In The News

For Dr. Sengupta, Long-Term Visa Is a Long Way Off

June Kronholz June 30, 2006
Highly successful immigrant researchers, doctors and engineers often wait years for citizenship in the US. The US Labor Department has a backlog of 235,000 skilled-immigrant permanent-residency applications, and the Citizenship and Immigration Service has another backlog of 180,000 cases. About half of the Ph.D. engineers and scientists in the US are foreign born, according to the National...

Congress May Yet Move on Immigration

Gail Russell Chaddock June 28, 2006
US legislators are polarized over immigration reform, but they also recognize that voters on both sides – those who welcome hardworking illegal immigrants who otherwise don’t break laws versus those who want to deport all illegals – are passionate about the issue. Voters question the ability of Congress to act on an obvious and glaring problem, with more than 12 million illegal aliens in the US....

Globalization: When Cure Is Worse Than Malady

Richard Hornik June 27, 2006
The global economic transition to a post-industrial economy has increased pace since the end of the Cold War, but the dislocations caused by rapid globalization rage on. As a consequence, electorates have become deeply divided between those who benefit and those who do not. Politicians find themselves pandering to narrow constituencies with petty, irrelevant legislation to build coalitions, often...

Managing Globalization: Economies Have a Stake in Where Companies Find Employees

Daniel Altman June 26, 2006
A growing interconnectedness of the global economy means companies will find skilled workers one way or another. The motives for companies to turn to outsourcing or the recruitment of immigrant labor are often similar: a domestic skills shortage, jobs that local workers will not take or the comparatively cheap cost of foreign labor. The forces driving companies’ choices to outsource or recruit...

US Wages Face Glut of Pressures

David Wessel June 26, 2006
Conventional economics suggests that the retirement of the baby boomers in the US will reverse the decline of wages and job benefits throughout the US. But the emergence of China, India and the former Soviet bloc as modern capitalist economies could prolong the agony, suggests journalist David Wessel, particularly if the US is unprepared. Overseas competition will continue to lower wages of US...

Migrants, Bound for Spain, Set off a Boom

Meg Bortin June 21, 2006
Many West Africans pool funds to finance their own illegal immigration to the Spanish Canary Islands by boat. Fish was the lead export for Senegal in 2003, but the bountiful oceans of Western Africa have long been decimated by massive foreign fishing trawlers that took advantage of the coast’s once abundant fish supply. So the one-time fishermen of Senegal have found another way to generate...

Holocaust Memories Hover Over Refugees

Peter Hirschberg June 20, 2006
Sudanese refugees who have illegally crossed the border into Israel are either forced back into Egypt or arrested and detained. Some of those arrested are released by the courts and taken in by kibbutzim, while others remain in prison waiting to be charged. The refugees pose a moral dilemma to the citizens and government of Israel; the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, wrote in...