Page 69 - Accelerating out of the Great Recession

ACCELERATING OUT OF THE GREAT RECESSION

It is not only money that has crossed borders. The high-
growth years have witnessed an enormous increase in foreign
nationals living outside their homelands—more than 200 mil-
lion of them around the world. Consider three examples, cited
by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development. The proportion of foreign nationals living in
Italy rose from 2 percent to 5 percent between 1996 and 2006;
in Spain, from 1.4 percent to 10.3 percent; and in the United
Kingdom, from 3.4 percent to 5.8 percent. Not all this growth
represents economic migration, but a lot of it does. And with
economies in crisis across the developed world, the pressure is
on to reverse this trend. An unwelcome consequence of any
slowdown in economic migration could be an increase in unrest
in the poorer nations that have been relying on the export of
their (predominantly) young men as a source of foreign earn-
ings through their remittances home.
Rising unemployment puts pressure on governments, forcing
them to protect domestic workers at the expense of migrant work-
ers. In the United Kingdom, there was a strike by oil workers
protesting the offering of jobs to foreign workers (albeit European
Union nationals) by a U.S. contractor to the U.K. operations of a
French oil company. The strikers called for “British jobs for British
workers.” The workers won concessions. And this was after the
liberal law allowing easy immigration from Eastern European
countries was reversed by the U.K. government.
Such protests, targeting migrant workers, have flared up all
over the world:

1. In Greece, anti-immigration protests turned violent,
with mobs attacking immigrant groups.

■ 48 ■