Articles - Employment & the Economy

The past decade has brought tens of thousands of Chinese migrants to Africa, and well over half of all Chinese migrants to the continent head to South Africa. Yoon Jung Park of Rhodes University discusses the history of Chinese migration to South Africa, the various communities of Chinese currently residing in the country, and their levels of political, social, and economic integration.

Immigration flows to the United States have noticeably slowed in the last year, raising fundamental questions for policymakers and analysts about the effect the economic crisis is having on inflows and return migration. MPI's Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Aaron Terrazas assess the potential impacts by examining recent data, the likely behavior of immigrants, and immigration history.

In response to an agricultural worker shortage over 40 years ago, Canada initiated a temporary migration program to brings workers from the Caribbean and later Mexico. But this "model" program also has its drawbacks, as Tanya Basok of the University of Windsor explains.

In the 1990s, Mexican immigrants began to leave California, Texas, and Illinois for the so-called new settlement states where they had not previously resided. As Ivan Light of UCLA explains, their reasons for leaving or bypassing Los Angeles were both economic and political.

The addition of Romania and Bulgaria to the European Union means another round of anxieties about labor migrants. Catherine Drew and Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah of the Institute for Public Policy Research in London explain how this enlargement is different from the historic one in 2004 and why most EU Member States favor temporary restriction.