In The News

You Shouldn't Have to Burn Cars to Get a Better Life—Ask My Bolivian Cleaning Lady

Niall Ferguson November 7, 2005
Both Britain and France have endured violence at the hands of their Muslim minorities in recent months: Britain in the July 7 London Underground attacks; France in the wave of nationwide rioting that has now gone on for more than a week. They need not endure such violence in the future. Their problem is not so much an excess of immigration as it is a lack of assimilation: the Muslim youths...

A Year of Living Dangerously

Francis Fukuyama November 3, 2005
One year after the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, well-known scholar Francis Fukuyama writes about the phenomenon of so-called "homegrown" European Islamic radicalism. He argues that radical Islam among immigrants to Europe is the result of their traditional faith being uprooted from its social and cultural underpinnings, and the crisis of identity that seems to particularly...

Sarkozy Pledges Police Crackdown after Riots in Paris

Jon Henley November 1, 2005
Following four nights of violent rioting in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy vowed to aggressively police many of the nation’s poorer, largely immigrant ghettoes. The unrest – the likes of which France has not seen in years – began on Thursday when two boys of North African origin, named only as Ziad, 17, and Banou, 15, died of electrocution after...

International Migration: Brain Drain or Brain Gain?

Caglar Ozden October 31, 2005
The surge in globalization since the end of World War II has been fueled chiefly by an international exchange of goods and capital rather than people. There are signs, however, that international migrants are playing an increasingly important role in globalization as the world enters the twenty-first century. What are the costs and benefits of this new wave of migration? The principal cost of...

Borders of Tolerance

Christopher Caldwell October 3, 2005
At a time when Mexican immigration has penetrated every corner of the United States – and, many Americans feel, stolen millions of jobs from native citizens – the US public demands an ever-tougher stand against immigrants. Yet, paradoxically, Americans are also growing increasingly accustomed to living with Mexican immigrants – immigrants who are "Christian, familial, hard working farm...

Generation Jihad

Bill Powell September 27, 2005
Since 1990, the Muslim population in Europe has expanded from around 10 million to 14 million. This spike in numbers has been accompanied by a growing restless dissatisfaction in the quality of life available to Muslims, either European-born or immigrant. High unemployment and a low glass ceiling have increased the sense of marginalization felt among the younger generation of followers of Islam....

Workers' Protest Spurs Arab Emirates to Act

Hassan M. Fattah September 25, 2005
More than half of Dubai's one million people are poor immigrants from South Asia and the Philippines. Eight hundred of those residents, dissatisfied workers who have not been paid in five months, recently marched on the emirate's Ministry of Labor. It was a rare show of labor unrest in a city-state that tolerates much in the name of business and little in the way of dissent. Even more...