On the new official xenophobia in the United Kingdom

Brexit is something that I've been paying attention to this year. In March, I pointed out that the limited free movement with other Commonwealth countries that some Brexit proponents was offering. (The curious fact that this free movement would be only with rich and white countries is something I noted in passing.) In June, meanwhile, I noted the losses that the United Kingdom would suffer and linked to Zakc Beauchamps' Vox piece noting that, to the considerable extent that migration concerns did impact Brexit, they were at best exaggerated and at worst inaccurate.

Yesterday, my Facebook feed was filled by reactions to an astonishing Financial Times report. I had hoped the reports of Amber Rudd's statements about forcing companies to disclose their foreign workforces were inaccurate, but, alas, no. The Guardian, for one, confirmed this.

Theresa May’s government is facing a growing backlash over a proposal to force companies to disclose how many foreign workers they employ, with business leaders describing it as divisive and damaging.

The proposal was revealed by Amber Rudd, the home secretary, at the Conservative party conference on Tuesday as a key plank of a government drive to reduce net migration and encourage businesses to hire British staff.

However, senior figures in the business world warned the plan would be a “complete anathema” to responsible employers and would damage the UK economy because foreign workers were hired to fill gaps in skills that British staff could not provide. One chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, whose workforce includes thousands of EU citizens, said it was “bizarre”.

The proposals, which are subject to consultation, have also been questioned from within the Conservative party. Lord Finkelstein, the Tory peer, told the BBC it was a “misstep”, while Tory MP Neil Carmichael, chairman of the House of Commons education select committee, said the policy was “unsettling” and would “drive people, business and compassion out of British society and should not be pursued any further”.

[. . .]

Rudd was forced to defend the proposals on Wednesday, insisting they were not xenophobic and that she had been careful about the language used. The home secretary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that some companies were “getting away” with not training British workers and “we should be able to have a conversation about what skills we want to have in the UK”.

That, as the Independent reported, this proposal is apparently quite popular with the general British public is another point.

It seems clear that the United Kingdom is heading for a hard Brexit, regardless of the poor economic rationale for this. It also seems clear that this will hit Britain's immigrant populations and ethnic minorities badly. In the case of the relatively recent European Union migrants from Poland and elsewhere, this might even trigger return migrations, to their homelands or elsewhere. I'm reminded of how France's Polish immigrant community first began to grow sharply in the 1920s following the displacement of ethnic Polish workers from the German Ruhr. Will Germany end up the main beneficiary of post-2004 Polish migrants, as I speculated it might have had 2004 gone differently?

The biggest lesson to take from Brexit is this: Whatever else it was about, Brexit was not about opening up the UK to the wider world. This is made clear by the aftermath, still unfolding. If the British government is to adopt a policy of naming and shaming companies which employ foreign workers, with even Irish migrants possibly coming under the aegis of these regulations, it's laughable to say that the United Kingdom is going to globalize.

Maria Farrell's mournful post at Crooked Timber, recapitulating Stefan Zweig's mourning for the open borders of pre-First World War Europe, is entirely appropriate. These losses are terribly sad, and so avoidable if only Britain had more leaders who cared about their country's future.

Some followups

For tonight's post, I thought I'd share a few news links revisiting old stories

• The Guardian notes that British citizens of more, or less, recent Irish ancestry are looking for Irish passports so as to retain access to the European Union in the case of Brexit. (Net migration to the United Kingdom is up and quite strong, while Cameron's crackdown on non-EU migrants has led to labour shortages.
• NPR notes one strategy to get fathers to take parental leave: Have them see other fathers take it.
• Reuters notes that the hinterland of Fukushima, depopulated by natural and nuclear disaster, seems set to have been permanently depopulated. Tohoku
• Bloomberg noted that East Asia's populations are aging rapidly, another article noting how Japan's demographic dynamics are setting a pattern for other high-income East Asian economies.
• In Malaysia, the Star notes that low population growth among Malaysian Chinese will lead to a sharp fall in the Chinese proportion in the Malaysian population by 2040.
• Coming to Alberta, CBC notes how the municipality of Fort McMurray has been hit very hard by the end of the oil boom, as has been Alberta's largest city and business centre of Calgary.
• On the subject of North Korea and China, The Guardian wrote about the stateless children born to North Korean women in China, lacking either Chinese or North Korean citizenship.
• The Inter Press Service notes that, as the Dominican Republic cracks down on Haitian migrants and people of Haitian background generally, women are in a particular situation.
• IWPR provides updates on Georgia's continuing and ongoing rate of population shrinkage, a consequence of emigration.
• On the subject of Cuba, the Inter Press Service reported on Cuban migrants to the United States stranded in Latin America, while Agence France-Presse looked at the plight of Cuba's growing cohort of elderly.

Some news links: Greece, China, Japan, Hong Kong

I thought I'd share three clusters of news links on subjects I've been following here, and one oddity.

• As Greece heads towards a catastrophic meltdown, the theme of emigration from Greece is one of several being explored by the international press. The Guardian and Bloomberg suggest that all kinds of professionally-trained Greeks are looking for a way out of their country, that newspaper later looking specifically to the Greek community in New York City while Reuters notes the dynamics of the Greek community in Australia's second city of Melbourne. (Migration within the Eurozone has not been such a major theme, at least in the English-language media I regularly read, but I don't doubt it's a reality.) With even the best-case predictions for Greece's economic recovery being decidedly dire and the large-scale flight of Greek professionals doing nothing to make this better, I think it's safe to predict that whatever the outcome of this crisis, Greece for the next while will be most notable as a place future generations of immigrants will come from.
• Japan, meanwhile, is facing rapid aging. The Asahi Shinbun notes that the national population fell by more than a quarter-million people, the biggest losers being rural prefectures and the only gainers urban ones (and the outlier of Okinawa). This shrinkage, accompanied by a rapid shrinkage of the work force, is leading to increased pressure on benefits to seniors, while working mothers continue to face problems on the job and in life.
• In adjacent China, the prospect of labour shortages is looming. Marginal Revolution noted earlier this week the costs imposed on the Chinese labour market by protections. This, along with the disappearance of China's rural surplus labour as a consequence of below-replacement fertility and migration, makes me think any number of futures are possible for China demographically. This includes the possibility of international immigration.
• Finally, the Irish Times was one newspaper among many that reported on a half-joking proposal in 1983 by people within the British government to resettle millions of Chinese in Northern Ireland if they so wanted it. (The Guardian goes into more detail about the specifics of the proposal.) This proposal seems at the time to have been a joke born of frustration with the complex situations of Northern Ireland and Hong Kong, yet it raises an interesting question: Why didn't the United Kingdom have programs to attract immigrants from Hong Kong in the years before the handover to China, like other countries around the world

Some St. Patrick's Day notes on how Irish immigrants became integrated into Toronto

I'm writing this post in the dying minute of St. Patrick's Day. (No, I'm not celebrating today. I save that for the weekend.) I found a few interesting links on the subject of the holiday. I liked this CBC analysis of the extent to which the modern holiday is actually a product of Irish-Americans seeking to consolidate their community and assert their identity in the face of a skeptical majority, or a pair of blog posts observing the notable divergence between Ireland and Irish-Americans on matters of sexual orientation, or a Universe Today post noting the green and red aurorae visible from Alaska complete with photos.

Here in Toronto, St. Patrick's Day is notable, not least as one of the first "ethnic" holidays brought by immigration. I've made two posts here, one in November 2012 and another in March 2013, commenting on modern-day Irish migration to Toronto and to Canada, concentrating on how, among other things, Gaelic football helped migrants find jobs. (This immigration is still going on, incidentally. The Irish Independent notes that Canada is becoming a major destination for migrants.) The origins of Toronto's Irish Catholic community in the catastrophe of the 1840s was described today by blogTO's Chris Bateman.

The vessels that carried roughly a million Irish across the Atlantic were called "coffin ships" for a reason. Hellish conditions that bred typhus, dysentery, and lice, were common. Coupled with a lack of food or water, hundreds died during the six-week crossing. Many were buried at sea or at the quarantine station on Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence--the first port of call in Canada.

Those that made it Toronto still faced an uphill battle. In 1847, 38,560 Irish--roughly twice the existing population of the city--stepped from ships, many of them sick with deadly typhus, a disease spread by bites from infected lice. The diseas was characterized by a severe fever that, without an effective treatment, frequently resulted in death.

[. . .]

Within five years of the 1847 migration, roughly a quarter of Toronto was Irish Catholic. As Allan Levine writes in his book Toronto: Biography of a City, the sudden rise of Catholicism resulted in a push back from the city's established Protestant population. Signs reading "No Irish Need Apply" on the outside of businesses were common.

Levine writes that "irrational fears about the power of the pope to usurp Protestantism across the world; highly exaggerated notions that all Irish Catholics were supporters of Fenianism, the early IRA-style anti-British radical militant movement based in the United States ... and the linking of Irish poverty with widely held stereotypes of Irish Catholic social ills and immorality" were also factors in the anti-Irish sentiment of the late 1800s.

George Brown, the founder of the Globe newspaper and the namesake of the modern day college, was also publicly sceptical of Catholicism. "Rome means tyranny, and has for its mission the subversion of the civil and religious liberty of the masses," he wrote in 1857. At the height of the typhus crisis, Brown's Globe suggested the newcomers would soon "sink down into the sloth to which they had been accustomed at home." Headlines in the paper called them "the curse of the land."

In an article published this weekend in the Toronto Star, Eric Andrew-Gee described in the article "19th-century Toronto Irish immigrants a lesson in upward mobility" how these immigrants, starting with so little and living in the face of strong hostility, ended up becoming a well-integrated--while still distinctive--component of Toronto's community.

It surely helped that the Irish spoke English, allowing them to sidestep the language barrier that would slow the integration of later generations of newcomers.

Physical mobility was another Irish advantage. Corktown and neighbourhoods like it may have served as landing pads for the new immigrants, but they rarely stayed in one place for long.

“By the 1890s, they’re everywhere,” said McGowan, himself descended from famine refugees. “If you went to an American city, there would be these long-standing Irish enclaves. You don’t have that here.” This geographic dispersal helped bring Catholics and Protestants into closer contact, driving mutual understanding and even encouraging intermarriage. “Cupid was probably more important than denomination at a certain point,” McGowan said.

At the same time, immigrants from other parts of the world began trickling into Toronto, loosening the Irish monopoly on the fears and resentments of the WASP majority.

“From the 1880s, Toronto started getting immigrants who were even more scary from the majority perspective,” said Allan Levine, author of Toronto: Biography of a City.

“Number one, Catholic Irish immigration peters out, so there are fewer paddies with cloth caps and accents in the downtown area,” said William Jenkins, a professor of North American Irish history at York University, and himself the proud owner of a lilting Irish accent. “People basically just forget about the Irish.”

In the meantime, the community was working doggedly to improve its lot. Mutual aid societies, church parishes, sports teams, card parties, and temperance leagues created a thick support net for Catholics trying to climb the social ladder or simply to avoid destitution.

“They created their own infrastructure,” said Levine. “They looked after themselves.”

All kinds of lessons can be taken from this particular experience.

More on how the Irish find jobs in Toronto

The Irish diaspora is continuing to expand, as tens of thousands of Irish leave the Republic in the wake of the ongoing economic troubles. (I'm unaware of any specific trends regarding Northern Ireland; leave links here if you'd like.)

Canada is taking on greater importance. An Irish Times blog post claims that three-quarters of Irish emigrants in 2011 went to the United Kingdom, Australia, and the remainder of the European Union, each destination accounting for roughly a quarter of the emigrants, with Canada and the United States each accounting for roughly a tenth. A more recent article suggests that Canada is starting to catch up to Australia, with news items like the February Irish Examiner article claiming that 6350 Canadian work visas were snapped up at a job fair over just four days and ention being made of the labour-hungry economy of Alberta.

Ontario, and the Toronto where I live, are also destinations. Back in November, I blogged about a Toronto Life article detailing how Gaelic football and real Irish pubs played critical roles in connecting Irish migrants to jobs. Two recent articles in the Toronto press highlight these interesting contingent mechanisms. The Torontoist post "An Irish Sport Gains Popularity in Toronto", by Sarah-Joyce Battersby, highlights Gaelic football.

[W]ith a new wave of Irish immigrants coming to find work in Canada, the sport has taken on a special role.

“The Toronto GAA has taken it on to make our best efforts to take care of people coming over,” spokesperson John Creery told us. “When you come over, the most important thing is to find work and a home. The Irish community in general is good, and they’re realy helpful, but the GAA community in particular is great for that.”

That’s how Creery got settled when he moved to Canada in 2001 from Lugan, a small town in County Armagh. Creery had been playing Gaelic football all his life. Soon after moving to Toronto, he met a team coach. “When he heard my accent he wanted me to come play for him,” said Creery.

Most of Creery’s friends are people he met through the Gaelic football community. And he said people involved in the sport look out for one another, helping new recruits find out about job prospects, apartments, and the Canadian way of life.

The support is helpful not only to the players, but also to their families in Ireland. “This way,” Creery said, “families back home know their loved one is being welcomed and taken care of, and has someone here to look in on them.”

St. Patrick's Day was Sunday. On that day, Toronto Star writer Antonia Zerbisias described how the parade provided a venue for meet-up groups, if not immediately a job.

Damien Lenihan could use some of that mythical luck of the Irish.

The 33 year old Dublin native, who came to Toronto last September, is looking for work — and a future in Canada.

“Every time I ring home, everyone says ‘Don’t come back, things are really bad, you’re not missing anything,’ ” he says. “Everyone seems really depressed.”

On Sunday, he shivered in a light leather jacket and hoodie as Toronto’s 26th St. Patrick’s Day passed on Queen St. W. Lenihan recognized Mayor Rob Ford, and seemed to approve of the floats and bands. But he spent most of the parade asking questions about jobs and life in Canada.

[. . .]

Still, as cold as it was on Sunday, Lenihan was basking in the warmth of a new group of friends, thanks to a meet-up organized online by the Irish Association of Toronto.

“It’s like they’re strangers in a strange land, and they’re coming in the hundreds and thousands because the economy is so awful there,” explains Leah Morrigan, a proud holder of dual citizenship and the association’s vice-president. “This is good fun because a lot of the Irish don’t have anybody to latch on to. We like to be a bit of a welcoming committee for them.”

I'm fascinated by these contingencies that help determine the direction and eventual success (or failure) of individuals' efforts at making a success of migration. These individual stories determine are hardly unique to Irish migrants to Toronto; they undergird every migration story.

On two ways Irish workers coming to Canada can find jobs

Reading the previous month's issue of Toronto Life, I was interested to come across Robert Hough's "The Celtic Invasion: why the arrival of hundreds of Irish construction workers benefits Toronto’s building boom". The main people Hough uses to illustrate the post-boom migration to Toronto are James and Sean McQuillan, brothers in their mid-20s from Dublin whose jobs as construction workers came to an end with the boom. For them, Canada was an appealing option.

What I particularly liked in Hough's article was an extended passage examining how the McQuillans, coming to Canada, came to find jobs. There's a very long history of Irish immigration to Canada, of course, and any number of networks imaginable. Two networks, though, stand out. One of these is Gaelic football, a sport that I described in January 2011 post as being hit hard by the emigration of its players--perhaps the game is itself channeling and encouraging migration. The other? Authentic Irish pubs.

Toronto has long been an Irish city. When the potato blight ravaged Irish farmland in the late 1840s, 38,000 Irish arrived in Toronto, which at the time had a population of only 20,000. While the majority of these immigrants either moved on or died from illnesses picked up on the unenviable journey over, about 2,000 stayed, making an Irish city all the more so. The Belfast of the North, as Toronto became known for many years, earned a reputation as a good place to settle, particularly when the Canadian economy was flourishing and the Irish economy was not. This happened again around the turn of the 20th century, and there was another wave of immigration in the 1950s, when Ireland became mired in a tenacious postwar recession. A large number came from Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1970s, and there was another surge when Ireland’s economy stalled in the 1980s.

For Irish arriving in Toronto today, there are two tried-and-true ways to find work. The first is by playing Gaelic football, a uniquely Irish game that, at least to the uninitiated, looks like soccer, North American football and rugby all rolled into one. Thanks to the most recent exodus of unemployed Irish, participation in Gaelic football has become a global phenomenon; there are now 10 Gaelic Athletic Association squads in the GTA alone (seven male and three female), and GAA teams have popped up in such unlikely locales as Dubai, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Beijing and Shanghai. “We exist as a welcome mat for new Irish arrivals,” says Mark O’Brien, an ex-president of the Toronto area GAA. “By playing football, they can meet people, make contacts and find work. The Irish, you know, are famous for helping each other out. It’s important to us, ’cause we were all helped by the older fellas when we came over.”

There’s one catch: to benefit from the GAA’s network of contacts, you have to be a decent player. Though Caolan Quinn plays with a Toronto GAA team called St. Vincent’s, the McQuillans do not: growing up, they preferred soccer. So the brothers resorted to the other ironclad method of procuring employment in Toronto: they went to the pubs.

Though there are probably 100 Irish-style pubs in Toronto, most of them are owned by corporations, frequented by non-Irish and operated by publicans without useful insight into the happenings back home. But there are a handful of real Irish pubs. There’s McVeigh’s at Church and Richmond, which, among the older Irish, is always referred to as the Windsor House, the name it had 25 years ago. There’s McCarthy’s, a hole in the wall on Upper Gerrard near Woodbine. And there’s the Galway Arms on the Queensway in Etobicoke; the Galway benefits from the Gaelic football crowd, who play their games at nearby Centennial Park.

James and Sean visited all these pubs, nursing pints of Keith’s, talking to locals and bartenders and letting it be known that they were looking for carpentry work. (They also hung around a sports bar called Shoxs for the simple reason that it was just around the corner from their apartment. Here, they both started dating Canadian-born waitresses. James’s girlfriend is named Erin, Sean’s is Stacey; both are 23 years of age.) About two weeks after coming to Toronto, a bartender at the Galway Arms referred the brothers to an Irishman named Joe Wilson, who owns a company called Clonard Construction. Wilson met with the boys, and by the following Monday they were working at the new condo development at Yonge and Bloor.

“The first thing that struck me about them,” Wilson says today, “was how young they looked. But other than that, they were like all the Irish who come over: they were just desperate for work. It’s a real shock to the system, having to leave home just to find work.”

I recommend the whole article. It provides an interesting look at how migration can be successful and relatively painless. (The big question is how can these social networks be replicated.)

A brief note on the restored Mediterranean periphery

At the end of the day of the most recent Greek legislative election that--one hopes--will see the formation of a Greek government capable of doing something, I just wanted to note that all this economic chaos in Europe may augur a restoration of the post-Second World War traditional patterns of migration within Europe, from the countries of the Mediterranean basin to the north.

The Eurozone might survive the current crisis fully intact, keeping all 17 of its member-states; the Eurozone might fall apart completely; most likely, I suspect, the Eurozone will crumble at the edges, particularly along the Mediterranean periphery, with Greece being the most likely candidate for exit. Peripheral countries face two options: if they remain inside the Eurozone, massive internal devaluation will be needed to bring economies to some sort of stability, creating excellent incentives for migration to more-favoured countries elsewhere in the Eurozone like northern Europe; if they exist the Eurozone, then the resulting economic collapse--especially in the context of current provisions for passport-free migration across Europe--will create excellent incentives for migration to more-favoured countries elsewhere in the Eurozone.

Mass migration from peripheral countries in the Eurozone--the Portugal-Italy-Ireland-Greece-Spain combination often cited in the press--seems inevitable. Critically from the perspective of these five countries, all save Ireland have had very low rates of net population replacement from the 1980s on. The emigration of so many people from these countries--often the young, often the talented--is going to have serious effects on the long-term futures of these countries, just as it may benefit (if all is handled well) the countries in northern Europe and elsewhere receiving these migrants.

Thoughts?

How emigration is hurting Gaelic football

The sport of Gaelic football, one of the prototypical Gaelic games revived as part of the Irish national awakening of the 19th century, finds itself threatened thanks to the Irish economic collapse. The County Clare branch of the Gaelic Athletic Association--the governing body of the sport--warned that the young men playing the game are leaving the country.

Clare senior hurling manager Ger ‘Sparrow’ O’Loughlin fears he may lose more players to emigration.

The Banner County was rocked last week by the departure of midfielder Brian O’Connell, who captained the team for the last three seasons, to Australia.

And O’Loughlin fears that O’Connell, 26, may not be the only departure from his squad in the months ahead.

O’Loughlin revealed: "In fairness to our county board, they have put together over the last two years a work committee, with three or four people involved in that.

"They are fantastic. They sit down, search and see are there any companies around the Clare and Limerick area (looking for people) to get guys something, even on a temporary basis, to see them through the season. We got two or three jobs last year that kept lads off the dole queues and this year, we have three lads not working. We’ll work hard to see what we can do, but is the environment out there? We’re not alone and this is a European problem. Unemployment has risen substantially over the last 12 months. We’ll see can we hold them here but it won’t be easy."

O’Loughlin, a successful businessman in his own right, noted: "Manufacturing companies have dwindled considerably. I see it big time in the Shannon Industrial estate. We’ve had multinationals folding after 25 or 30 years, with very little previous talk of them closing their doors. The Shannon Industrial Estate is fairly depleted if you drive through it. Dell and others have relocated to Poland and Hungary with the loss of thousands of jobs. Counteracting this is a big challenge but we have to come up with new ideas, know our cost base and see can we attract manufacturing companies. The situation is more severe than the 1980s, when I started out. Then, you could go to England or America but jobs there are very hard to come by as well."

Why does the domestic economic meltdown have such a direct effect on Gaelic football players? Shouldn't they be insulated by salaries. They are not, for they are amateurs: they don't receive an income for their sport. They do get compensation for expenses, and acquire a certain amount of cultural capital through name recognition, but that's it. Notwithstanding new schemes to provide financial and other assistance to players, the situation for many relatively marginal clubs seems dire.

[County board secretary Pat Fitzgerald] also highlights the fact that the survival of many clubs is being threatened because of emigration, as reported in The Clare Champion recently.

“Some rural clubs in the county, in a perennial struggle for survival, now fear woes of a more monumental nature – their very existence and identity. What had been a trickle of young players heading abroad to find employment has now turned into a steady exodus as the economic crunch continues to hold the country in a vice-like grip.”

He explains a county board survey showed in the last three years alone, over 200 players have emigrated. “Recently, in Shannon Airport, the extent of the problem facing clubs was graphically illustrated when no fewer than 17 players from three clubs in North Clare boarded flights for foreign destinations.”

He states the findings of the survey showed there was a 3% increase in emigration figures from 2008 to 2009, while this jumped dramatically to 15% in the last 12 months.

“It is not overemphasising the point to state that this represents a catastrophe for a great percentage of clubs because the loss of even a handful of established players can undermine a club, particularly small rural clubs with small catchments. Furthermore, there is no club that isn’t and won’t be affected, particularly in the next six months when a lot more are expected to leave.

“Against the backdrop locally, the Gaelic Players’ Association has also admitted that 15% of inter-county players are unemployed, which is 2% higher than the national average.”

The sport doesn't seem to be that well-entrenched outside of Ireland, concentrated in the Irish diaspora. There is, local to this writer, Toronto affiliate group and a youth organization offering four teams in Ontario, but the density of teams in Ireland seems absent. It is true, however, that Gaelic football is close enough to Australian rules football--a professional sport, with salaries--to attract Irish players to play the sport for an income. Or, as in the case of O'Connell, just to earn an income at all.

Clare hurling boss O'Loughlin says Brian O'Connell's decision to emigrate to Australia is a massive blow to the Banner County.

O'Connell, who had served as Clare captain for the last three years, moved Down-Under last autumn on a temporary basis, but has now returned to Australia for the foreseeable future.

"Originally, Brian was in Australia for three months from last October," said O'Loughlin on the Wolfe Tones, Shannon star, who is a qualified civil engineer.

"He came home before Christmas for his brother's wedding, but earlier this month he decided to go back to Australia long-term. He was in limbo with the job situation in this country not being very favourable, and while he was home he had plenty of time to think about his future.

"And the fact that some of his mates had already gone to work in Australia was also probably a major factor."

On O'Connell's attributes as a player, Clare legend O'Loughlin (right) said: "You'd always regret losing a player of Brian's quality, and as he was only 26, he was really coming into his prime as an inter-county hurler.

The sport's continued existence isn't at risk, as such, but emigration of a disproportionately large number of potential players--and spectators?--for a sport so geographically concentrated in a single island won't do good things in the short or the long runs. The GAA might be well advised to extend its benefits plan.

Five noteworthy links

This morning, I thought I'd share five population-related blog posts of interest with you. (It is still morning in Toronto.)

At the Economist's Eastern Approaches blog, notice was made of a recent conference on the plight of the Romani of Romania. There's room for hope, but then, it also seems like the Romanian government and many ordinary people would like the Romani to, quietly, take advantage of Schengen Zone and leave, so lightening the burden. Among other things

No clear consensus emerged on the impact of EU funds on Romania's Romanies, most of whom live in dire conditions. This is no great surprise considering that red tape and ministerial incompetence has meant that only about 1% of the €20 billion allocated to Romania in EU structural funds has actually been spent. Government programmes for the Romanies, such as positive discrimination for universities, barely scratch the surface. Most of Romania's Romanies remain marginalised, with little or no access to healthcare, education or social services.

But the conference did have two interesting outcomes. One was a discussion of an excellent piece of research by the World Bank, which states that the cost of educating Romania's Romanies would be far exceeded by the contribution an educated Romani workforce would make to the national economy. The opportunity presented by the report suggested that all the chatter—by both government representatives and Romani leaders—about strategy, empowerment, consultation, rights, monitoring, community projects, exclusion, research, discrimination and poverty was missing the point.

The Global Sociology blog examines the migration of soccer players from player-sending countries and regions (Africa, Latin America, eastern Europe) to player-receiving countries. It illustrates how "individual trajectories shape up to be [. . .] a function of interaction with specific social networks and human intermediation, social capital, economic and speculative interests, competitive advantages and structured inequalities in the world-system."

* The platform space: the first country to which the player comes from (often the periphery or the semi-periphery)
* The stepping stone space: the country from which the player gains access to a “big league” country (for instance, less dominant European countries in the European football world)
* The transit space: the country the player passes through and leaves and where the level of competition is what he is used to
* The relay space: the country where the player was loaned before he returned to either the stepping stone or the transit space
* The destination space: the wealthiest and most prestigious leagues and clubs (England)

At his New England History blog (New England being the northeastern part of the Australian state of New South Wales, not the American region), Jim Belshaw describes how demographic changes--accompanied, of course, by all manner of changes including fluctuation gender roles and theological and institutional innovation, with hostile and confused reactions to these prevailing--helped undermine the Methodist and Roman Catholic religious communities in his region (and, I suspect Australia, as most of the industrialized world).

In the Australia of 2009, it is hard to believe that majority of the Australian population once lived outside the capital cities. The decline in country Australia began in the nineteenth century, but accelerated during the twentieth century and especially in the period after the Second World War. Uralla really suffered - by the 1960s and 1970s even its main stores had closed.

This decline reduced the population available to the Methodist Church. However, the Church's decline was accentuated by other factors. A key was the social structure of the Church itself. To survive, the Church had to reach out beyond its now middle class base; it could not because of the attitudes of its membership and especially its senior laity. Dempsey quotes case after case where those in the lower middle and working classes with some connection to Methodism dropped out because they felt excluded.

[. . .]

The mass Australian mass migration program that began at the end of the Second World War brought to Australia more than a million non-Irish Catholics. The Church and its orders such as the Ursulines struggled to build and staff the schools required to educate the new arrivals. Then came waves of change and reform that swept the Church and confused the laity, but even more so the religious whose entire life had been built around previous structures.

At the Discover=hosted blog Not Rocket Science, Ed Yong reports on a study demonstrating that there is discrimination against people of Senegalese background in the French labour market. And if anything, relatively positive stereotypes of the Senegalese might mean they're doing better than other groups.

Khadija Diouf had a well-known Muslim first name and an obvious Senegalese surname and had worked with Secours Islamique, a humanitarian organisation. Marie Diouf had worked for its counterpart Secours Catholique and had an obvious Christian first name. And Aurélie Ménard had a typical French name with no religious connotations and had only worked for secular firms.

In the spring of 2009, Adida collected ads for secretarial and accounting jobs from the French national employment agency and grouped them into pairs, matched for area, sector, company size and position. For each pair, both received Aurélie’s CV while one received Khadija’s and one received Marie’s.

The results were striking. Marie Diouf got a positive response on 21% of her applications; she was clearly an employable (if fictional) young woman. But Khadija Diouf – her exact equal in virtually every respect – got callbacks from just 8% of her applications. For every 100 interviews that Marie was called for, Khadija was summoned for just 38. Even after Adida included a photo on the applications (the same one, showing a woman who was clearly not North African), she found the same bias.

Carl Haub at the Population Reference Blog's Behind the Numbers wonders whether, in light of continued low fertility rates and profound ambivalence towardss immigration, economic rationales might mean Germany could adopt a more open policy towards immigrants, perhaps using something akin to Canada's points system to accumulate skilled migrants.

[A}ccording to a study conducted by Bernd Raffelhü, [. . .] not only are immigrants being sought to fill technical positions in German industry but, throughout their lifetimes, they actually contribute more to government coffers than they take out. The German economics minister also stated that German companies are clamoring for workers.

Often, immigrants are portrayed as a burden on the state budget. The study concluded that that was true in the past but well-trained immigrants in higher paying fields make an immediate contribution through taxes and increase the size of the consumer market. Given their younger age than the workforce in general, such benefits can begin immediately. While it is true that some immigrants will take lower paying jobs that Germans themselves no longer want, an increased emphasis on skilled workers will fill many gaps. The study also recommended that immigrants and their children must integrate into German society, a point recently made by Chancellor Merkel, so that Germans do not feel that their country is becoming too multicultural.

Co-blogger Scott Peterson, at Wasatch Economics reports on how Ireland's economic catastrophe has reawakened the old trade of emigration, this one directed to countries like Canada and Australia which have escaped the worst of things. The strict rules that potential destination countries have established, Scott notes, aren't going to help things.