovered it sooner I would have discounted it for the same reason as CL-migrations.

CL-migrations looks very promising. It is a simple library focusing only on migrations. It uses clsql to interface with the database which bothered me because I already committed to using Postmodern and I try to avoid adding a lot of unused code to my projects. The positive side is that it interfaces to many different databases so it is a good candidate if you are not committed to using Postmodern. It is also a stable code base with no outstanding bug reports.

The two projects I focused on was Postmodern-passenger-pigeon and Database-migrations because they both use Postmodern for a database interface.

Postmodern-passenger-pigeon was in active development at the time and it seemed safer to use than Database-migrations because it can do dry runs, which is a very nice feature when you are upgrading your production database and face the possibility of losing data when things go awry. Unfortunately I could not get it working within a reasonable amount of time.

I finally settled on Database-migrations. It is a small code base, focused on one task, it is mature and it uses Postmodern so it does not pull in a whole new database interface into my project. There are however some less positive issues.

The first issue is a hindrance during development. Every time the migrations ASDF system (or the file containing it, as ASDF prefers that all systems be defined in a single file) is recompiled it adds all the defined migrations to the migrations list. Though each one will only be applied once to the DB it is still bothersome. One can then clear the list with (setf database-migrations::*migrations* nil) but then only newly modified migration files will be added. The solution then is to touch the .asd file after clearing the migrations list.

The second negative point is quite dangerous. The downgrade function takes a target version as parameter, with a default target of 0. This means that if you execute downgrade without specifying a target version you delete your whole database.

I am currently using Database-migrations and it works well for me. If for some reason I need to switch I will use cl-migrations.

Using Database-migrations

To address the danger of unintentionally deleting my database I created a wrapper function that does both upgrade and downgrade, and it requires a target version number.

Another practical issue I discovered is that upgrades and downgrades happen in the same order as they are defined in the migration file. If you create two tables in a single file where table 2 depends on table 1 then you can not revert / downgrade because Database-migrations will attempt to delete table 1 before table 2. The solution here is to use the def-queries-migration macro (instead of def-query-migration) which defines multiple queries simultaneously . If you get overwhelmed by a single definition that defines multiple tables the other option is to stick with one migration definition per file.

1. Shah slams Bengal govt for 'not allowing' migrant trains; Centre lying, says TMC  Times of India
2. Not Allowing Migrants' Trains "Injustice": Amit Shah To Mamata Banerjee  NDTV
3. TMC releases 'proof' after Centre alleges blockade of migrant transport in West Bengal  TIMES NOW
4. News updates from Hindustan Times: Have 7-stage plan to bring back migrants, says TMC on Amit Shah’s...  Hindustan Times
5. Bengal Says 8 Trains to Bring Back Migrant Workers Scheduled as Amit Shah Writes to Mamata on 'Injustice'  News18
6. View Full coverage on Google News

We use longitudinal data from the income tax system to study the impacts of firms’ employment and wage-setting policies on the level and change in immigrant-native wage differences in Canada. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the early 2000s, distinguishing between those with and without a college degree from two broad groups of countries – the U.S., the U.K. and Northern Europe, and the rest of the world. Consistent with a growing literature based on the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), we find that firm-specific wage premiums explain a significant share of earnings inequality in Canada and contribute to the average earnings gap between immigrants and natives. In the decade after receiving permanent status, earnings of immigrants rise relative to those of natives. Compositional effects due to selective outmigration and changing participation play no role in this gain. About one-sixth is attributable to movements up the job ladder to employers that offer higher pay premiums for all groups, with particularly large gains for immigrants from the “rest of the world” countries.

German multinational Bayer underestimated the risks of acquiring Monsanto. Now, the company is desperately seeking to contain the damage by selling business divisions and cutting jobs. So far, though, none of these moves have helped.