A Global Trek to Poor Nations, From Poorer Ones, By (NYT)

JUAN GÓMEZ, Dominican Republic — The scrap-wood shanties on a muddy hillside are a poor man’s promised land.

They have leaky roofs and dirt floors, with no lights or running water. But hundreds of Haitian migrants have risked their lives to come here and work the surrounding fields, and they are part of a global trend: migrants who move to poor countries from even poorer ones.

Among them is Anes Moises, 45, a dark-skinned man with flecks of gray hair, who has worked the Dominican banana fields for more than a decade, always illegally. Farm bosses pay him $5 a day and tell him that Haitians stink. Soldiers have called him a dark-skinned “devil” and deported him four times.

Still, with the average income in the Dominican Republic six times as much as in Haiti, Mr. Moises has answered each expulsion by hiring a smuggler to bribe the border guards and guide him back in.

“We are forced to come back here — not because we like it, but because we are poor,” he said. “When we cross the border, we are a little better off. We are able to buy shoes and maybe a chicken.”

Across the developing world, migrants move to other poor countries nearly as often as they move to rich ones. Yet their numbers and hardships are often overlooked.

They typically start poorer than migrants to rich countries, earn less money and are more likely to travel illegally, which raises the odds of abuse. They usually move to countries that offer migrants less legal protection and fewer services than wealthy nations do. Yet their earnings help sustain some of the poorest people on the globe.

There are 74 million “south to south” migrants, according to the World Bank, which uses the term to describe anyone moving from one developing country to another, regardless of geography. The bank estimates that they send home $18 billion to $55 billion a year. (The bank also estimates that 82 million migrants have moved “south to north,” or from poor countries to rich ones.)

Nicaraguans build Costa Rican buildings. Paraguayans pick Argentine crops. Nepalis dig Indian mines. Indonesians clean Malaysian homes. Farm hands from Burkina Faso tend the fields in Ivory Coast. Some save for more expensive journeys north, while others find the move from one poor land to another all they will ever afford. With rich countries tightening their borders, migration within the developing world is likely to grow.

“South to south migration is not only huge, it reaches a different class of people,” said Patricia Weiss Fagen, a researcher at Georgetown University. “These are very, very poor people sending money to even poorer people and they often reach very rural areas where most remittances don’t go.”

The Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic, its neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, has been large, longstanding and filled with strife. The Spanish-speaking Dominicans still refer angrily to a Haitian occupation that ended in 1844. The Creole-speaking Haitians point to 1937, when a Dominican massacre along the border is estimated to have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Haitians.

Haitian workers started coming in large numbers nearly a century ago, as seasonal help in sugar cane fields. But many now work year-round on farms or urban construction sites, which raises their visibility and the chance for conflict. Estimates vary greatly, but Dominican officials put Haitian migrants at one million, or 11 percent of the population.

As Haitians see it, the problems go beyond hard work and low pay to the systemic violation of their rights. Dominicans profit from their labor, they say, but deny them work papers, deport them at will and discriminate on the belief that Haitians have darker skin.

“There is no justice here,” Mr. Moises said.

Dominicans often present themselves as generous neighbors of limited means, forced to bear the burden of Haiti’s failed state, indigence and epidemic disease. They say they offer Haitians jobs and health care — 30 percent of the public health budget is spent on Haitians, government officials say — while enduring lectures about human rights from countries far from the fray.

“Ay-yai-yai-yai,” said Gen. Adriano Silverio Rodríguez, the commander of a new border force, when describing how Americans would respond if they shared a border with a country as troubled as Haiti. “That wall they’re building — it would be longer and taller.”

Per capita income in the Dominican Republic is $2,850; in Haiti it is $480.

The clash of civilizations can be seen along the Massacre River, a muddy, waist-deep waterway that divides them. On the Dominican side, Dajabón is a market town of 10,000 people, with paved streets, public utilities and a new Internet cafe. Its Haitian counterpart, Ouanaminthe, is seven or eight times as big, with no municipal lights or running water. The dirt roads are filled with trash and pigs.

Twice a week, Dominicans open the bridge, and thousands of Haitians rush across to buy goods that are scarce on their side: eggs, nails, flour, concrete, carrots, salami, juice, cooking oil, chickens and plastic chairs. Guards patrol the area, trying to ensure the Haitians’ return.

Bribery and violence are common. In a case now before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Dominican soldiers are accused of indiscriminately firing on a smuggler’s truck, killing six Haitians. Two dozen Haitians in a smuggler’s truck suffocated last year. Their bodies were dumped on the road.

Unwritten Rules

The village of Juan Gómez lies 35 miles east of the border, past three military checkpoints that search for illegal migrants. But its illegal migrants, like Mr. Moises, live in plain view. Their open presence points to the capricious unwritten rules: Haitians caught at the border are usually sent back, while those needed by employers are often left to stay, at least until someone objects.

“We do not intervene in the workplace,” said Carlos Amarante Baret, the Dominican immigration director. “We understand the needs of the agricultural sector.” He acknowledged that the situation “benefits the landowner.”

Gathered here at a small hilltop church squeezed among the shanties, the workers talked of the hardships they had fled and those they had encountered. Jacqueline Bayard said the threat of deportation left the workers powerless. Katline Auguste said the lack of legal papers had kept her from visiting her children in Haiti for three years.

Lorvil Seus said he lived in fear of vigilante violence, as in a famed incident in nearby Hatillo Palma, in which a Haitian pastor was killed — and 2,000 Haitians deported — after the murder of a Dominican woman. Reprisal killings spread, and three Haitians were burned to death near the capital, Santo Domingo.

Mr. Moises voiced gratitude as well as complaints, explaining that he had once walked from Haiti with his malarial daughter in his arms, and Dominican doctors had saved her. “We can only thank them because they helped us,” he said.

Dominican society, in his view, is complex. Some politicians want Haitians deported, he said, but employers “need us to work.” Poor Dominicans claim Haitians are stealing jobs, but refuse those jobs themselves. Officers sometimes order raids to curry political favor, he added, but low-paid soldiers want the Haitians around to extort bribes. “It’s a business they have,” he said.

“We are living in their country,” he said. “We have to take it.”

Colliding Interests

Dominican officials often say that the colliding interests that surround immigration are similar to those in the United States, but that poor countries like theirs have fewer resources to cope. Carlos Morales Troncoso, the Dominican foreign minister, said that the solution to the Haitians’ problems was to promote development in Haiti and urged the United States to do more. “The developed countries talk a lot about Haiti, but the necessary aid just doesn’t come,” he said. By providing jobs, he said, “we do more than the whole international community combined.”

Some south to south migrants are “pushed” by wars and political crises. Others are “pulled” by jobs and better wages. Some follow seasonal work. Some put down roots. Some countries — Argentina is one — have been quick to give amnesty to migrants. Others, including Nigeria and Indonesia, have subjected them to mass deportations.

Many countries simultaneously send and receive large migrations. One reason there are jobs for Haitians is that so many Dominicans have left for the United States. The president, Leonel Fernández, was largely reared in New York City.

That exposes what Dilip Ratha, an economist at the World Bank, calls a common double standard. “Many countries want good treatment for their own people abroad but they don’t treat immigrants well themselves,” he said.

Egyptian police officers killed 26 Sudanese migrants last year in an attack on their squatter camp. An Indian film star, Hritik Roshan, set off a deadly riot in Katmandu, Nepal, in 2000 when he was quoted as saying he “hated” the Nepalis. Costa Ricans sometimes deride Nicaraguans as “Nicas.” In 2005, two Rottweilers killed a Nicaraguan suspected of being a burglar, as an approving crowd watched. Jokes flooded the country, praising the dogs.

Still, Manuel Orozco of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research group, warned against viewing south to south migration solely in a negative light. He estimates that Haitians in the Dominican Republic send home $135 million a year.

“Destination countries benefit from foreign labor,” Mr. Orozco said, while migrants get jobs. The challenge, he said, is to create policies that “promote development for both countries, while protecting migrants and their families.”

“Just letting migration happen is not good enough,” he added.

The Dominican Republic has no such framework. This year alone, the conditions of its Haitians have been the focus of two documentary films, a photo exhibit in Paris and a United Nations investigation that found “a profound and entrenched problem of racism.”

Who Is a Citizen?

One battle now playing out involves the right to citizenship, which the Dominican Constitution promises to anyone born on Dominican soil except the children of diplomats and visitors “in transit.” But in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that illegal immigrants were essentially in transit — though some lived in the country for decades — and therefore their children had no citizenship rights.

Critics say that the ruling conflicts with international law, including a decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights two months earlier. They also said the government was using it to deny papers to Dominicans of Haitian descent, impeding their ability to work, study and vote.

Nationalists are trying to get the anti-citizenship provisions written into the Constitution.

“We could have hundreds of thousands of so-called Dominican nationals who on cultural, emotional and political grounds would see themselves as Haitian,” said Pelegrín Castillo, a leading nationalist legislator.

“Every day there are more Haitians in the Dominican Republic,” he added. “We are overwhelmed.”

For many Haitians, the journey ends where it began — in the muddy border town of Ouanaminthe, which receives scores of deported migrants each week. Most arrive penniless. Some sleep in City Hall.

Wesbert Sertil, 27, was among the unfortunates. Tired of hearing his in-laws complain that he could not feed his children, he borrowed $50 a year ago and boarded a smuggler’s truck. But the construction work he found was sporadic, and he sent money home just twice, totaling $90.

He was leaving work one day when military men asked for his papers. After a few days in a border-town jail, he was sleeping in abandoned houses, and asking a religious group for food.

His village was an eight-hour bus ride away, and the family that had urged him to go was unaware of his pending return. Smugglers approached him on the streets, but Mr. Sertil planned to use any money he could scrounge to buy a ticket home. “I got desperate and went to the Dominican Republic,” he said. “I’m not going back again.”

He noted that there were plenty of Haitians willing to take his place.

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**Image Courtesy of Richard Perry (NYT): "Dajabón, a Dominican border town, opens its gated bridge twice a week to allow Haitians to buy goods unavailable in their country."

As the Poles Get Richer, Fewer Seek British Jobs, By Julia Werdigier (NYT)

LONDON — When Piotr Farbiszewski landed here three years ago, he had enough money in his pocket to live for two weeks.

A successful technology consultant in Warsaw, he and his wife, Ela, a schoolteacher, had come to London to try it on for size; if they liked it, they would stay. To earn money, he worked as a builder while she flipped hamburgers.

They decided that they liked London, and within a year, Mr. Farbiszewski was a senior programmer at a software company. In March, the couple bought a small terraced house outside London, where they plan to raise a family.

“We’re very happy here,” Mr. Farbiszewski, 31, said. “The quality of life is better, the economy is stronger, there is less bureaucracy, it’s a multicultural society and the lady in the supermarket will smile at me. People don’t smile at each other in Poland.”

The Farbiszewskis are small players in one of Europe’s most successful immigration stories. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004 and Britain, unlike France and most other members, welcomed Polish workers, an estimated 1.1 million Poles, mainly young, have come to Britain. Today, they are the third-largest group of immigrants in the country, behind Irish and Indians.

Britain has benefited. On Tuesday, the Home Office estimated that immigration added £6 billion ($12.3 billion) to the nation’s economy last year. According to David Blanchflower of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, East European immigration has also reduced inflation pressure by increasing the supply of goods and services.

Indeed, Britain may soon face a novel immigration problem. As Poland’s economy has improved this year, immigration has slowed, which economists say could cause labor shortages in British industries.

When Poland and nine other new members, most of them former Communist countries, were admitted to the European Union, many West Europeans feared an influx of cheap labor. In May 2005 in France, opponents of a new European constitution used the labor threat — personified by an archetypal “Polish plumber” who would steal French jobs — to help defeat the proposed constitution in a national referendum.

But Britain, along with Ireland and Sweden, welcomed workers from the new European Union members — partly because they took physically demanding, minimum-wage jobs that many native-born Britons snubbed and partly because a wide range of industries in this country were suffering labor shortages.

Today, the reputation of Polish construction workers, nannies and caregivers is so high that other East Europeans sometimes say they are Polish to increase their chances of being hired. At Strathaird Salmon, a fish farm in Scotland, more than a third of the employees are from Poland.

Immigration opponents were correct on one point: on average, Poles earn £7.30 ($14.93) an hour, compared with £11.10 ($22.70) an hour for Britons, according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a British institute.

In some regions, Britons worry that immigrants are pushing up housing costs and crime rates. The Polish influx was much larger than the government anticipated and unlike most previous waves of migrants — from South Asia and the Caribbean, for instance — the Poles did not restrict themselves to the cities.

Some settled in remote towns of East Anglia and the Midlands, areas with little experience in immigration, where there have been some complaints of school overcrowding and a lack of personnel able to teach children whose native language is not English.

But a decline in Polish immigrants could be a bigger problem than a surplus. “People still come,” said Ania Heasley, who arrived from Poland 16 years ago and now runs a recruitment agency, “though with less hurrah and enthusiasm because they have realized the cost of living here is higher than they thought and if you don’t speak English you will only get a low-paid job.”

In addition to a better economic climate in Poland, Britain is also something of a victim of its Polish immigrants’ success. Many who started in low-skilled jobs have improved their English and moved up the career ladder. Many Poles now reject lower-paying jobs, or team up with trade unions to ask for better pay and benefits.

This could present problems for British employers, which have relied on immigrants to fill certain unappealing jobs. The National Farmers’ Union warned last month, for instance, that there are few alternatives to immigration if Britain is to prevent a labor shortage that could damage agriculture.

Even before 2004, Britain’s farms relied heavily on seasonal workers from Poland covered under a special agreement to help during the harvest season. Once Poland joined the European Union, many of these seasonal workers became full-time regulars, but the demand for seasonal workers remained high.

The construction industry could also face shortages as London prepares for the 2012 Olympics and these could be heightened by the government’s promise to build new affordable housing, as well as renovate and improve hospitals, schools and the rail system.

According to a World Bank survey, thousands of Bulgarians and Romanians are eager to work in Britain, but are unlikely to get the chance because, unlike the Poles, they did not gain work-permit rights when their countries joined the European Union at the beginning of 2007. The restrictions, which have generated debate over the benefits and costs of immigration, are up for review this year, and their fate is uncertain.

Jan Mokrzycki, president of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, said anecdotal evidence suggested that about 30 percent of Poles, mainly skilled workers and those able to speak English, were staying in Britain while many less skilled migrants, mainly from Poland’s poorer southeast, were leaving.

“At the beginning, most questions we heard were about finding work,” said Mr. Mokrzycki, who came from Poland with his parents in 1948. “Now, people ring to ask how they can get their children into a better school or how to deal with landlords. We even get the odd marital problem these days.”

Racism is not a problem he often hears about. Rather, many Poles are struggling to warm to British cuisine, said Mr. Mok- rzycki, who despite living in Britain for the last 60 years still needs his wife’s Polish cucumber soup at least twice a week.

Such cravings have led to a growing industry of Polish bars, restaurants and shops. “Food is very important for us Poles,” said Beata Ciepal, 42, who came to Britain two years ago with her 14-year old daughter after losing her job at a software company in Poland. “I only buy Polish sausages. I don’t like the British ones.”

Last year, British banks, supermarkets and brewers started to discover the lucrative market in catering to Poles in Britain, with combined disposable income estimated around $4 billion a year by some analysts.

Lloyds bank not only began translating brochures into Polish and hiring Polish-speaking staff members, but stopped asking for proof of address to open an account after realizing that most Polish immigrants cannot provide it because they are in temporary quarters or informal sublets.

Tesco, the country’s largest supermarket chain, said in July that demand for its Polish food specialties, like pulpety (meatballs) and chocolate-jam cookies called delicje, was growing so fast that from 2006 to 2007, it doubled the range of products and widened distribution to 370 stores from 10.

SABMiller, the London-based brewer, started importing Tyskie, Poland’s best-selling beer, two years ago. “There’s been nothing like this,” said John Littleton of Miller Brands UK. “We’re actually now struggling to keep up with demand.”

Of course, Britons share some historical links with Poland — many Poles fought with the British in World War II and decided to settle in this country rather than returning home to live under Communism.

And the Poles are affecting the natives, too. Leila McAlister, who imports Polish sausage and pickled cucumbers, including some for sale in up-market stores like Whole Foods and Selfridges, says most of her staff is Polish but most customers are not.

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**Image Courtesy of Jonathan Player, NYT (A post-punk band performing at the Polish Cultural Institute in London. Many of the immigrants surmount language difficulties.)

Ireland Learns to Adapt to a Population Growth Spurt, By Eamon Quinn (NYT)

Inside a north Dublin warehouse, 15,000 cardboard boxes containing the documents of Ireland’s most recent census rise on new shelving from the concrete floor. The sight is nondescript, but the collated and computer-scanned documents contain evidence that the Republic of Ireland is the fastest repopulating small country in the world.

Findings from the April 2006 census, which are being published in a series of releases this summer, showed that in the four years since a previous survey, the Irish population swelled by 322,645, roughly split between immigrants and births. That lifted the total population to 4.2 million.

No European Union country has a younger population: statistically, the Irish have been barely aging at all, with the median age staying close to 33. The country will remain young for decades, say the experts, and escape the “graying” fate of the rest of Europe.

Further, demographers now predict that the population could rise to over five million in about a dozen years, and to six million within a generation. With a growing population in Northern Ireland, the island could match its largest population — more than eight million before the devastating 19th-century famine that prompted waves of emigration — by 2032.

Edgar Morgenroth, a member of a panel of experts who predict Irish population growth, said the famine started a diminishing of the population that lasted to the late 1960s. “It was only in the 1990s that our population stabilized and started to grow, rapidly,” he said. The population might reach the 19th-century level, but it will look very different.

The population changes have been uneven geographically. New houses stretch in a wide arc from north Dublin to the west of the city. But the city’s core, despite being replenished by an influx of immigrants, has lost residents to the suburbs and to once unimaginably distant commuting centers in the midlands. In the south, the city of Cork shrank while the county grew.

Some experts think the scale is beyond most citizens’ imaginations: in about half a generation, the population may grow by another Dublin, which has 1.1 million people in its greater metropolitan area.

“The worst is that we find ourselves without growing our services to cope with the numbers,” Mr. Morgenroth said. “The benign outlook is that we have tackled our services and, like Switzerland or Luxembourg, we have great wealth and a great quality of life. The smaller countries can do it right.”

Eunan King, an economist at NCB Stockbrokers in Dublin, has long argued that a rising population — more workers and more consumers — will help sustain Ireland’s remarkable economic renaissance of the past dozen years.

The largest increases in immigration since 2002 have been from Poland, Lithuania and Nigeria. The latest census showed 63,276 Poles living permanently in Ireland, up from 2,124 four years earlier. In some small districts in Dublin, Limerick and Cork, the census showed, 52 percent of residents were non-Irish, said Aidan Punch, a senior census statistician.

Ireland permits all residents, not just Irish citizens, to cast ballots in local elections. That has helped immigrants win seats in local councils. The mayor of the midlands town of Portlaoise, Rotimi Adebari, is from Nigeria.

To encourage assimilation, the government recently named a minister for integration, Conor Lenihan. The department was organized, Mr. Lenihan said in an interview, to show Ireland’s commitment to share and develop its new wealth with new arrivals. “We have chosen a midpoint between the U.S. and Europe in terms of our economic success,” he said. “I think we can choose a midpoint in integration as well.”

Mr. Lenihan said his department would investigate ways to provide extensive language classes for adult immigrants and to increase training for unskilled local Irish workers.

But immigrants’ representatives say the government needs to do more.

“Ireland should be taking a lead in Europe,” said Jean-Pierre Eyanga Ekumeloko, a naturalized Irish citizen from Congo and a co-founder of Integrating Ireland, an independent support group for immigrants.

Mr. Ekumeloko said the Irish prime minister should lay out a plan for welcoming and integrating immigrants. He said many were working jobs for which they were overqualified. “A lot of things have changed in interactions between the Irish community and immigrants,” he said, adding that in the past he had heard racist remarks. “Things have changed very positively. Now Irish people know Africans.”

At a restaurant table in Lucan, in western Dublin, Dulce Huerta, a Mexican, and her husband, an Irishman named Lorcan Donnellan, cradled their 5-week-old child. They talked about the strains population growth was causing in their area, near the district of Lucan Esker, which according to the census numbers is the youngest spot in the country. More children under 4 live there than anywhere else in Ireland.

“The maternity hospital was packed and needed more staff,” Ms. Huerta said.

They fretted about how the huge housing estates under construction would add to local traffic. “The roads cannot cope already,” Mr. Donnellan said. “It’s going to get more choked.”

A new mother at a nearby table, Suzanne Leyden, an actuary, said the authorities seemed to have anticipated the growing needs by opening or expanding primary schools. “Secondary schools will be the next big challenge,” she said.

Derek Keating, a local councilor for the Lucan area, said: “The big picture is that we are playing catch-up all the time. There is a lack of infrastructure, in everything from schools to recreational activities.”

In the northern Dublin suburb of Swords, Gerard Kelly, a teacher for 25 years and now a principal, said his school would struggle to meet the demand for classroom seats when it opened in September. “Back in 2001 we had 21 children,” Mr. Kelly said. “Next September we will have 340. We have children from 40 countries.”

**Photo Courtesy of Ross McDonnell (NYT)
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M.I.A. from the Immigration Debate, Creating Economic Opportunity in Mexico, By James Ridgeway (MJ)

Washington Dispatch: Could an influx of foreign aid to Mexico solve America's immigration problem?

For all the talk about immigration reform on the Hill, there has been notably little discussion about what is driving Mexican immigrants to pour over the border into the U.S., let alone any debate about measures that might go to the root of the problem. According to Laura Carlsen, the director of the International Relations Center's Americas Program, the reason behind the "massive out-migration" is fairly clear. Put simply, she wrote not long ago, "Mexico is not producing enough decent jobs for its people—and the United States is hiring." It would seem, then, that one potential answer to the United States' so-called immigration problem would be an effective development policy toward Mexico (whose citizens make up 56 percent of America's undocumented population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center), including both private investment and foreign aid. As it stands, Mexico receives the bulk of its aid not from the U.S. government or corporations but from immigrants themselves.

Despite having incomes well below the national average, many Mexican immigrants regularly send a portion of their earnings home to support their families and sometimes entire communities. Remittances from immigrant workers now stand approximately equal to oil revenues as one of the two largest sources of foreign income in Mexico. According to Guillermo Ortíz, head of Mexico's central bank, they totaled $23.54 billion in 2006.

These remittances – the vast majority sent from the United States, primarily in payments of $100 to $200 -- exponentially exceed foreign aid to Mexico. According to the Century Foundation, for every dollar in official foreign aid that goes to Mexico, immigrants send home $150. The bottom line is that these remittances have become a substitute—and a poor one at that—for effective development policies aimed at generating employment and stimulating rural production.

While the United States frequently grouses to the Mexican government that it ought to provide economic opportunities at home that will keep its citizens from teeming over our border, we've been less quick to provide Mexico with much help in doing so. To the contrary, the U.S. continues to exploit Mexico's resources for its own needs. Those resources, of course, include the very undocumented workers we complain about, which, like the illicit drugs we likewise condemn, would soon cease to flow north across the border if there were no demand for them here.

The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to be a tremendous boon for Mexico, as well as for the United States and Canada, creating the beginnings of a common market for the benefit of all. More than 13 years later, though, the relationship still smacks of colonialism. Howard Zinn, the author of A People's History of the United States who has documented the history of U.S. colonialism in Latin America, says of the current immigration debate, "Why should capital go freely across borders while people cannot? These are human beings trying to make a better life, for god's sake. Why is the wall on the Mexican border more acceptable than the Berlin Wall?"

Contrast all this to what's happened in the European Union, which was formed just two years prior to NAFTA, in 1992. Through the post-war years and well into the 1980s, most of the huge number of foreign guest workers in then-richer nations like Britain, Germany, France, and Switzerland came not from the so-called Third World, but from current European Union member-countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland. Instead of just employing foreign workers, though, the wealthier European nations also jumpstarted the economies of their poorer neighbors with billions of dollars in investments. As Douglas Massey, a Princeton University sociologist and co-director of the school's Mexican Migration Project, told the San Francisco Chronicle last year, if "the United States had approached Mexico and its integration into the North American economy in the same way that the European Union approached Spain and Portugal in 1986, we wouldn't have an immigration problem now."

**Photo Courtesy of Mother Jones
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