In The News

Global Migration Trends Add Tensions: Asia Sentinel

John Berthelsen December 16, 2019
People migrate for wealthy nations for many reasons, economic and security, including poverty, disasters and conflict. Numerous businesses and families seek low-cost workers for household services, construction, farming and more, yet opposition to undocumented and even legal immigration is on the rise, suggests a new report on world immigration. The report warns that immigration is “weaponized”...

Argentina Faces Economic Crisis: Buenos Aires Times

December 13, 2019
Alberto Fernández, sworn in as president of Argentina, inherits enormous debt, recession, inflation, a 10 percent unemployment rate and 40 percent poverty rate, reports the Buenos Aires Times. The peso has lost two thirds of its value since 2018. The many challenges compound the hardship in paying external debt. Fernández promises to increase economic growth but offers no details, partly because...

Is Crisis of Capitalism a Crisis of Democracy? DW

Alexander Görlach November 26, 2019
Protests are breaking out worldwide: over corruption in Lebanon and Egypt, rising fuel prices and cuts in subsidies in Chile and Ecuador and France, sectarian power-sharing in Iraq and Lebanon, worries about housing prices and Chinese control in Hong Kong, separatist movement in Spain, and failure to enact climate-change regulations in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Austriaand New...

Sea of Troubles: The New Republic

Ben Ehrenreich October 17, 2019
Conflict, a changing climate, famine and poverty destroy communities throughout the Middle East and Africa, driving thousands of people of all ages to risk crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe’s safety. Authorities have documented more than 18,000 deaths in the Mediterranean since the start of 2014. Worries about unchecked immigration have boosted far-right populism, and Europe’s leaders...

Ebola Crisis: Council on Foreign Relations

Claire Felter June 20, 2019
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo officially started in August of 2018, in the northeastern regions of the country bordering Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan. Claiming more than 1,300 deaths, with cases doubling in the past three months, the Ebola crisis is escalating but remains second place to the 2014-2016 outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people. The World Health...

Depression in Poor Nations: Guardian

Tina Rosenberg June 8, 2019
Many experts once assumed that mental illness, especially, depression was concentrated in wealthy nations. In the 1990s, Vikram Patel, psychiatrist and researcher, set out to study if depression in Zimbabwe and other poor countries was actually a response to deprivation and injustice – conditions stemming from colonisation.” Traditional healers in Zimbabwe described “kufungisisa,” or excessive...

Common Sense on the Border Crisis: RAND

Blas Nuñez-Neto May 4, 2019
Apprehensions of undocumented immigrants at the US-Mexico border rise despite the US trying family separations, deployed military personnel, Mexico sheltering asylum-seekers, a declared national emergency and strengthened border security. The policies do not work, and there is a humanitarian crisis. “This massive surge in migration is driven almost entirely by families and children from Central...