Paul Fauchille on the Rights of Emigration and Immigration

International migration is squarely on the present‐day agenda of the international community, as attested by the newly released report of the Global Commission on International Migration (see the Documents section of this issue) and by recurrent controversy over proposals to establish a migration analogue to the World Trade Organization. Conventional assumptions about the prerogatives of national sovereignty come up against universalist views of human rights, the logic of globalization, and, in some measure, the regulative ambitions of international organizations. The last period in which this subject aroused comparable ferment was in the 1920s. At that time the main sources of migrants were not countries of the global “South” but self‐described overpopulated countries in Europe. In May 1924 one such country, Italy, convened what became known as the First International Emigration and Immigration Conference. Held in Rome, the meeting was attended by delegates from 57 countries and the League of Nations. Among its resolutions was an “Emigrants' Charter,” recognizing rights to emigrate and immigrate but with strong provisos. Thus the right to immigrate was subject to restrictions “imposed for economic and social reasons based in particular on the state of the labour market and the necessity of safeguarding the hygienic and moral interests of the country of immigration” (see the Notes on Migration section in Industrial and Labour Information [Geneva], Vol. XI, July‐Sept. 1924, pp. 54–68). A more systematic discussion of these putative rights appeared in an article published a few months earlier by a prominent French jurist, Paul Fauchille, which is excerpted below. The rights to emigrate and to immigrate are seen as broad and fairly symmetrical, able to be limited by a state only by appeal to its own right of self‐preservation. Circumscribing the right to emigrate may seem dated in the light of the blanket provision in Article 13 of the (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” (In Fauchille's extreme case, a state can seek to prohibit the wholesale flight of its population.) However, on immigration, about which the Universal Declaration is silent, “self‐preservation” yields a longer list of grounds for restriction. An issue with contemporary resonance is whether those grounds can include the wish by a state “to prevent a fusion of races which might alter its ethnic character or obliterate its national culture.” Restriction on such a basis would be justified, says Fauchille, only where the intending migrants “belonged to an absolutely different civilisation” and were large in number. Paul Fauchille (1858–1926) was an expert in international law, author of the four‐volume Traité de Droit International Public (8th ed., Paris, 1921–26). He was the founding editor of Revue générale du droit international public and founding director (from 1921) of the Institut des Hautes Études Internationales within the University of Paris. The excerpt below is the major part (subtitled “State and Individual Rights in Theory”) of Fauchille's article “The rights of emigration and immigration,” which appeared in the International Labour Review (Geneva), vol. IX, no. 3 (March 1924), pp. 317–333.     

The Council of Economic Advisers on Work and Retirement Among the Elderly

The 1999 Annual Report of the US council of Economic Advisers (a document of some 450 pages, formally an Annex to the Economic Report of the President Transmitted to the Congress February 1999, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office) addresses some of the questions an aging population raises for the American economy. (Aspects of this topic were also discussed in earlier Council reports; see the Documents section of the March 1996 and June 1997 issues of PDR.) Chapter 4 of the 1999 report is titled “Work, Retirement, and the Economic Well-Being of the Elderly.” The excerpts from this chapter reproduced below provide a summary of the expected future changes in the age distribution of the US population—a result of improving life expectancy and low fertility—and the concomitant marked changes that will characterize the racial and ethnic composition of the elderly. The report notes recent declines in the rate of disability among persons aged 65 and older and discusses changing patterns of retirement and their causes. Despite long-term improvements in health and longevity, the retirement age has fallen rather than risen during the twentieth century. The report suggests, however, that this trend has now run its course, as influenced by the increasing dominance of physically less demanding service-sector jobs, more flexible work schedules (including availability of part-time employment), and changes in persion arrangements.     

An Italian Statement on International Migration

Increasing realization of the implications of persisting below‐replacement fertility in Europe—shrinking absolute numbers combined with a rising proportion of the elderly—is giving new salience to policy considerations regarding immigration in the countries most affected by low fertility. The recent United Nations report on “replacement migration” (see the Documents section in the June 2000 PDR) highlighted the issue through illustrative calculations showing the size of immigrant streams that would be needed for achieving specified demographic targets in selected lowfertility countries, given continuation of present fertility and mortality trends. For example, the UN report suggested that in Italy—which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world—maintaining a constant population over time would require a net influx of some 12.6 million immigrants during the next 50 years, and maintaining a constant labor forceage population (ages 15–64) would require a net inflow of 18.6 million. Yet immigration policy in Western Europe has become increasingly restrictive during the last quartercentury, and the official policy stance that regulating immigration is strictly within the domain of a country's sovereign right has been assiduously maintained. (International treaty obligations qualify that right in the case of bona fide asylum seekers; however, the definition of that category is also subject to the discretion of the receiving countries.) Thus, although within the European Union national borders are open to EU citizens, the power of regulating immigration from outside the EU is retained by the individual countries rather than subject to EU‐wide decisions. Suggestions coming from the developing countries to follow up the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development with an intergovernmental conference on international migration and development were set aside by the potential immigrant‐receiving countries as overly contentious. A statement by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy, Lamberto Dini, delivered at the 55th General Assembly of the United Nations, 13 September 2000, may be a sign of a notable shift in official approaches to immigration policy by at least one EU member state. The statement, in a departure from the practice of touching lightly upon a wide range of issues in international affairs, typical in high‐level ministerial speeches given at that UN forum, is devoted essentially to a single topic: international migration. It characterizes migration “between or within continents” as an international problem and advocates “coordinated and integrated” instruments in seeking a solution. It suggests that “today, with a declining birth rate and an aging population, Europe needs a strategy that embraces the complex process of integrating people from different regions of the world.” The rules for international migration, the statement claims, should be set in a global framework, such as provided by the United Nations. In the “age of globalization,”“a solidarity pact is needed to find the best and most effective way of balancing the supply and demand of labor.” With the omission of opening and closing ceremonial passages and a brief comment on the problem of debt relief, the statement is reproduced below.     

Alan Greenspan on the Economic Implications of Population Aging

At the 2004 annual symposium of central bank leaders sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, devoted his opening remarks on 27 August to a discussion of the economic implications of population aging. The full text of his remarks is reproduced below. Greenspan's high prestige and great influence on US economic policy lend special interest to his views on this much-discussed subject (see also the next Documents item in this issue). He outlines the coming demographic shift in the United States in language that is characteristically cautious and qualified. (The elderly dependency ratio will “almost certainly” rise as the baby boom generation retires, Greenspan says, although elsewhere he terms the process, more accurately, inexorable.) The main factor responsible for population aging he identifies as the decline of fertility. Immigration is an antidote, but, to be effective, its size would have to be much larger than is envisaged in current projections. Greenspan's assessment of the economic consequences of the changing age structure highlights the prospect of a deteriorating fiscal situation in the United States: chronic deficits in the Social Security program over the long haul, assuming that existing commitments for benefits per retiree are met, and even greater difficulties for the health care system for the elderly—Medicare—in which the effects of increasing numbers in old age are amplified by advances in medical technology and the bias inherent in the current system of subsidized third-party payments. The sober outline of policy choices imposed by population aging—difficult in the United States, but less so, Greenspan notes, than in Europe and Japan—underlies the need for counteracting the declining growth of the population of labor force age through greater labor force participation and later retirement. Beyond that, growth of output per worker can provide the key “that would enable future retirees to maintain their expected standard of living without unduly burdening future workers.” This requires continuation of policies that enhance productivity, such as deregulation and globalization, and greater investment. In turn, the latter presupposes greater domestic saving, both personal and by the government, as the United States cannot “continue indefinitely to borrow saving from abroad.” Demographic aging requires a new balance between workers and retirees. Curbing benefits once bestowed is difficult: only benefits that can be delivered should be promised. Public programs should be recalibrated, providing incentives for individuals to adjust to the inevitable consequences of an aging society.     

Mapping Queer Bioethics: Space,Place, and Locality

ABSTRACT

This article, which introduces the special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” begins by offering an overview of the analytical scope of the issue. Specifically, the first half of this essay raises critical questions central to the concept of a space-related queer bioethics, such as: How do we appreciate and understand the special needs of queer parties given the constraints of location, space, and geography? The second half of this article describes each feature article in the issue, as well as the subsequent special sections on the ethics of reading literal, health-related maps (“Cartographies”) and scrutinizing the history of this journal as concerns LGBT health (“Mapping the Journal of Homosexuality”).     

The Council of Economic Advisers on the Changing American Family

The 2000 Annual Report of the US Council of Economic Advisers (a document exceeding 300 pages, formally an Annex to the Economic Report of the President Transmitted to the Congress February 2000, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office) devotes considerable space to a discussion of the demographic and economic changes affecting families in the United States. Excerpts reproduced below from the first part of Chapter 5, titled “The Changing American Family,” examine the relevant trends in a broad historical perspective, drawing on data in some cases spanning the entire twentieth century. The second part of this chapter discusses the “money crunch”: financial constraints “that still burden many families despite the remarkable growth in the American standard of living,” and the “time crunch”: shortage of time devoted to family needs “that results from the increased participation of parents, especially mothers, in the paid labor market.” Policies designed to address these problems are also discussed in the second part of the chapter.     

The IMF on Policies Responding to Demographic Change

In its semiannual report World Economic Outlook, the International Monetary Fund presents its analysis of major economic policy issues and assessment of economic prospects, along with more detailed treatment of a selected current topic. The special topic in the 300-page report published in September 2004 is “The Global Demographic Transition,” treated in Chapter III of the document. An excerpt from the section of that chapter titled “Policies to Meet the Challenges of Global Demographic Change” is reproduced below with the permission of the IMF. Footnotes and the figure included in the excerpt have been renumbered. The title of Chapter III is “How Will Demographic Change Affect the Global Economy?” The tone of the discussion is set by the opening epigraph, a quotation from the UK's 1949 Report of the Royal Commission on Population: “It seems possible that a society in which the proportion of young people is diminishing will become dangerously unprogressive, falling behind other communities not only in technical efficiency and economic welfare, but in intellectual and artistic achievement as well.” Accordingly, the focus of the analysis, like that of the commentary by US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan reprinted in the preceding Document item in this issue, is on the consequences of population aging and on the desirable policy responses to that process. The discussion broadly parallels Greenspan's but with a wider compass, including some consideration of the effects of aging in developing countries. It emphasizes the need for counteracting adverse effects of demographic change through a combination of policy measures, since “the size of the reforms” (such as increasing labor force participation, inducing later retirement, and attracting more immigrants) “that would be needed in any single area [is] sufficiently large that they would be politically and economically difficult to achieve.”     

“Demodystopias”: Prospects of Demographic Hell

Dystopian fiction, stories envisioning dire human futures, originated with the novels of H. G. Wells and others a century ago. “Demodystopias” are a subgenre of dystopias where the imagined futures derive from demographic change, taken perhaps to an extreme: the population explosion, aging and depopulation, mass migration, global epidemics, and the eugenic possibilities of new reproductive technologies. This essay traces the genealogy of demodystopias over the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Their themes reflect the demographic issues of the day: fear of overpopulation in the “population bomb” era; later, threatened societal senescence or swamping by immigrants under ultra‐low fertility; new reproductive regimes under genetic engineering; and the geopolitics of demographic change. As with other dystopias, demodystopias seek to identify present‐day negative tendencies that might lead to a future theatrum diabolorum—and to pin responsibility for such an outcome on ourselves. Authors discussed include Margaret Atwood, Anthony Burgess, Günter Grass, Michel Houellebecq, José Saramago, Lionel Shriver, and Kurt Vonnegut.     

The mommy wars: on the home front and waged abroad

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” published in 2012, generated huge response, well beyond what already has become typical in the intensifying mommy wars in the United States. It also drew considerable attention globally. Within one week of publication, Slaughter’s “lament” attracted a million readers. Slaughter’s explanation of why she quit her high powered job, and then Yahoo’s choice of the then-pregnant Marissa Mayer as its new chief executive, provoked another round of mommy wars. The research reported here on how journalists dealt with the controversy compares the US, with its tradition of heated controversy over working mothers and neoliberal opposition to structural supports for families, and Israel, where attention to Slaughter was somewhat surprising, given the presumption in Israel that mothers will work outside the home. Journalistic discourse in both countries tended to frame the work–home conflict as a women’s issue, to be addressed by women journalists, and not men. Moreover, writers tended to address the issue anecdotally, in terms of personal experience but ignoring structural issues and structural solutions and ignoring how solutions for middle-class professional women or women at the “center” may not work for other kinds of women.     

25 Years On: The State and Continuing Development of LGBTQ Studies Programs

ABSTRACT

This article serves as the introduction to “25 Years On: The State and Continuing Development of LGBTQ Studies Programs.” It begins by placing the current issue in a commemorative context: marking the anniversary of a 1993 special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality dedicated to the emergence of “Gay and Lesbian Studies” and edited by Howard L. Minton. The introduction continues by providing an overview of early phases of academic transformations, primarily in the United States, with notes on particular legacies. This is followed by a brief survey of scholarship published since 1993 that pays particular attention to curricular and pedagogical concerns. It concludes by identifying themes articulated by the essays selected for this issue as well as commentary on their individual, yet richly interrelated, contributions.     

From Bucharest to Mexico: a decade of changing perceptions

The 2nd International Conference on Population held in Mexico City in 1984 had 3 main objectives: 1) to adopt the plan to changing demographic situations, 2) to enlarge the plan's scope so it can consider new views that have emerged since Bucharest, and 3) to reinforce the plan's operational aspects so that the plan can be applied more effectively. The Mexico conference had significant differences with the Bucharest gathering: 1) greater participation of developing countries, 2) clarification of the role of population and family planning in development, and 3) recognition of the status of women in development. Governments of many developing countries argue that they cannot wait for their countries to modernize sufficiently enough to stabilize their population levels. Participants in the Mexico conference agreed that family planning programs have been successful in reducing fertility at relatively low cost. The goal of a development-oriented population policy is to improve the people's standard of living by lowering fertility rates, improving health conditions and life expectancy, improving population distribution, and adopting sound economic policies. The overall objective of population policy should not be confined only to growth, distribution, and other demographic aspects; it is imperative that human life and human dignity be upheld.     

Major Natural Catastrophes, 1950–2001

The organizations with most interest in recording worldwide disaster statistics are humani‐tarian agencies such as the International Red Cross (see its annual World Disasters Report) and the large reinsurance companies. The latter are likely to be more meticulous. The data and the brief text below come from an annual report on natural disasters, Topics 2001, issued in March 2002 by Munich Reinsurance Company (more familiarly known as Munich Re), and are reproduced by permission. The trend in economic losses from “great catastrophes” (those requiring interregional or international assistance) over the last 50 years is strongly upward, as shown in the annual statistics and decadal comparisons. Both total losses and insured losses have been rising, the latter more sharply. An implication is that insurance premiums calculated on the basis of historical experience will underestimate future risks. The trend in disasters mainly results from greater exposure to risk through thegrowth of economies and populations rather than from changes in natural hazards themselves. One exception noted in the report is an increasing likelihood of “extreme precipitation” during hurricanes and other windstorms, which may be associated with global warming‐a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor. (There is no consensus on whether the frequency or intensity of storms is increasing, but there is evidence that they are getting wetter.) Greater allowance will have to be made for flood damage: Hurricane Andrew in the United States in 1992, causing a record $30 billion in estimated total losses, was a relatively “dry” storm‐ and it missed Miami and New Orleans. Munich Re describes 2001 as an “average year” for natural disasters, with an estimated 25,000 fatalities worldwide and total economic losses of some $36 billion. The four events during the year classed as great catastrophes were an earthquake and landslides in El Salvador in January, killing 845 persons; a magnitude 7.7 earthquake in Gujarat in the same month, killing more than 14,000; a hailstorm in Kansas City in April, killing no one but costing the insurance industry $2 billion; and Tropical Storm Allison in June, in which 72 m of rain over 12 hoursjlooded Houston, Texas, causing about $6 billion in total losses‐ “the costliest non‐hurricane of all time.” A recurrent concern of Topics 2001 is the problem of what are termed unidentified loss potentials. These are low‐risk but high‐loss events, exemplified by the 1999 Taiwan earth‐quake, which had an estimated return period of 10,000–100.000 years (or, more exotically, by the remote chance but catastrophic eflect o f a large meteorite impact‐the subject of one section of the report). Other kinds of hard‐to‐calculate loss potentials are related to unanticipated chains of events leading to or following from a disaster. The September terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center, although unambiguously man‐made and thus not treated in the report, has been a further stimulus to wide‐angled thinking on loss potentials. It demonstrates the broad scope of worst‐case scenarios that now have to be considered by under‐writers who must seek to eliminate “the ‘bare patches’ on the ‘risk landscape.’” The full report is available online at http://www.munichre.com/pdf/topics~2001‐e.pdf     

Openings: On the Journal of Homosexuality,Volume 1, Issue 1

ABSTRACT

This article serves as one of the supplementary pieces of this special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” in which we take a solipsistic turn to “map” the Journal of Homosexuality itself. Here, the author examines Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Journal of Homosexuality and asks whether the journal’s first contributors might reveal a historically problematic relationship whereby the categories of front-line LGBT health advocates in the 1970s might be incommensurate with the post-AIDS, queer politics that would follow in decades to come.     

Reshaping Time: Recommendations for Suicide Prevention in LBGT Populations

ABSTRACT

This article serves as one of the supplementary pieces of this special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” in which we take a solipsistic turn to “map” the Journal of Homosexuality itself. Here, the author examines the journal’s 2011 consensus recommendations for the prevention of LGBT suicide. Invoking the axiom approach of Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s seminal Epistemology of the Closet, the author argues that merely offering practical guidelines at the level of the demonstrative and the instructive may not be sufficient models to address the urgency of suicide rates in LGBTQ youth populations.     

The US National Intelligence Council on the Changing Geopolitical Landscape

The National Intelligence Council, a body reporting to the Director of National Intelligence, draws on expertise from within and outside the US intelligence community to assess strategic developments bearing on national security. In addition to its classified reports (notably the National Intelligence Estimates) the Council also issues unclassified versions of some of its work. In December 2004 it released a report, Mapping the Global Future, the outcome of a year‐long study known as the 2020 Project, looking at geopolitical trends in the world over the medium term. Robert L. Hutchings, the NIC's then chairman, writes in a preface that this report “offers a range of possibilities and potential discontinuities, as a way of opening our minds to developments we might otherwise miss.” It differs from a preceding NIC exercise, Global Trends 2015 (2000), in the wider range of experts consulted—preparatory workshops were conducted in a number of countries—and in the heavier store it places on formal scenario development. While the underlying scenario‐building techniques employed are not spelled out in the document (some are described elsewhere on the NIC's website), four specific “fictional scenarios” are selected to enliven the report: Davos World—illustrating “how robust economic growth, led by China and India, … could reshape the globalization process”; Pax Americana—“how US predominance may survive the radical changes to the global political landscape and serve to fashion a new and inclusive global order”; A New Caliphate—“how a global movement fueled by radical religious identity politics could constitute a challenge to Western norms and values as the foundation of the global system”; and Cycle of Fear—proliferation of weaponry and terrorism “to the point that large‐scale intrusive security measures are taken to prevent outbreaks of deadly attacks, possibly introducing an Orwellian world.” (The quotes are from the report's executive summary.) The excerpt reproduced below comprises the section of the report headed “Rising Powers: The Changing Geopolitical Landscape,” omitting text boxes and charts. The summary table appended is taken from the beginning of the document. The full report is available at http://www.cia.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020.html .     

Frank Fetter on Population Versus Prosperity

How population change affects human welfare was a central concern of economists during the decades that followed publication of Malthus's Essay. But from the middle of the nineteenth century, continuing for some one hundred years, population issues played a marginal role in economics, with leading figures of that discipline, particularly in the New World, turning their attention to the topic only episodically. The presidential address delivered by Frank Fetter to the American Economic Association in 1913 is a notable example of such attention. Frank Albert Fetter (1863–1949), much of whose career was spent as professor on the faculty of Princeton University, was a prominent economic theorist of the early decades of the twentieth century and author, among numerous other works, of the influential texts Principles of Economics (1904) and its two-volume successors, Economic Principles (1915) and Modern Economic Problems (1916 and 1922). Population was an early interest of Fetter's, as is shown by the topic of his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote, after studies at Indiana University, Cornell, and the Sorbonne, at the University of Halle (Versuch einer Bevölkerungslehre ausgehend von einer Kritik des Malthus'schen Bevölkerungsprincips, Jena: G. Fischer, 1894). His address to the AEA recalls that interest, looking back on the decade ending in 1910, a period of rapid population increase in the United States, fueled by heavy immigration. In the first part of the address, Fetter offers insightful comments on Malthus's novel humanitarian and democratic formulation of the population problem and on the contrasting demographic situation between Europe and the United States. But with the closing of the land frontier he sees American exceptionalism coming to an end, as the economic forces—abundant natural resources and progress in science and the “technical arts”—that heretofore counteracted the depressing effect of population growth on wages “have spent themselves.” At a time when the US population was about one-third of its present size, he argued that “we have passed the point of diminishing returns in the relation of our population to our resources.” Therefore “it is high time to revise the optimistic American doctrine of population.” To control “the fate and fortunes of the children of this and future generations,” the US would need a policy of conserving natural resources and retarding the increase of population. Of the two components of population growth—natural increase and immigration—only the latter is “controllable in large measure by legislative action.” Fetter thus devotes the second part of his address to a discussion of the effects of immigration on the American economy. His line of argument closely parallels an influential strand in the contemporary US debate on that issue. In the first decade of the century, the population of the United States grew by some 16 million and the number of immigrants was nearly 9 million. Fetter sees the potential for further immigration as nearly limitless, given an open-door policy. The motive to migrate to the United States would not cease “until real wages in America are leveled down to those of the most impoverished populations permitted to enter our ports.” Yet reducing American prosperity would afford “no permanent relief to the overcrowded lands,” as “natural increase quickly fills the ranks of an impoverished peasantry.” While unrestricted immigration is against the interest of the mass of the people, conflicting interests, ideas, and sentiments paralyze remedial action: individual or class advantage comes before consideration of the “larger national welfare.” Unless immigration is restricted, Americans may find “that they have bartered the peace and security of their children for the pleasures of a brief season.” The text of Fetter's address is reproduced below in full from American Economic Review, vol. 3, no. 1: Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, March 1913.