In The News

China’s Neo-Colonial Slavery in PNG

Rowan Callick February 15, 2007
China’s growing worldwide investment in natural resources is not a new story and just one of many results of a well-chronicled booming economy. What is new is the phenomenon of Chinese corporations dealing with the people and governments of countries supplying them with these mineral riches. A large-scale nickel extraction scheme in Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one such endeavor, in which conflicts...

Managing Globalization: The Global Quest for a Second Passport

Daniel Altman February 7, 2007
With citizenship comes certain rights – and some workers try to accumulate more rights be acquiring citizenship in more nations. Nations tinker with citizenship laws to attract talent, and individuals examine citizenship laws to broaden a job search. For example, people with grandparents of European heritage, would-be soldiers willing to fight for the US in Iraq and pregnant women who travel to...

Migrant Power

January 19, 2007
A new World Bank report shows that migration remains a significant force in Eastern Europe and Central Asia almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the initial surge of migration in the 1990s was due to ethnic reconsolidation, there has been a growing movement of workers seeking economic opportunity from the region’s poorer nations. According to the report, the remittances...

An Immigration Raid Aids Blacks – For a Time

Evan Perez January 18, 2007
After federal agents raided chicken and meat processors in 2006, many immigrant workers fled their jobs. In rural Georgia, one company raised wages by $1 and recruited local workers, most African Americans. Since then, company officials have had to deal with more complaints about work conditions, pay disputes and workplace rights, reports this article in “The Wall Street Journal.” Injury rates...

Technology, Not Globalization, Is Driving Wages Down

Jagdish Bhagwati January 10, 2007
Confronting wage stagnation, US labor groups blame trade and immigration from developing countries. But economic research does not support the assertion that competition with developing nations reduces either wages or bargaining power, argues Columbia University professor Jagdish Bhagwali of Columbia University. If anything, ongoing technological innovations reduce the need for unskilled labor,...

Too Much Globalization, Or Not Enough?

Andrew Leonard January 5, 2007
Immigrants contributed to more than 25 percent of new engineering and technology start-up firms in the US between 1995 and 2005, according to a study from Duke University’s Master of Engineering Management Program and the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. Companies started by immigrants produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 in 2005. Notably, firms with...

Migranomics Instead of Walls

Ernesto Zedillo January 4, 2007
Illegal immigration stirs resentment against immigration in general. Yet enforcement alone – building giant walls, adding border patrols, requiring new forms of identification – will not stop illegal immigration, points out Ernesto Zedillo, director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. For a nation in need of willing workers, immigration contributes to prosperity and the ability to...