straight talk
MARK BARNES: Lessons on immigration from Six Nations rugby
Best to accept the influx of migrants and find the best way to make it work
Globalisation used to be all the rage, and for good reason. Cross-border trade and the accompanying flows of goods and services, capital, and people and ideas, seems to have done the world economy the world of good. All the right trends have been upwards, fuelling growth in trade world GDP. That is until the return of protectionism, until the election of Donald Trump. Ironically, the success of the US economy is largely attributable to European immigrants, fleeing from persecution n their home countries. Protectionism and globalisation are clearly counterforces. Although the effect is initially felt in trade, at some point the divide becomes wide enough to start murmurs of war. Once the US chose to set aside the nuclear arms treaty, the Russian response was predictable. Never mind nuclear disarmament, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would start building previously banned weapons, and certainly wouldn’t be the first to engage in future nuclear arms control. At the limit, this sc...
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