Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin is a journalist and photographer based in Nairobi who covers migration across the global south, with work appearing in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Through Waypoints, a publication Mackenzie runs at waypoints.media, his reporting follows individual people across borders and over time, from a man in western Nepal whose family has said goodbye to him every season for two generations, to a Nepali woman working elder care in Japan, where the government quietly recruits foreign workers while publicly moving to the right on immigration.
Mackenzie has spent years embedded in migration stories that never make it into US headlines, and that distance from the American enforcement frame is precisely what makes his perspective valuable. When I asked what draws him to the work, his answer had less to do with migration as a subject and more to do with what journalism makes possible as a practice.
“The stories that I am always fascinated by are where can I really embed into somebody’s life and where can I find an emotional thread to be able to pull on that is something that I’m made of as well, that I’m stitched from as well—what’s a dynamic that I can write about that I can see my life in theirs and their life in mine.”
My conversation with Mackenzie ranged widely, from the circular migration patterns created by the open Nepal-India border to Japan’s quiet demographic reckoning brought on by its aging population. Underlying all of it was the broader question of why people leave home at all, and the answer kept coming back to the same thing: the distance between migrants’ lives and our own is much smaller than we think, and it has everything to do with empathy.
“Empathy is first and foremost a process of being able to see your life in theirs. I think in a lot of ways that’s how we relate to the world, we relate to the world through our own experiences. But it’s a two-way street: once we’re able to see ourselves in that person, we’re able to then see that person in us.”
Mackenzie said that at the end of every reporting trip, he finds himself humbled by how much more the person was like him than he expected going in. That kind of honesty about the limits of his own assumptions is, I think, what separates his work from coverage that treats migration as a phenomenon to explain rather than a set of lives to understand.
That practice of recognition is what Waypoints is built around and why I encourage folks to follow his work. Waypoints exists because Mackenzie believes readers can be drawn into a stranger’s life through the right emotional thread, and that once they are, they come out the other side having learned something about how the world actually moves that no policy summary or data analysis could teach them.
For readers whose understanding of migration has been shaped almost entirely by the US enforcement debate, Mackenzie’s work offers something genuinely rare: an empathetic and decidedly not politicized view of migration, reported with patience, generosity, and humanity.
Watch the full conversation above, where Mackenzie shares photographs from Nepal and Japan that give these stories their full weight. We covered a lot of ground, including:
How Mackenzie got into photojournalism, from NPR in Boston to Rwanda to the Associated Press in South Sudan
The Nepal-India open border and what it reveals about what happens when borders close
Dipak, a man from western Nepal who has been commuting seasonally to Delhi for ten years, following a path his father walked for twenty years before him
Japan’s demographic crisis and the government’s quiet effort to build a foreign worker pipeline while saying the opposite in public
Remittances, which reached $700 billion globally in 2024, more than all government foreign aid combined
Why “economic migrant” has become a term of contempt in the US, and what it actually describes
Timestamp of key themes
00:00 — Why a global view of migration matters
02:21 — How Mackenzie got into journalism
05:15 — What draws him to the work: curiosity, people, and geography
08:52 — Living outside the US, from China to Kenya, and seeing the country from the outside
16:12 — Migration as the lens for understanding the whole world 1
9:53 — What Waypoints is and the stories it tells
22:59 — Dipak and the open Nepal-India border with photographs
32:24 — Remittances and migration as a development engine
36:49 — How to find and recognize human stories
40:05 — Empathy as the core of the work
43:31 — Japan's demographic reckoning and its quiet foreign-worker pipeline
51:51 — Why “economic migrant“ became a slur, and the most American story
59:05 — Where to follow Mackenzie, and closing thoughts
Please share this conversation with others. I promise if you listen to it, you’ll know why I’m encouraging you to do this. I think I lot of people who are less interested in detailed policy debates will find this discussion illuminating and inspiring.
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