Author: International Datelines

“If you look in the 1990s, in every one of the 50 states, non-Anglo Hispanic populations grew faster than Anglo populations,” said Steve Murdock, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau. “It’s a very pervasive pattern.”

TORONTO – In this city of big buildings and big dreams, a big hope slipped away last week when the Canadian sister city of Montreal missed out on sport’s premier event.

And when the Montreal Canadiens, as the National Hockey League team is known to English speakers (or the Habs, as it’s known to French speakers) were checked by the Philadelphia Flyers from getting into the Stanley Cup finals, the entire nation was disappointed.

But among those suffering the biggest letdown were Arabs and South Asians. When, you wonder, did ice hockey become a thing with Arabs and South Asians?

When they moved from their homelands to Canada.

While about half of all Canadians express interest in professional hockey, the level of interest among immigrants is much higher.

“Perhaps as they come to Canada, they want to be part of the fabric of Canadian society, and hockey is one of the things they latch on to,” according to Doug Norris, of the survey firm of Environics Analytics and Research Now.

Like its neighbor to the south, Canada has been built by immigrants. But unlike its southern brother, the ethos here is palpably different.

Indeed, from this city’s motto, “Diversity is our strength,” to newcomer-friendly laws, to pronouncements by public officials and corporate displays of multicultural acceptance, foreign immigration in Canada is viewed in a different context.

Having been shaken less by the three-year international economic downturn, Canada is springing back. While the commercial real estate sector is in the tank in other advanced countries, some two dozen building cranes dominate Toronto’s downtown skyline.

The greater Toronto area has about 5 million residents. Twenty-five percent of the area’s population is South Asian, and 42 percent is comprised of visible minority groups.

“China has been the leading country of birth among individuals who have immigrated to Canada since the 1990s, followed by South Asian countries, including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh,” according to a report by Ipsos Reid, a Canadian marketing firm.

It landed 19 leading researchers from Britain, France, Brazil, Germany and the United States in a $200-million recruitment drive that critics charged could leave other nations with a brain drain.

Researchers in virology, fish-stock management, neuroscience, biomedicine and other disciplines were among the experts accepting the invitation to move to Canada. “Canada has to become more than ever a magnet for talent,” Tony Clement, Canada’s industry minister, said in a statement.

But Sumitra Rajagopalan, a professor of biomechanics at McGill University in Montreal, saw hidden motives behind the government move. She noted in the May 21 Globe and Mail that one of the world’s leading nanomaterial scientists, Dr. Thomas Thundat, a fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, was attracted not to shape the future of Canadian nanoscience, but instead was given the mandate to “find better ways of extracting oil from tar sands.”

It has erected posters and billboards around Toronto and other Canadian cities showing off its pride in Canada’s multiculturalism. A transnational giant, it has banking operations in more than 50 countries. It is Canada’s most international bank and has a vice-president of multicultural banking.

Plunging deeper into the current in which Canada is moving, two years ago Scotiabank kicked off its StartRight program of services to potential immigrants and new Canadians, including help with settlement agencies, and direction in education and employment opportunity. Its ATM machines are in five languages, and it boasts that toll-free callers to the bank may speak to multilingual representatives. Its Web site is in eight languages.

Scotiabank executives regard its outlook as more than just a smart-business approach, according to Chemi Nanglu, a corporate spokeswoman. They see it as part of the changing times. For example, she pointed to federal statistics showing that by 2030 immigration will account for 100 percent of Canadian population growth. Immigration is currently feeding two-thirds of the population growth.

Nanglu said the bank’s Startright program won the Visionary Award of Canadian Newcomer magazine in June 2008, and was recognized by Marketing magazine in October of that year.

TORONTO – Seductive food aromas can floor a hungry person strolling Queen Street at dinner time or visiting the Spadina-Dundas neighborhood, one of four Chinatowns in this sprawling city.

Besides bringing a babel of tongues, they bring culinary habits that have turned their presence into a gourmet’s perfection. There are Vietnamese soup kitchens, Thai noodle houses, and plenty of places to gobble spring rolls, kimchi, biryani or rotis.

The huge St. Lawrence market is a good place to purchase musk ox rib eye steaks, ground venison, and prime camel boneless hip ($19.99/lb.) or strip loin of camel ($29.99/lb.).

From the first-nation peoples of Nunavut in the sub-Arctic wilds, to the newest arrivals at Toronto Pearson International Airport, Canada is a nation increasingly populated by hues of browns and yellows.

Still, it has distinct European communities – a Czech community, German delicatessens, a Greektown and Greek residents numbering around 100,000, a Hungarian community of about 50,000, a Ukrainian community of 100,000, an Italian community of more than 400,000, a Little Poland, and a Little Portugal.

Such diversity spills over into religion. The Jewish community here is said to number about 130,000 people.

TORONTO – “These groups cannot be ignored by marketers, and the most effective way to reach them is online,” Ipsos Reid, a Canadian marketing firm, said in a recent report about new Canadians. “According to Statistics Canada, nearly eight-in-ten (78%) immigrants who have arrived in Canada in the past ten years use the Internet.”

At a multicultural marketing conference last year, panel experts offered advice that businesses overlooking “ethnic consumers are missing a huge opportunity,” according to Marketing magazine.

“All the bad news about the economy is making everyone shell shocked,” Albert Yue, managing director of Dynasty Advertising and Communications, said in the magazine. “It’s clear that many marketers are starting to cut their budgets. But if you can see through the fire and smoke, the ethnic markets are more resilient than mainstream ones.”

According to Ramesh Nilakantan, account director at Publicis Diversite, corporations that underestimate the ethnic sector’s buying power do so at risk.

“There are many Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who’ve spent the last 15 years of their lives in Dubai and southern India in tax-free markets,” Nilakantan said in the magazine. “Those markets are collapsing. They don’t want to go back home. They’re coming here not just with an education, but with loads of money.”

SANTIAGO, Chile – Amid swank boutiques in the Providencia neighborhood of this sprawling city, afternoon shoppers unwind at the Foto Café over sweet coffee and even sweeter pastries as pictures of Hollywood idols and scraggly haired Tibetan children stare out at them.

Hernan Jara, the coffee shop owner, talks about his photographic experiences and his trips over the years to southern Chile where the snow-capped Andes and its scores of glaciers, all once so proud and mighty, now seem much smaller to him.

“The glaciers, they are shrinking,” he said.

Jara is getting out of the restaurant business and isn’t quite sure what he’ll do next. Like some other Chileans, he worries not so much about his economic future as he does about Chile’s economy, its energy needs, which are growing at upward of 6 percent a year, and the environmental impact of those needs.

Jara wonders what energy choices his nation will make and their effect on global warming.

Indeed, the challenge of balancing energy needs swirled through conference halls at the recent United Nations climate change meeting in Bali, and it provided the canvas for recent recommendations from a commission appointed by Gov. Martin O’Malley to cut global warming in Maryland by 90 percent by 2050.

In this country and elsewhere in Latin America, hardly a week goes by when energy needs and global warming are not in the news.

Environmentalists and indigenous people here are pitted in a running struggle over a massive dam project proposed for the Baker and Pascua Rivers in Chile’s southern Aysen region. The dam project has also galvanized environmentalists in the United States, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and International Rivers Network being prime among them.

Constructing a dam involves building a flood basin. The Aysen project would create artificial lakes flooding more than 14,700 acres of agriculture and ranch lands. According to International Rivers, the project would threaten the endangered huemul deer, as well as rare forest species.

The $4-billion project to dam the two rivers would generate 2,400 megawatts of electricity, a substantial portion of Chile’s energy needs. Currently, the nation’s four electricity operations generate about 12,000 megawatts per year. Typical coal- or oil-fired power plants can generate from 500-1,000 megawatts.

Proponents of the project say it will create thousands of construction jobs, as well as lots of hydro-electric power.

“Chile is growing, and as such it needs energy,” Bernardo Matte, president of the Chilean energy corp. Colbun, told El Mercurio, a Santiago daily. His company holds 49 percent of the firm created to build the Aysen dams. “In the next 10 years we’ll need to double what’s currently available in Chile.”

But Chilean environmentalists and others say nature will pay the cost.

To dramatize their opposition to the dams, more than 100 protesters rode horseback through the Aysen region for nine days in November to the small city of Coyhaique where “enthusiastic crowds” greeted them, according to the Nov. 28 Santiago Times.

“We can live without hydro-electric power. We can live without gas. But we cannot live without water. God gave us these rivers, and we the right to defend them,” said Ernesto Sandoval, a leader of the horse riders.

Hamlet Paoletti, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, notes that Endesa, the Spanish multinational behind the Aysen project, is currently involved in renewable energy projects in Chile and should pursue more of them instead of wanting to dam rivers.

“We’re not against all dams. It’s case by case. But we think there are better solutions,” he said. “They have the knowledge and ability to build [renewable energy projects], and they should be put forward.”

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicated in 2006 that reservoirs are a source of greenhouse emissions, and it called for more research.

Although they are challenged by the hydropower industry, studies conducted by Philip M. Fearnside, a U.S.-born climate scientist working in Brazil, contend that the emissions released through dam turbines and spillways exceed those of fossil-fuel energy plants.

On top of that, activists say that constructing the five dams will impact local villages. The dams would require clearcutting a 1,200-mile swath about 120 yards wide for a transmission line to feed electricity from southern Chile up to greater Santiago in the central part of the nation.

As planned, the transmission line would go through 12 areas that are granted protected status under Chilean law due to their environmental value.

Paoletti said, “It would go through pristine areas, natural reserves, parks and such.” He added that before the government allows the project, the University of Chile should be allowed to conduct an independent study of alternatives.

Paoletti, who is based in NRDC’s West Coast regional office, believes that Chile could benefit from more renewable energy and from better management of its existing energy generation.

He noted that in California stricter government oversight means that “the average per capita use of energy is the same as it was in the mid-70s. So, there are ways to make energy consumption more stable. We think that’s one of the things Chile should look into.”

Patagonia glaciers melting

With rising sea levels grabbing headlines last week due to speeded-up melting of Arctic sea ice, scientists familiar with the vast Patagonia ice fields in the southern hemisphere note that they are also melting and contributing to sea-level rises.

According to a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center, Arctic sea ice is melting so fast that some scientists believe it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

In the southern hemisphere two large icefields in Chile are melting and, as is the case with Arctic ice, global warming is a cause.

“It is possible to say that glacier melting of [the] last decades in Patagonia is due to global warming,” said Dr. Paulina Lopez, a member of the Great Ice research group of Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement, a French research institute.

“The scientific community agrees with this idea,” she said in an e-mail interview from France.

As part of her doctoral thesis, Lopez studied the Northern and Southern Patagonia Icefields and Cordillera Darwin. She notes that several other studies and the Centro de Estudios Cientificos, a Chilean scientific research institute, concur with her findings about the effect of global warming on Patagonia glaciers.

From 1975 to 2000 about 4 cubic miles of the Patagonia icefields melted each year, Lopez said. She noted that accompanying sea-level rise was about .0017 inches per year.

According to NASA, based on its shuttle radar and other measurements, Chilean and United States’ scientists confirmed that the Patagonia icefields “are thinning at an accelerating pace and now account for nearly 10 percent of global sea-level change from mountain glaciers.”

REYKJAVIK, Iceland – Dusk falls late in the evening this time of year on the island nation of Iceland where slightly fewer than 300,000 people live, half of them in this capital city of Reykjavik. Shops and malls go to sleep. Discotheques arise.

The economy, long dependent on the sea to provide bounty, is booming with computer and biotechnology companies, and the fishing industry has gone high-tech.

Startling in its natural beauty, Iceland is increasingly a mecca for wilderness and ecotourism. A trout stream and a salmon river run through this capital, and expeditions spirit visitors to the mountains, glaciers and fjords, where kayakers can get close to migrating whales.

The vast majority of Icelanders, 94 percent, are descended from Vikings and Celts who settled on the island in the ninth century.

The nation has the most homogeneous society in Europe, and is home to deCode, a pioneering research firm hoping to capitalize on Iceland’s DNA heritage and unravel cures for diabetes, heart disease, asthma, obesity and other illnesses.

Having a small defense force but lacking a full-sized army, navy or air force, the Icelandic federal budget contains no large-scale military funding. But with a U.S. Naval Air Station on the island, Iceland is a strong ally of the United States. The administration of Prime Minister Halldor Asgrimsson supports the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq, a fact that troubles many ordinary people. The foreign affairs ministry announced in June that it is sending more peace corps types to Afghanistan in September.

Because it has no large-scale military to fund, Iceland has maintained a generous, by United States standards, health care and social welfare system. But as is the case in Germany, France and other European democracies, privatizations and erosion of the social safety net has occurred.

Banks have been privatized, and Icelanders can be heard complaining of red tape and charges for transactions. Last week, the government signed a purchase agreement with a private investment firm for its 98 percent share in Siminn, the nation’s telephone company.

A week ago, as Reykjavik residents were piling into family cars to head out on a three-day holiday weekend, operators of diesel trucks conducted a rolling blockade of highways to protest the loss of a government fuel oil subsidy.

Just as conservative voices have criticized the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States, similar criticism is under way against government broadcasting here.

Although Icelanders enjoy a relatively high standard of living, inequality in wealth has grown. Many of the newest immigrants work in fish processing or other lower-paying jobs.

A recent concert by the rapper Snoop Dogg and an earlier one by 50 Cent touched off a discussion about the corrosive effect of sexist lyrics and imagery.

Older Icelanders object that their culture is under siege by American popular influence. Hollywood blockbusters screen here not long after their U.S. release, and cop dramas, sitcoms and television shows like “Desperate Housewives” enjoy a big draw.

English is a requirement in grade school, and teenagers in video-game parlors can be heard hurling American slang.

The number of people serving prison sentences for drug crimes, although small, quadrupled between 1990 and 2003. Still, government figures show total criminal offenses holding steady since 1999.

Meanwhile, with little stigma on co-habitation, the marriage rate has fallen since the mid 1970s. But the divorce rate has held steady.

The small nation is the world’s 11th largest fishing power.

For generations, fishing has been central to Iceland, and protection of its rich fishing grounds are the primary reason the nation has not fully joined the European Union. Hoskuldur Steinarsson, director of information at the Directorate of Fisheries, said seafood accounts for 48 percent of the total export value of goods and service and 62 percent of the export value of goods from the nation.

Cod accounted for 40 percent of total seafood export revenue last year. However, haddock is the most popular fresh or frozen fish with Icelanders.

Although the economy is dependent on the fishing industry, biotechnology and tourism are gaining ground.

From river rafting, horseback caravans, trekking and snowmobiling, visitors can find attractions for most tastes and pocketbooks.

For more information about tours and attractions, go to www.goiceland.org. For information about official Iceland, go to http://www.government.is.

PAPEETE, Tahiti -Under the merciful shade of a pavilion in the central plaza near the McDonald’s restaurant, a disc jockey is tuning up a heavy beat. As teens mill during their school lunch period, a few boys burst into a breakdance, their arms and legs whirling to the lyrics of American and reggae rappers.

Postcards still depict Tahiti as a sleepy getaway, home of fruity soft drinks, women in flowered mumus and bare-chested men in outrigger canoes.
But Polynesians, much like their neighbors elsewhere in Oceania, are rapidly succumbing to globalization. Although Oceania spans eight time zones and tens of thousands of square miles, island groups are less isolated than ever from each other -both economically and politically.

International trade barriers are falling, and iconic cultural influences from the United States, France and the United Kingdom flash across vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean at the click of a television remote.

Here in the adopted home of the French post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin, where the myth and lore of much of Pacific culture resides, a small but growing film industry is helping to document the unfolding change.

This port city was the site of the 4th annual Documentary Film Festival of Oceania from Jan. 30 to Feb. 3. The event had 18 films in the competitive category. Organizers also screened 13 other films. The films came from 110 documentaries submitted to the festival selection committee.

The movies came from or featured matters pertaining to New Zealand, Australia, French Polynesia, Hawaii, New Caledonia, Nauru, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Easter Island. Some depicted the lives Pacific Islanders dwelling in France, which had a large colonial empire in this part of the world.

The films portrayed the loss of wildlife, cultural identity and oral history traditions, as well as the clash of old and new. Several films depicted the sometimes-uneasy relationship these islands have with their former colonial masters, Australia and multinational mining corporations.

Madeleine Carter, a producer with the Washington, D.C.-based National Geographic Society, served as a festival juror.

“An underlying theme in almost all of the films was salvaging the culture,” she noted in an interview. Carter was delighted to be a juror.

“I have a personal interest,” she said, “because my great grandfather was from Polynesia, from Hawaii.”

One of the festival films was from Hawaii. It depicted how in 1893 four boatloads of American troops invaded the Hawaiian islands and forced the queen of Hawaii to surrender her throne.

The documentary “Australian Atomic Confession” portrayed atmospheric testing by Britain of atomic bombs in Australia in the early 1950s and the consequent radiation sickness and death of aborigines. White Australian soldiers, who were exposed after the British told them there would be no danger, have formed a veterans survivor group and were interviewed in the documentary.

A light-hearted, 45-minute film from New Zealand titled “Made in Taiwan” follows two men of Polynesian and Maori roots, Nathan Rarere and Oscar Knightley, as they track their ancestry through DNA analysis back through the Cook Islands, Samoa and Vanuatu to Taiwan.

Before the Chinese began populating Taiwan, the men learn, the island was dominated by indigenous coastal peoples whose DNA is common in several Pacific Island ethnic groups.

One “Made in Taiwan” scene that drew laughs from the audience occurred when Knightley informed his mother, a white woman, about her genealogy. She had only known about her family history in Cornwall, England, before she emigrated to New Zealand. So, she was surprised to learn that her genealogy stretched back to ancestors who departed North America toward Asia and Europe via the Bering Straits.

“Made in Taiwan” captured the festival’s grand prize.

“That film’s going to be so good for the swabbing industry,” she said about the cheek swab procedure used to capture DNA.

The jury awarded special prizes to “Tjibaou, the Forgiveness,” a documentary depicting two widows attempting to heal divisions 15 years after civil strife on New Caledonia, and “Mr. Pattern,” the story of a white teacher’s attempt to alleviate impoverished conditions of aborigines in rural, central Australia.

Carter, who is with the geographic society’s international division, said the films had important messages, but she said she found several of them to be slow moving. Still, she added, “We at the National Geographic channel don’t have enough films on this stuff.”

She guessed that several of the film subjects could get a broader hearing if they had “a slightly more commercial pacing and slightly less academic narrative.”

Nonetheless, she added, “I just learned so much.”

SYDNEY, Australia – On the day that most of Australia celebrated the nation’s founding, word came down that a police sergeant on Palm Island in the north of this sprawling nation was being charged with manslaughter and assault in connection with the beating death of an aboriginal man in his custody two years ago.

The decision by the Queensland attorney general reversed a court ruling that the white officer was not to blame. The indictment elated many indigenous people, but it angered police, who threatened to strike.

The case of 36-year-old Mulrunji Doomadgee, who had his liver crushed and four ribs broken during the attack, inflamed indigenous people, who recite a litany of abuse and discrimination since Jan. 26, 1788, the day that Britain declared Australia a colony – a day some aborigines term Invasion Day or Survival Day.

Aboriginal advocates note that 147 aborigines have died in police custody since 1990, and previous claims of violence on aborigines had been lodged against the Palm Island cop.

The plight of aborigines has been compared to that of the indigenous peoples who lived in the Americas prior to European arrival.

SYDNEY, Australia – Be it in Maryland or half a world away here, water, which is so vital to life, can be a rare commodity.

During prolonged Maryland droughts of recent years, authorities prohibited washing automobiles and watering lawns. People were advised to shower or flush toilets less often.

But Australia is experiencing its worst drought in 100 years, and the consequences and restrictions are much more severe.

One farmer takes his life every four days, according to an October mental health report. Their suicide rate has soared to twice the Australian national average.

With the drought in its sixth year, the national government in Canberra has struggled for answers and announced aid packages. In October 2006, economic forecasters halved their estimate on the predicted size of the annual wheat crop, and another highly regarded estimate said agricultural output in Australia could be off by one third within 18 months.

Two weeks ago, Prime Minister John Howard unveiled a controversial plan costing about $15 billion that among other things involved the federal government seizing control of Murray-Darling Basin, the country’s largest watershed, from state administration.

Around the same time, due to record-low dam levels, the premier of the Queensland state in the north of the country announced a plan to recycle sewer water into public drinking water next year.

“It will be treated to the extent that is world accepted. There will be no skimping on health standards,” he said in the Jan. 29 Australian. “I personally believe . that one day all the major centres of Australia will be using recycled water.”

For example, the plan to replace open irrigation channels with covered pipes to reduce evaporation is sound.

Meanwhile, water companies in major cities in Australia have already informed customers that water pressure is being halved to reduce usage. The move touched off a debate about whether there would be sufficient pressure for fighting fires or for hospital use.

During fall 2006, a visiting Canadian water resources expert caused soul searching here when she declared that Sydney is on track to become the world’s first major city to run out of water.

“You have 80,000 toxic sites around the country that are destroying aquifers and, the drop of aquifers and the use of industrial and agricultural water has increased dramatically over the last 10 years,” Maude Barlow said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “So, as your drought is here, and you’re having less rain and climate change is creating more drought, you’re exponentially overusing the current river and aquifer systems that you have.”

The roots of Australia’s drought lie in the natural rhythm of things, especially in the effect of the Southern Oscillation component of El Niño – and perhaps also in global warming.

Australia has always been known the world’s driest inhabited continent. But it is especially subject to the effects of El Niño and La Niña, particularly the Southern Oscillation, which is a major air pressure shift between the Asian and east Pacific regions that fuels the drought.

During an El Niño phenomenon, which the planet is experiencing, normal warm water circulation in the Pacific weakens and the seas east of Australia cool, causing the easterly trade winds to slacken in strength and feed less moisture onto the Australian continent. This makes eastern and northern Australia drier than normal.

In the opposite years of El Niño, when La Niña is strong, Australia suffers from major flooding.

According to the Australia Bureau of Meteorology, the nation’s worst examples of flooding were in 1973-74 (Brisbane’s worst flooding this century in January 1974) and 1988-89 (vast areas of inland Australia had record rainfall in March 1989).

Although British habitation of eastern Australia began in the 1770s, it was not until 1812 that a white explorer found a pathway toward the west across the Blue Mountains in a search for arable lands.

The fiery, four-term prime minister, who is usually aligned ideologically with President Bush, criticized presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq.

“If I was running al-Qaida, in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and pray as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats,” he said.

“So, if he’s ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them up to Iraq. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric,” Obama added.

The Howard administration has some 1,400 Australian troops in Iraq fighting the U.S. war.

Labeled “Animal Planet Australia: Wild Extremes,” the Baltimore National Aquarium’s new Australia exhibit provides an introduction to the animals and geography of the land Down Under.

Consisting of more than 65,000 square feet, the exhibit opened in December 2005 and presents the continent as a place of floods, fire and droughts.

It has more than 100 live trees and shrubs and 1,800 Australian animals, including flying foxes and bats, plus a 35-foot waterfall.

Feb. 21, 2007 – Landmark Media Group

NICE, France – As the U.S. Congress struggles to reconcile different immigration bills, this bustling coastal city is adapting to the immigration debates roiling the capitals of major industrial nations in France’s typical comme ci, comme ca manner.

Like Marseilles, its neighbor to the west, Nice has long been an international gateway. People of every race and culture from France’s former colonial empire mingle in the cafes and wine bars. Lovers from different ethnic groups laze on park benches and stroll the boulevards, hand in hand.

While neighborhoods in Paris erupted for several nights last week, Nice remained calm, a turnaround from last November when youths in Nice and other cities across France exploded over chronic joblessness and discrimination against people of Arab and African descent.

Despite government pledges of improvement, conditions have barely changed. The jobless rate in France is 9.3 percent, higher than the European Union average. Youth unemployment in France is 22.1 percent.

Last month, the lower house of parliament passed a stringent immigration bill by a wide margin. The bill, which is slated for discussion in the French Senate this week, would allow unskilled workers into the country only when labor shortages exist in certain sectors of the economy, and it would end the automatic right to long-term residency after living in the country for 10 years.

Opponents said the bill would heighten racism and discrimination against immigrants. Following the measure’s passage, Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, faced protests when he visited the African nations of Mali and Benin.

France’s search for a balance on immigration comes against the backdrop of the rapidly evolving labor and industrial scene across Europe and elsewhere. Not a day goes by when there is not some news about the impact of globalization and its game of musical chairs involving capital, markets, labor, services and the corporate chase for talent and competitive advantage.

“Car plants across Western Europe are waiting for the ax to fall,” Michael Shields wrote in a June 1 Reuters dispatch. “From Britain to Spain, workers are left wondering if their plants will survive as production shifts steadily to low-cost Eastern Europe.”

Labor costs in the Czech Republic and Slovakia are less than one third what they are in Western Europe, Reuters reported.

Economists point out that while a hallmark of modern economic agreement has been the European Union’s establishment of the right to work anywhere in European Union states, that benefit has not been easy to manage. The Austrian government has prolonged its ban on hiring workers from nearby Eastern European states, even though Austrian business “has benefited immensely” from Eastern European workers, according to the May 30 International Herald Tribune.

Joblessness stands at a relatively low 5.2 percent in Austria, but politicians there fear a social backlash if they cracked the door to wider immigration. “Our answer to this problem is political, not only economic,” Austrian economy minister Martin Bartenstein told the Herald.

Meanwhile, as Austria is being cautious, France’s northern neighbor, Belgium, has begun easing its limit on workers from the newest EU countries in Eastern Europe, as a way to “keep a lid on wages,” according to the June 2 Bloomberg News. Belgium decided to follow Britain, Ireland and Sweden in permitting more immigrant job seekers.

Since the EU expanded to 25 nations in May 2004, more than 300,000 Eastern Europeans have taken jobs in Britain.

“The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said last month that the Bank of England might be able to avoid raising interest rates as economic growth accelerates, because immigrant labor could hold down wages and inflation,” Bloomberg News reported.

GENOA, Italy – More than 500 years after Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World, this birthplace of his and other European ports of call are experiencing a reverse migration under globalization.

And like Columbus, sometimes the immigrants to these shores are arriving in boats.

It is in former Queen Isabella’s Spain where African immigration has recently reached a critical point.

For the past few weeks, a record number of boatloads of Africans have struck out for the Canary Islands, an outpost of Spain 70 miles from the West African coast.

Madrid has been diplomatic about the matter, according to news reports, establishing new embassies in African nations and seeking cooperation from Senegal and other West African nations in policing the African coastal waterway.

Under Spanish law, the authorities must set free in mainland Spain any immigrants they are not able to repatriate back to Africa from the Canary Islands.

The International Herald Tribune said Senegal is willing to help with deportation arrangements with Spain “in return for economic assistance, such as help in expanding its irrigation systems to create more agricultural jobs, which would entice more of its workers to stay home.”