Immigration News: September, 2002 - Volume #9

THE AMERICAS

Security: Hearings, Detention, Visas
In September 2001, the nation's 220 immigration judges were ordered to hear 600 "special interest" cases in closed courtrooms: "no visitors, no family and no press."

INS: Border, Exit-Entry
James Ziglar, the 25th INS Commissioner, announced his resignation in August 2002; he agreed to remain at the INS until the agency is absorbed in the new Department of Homeland Security.

Labor: Hispanics, H-1B
The US unemployment rate was 5.9 percent in June 2002.

Canada: Immigration, Integration
Canada had 250,346 immigrants in 2001, up from 227,327 in 2000.

Mexico: Fox, Migrants, Remittances
Texas executed a Mexican citizen convicted of killing a US policeman in August 2002.

Bilingual Education, Welfare
The number of K-12 pupils with limited English proficiency doubled in the 1990s to five million, but the number of qualified teachers for bilingual or English-as-a-second-language classes remained at about 50,000, or about one per 100 LEP students.

Latin America
El Salvador is one of the countries most dependent on remittances, which were 14 percent of gross domestic product in 2001.

ASIA

China: Migrants, One-Child, Water
Some 16 local governments have begun to implement policies that give a Hukou, a permanent urban residence permit, to employed migrants not registered in the city where they are living.

Japan, Korea
Japan is considering granting TPS to foreigners who apply for asylum and stay in government-operated shelters while their applications are pending.

Malaysia/Indonesia
Malaysia's tough new immigration laws went into effect August 1, 2002--the Immigration Act (Amended) 2002 calls for illegal foreigners to be fined up toM$10,000 ($2,631), imprisoned for five years, and to receive six strokes of the cane.

Thailand: Migrants
Thailand manages the 500,000 to 800,000 foreign migrants in the country by having periodic registrations.

Philippines: Migrants
Migrants remitted $6.1 billion in 2001, and in 2002, remittances are expected to exceed the $6.4 billion average of the past three years.

South Asia: Afghans
There were four million Afghans outside Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-02...

RESOURCES

Immigrants in the US
In 1979, Michael Piore in Birds of Passage, examined the role of immigrants in the US labor market...

Immigration to Europe
The Bade and Muenz book, Migrationsreport 2002. Fakten - Analysen - Perspektiven, was sponsored by the Rat für Migration, an academic group founded in 2000.

Unions and Immigration
Briggs' seven-chapter book, Immigration and American Unionism, is an economic history of the US from an immigration and labor point of view.

Asian Demography and Immigration
What role did population change play in East Asia's rapid economic development?

EUROPE

EU: Population, Enlargement
The European Union's population rose by 1.6 million to 380 million in 2001, with 75 percent of the growth due to "net migration."

Germany: Campaign, Foreigners, Labor
Germany goes to the polls on September 22, 2002, and the conservative coalition of CDU-CSU-FDP led the governing SPD-Green coalition in opinion polls.

UK: Asylum, Economics
Some 92,000 people applied for asylum in the UK in 2001 (71,365 applications plus children), including 3,500 children who arrived and applied for asylum on their own.

France, Italy: Migrants
The Washington Post on August 3, 2002 reported that there may be three million unauthorized workers in the 15-nation EU...

Spain-Morocco, Turkey
Relations between Spain and Morocco remained tense in August 2002, after Morocco briefly occupied an uninhabited island 200 yards off its coast that is claimed by Spain in July 2002.

Russia, Eastern Europe
Russian migration officials say that by 2010, Russia could have as many as eight million to 10 million Chinese residents, and that the Chinese could be Russia's second-largest ethnic group.

Northern Europe
Denmark implemented tougher asylum and immigration laws on July 1, 2002, and in August 2002 estimated that the savings would be E200 million a year, as fewer people applied for asylum.

OTHER

Australia, New Zealand
The Australian government, in a continuing effort to prevent boats from sailing from Indonesia to Australia, announced plans to remove more than 3,000 islands from the Australian migration zone.

Israel: Migrants
About 13 percent of immigrants who arrived in Israel between 1998 and 2001 are unemployed, slightly higher than the country's overall unemployment rate.

Africa: Zimbabwe
The United Nations says six million people- half the population of Zimbabwe-is threatened with starvation.

Population, Trade, Environment
During the 20th century, the world's population quadrupled, and the share in rural areas fell sharply, from 86 percent in 1900 to 53 percent in 2000.

Mexico-US Migration
Journalist Joseph Nevins's Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the 'Illegal Alien' and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary argues that sharply increased...

Trade and Migration
Hatton and Williamson deal with the causes and consequences of migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in their book, The Age of Mass Migration: An Economic Analysis.

World Migration Organization?
Two hundred years ago, Adam Smith wrote that "a man is of all sorts of luggage the most difficult to be transported."

OECD on Migration
The OECD publishes an annual report entitled Trends in International Migration (Continuous Reporting System on Migration or SOPEMI in its French acronym)...