In The News

Renwick Mclean March 21, 2006
As thousands of Africans gather in Mauritania, seeking eventual passage to the EU, Spain is taking an active role in preventing the migrant job-seekers from reaching its shores. Spain’s deputy prime minister paid an emergency visit to the Canary Islands to discuss controls on the record flow of African migrants reaching there from Africa’s Atlantic seaboard. Many of the Africans, who are...
Ahmed Mohammed March 20, 2006
More than 1000 Africans have died in the first four months of 2006, trying to reach the EU and the economic opportunity it represents. Increasing numbers of desperate migrants flee Africa in crowded and small fishing canoes, called pirogues, from Mauritania to the Canary Islands and the coast of Spain. Police intercepted a record 400 Africans in a single day, crowded into nine boats. In 2005...
Geoffrey Colvin March 17, 2006
Educators and politicians have long argued that a college degree provided substantially more income than the high-school degree. Now that income gap is showing small signs of closing; between 2000 and 2004, the income of high school graduates rose 1.6 percent, and the income of college graduates dropped 5.2 percent. The reason is disturbing, with the changing demands of a global economy, reducing...
Alan Travis March 13, 2006
A new points-based immigration system – based on aptitude, experience, age, and shortages in the labor market – will go into effect in 2008, the biggest shakeup in British immigration law in 40 years. The plan assumes that low-skilled help can be found within the EU, and an advisory board will determine annual quotas for occupations that have a shortage of workers. According to the new system,...
Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco March 6, 2006
Europe and the US have different perspectives on immigration and therefore different problems, according to immigration scholar Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco. Immigrants typically receive good educations on both sides of the Atlantic, but immigrants in Europe face intense discrimination in the labor market. European immigration is driven by asylum-seeking and marriage, so ethnic groups tend to...
Sharon Noguchi March 2, 2006
As Japan confronts challenges of a low birth rate, an aging population, and a shrinking labor pool, Sharon Noguchi describes the country’s newfound reliance on illegal workers who are employed in low-wage jobs and unprotected from exploitation. Immigrants from China, Latin America and South Asia seek jobs with employers willing to risk legal punishments in order to hire workers at lower wages....
February 21, 2006
The fight for survival by age-old icons of business and culture is not limited to the US. Volkswagen and other carmakers in Germany and France question whether they can provide mass domestic employment while competing against firms with lower labor costs in Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and China. One study reports that one in seven German jobs is “directly or indirectly...