Pity the Poor Immigrant: Adoiche story in New Yorker

You could teach a whole course - a series of courses - on English and American fiction about the immigrant experience: in America, much of it in the 20th century about Jewish and Italian immigrants, and now in the 21st we're seeing more fiction about Asian, Eastern European and Russian (i.e., former Soviet states), and to a lesser extent African immigration stories; from England, in the 20th century the many stories from the British West Indies, most notably Naipaul, and from India and Pakistan - and now in the 21st we're seeing I think for the first time British fiction about an immigrant wave from Africa. Current New Yorker story by C.N. Adiche is a good example and a good story, Checking Out - of course it has many of the familiar tropes, the young man living on the edges of London society, struggling to get a job, living on false papers, taken advantage of by other more settled men from his homeland - it recalls so many similar stories, Levy, Hrabal, Adams - but Adiche does provide a few original touches - the young man is quite well educated and a son of a university professor back in his native Nigeria - and in a pretty tight space she makes the main character very full and gives the secondary characters just the right touch of specificity so that they're neither cliched types nor indistinguishable blurs. Essence of the story is that the young, Okinze (?), is living on expired papers and, in order to stay in the country legally, he conspires to marry someone with proper residency permit; he pays some fellow Nigerians to arrange the deal, but the kicker is that he and the fake bride sort of fall for each other - making the approach to their wedding day emotionally complex. Some very nice descriptions of O's work in a warehouse, his tentative and worried friendships with fellow workers, most of them English, and most of all the feeling of loneliness and despair that haunts the story and is a common ground for almost over story of immigration, or at least of the young man as solitary immigrant, isolated by language, color, or culture from the prosperous but inhospitable society all around him and just out of reach.