On most days, my work has involved scanning headlines from war zones, refugee camps, and international summits before heading out to cover a ribbon-cutting in Milwaukee. The distance between those two realities is more than miles. It’s a gulf in perspective.
Being a photojournalist for a local news outlet with a global lens means navigating that expanse daily. While I’m reporting on an event or political policy, I’m also aware of other stories playing out across the world, where the stakes are just as high but the context is entirely different.
Yet in Milwaukee, many of those connections get lost in translation, if they are even noticed at all.
Which is why our editorial mission is to always localize such news, to show the city’s connections beyond the city. Like how a desire in Milwaukee to eliminate a freeway section could learn lessons from when Seoul successfully decommissioned its entire downtown highway system.
The phrase “global citizen” is often used loosely, reducing it to a marketing line for a lifestyle brand. For me, it’s not a label but a lived experience.
I am a Milwaukee native, but I have lived overseas for major portions and formative years of my life. That taught me to absorb events beyond U.S. borders, connecting them to our city’s immigrant neighborhoods, explaining why international issues matter here. It’s a commitment to seeing Milwaukee as part of a much larger system — political, economic, and cultural — rather than as an isolated Midwestern city.
Milwaukee is not without its global credentials. It has a rich immigrant history from Germany, Poland, and a host of other nations that shaped our industries, neighborhoods, and traditions. Walking through certain blocks today, you can hear conversations in Hmong, Spanish, Arabic, and Burmese. The city has welcomed refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar, as well as more recent arrivals from Afghanistan and Ukraine.
In moments like these, Milwaukee looks outward. But the broader civic conversation still tends to fold inward, focused tightly on the boundaries of Milwaukee County, and sometimes just on the neighborhoods where residents feel most at home.
I have covered community events tied to international causes where attendance barely filled a small meeting room, even though the issue at hand had clear implications for local policy. At other times, major global developments — a famine, an election, a peace deal — pass without a ripple in the city’s public discourse.
These gaps are not about a lack of compassion. They reflect an entrenched habit of viewing the world through a local-first lens, where outside events are only seen as relevant when they directly affect local employment, taxes, or public safety.
That focus on immediate concerns is understandable. Milwaukee has its share of pressing challenges: poverty, public health, education, and housing. Yet these are not isolated problems. The same economic forces, migration patterns, and climate impacts driving debates in other countries are shaping life here. If those links are ignored, the city risks making decisions without the benefit of seeing the full picture.
Part of the disconnect comes from media coverage. Local newsrooms have steadily reduced their foreign reporting, relying instead on wire services to fill the gaps. That means many stories are stripped of the local angles that would make them resonate with readers here. A conflict overseas might only appear in Milwaukee’s news feeds as a short update buried under more familiar headlines. Without context, global events remain abstract — tragedies happening “over there,” with little perceived impact on “here.”
At “Milwaukee Independent,” we’ve made a different choice. We seek out the intersections where global meets local. That might be an interview with a refugee who fled Syria and now runs a bakery in the city, or coverage of a climate summit that connects to flooding risks along Lake Michigan. These stories require more than just translating international developments into plain language. They require showing how the fates of communities half a world apart can be intertwined.
Yet being a global citizen here can be isolating. In conversations, I sometimes sense a polite disinterest when topics shift beyond U.S. borders – or even beyond Wisconsin. It’s not hostility, more a quiet uncertainty about why it matters to know what’s happening in places most people have never visited.
This disconnect can make it difficult to sustain momentum for global awareness campaigns or public forums. Even when events are free, open to the public, and promoted widely, they often draw smaller crowds than local sports watch parties.
Still, I’ve seen how quickly that can change when a story makes the global personal. Milwaukee residents responded with generosity after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2022 war in Ukraine, donating money, supplies, and time. The difference was visibility — these crises were covered extensively by national media, paired with images and stories that humanized the suffering. It’s a reminder that people here do care, but attention is finite, and competition for it is relentless.
This reality puts a special responsibility on local journalists. We have to make the case for why an international issue belongs in the Milwaukee conversation. Not just in moral terms, but in practical ones. Trade policy with Canada affects dairy exports from Wisconsin farms. Immigration law changes in Washington shape who can build the homes in Milwaukee’s new developments. Droughts in other parts of the world influence the cost of food in local grocery stores.
I even reported on COVID-19 months before it was picked up locally, from November 2019, when it was still referred to in Mandarin as the Wuhan pneumonia. I did not expect people to care about a virus so far away, but I understood there would be an agricultural impact. Wisconsin is a major exporter of ginseing and soybeans, two staple crops for China.
The challenge is to bring those connections to light without turning every story into an abstract civics lesson. The facts have to live alongside the human stories that readers can relate to.
That’s where a local-global approach works best, such as documenting how Milwaukee’s interfaith communities mobilize in response to global humanitarian disasters, or showing how international conflicts like the war in Ukraine have drawn direct involvement from Milwaukee residents through technology donations, advocacy, and civic partnerships.
Milwaukee’s sense of identity is tied to its history, but it can’t afford to ignore its future. That future will be shaped by forces that cross borders every day. The city has always been part of a global network, whether it still sees itself that way or not today. The question is whether its civic culture will grow to reflect that reality.
Cities of similar size to Milwaukee have made such a leap. Minneapolis leveraged its large Somali community into cultural and economic partnerships that connect the city to East Africa. Pittsburgh, once defined by steel, rebuilt its economy around education and international research, forging connections from Europe to Asia. These examples show what happens when a city chooses to embrace global engagement as a core part of its identity rather than an occasional talking point.
Milwaukee has the ingredients to do the same. It has diverse communities with ties to dozens of countries, a port that connects to the world through the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway, and a network of universities that already host international students and research programs. But these assets are underused in the broader civic conversation. Too often, they remain siloed, appreciated within their own circles but not seen as central to the city’s growth strategy.
Bridging that gap requires intention. It means investing in cultural exchange programs, supporting media coverage that connects local stories to global contexts, and encouraging schools to broaden their international curriculum. It means treating global awareness as an economic development priority, not just a cultural one. And it means recognizing that the health of Milwaukee’s future workforce depends on its ability to operate in a global economy.
As a journalist and photojournalist, I see the impact when these connections are made. Covering local forums on discrimination, faith and spirituality, or diaspora identity reshapes how attendees understand international justice. It is especially true when those events are led by Milwaukeeans whose families come from India, Ethiopia, or Myanmar.
It is too convenient for Milwaukee natives to forget that we are all immigrant ancestors from some distant land. At Cathedral Square Park downtown stands “Immigrant Mother,” a 1960 bronze sculpture by Ivan Meštrović that was modeled after a Polish immigrant woman. It was installed as a tribute to Milwaukee’s working-class Catholic mothers who arrived in the city’s south side in the early 20th century and raised families in the shadow of displacement, poverty, and faith.
Reporting on how Milwaukee’s sister-city relationships have influenced trade and tourism puts an international frame around what might otherwise be a small item in the news cycle. These are opportunities to break down the idea that “global” and “local” are separate categories.
The resistance to this kind of integration isn’t always deliberate. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of habit, a belief that Milwaukee is a mid-sized city in the middle of the country, far removed from the pressures that shape coastal or international hubs.
But geography doesn’t insulate us from global events. Nor does it shield us from political choices made in Washington DC. The pandemic exposed how quickly international disruptions, from supply chains to border closures, could reach Milwaukee’s neighborhoods.
At the same time, Trump’s crackdown on immigrants of Hispanic heritage has reverberated through local communities with fear, arrests, and the sudden loss of neighbors. In both cases, the city’s connection to wider systems became unavoidable.
The question now is whether that awareness will last, or if Milwaukee will retreat into the more comfortable belief that it stands apart from the world.
There’s a personal cost to watching the city retreat from those connections. I’ve spent years documenting how the lives of people in Milwaukee intersect with each other and the broader world. When those stories are ignored, it feels like a missed chance to strengthen the city’s understanding of itself.
Embracing a global identity does not require Milwaukee to abandon its roots, but it does demand that the city understand those roots as part of a larger, interwoven story. To be from here should mean understanding how here connects to elsewhere.
The same civic pride that builds local food banks, defends neighborhood schools, or holds protests at City Hall can also fuel solidarity with families displaced by war or journalists silenced abroad. The distance between those causes is not as wide as we pretend. Shrinking that distance is the only way forward.
Local journalism plays a role in normalizing such a mindset. By consistently showing the connections between Milwaukee and the world beyond its county borders, we make it harder for those links to be dismissed as irrelevant. Over time, that can help build a civic culture that values both local identity and global responsibility.
The work is slow, and the results aren’t always immediate. But the alternative, continuing to treat Milwaukee as if it exists in its own bubble, carries risks that are harder to see until they become crises.
Economic opportunities will pass the city by if businesses don’t have the cultural and logistical skills to operate internationally. Social cohesion will weaken if residents are unable to relate to people whose experiences differ from their own. Civic decision-making will suffer if policymakers overlook how global forces shape local outcomes.
Being a global citizen stuck in Milwaukee is not about rejecting the city. It’s about wanting it to thrive in a century where the ability to engage beyond our own borders will define which communities prosper and which are left behind.
The challenge is persuading a city built on proud local traditions to also see itself as part of a global story, where its actions and attitudes have consequences far beyond the county line.
Every day, the world comes to Milwaukee in a small way. Through the ships in its harbor, the students in its classrooms, the goods on its store shelves, or the headlines we read on our phones.
Recognizing those connections, valuing them, and acting on them is the work ahead. Whether city residents embrace that work will determine not just how we are seen by the rest of the world, but how we see ourselves.
© Photo
Wirestock Creators (via Shutterstock)
