United Kingdom Tries to Limit Immigration

The United Kingdom has been moving to limit its "uncontrolled immigration," especially from Eastern Europe. However, a think tank in the UK has concluded that net migration is unlikely to change much this year because very few people are leaving the country, even if the number of immigrants might go down a bit.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) says the figure for immigrants to the UK minus the number leaving will be around 200,000.

One reason it points to is that only about 30,000 UK citizens are emigrating - the lowest for almost a decade.

The government said it was committed to reducing net migration from its current 215,000 to less than 100,000 by 2015. 

Empowering Muslim Women

The gender divide is probably the single most important "clash of civilizations" in the modern world, and there is evidence that progress on this front is being made by Muslim women in the United States.

“What we’re seeing now in America is what has been sort of a quiet or informal empowerment of women,” said Shireen Zaman, executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonprofit research institute founded after the 2001 attacks to provide research on American Muslims. “In many of our home countries, socially or politically it would’ve been harder for Muslim women to take a leadership role. It’s actually quite empowering to be Muslim in America.”

As Najah Bazzy, a American-born nurse and founder of several charities in Michigan, put it: “Yeah I’m Arab, yeah I’m very American, and yeah I’m very Islamic, but you put those things in the blender and I’m no longer just a thing. I’m a new thing.” 

No Census Reform After All

The Senate earlier this month had unanimously passed a bill that would reform the administrative structure of the Census Bureau in a way that would give it more autonomy and would be less influenced by politics. In an earlier post, I noted that the opposition in the House seemed to come mainly from the Republicans. Unfortunately, it turned out to be President Obama and key Democrats who shot it down in the house.

The administration’s objections had more to do with turf issues than substance. Gary Locke, the commerce secretary whose department houses the census, objected to one provision that called for the director to report directly to the secretary rather than to a midlevel commerce official, saying that it undercuts a secretary’s prerogative to organize the department.