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writingA recent report has found that the US currently has 7 million workers from Mexico, an increase of 2 million from six years ago… meaning that one in 7 Mexican workers now works in the United States.
Ironically, one cause of the increase may be better border enforcement, effectively trapping Mexicans in the US who might otherwise cross the border back to Mexico.
In 2005, 9.4% of native Mexicans were living in the US, and 14% of working Mexicans had jobs in the US (as opposed to 2.5% of working Canadians). This year, Mexicans accounted for nearly 5% of the total US civilian workforce.
“They all say that if they could earn in Romania even half of what they earn in Spain and elsewhere, they would come back. But there are no jobs here,” says the mayor.
Hundreds of mayors in Romania and Bulgaria are in the same position as the two countries prepare to join the European Union on January 1. So are many of their counterparts in Poland, Slovakia and the Baltic states, which were among the 10 countries that became EU members in 2004. (…)
Mihai-Razvan Ungureanu, Romania’s foreign minister, says he is happy to see young Romanians going abroad but – like the mayor of Feldru – hopes that one day some will return. “I know some Romanians think emigration is a brain drain but I don’t. Romanians living abroad maintain their identity. They work hard and bring Romania a good name. What would be really interesting would be in future to attract back people from abroad as investors.” (…)
For Romania and Bulgaria this gap is even larger than for the 2004 entrants. Average incomes in purchasing power terms are just 28 per cent of the west European level, compared with 45 per cent in central Europe. (…)
An estimated 2m Romanians are employed abroad – about 20 per cent of the working-age population. (…)
After lurching from crisis to crisis in the 1990s, the Romanian economy is now among the fastest-growing in Europe with an expected real increase in gross domestic product for 2006 of 7 per cent. (…)
Migrants, too, are playing a role in boosting the economy, contributing an estimated €3.5bn ($4.4bn, £2.3bn) to €4bn in remittances – enough to cover almost half the country’s 2005 current account deficit. (…)
But there is still a long way to go. Some 40 per cent of Romanian workers are nominally employed in agriculture (…)
Economists estimate that at current economic growth rates it could take 20 years before Romanians reach the living standards of today’s west Europeans. (…)
As the figures show, most migrants leave their children (…) usually in the care of grandparents. (…) school examination results have declined sharply, with just half of those aged 14 and 15 passing their year-end tests in 2006, compared with 80-90 per cent in the past.
FT.com
Critics said the fence does not take into account the extraordinarily varied geography of the 2,000-mile-long border, which cuts through Mexican and U.S. cities separated by a sidewalk, vast scrubland and deserts, rivers, irrigation canals and miles of mountainous terrain. (…)
And, they say, the estimated $2 billion price tag and the mandate that it be completed by 2008 overlook 10 years of legal and logistical difficulties the federal government has faced to finish a comparatively tiny fence of 14 miles dividing San Diego and Tijuana.
“This is the feel-good approach to immigration control,” said Wayne Cornelius, an expert on immigration issues at the University of California at San Diego.
washingtonpost.com
Spain has announced deals with Guinea and Gambia to curb the flow of illegal migrants towards Europe in a diplomatic offensive that pledged more Spanish aid and cooperation to poor West African states. (…)
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos (…) announced a €5 million ($8.49 million) aid package, part of a two-pronged strategy that seeks to halt migrant departures and also back long-term development aimed at persuading young Africans to stay in their own nations.
In Gambia, he sealed a similar deal to expand legal migration channels while tightening controls to keep out clandestine job-seekers from the world’s poorest continent.
“We will open avenues where Gambians can have opportunities to work in Spain legally if they have legal documents,” he told reporters after signing the agreement in Banjul.
A record number of around 26,000 mostly African migrants have landed in the Canaries this year (…)
NEWS.com.au (10 Oct 2006)
“Migration will be the first challenge for Europe in the years to come,” Franco Frattini, EU commissioner for justice and security issues, said in an interview. “Fortunately, for the first time there is a consensus,” he added, that European nations must work with Africa to address the issue effectively. (…)
The agreements (…) include pledges from European nations to provide more temporary work visas for African migrants and to make it easier for them to send remittances back home.
International Herald Tribune
“People flow” northwards across the Strait is driven by a vast disparity in wealth – average income in Spain, at around $15,000, is thirteen times that of Morocco – and currently seems unstoppable. (…) [The Spanish] foreign population, now 2.6 million (in a total of 40 million), has quintupled since 1996; it includes around 600,000 Moroccans (…)
Migration, in short, works as a safety-valve that helps to forestall any prospect of major change in this key Arab nation. “The result of so much migration is that people stop thinking of any collective alternative. People only think about how to escape individually, while others simply do not care what happens to them,” asserts Abdelhamid Beyuki
openDemocracy
Jan Hofmann and Marion König, at Deutsche Banks writes in “Technology boosts trade boosts migration”: … “to understand and forecast migration (and then population) patterns, we have to scrutinise the complete chain of cause and effect that interlinks technology, trade and migration.” …
“For those countries that badly need immigration e.g. owing to an ageing own workforce, trade openness should be a priority. Having said that, as more countries will become full-blown knowledge economies in the next decades, the old Ricardian notion of differences in technology (and thus labour productivity) driving migration could get a new meaning: differences in nations’ innovation capacity could take the lead in driving migrant flows. The countries with the most creative juices are likely be the next immigration magnets, rather than the old-school efficiency hunters.”
New Economist
John Reid, British home secretary, said recently: “Migration and the management of immigration is now the greatest challenge facing all European governments.” …
Global shifts are driving immigration. The weakening of border controls following the end of communism are, along with economic globalisation and the spread of low-cost air travel and telecommunications, all playing their part. …
Critics warn of the impact on low-paid natives, public services and national identity. …
As Tony Blair said in a speech this month: “People want migration controlled.” …
The net inflow into the UK reached 235,000 in the year to mid-2005, up from 47,000 in the first year of the Blair era. The British population exceeded 60m for the first time and is set to grow further, driven largely by more immigration. …
biggest inflow over the past decade has come from the British Commonwealth – especially India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Britain’s former African colonies.
new waves not only from eastern Europe but also from north Africa and war-ravaged countries such as Somalia. …
According to the Home Office, 427,000 registered to work in the UK between May 2004 and June 2006. …
Migration has increased the number of foreign-born UK residents by 30 per cent in a decade to more than 5m – or nearly 10 per cent of the population, not counting some 250,000–500,000 illegal migrants. In London, which has the world’s biggest concentration of immigrants, the foreign-born number about 30 per cent.
Danny Sriskandarajah, a migration specialist at IPPR, a pro-migration research group, says: “Far from being a burden, immigrants are vital to the public services.” …
Robert Rowthorn, a Cambridge University economics professor, has written: “Large-scale immigration of unskilled people may be beneficial for urban elites who enjoy the benefits of cheap servants, restaurants and the like, but it is not to the economic advantage of those who have to compete with these immigrants.”
FT: Migrants enrich ever more anxious host, by Stefan Wagstyl
UN projects that the labor force of many European countries and Japan will not only cease to grow, but actually decline in coming years.
The Future of Migration
Spain said Saturday that its coast guard had intercepted four boats within 24 hours carrying 248 would-be immigrants from West Africa as they arrived in the Canary Islands, and had sighted another.
248 immigrants arrive in 24 hours by boat to Spain’s Canary Islands - JAMAICAOBSERVER.COM