Ayittey takes a new fresh look at Africa's future, January 10, 2005
By David Fick "Author: Africa: Continent of Econ... (Overland Park, Kansas USA) - See all my reviews

In Africa Unchained (January 2005), Ayittey takes a new fresh look at Africa's future and makes a number of daring suggestions.

First, he says economic development requires investment, both foreign and domestic. Investment, however, does not take place in a swamp or vacuum but in an "enabling environment," which must have, among others, the following features: security of persons and property; rule of law; and basic functioning infrastructure.

This environment does not exist in many parts of Africa because of the absence of a few key critical institutions: an independent media, an independent central bank, and an independent judiciary. These institutions are established by civil society or parliament, not by corrupt leaders since they are fundamentally opposed to the establishment of institutions that will check their arbitrary use of power.

Second, looking at how Africa can modernize, build, and improve their indigenous institutions, which have been castigated by African leaders as "backward and primitive," Ayittey argues that Africa should build and expand upon these traditions of free markets and free trade. Asking why the poorest Africans haven't been able to prosper in the 21st century, Ayittey makes the answer obvious: their economic freedom was snatched from them.

War and conflict replaced peace and the infrastructure crumbled. In a book that will be pondered over and argued about as much as his previous volumes, Ayittey looks at the possibilities for indigenous structures to revive a troubled continent.

Reviewed by David S. Fick, Author of Africa: Continent of Economic Opportunities, STE Publishers, Johannesburg SA, May 2005, www.ste.co.za

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (Paperback)
by Dean Acheson

Dean Acheson joined the U.S. Department of State in 1941 as an assistant secretary for economic affairs. Shortly after the end of World War II, he attempted to resign, but was persuaded to come back as under secretary of state; Harry Truman eventually rewarded Acheson's loyalty by picking him to run the State Department during his second term (1949 to 1953).
"The period covered in this book was one of great obscurity to those who lived through it," Acheson wrote at the beginning of his memoirs, first published in 1969. "The period was marked by the disappearance of world powers and empires ... and from this wreckage emerged a multiplicity of states, most of them new, all of them largely underdeveloped politically and economically. Overshadowing all loomed two dangers to all--the Soviet Union's new-found power and expansive imperialism, and the development of nuclear weapons." Present at the Creation is a densely detailed account of Acheson's diplomatic career, delineated in intricately eloquent prose. Going over the origins of the cold war--the drawing of lines among the superpowers in Europe, the conflict in Korea--Acheson discusses how he and his colleagues came to realize "that the whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone," and that the old methods of foreign policy would no longer apply. Among the accolades Acheson garnered for his candid self-assessment was the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for history.

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Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; New Ed edition (July 1987)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393304124
ISBN-13: 978-0393304121
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The current bibliography (books only) of "Great Powers"

Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), pp. .

Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso, 2007), pp. .

George B.N. Ayittey, Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa’s Future (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), pp. .

James A. Baker III, “Work Hard, Study, and Keep Out of Politics!”: Adventures and Lessons from an Unexpected Public Life (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006), pp. .

William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan and Carl J. Schramm, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. .

Maurice G. Baxter, Henry Clay and the American System (Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), pp. .

James C. Bennett, The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), pp. .

Hans Binnendijk and Richard L. Kugler, Seeing the Elephant: The U.S. Role in Global Security (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2006), pp. .

James R. Blaker, Transforming Military Force: The Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and Network Centric Warfare (Westport CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), pp. .

Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (New York: Viking, 2007), pp..

K. Bogdanova, Ten Russian Poets: A Russian Reader with Explanatory Notes in English (Moscow: Russian Language Publishers, 1979), pp. 113-14.

Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. .

Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2005), pp. .

Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (New York: Portfolio, 2006), pp. .

Lael Brainard (editor), Security By Other Means: Foreign Assistance, Global Poverty, and American Leadership (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), pp. .

Ian Bremmer, The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. .

Harry G. Broadman, Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier (Washington DC: The World Bank, 2007), pp. .

Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), pp. .

Stephen Burman, The State of the American Empire: How the USA Shapes the World (Brighton UK: Earthscan, 2007), pp. .

Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future (New York: Twelve, 2007), pp. .

Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. .

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), pp. .

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), pp. .

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. .

Kendrick A. Clements, Woodrow Wilson: World Stateman (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), pp. .

Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. .

Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (New York: Back Bay Books, 2002), pp. .

Gwyneth Cravens, Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. .

Karen DeYoung, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp. .

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005), pp. .

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), pp. .

Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. .

William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), pp. .

Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. .

Juan Enriquez, As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001), pp. .

Juan Enriquez, The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005), pp. .

Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), pp. .

Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008), pp. .

Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), pp. .

Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. .

Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. .

Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), pp..

Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. .

Francis Fukuyama (editor), Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. .

David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 2005), pp. .

Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr, Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. .

Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly, 2004), pp. .

Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), pp. .

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), pp. .

Richard N. Haass, The Opportunity: America’s Moment To Alter History’s Course (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), pp. .

Morton H. Halperin, Joseph T. Siegle and Michael M. Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. .

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), pp. .

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007), pp. .

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. .

Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect: What Elephants & Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation (Cambridge MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), pp. .

Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World From Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp. .

Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), pp. .

John Kao, Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity (New York: Harper Business, 1996), pp. .

Robert D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. .

George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), pp. .

George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor, Fifty Years of Foreign Affairs (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), pp. 188-205.

Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), pp. .

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: BiblioBazaar, 2007), pp. .

Parag Khanna, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (New York: Random House, 2008), pp. .

Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), pp. .

Michael T. Klare, Rising Power and Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), pp. .

Alan B. Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. .

Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn, Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), pp. .

Bruce Kuklick: Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War From Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. .

Joshua Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. .

James Kynge, China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future—and the Challenge for America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), pp. .

Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. .

George Lodge and Craig Wilson, A Corporate Solution to Global Poverty: How Multinationals Can Help the Poor and Invigorate Their Own Legitimacy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Pres, 2006), pp. .

Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. .

Amory Lovins et al, Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security (Snowmass CO: Rocky Mountain Institute, 2007), pp. .

Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. .

Margaret Macmillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2007), pp. .

David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. .

Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1805 [Introduction by Antony Preston] (New York: Gallery Books, 1980), pp. .

Burton G. Malkiel and Patricia A. Taylor, From Wall Street to the Great Wall: How Investors Can Profit from China’s Booming Economy (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), pp. .

James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (New York: Viking, 2007), pp. .

Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), pp. .

Michael E. Marti, China and the Legacy of Deng Xiaoping: From Communist Revolution to Capitalist Evolution (Washington DC: Brassey’s, 2002), pp. .

Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. .

Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. .

Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Modern Library, 2001), pp. .

Ricardo S. Morse, Terry F. Buss, and C. Morgan Kinghorn (editors), Transforming Public Leadership for the 21st Century (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), pp. .

John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. .

Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. .

Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), pp. .

Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: American in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), pp. .

George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. .

Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), pp. .

C.K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Upper Saddle River NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2005), pp. .

Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (New York: Harper One, 2007), pp. .

Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2001), pp. .

Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. .

Glenn Reynolds, An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths (Nashville TN: Thomas Nelson, 2006), pp. .

Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. .

Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), pp. .

T. R. Reid, Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), pp. .

Chet Richards, Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead (Washington DC: Center for Defense Information, 2005), pp. .

John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), pp. .

David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. .

Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. .

Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities For Our Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), pp. .

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Common Wealth: Economics For a Crowded Planet (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), pp. .

Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954), pp. .

Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007), pp. .

Robert J. Schapiro, Futurecast: How Superpowers, Populations, and Globalization Will Change the Way You Live and Work (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), pp. .

Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. .

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James Surowiecki, The Wisdom Of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. .

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DECLARATIONS
By PEGGY NOONAN

Pity Party
May 16, 2008
Big picture, May 2008:

The Democrats aren't the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead. For all their fractious fighting, they're finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They're busy being born.

Terry Shoffner
Clarke Reed
The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They're frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.

The headline Wednesday on Drudge, from Politico, said, "Republicans Stunned by Loss in Mississippi." It was about the eight-point drubbing the Democrat gave the Republican in the special House election. My first thought was: You have to be stupid to be stunned by that. Second thought: Most party leaders in Washington are stupid – detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in '78 or '82 or '94. Whatever they learned then, they think pertains now. In politics especially, the first lesson sticks. For Richard Nixon, everything came back to Alger Hiss.

They are also – Hill leaders, lobbyists, party speakers – successful, well-connected, busy and rich. They never guessed, back in '86, how government would pay off! They didn't know they'd stay! They came to make a difference and wound up with their butts in the butter. But affluence detaches, and in time skews thinking. It gives you the illusion you're safe, and that everyone else is. A party can lose its gut this way.

Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions made the past seven years in the White House. But they've publicly supported it so long they think they . . . support it. They get confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply.

And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall.

"This was a real wakeup call for us," someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. "We can't let the Democrats take our issues." And those issues would be? "We can't let them pretend to be conservatives," he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.

The Bush White House, faced with the series of losses from 2005 through '08, has long claimed the problem is Republicans on the Hill and running for office. They have scandals, bad personalities, don't stand for anything. That's why Republicans are losing: because they're losers.

All true enough!

But this week a House Republican said publicly what many say privately, that there is another truth. "Members and pundits . . . fail to understand the deep seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures," said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia in a 20-page memo to House GOP leaders.

The party, Mr. Davis told me, is "an airplane flying right into a mountain." Analyses of its predicament reflect an "investment in the Bush presidency," but "the public has just moved so far past that." "Our leaders go up to the second floor of the White House and they get a case of White House-itis." Mr. Bush has left the party at a disadvantage in terms of communications: "He can't articulate. The only asset we have now is the big microphone, and he swallowed it." The party, said Mr. Davis, must admit its predicament, act independently of the White House, and force Democrats to define themselves. "They should have some ownership for what's going on. They control the budget. They pay no price. . . . Obama has all happy talk, but it's from 30,000 feet. Energy, immigration, what is he gonna do?"

* * *

Could the party pivot from the president? I spoke this week to Clarke Reed of Mississippi, one of the great architects of resurgent Republicanism in the South. When he started out, in the 1950s, there were no Republicans in his state. The solid south was solidly Democratic, and Sen. James O. Eastland was thumping the breast pocket of his suit, vowing that civil rights legislation would never leave it. "We're going to build a two-party system in the south," Mr. Reed said. He helped create "the illusion of Southern power" as a friend put it, with the creation of the Southern Republican Chairman's Association. "If you build it they will come." They did.

There are always "lots of excuses," Mr. Reed said of the special-election loss. Poor candidate, local factors. "Having said all that," he continued, "let's just face it: It's not a good time." He meant to be a Republican. "They brought Cheney in, and that was a mistake." He cited "a disenchantment with the generic Republican label, which we always thought was the Good Housekeeping seal."

What's behind it? "American people just won't take a long war. Just – name me a war, even in a pro-military state like this. It's overall disappointment. It's national. No leadership, adrift. Things haven't worked." The future lies in rebuilding locally, not being "distracted" by Washington.

Is the Republican solid South over?

"Yeah. Oh yeah." He said, "I eat lunch every day at Buck's Cafe. Obama's picture is all over the wall."

How to come back? "The basic old conservative principles haven't changed. We got distracted by Washington, we got distracted from having good county organizations."

Should the party attempt to break with Mr. Bush? Mr. Reed said he supports the president. And then he said, simply, "We're past that."

We're past that time.

Mr. Reed said he was "short-term pessimistic, long-term optimistic." He has seen a lot of history. "After Goldwater in '64 we said, 'Let's get practical.' So we got ol' Dick. We got through Watergate. Been through a lot. We've had success a long time."

Throughout the interview this was a Reed refrain: "We got through that." We got through Watergate and Vietnam and changes large and small.

He was holding high the flag, but his refrain implicitly compared the current moment to disaster.

What happens to the Republicans in 2008 will likely be dictated by what didn't happen in 2005, and '06, and '07. The moment when the party could have broken, on principle, with the administration – over the thinking behind and the carrying out of the war, over immigration, spending and the size of government – has passed. What two years ago would have been honorable and wise will now look craven. They're stuck.

Mr. Bush has squandered the hard-built paternity of 40 years. But so has the party, and so have its leaders. If they had pushed away for serious reasons, they could have separated the party's fortunes from the president's. This would have left a painfully broken party, but they wouldn't be left with a ruined "brand," as they all say, speaking the language of marketing. And they speak that language because they are marketers, not thinkers. Not serious about policy. Not serious about ideas. And not serious about leadership, only followership.

This is and will be the great challenge for John McCain: The Democratic argument, now being market tested by Obama Inc., that a McCain victory will yield nothing more or less than George Bush's third term.

That is going to be powerful, and it is going to get out the vote. And not for Republicans.

Pay them now or cost yourself soon

ARTICLE: "Fewer Latin Migrants Send Money Home, Poll Says: Slowing Economy, Legal Crackdown Said to Cut Flows," by Miriam Jordan, Wall Street Journal, 1 May 2008, p. A4.
Most Hispanic population growth in the U.S. is now from births to parents/families already living here, not immigrants.

Of the roughly 20m Latinos adults living in the U.S., half are illegal. On average, those who remit money end up sending $325 home 15 times a year. Last year, that yielded a total of $46 billion, which is a lot more than America sends in foreign aid globally.

The danger now? Slower economy means less money remitted, means more economic distress in Latin America, more more illegals showing up.

Pay them now or rack up the costs later.

Still, stunning to consider the combination of people/money flow.

Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett on May 16, 2008 6:19 AM Permalink | Comments (0)