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A New Saipan

Here’s the latest dispatch from the global marketplace. Dozens of Vietnamese women working in a sweatshop in American Samoa were beaten, deprived of food and not paid minimum wages as they carried out their assigned role in our great borderless economy. The workers were making clothes for a Ko

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The Family Business

Last summer, after the Republican National Convention made history by nominating the son of a former president as its standard-bearer, the writer Andrew Sullivan raised an issue that only now is beginning to make its way onto op-ed pages. How was it, Sullivan wondered, that in a supposedly meritocra

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Immigration and the Borderless Economy

Nobody seems quite sure what the immigrant-returning immigrant ratio might be today, but I suspect it is higher than most people might think. Labor is following the lead of capitalit is fickle, it follows the market, and it is decidedly unsentimental. To cite just one example: thousands of Irish imm

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Not Just Balloons and Funny Hats

Is there a public institution in America more reviled than our national political conventions? (Picking on Congress doesn’t count.) Every four years the punditry class informs us that conventions are little more than glorified political commercials, which enlightened people ought to avoid for

Posted inArts & Culture, Columns

Marching Season

This year’s parades will be a test of the great new arrangement in Northern Ireland. The new power-sharing government is back in business in Belfast, and one day people will find it hard to believe that it could be otherwise. In that perhaps not-so-distant day, full-fledged citizens of the thi

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