YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: POPULATION-TRENDS

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION Governments throughout the world made renewed efforts in 1995 to reduce the number of arrivals of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. In the U.S. the anti-immigrant backlash that had been reflected in the results of the November 1994 elections continued to be a major political theme. Patrick Buchanan, a candidate for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, made the curbing of immigration part of his message of economic nationalism. Opposition to immigration also had been part of the message of California Gov. Pete Wilson, whose state had voted in 1994 to deny illegal aliens access to medical and social services. Wilson's presidential campaign quickly failed because of his inability to raise the funds needed to continue. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) fortified the Mexican border with additional floodlights and steel fences and introduced more sophisticated computer and tracking technology. More than $500 million had been budgeted in 1994 by the Clinton administration to halt illegal crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border. The assessments after one year were mixed, with arrests declining in some areas and rising in others. It became known in 1995 that the U.S. had been granting asylum to Mexicans. This tacit recognition of political repression in Mexico was a further cause of tension between the governments of the two countries. The INS also streamlined procedures to expedite the deportation of unqualified asylum seekers. More than 147,000 asylum applications were filed during the year, the largest numbers coming from Guatemalans and Salvadorans. The Republican-controlled Congress in September introduced bills that would crack down on illegal immigration and reduce, for the first time since 1924, the number of foreigners allowed to enter the U.S. The Congress proposed, among other measures, to cut legal immigration by one-third and reduce by one-half the number of people granted political asylum. These proposals came under attack not only from groups that had long supported the rights of immigrants but, more unexpectedly, from businessmen who claimed they needed to bring into the country workers, such as computer programmers, who supplemented the insufficient number of U.S. citizens with these skills. The number of asylum applications submitted in Western Europe during 1994 dropped to 320,000 from 550,000 in 1993. The largest reduction was recorded in Germany, where 127,000 applications were received, compared with 323,000 a year earlier. Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland all reported significantly fewer applicants. Only The Netherlands and the United Kingdom experienced significant increases. The reductions resulted primarily from the introduction of more restrictive immigration and asylum regulations that were designed to deny entry to foreign nationals originating or arriving from safe countries in Central and Eastern Europe. In response, trafficking in illegal immigrants increased. Romania and Bulgaria were believed to be the most common entry point for illegals from Africa and Asia, while immigrants from Central Asia generally moved from Moscow through the Baltic states, and into Scandinavia. European police agencies were concerned about the growing involvement of international criminal syndicates in these operations. A report by the U.K. Home Office immigration intelligence service claimed that the British government's "light touch" policy on visitors from other European countries had led to massive welfare fraud costing millions of pounds. Rapid social and economic change in China, particularly in the coastal provinces Fujian and Guangdong, continued to spur a major exodus of international migrants. The total number of Chinese living illegally in other countries was estimated to have reached at least 500,000. In April 1994 the U.S. State Department estimated that 100,000 illegal Chinese immigrants would enter the U.S. during the year, many of them transported by criminal syndicates and other professional smugglers. The movement of Vietnamese boat people to the countries of Southeast Asia came to an effective halt in 1994 as a result of improved economic and political conditions within Vietnam and declining opportunities for resettlement in the West. In 1994, of the roughly 52,000 Vietnamese citizens who legally emigrated by using assistance from an internationally supervised Orderly Departure Program, the vast majority went to the U.S. Some 13,000 Vietnamese boat people returned to their homeland in 1994, about half of them from Hong Kong. More than 40,000, however, remained in camps throughout Southeast Asia at the end of the year. South Africa, which completed its transition to majority rule in 1994, was confronted very quickly with a growing influx of immigrants from such less prosperous and stable countries as Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Zaire. The number of illegal immigrants in South Africa stood at some two million; many of them were unskilled workers who provided cheap and nonunion labour. This caused growing public concern about the social and economic impact of the new arrivals, which the South African government responded to by deporting over 90,000 foreigners in 1994. (JEFF CRISP) RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS Worldwide, the catalog of race and ethnic problems continued to be long and grim in 1995.