“Sovereignties” at Vanderbilt

[Here, somewhat belatedly, is the announcement of "Sovereignties," the Vanderbilt History Seminar this academic year.]

The theme of “sovereignties” offers [the Vanderbilt History Seminar] an opportunity to examine forms of power over a vast temporal and geographic terrain, from the most ancient kingdoms and empires to the modern nation-state. From this perspective, this theme will allow us to engage with fresh and exciting work in political, intellectual, and social history, much of it stimulated by living through an era of global history in which the borders and powers of nation-states have become deeply unsettled.  This unsettling has prompted interest in other kinds of polities across history—empires, city states, confederacies, and tribes—and how they have exercised control over their territory and peoples. It has also generated interested in the deployment of power by groups living “in between” territorially demarcated polities, both on land and at sea. We intend to explore the meanings of sovereignty and power in these borderlands and international maritime zones. And we will be keen to connect our interest in sovereignty to recent work on the break up of colonial empires, the formation of post-colonial and post-independence states, and the religious, ethnic, and racial identities that flourished in these political spaces.

Issues of sovereignty raise intellectual and social questions as well as political ones. We are interested in how different societies and legal regimes have defined sovereignty over time. We will chart how medieval polities began to distinguish the rights of rulers and subjects, and of “superior” and “inferior” groups, in varying parts of a domain, and how such distinctions congealed over time into early modern discourses about “sovereignty.” We will explore the ideologies and practices of “popular sovereignty” launched by the Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And we will inquire into attempts made by rulers, from absolute monarchs to ordinary heads of families, across a broad array of state and non-state polities, to exercise sovereign power over the persons and, in many cases, the actual bodies of those who comprised their households.  Thinking about “household sovereignty” will make gender and reproduction key categories of our historical exploration.

Sovereignty raises questions, finally, not just about political power and patriarchal rule but also about mastery over the self. Self-rule, virtue, and a capacity for independence have been foundational elements of republicanism wherever it has appeared (ancient Greece and Rome, early modern Italian city states, eighteenth-century France, British America and Spanish America); on the other hand, a wide variety of discourses across history, from the theological to the medical and psychological, have challenged this vision of the autonomous, knowing, and disciplined self.  We will use the opportunity afforded by the sovereignty theme to explore varying conceptions of personhood across time and space.

[Participants and papers after the jump.]
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CFP for LSA: Colonial Law around the Indian Ocean

[We have the following CFP.]

We seek panelists for the 2014 Law and Society Association meeting in Minneapolis (May 29-June 1) for a panel entitled Colonial Law around the Indian Ocean. We are looking for scholars interested in colonial law around the Indian Ocean littoral, including East Africa, Persian Gulf, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. We are particularly interested in papers that probe legal classifications, different understandings of imperial and/or indigenous legal knowledge, and related topics. Our panel currently comprises one paper that would explore legal classification of Arabs in the Netherlands Indies and another that would focus on colonial versus metropolitan classifications of legal knowledge and legal conceptions of publicity in the French Indian Ocean colonies.

If you're interested in joining our panel, please contact both Laurie Wood at lmwood2@wisc.edu and Fadzilah Yahaya at nyahaya@wustl.edu before October 7.

Trials for International Crimes in Asia

We have an announcement for the conference, "Trials for International Crimes in Asia," hosted by the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, on October, 17-18, 2013.  According to the announcement, the conference

will examine the legal issues arising from the tribunals convened in Asia to deal with crimes of international import - namely, aggression, war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. It will consider both tribunals that have been established on the initiative of Asian governments and tribunals mounted in Asia at the behest of non-Asian governments or international organisations. In keeping with the legal theme, it will lay particular stress on the different modes of liability developed within these courts' respective jurisdictions - among them, joint criminal enterprise, command responsibility, complicity, and defences against them.

Over a seven-decade time-span, many tribunals have been convened in the region, from the earliest, established in Manila and Tokyo after the Second World War, to the latest, currently hearing cases in Phnom Penh and Dhaka. During the intervening years, lesser-known trials were also mounted by the colonial powers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Batavia, Saigon and elsewhere; by the Guomindang and People's Republic of China in the early Cold War period; and by the Vietnamese authorities after Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s. Beyond the historical-political analysis, the conference aims to draw substantive conclusions about the legal legacy of these tribunals, and appraise the mechanisms evolving in Asia today, either at the 'hybrid' internationalised tribunals or within national systems.

Places are limited. For further details, please email: cals@nus.edu.sg.  The registration form is here.  The schedule appears after the jump.
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Sexual Violence against Women in Asia

In a recent article in the Graphic Details section of The Economist, it was reported that more than ten percent of surveyed men in six Asian nations said that they raped a woman who was not there partner and that number rose to nearly twenty-five percent if their partners were included. This finding is based on data from a UN study to assess the number of rapes which occur in the Asian region and was published in the Lancet Journal of Global Health.

The survey was administered from January, 2011 to December, 2012 to men ages 18 through 49 who lived in six Asian nations,Cambodia, China, Sri Lanka, Bangledesh, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia. The interviews were done in a  face-to-face manner and the men were ask about their sexual behaviors. The men were asked if they had ever "forced a woman who was not your wife or girlfriend at the time to have sex" or if they “had sex with a woman who was too drunk or drugged to indicate whether she wanted it," but the word "rape" was never used in the interview.

Read more:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/09/daily-chart-7?spc=scode&spv=xm&ah=9d7f7ab945510a56fa6d37c30b6f1709
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail
http://www.economist.com/
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(13)70069-X/fulltext
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/latestcontent

New Release: Flaherty, "Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan"

The Harvard University Asia Center has released Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2013), by Darryl E. Flaherty (University of Delaware). A description from the publisher:

Long ignored by historians and repudiated in their time, practitioners of private law opened the way toward Japan’s legal modernity. From the seventeenth to the turn of the twentieth century, lawyers and their predecessors changed society in ways that first samurai and then the state could not. During the Edo period (1600–1868), they worked from the shadows to bend the shogun’s law to suit the market needs of merchants and the justice concerns of peasants. Over the course of the nineteenth century, legal practitioners changed law from a tool for rule into a new epistemology and laid the foundation for parliamentary politics during the Meiji era (1868–1912).

This social and political history argues that legal modernity sprouted from indigenous roots and helped delineate a budding nation’s public and private spheres. Tracing the transition of law regimes from Edo to Meiji, Darryl E. Flaherty shows how the legal profession emerged as a force for change in modern Japan and highlights its lasting contributions in founding private universities, political parties, and a national association of lawyers that contributed to legal reform during the twentieth century.

Ramnath on the Criminal Jury in Colonial India

Kalyani Ramnath, a graduate student in the Department of History at Princeton University, has published The Colonial Difference between Law and Fact: Notes on the Criminal Jury in India, which appears in the (gated) Indian Economic & Social History Review (July 2013) 50: 341-363.  Here is the abstract:

This article tracks the rise and fall of criminal jury in colonial India through official and non-official debates, discussions and interventions. The discussion on criminal juries in the Anglo-American system has typically focused on the division of legal labour between judge and jury. In colonial India, this conventional difference between ‘law’ and ‘fact’ were shaped by notions of belonging to a different race, religion and language. These were frequently articulated as the story of the ‘unreliable’ juror or the ‘religious’ native who feared eternal damnation. From the jurors who were allegedly intoxicated by the publicity over the infamous Nanavati trial to women jurors who claimed to be followed on the way home from court, to the religious Brahmin juror who would not swear an oath, the story of the criminal jury is peopled with anxieties over undesirable forms of influence, that impinge on legal impartiality. Using the criminal jury as a lens, I look at the claims of universal legal reform as particularly lending themselves to contestations over sovereignty.

Welcome to the Blogosphere: History and the Law

A hearty welcome to the blogosphere to History and the Law, the brainchild of Rohit De, a legal historian of South Asia and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge, and Fei-Hsien Wang, a legal historian of modern China.  They describe their project as “a set of digital resources for legal historians, particularly those working on the non-Western world.”  They are creating an online directory of scholars, and their directory of digital resources already has two curated section.  One focuses on ways of reading primary legal sources; the other consists of conversations with legal historians whose books have recently been published: Rachel Sturman, Mitra Sharafi, and Issa Husin.

The Political Economy of Transnational Tax Reform

Just out from the Cambridge University Press is The Political Economy of Transnational Tax Reform: The Shoup Mission to Japan in Historical Context, edited by W. Elliot Brownlee, University of California, Santa Barbara, Eisaku Ide, Keio University, Tokyo, and Yasunori Fukagai, Yokohama National University, Japan.  Cambridge explains:

This volume of essays explores the history of the U.S. tax mission to Japan during the occupation following World War II. Under General MacArthur, economist Carl S. Shoup led the mission with the charge of framing a tax system for Japan designed to strengthen democracy and accelerate economic recovery. The volume examines the sources, conduct, and effects of the mission and situates the mission within the history of international financial and fiscal reform. The book begins by establishing the context of progressive social investigations of taxation, including Shoup's earlier tax missions to France and Cuba. It then goes on to explore the Japanese background to the Shoup mission and the process by which American and Japanese tax experts shaped their recommendations. The book then assesses and explains the mission's accomplishments in the context of the political economies of the United States and Japan. It concludes by analyzing the global implications of the mission, which became iconic among international tax reformers.

TOC after the jump.
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Krishnan et al. on Access to Justice in India

Jayanth K. Krishnan, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, et al., have posted Grappling at the Grassroots: Litigant-Efforts to Access Economic and Social Rights in India, which is forthcoming in volume 27 of the Harvard Human Rights Journal (2014).  Here is the abstract:    

How do courts at the grassroots level in India approach and address economic and other civil litigation cases brought by litigants? During 2010, 2011, and 2012, a team of researchers from academia and civil society organizations conducted extensive ethnographies of litigants, judges, lawyers, and courtroom personnel within multiple districts in three states: Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, and Maharashtra. The research below provides an in-depth account of the everyday struggles these actors face in the pursuit of their respective objectives. As the findings suggest, there exists a complex matrix of variables that affect: whether lawsuits are filed in the first place; how they are handled once in a legal forum; what legal strategies lawyers employ when litigation occurs; and how cases are adjudicated by judges. The results of this study offer competing, yet also complimentary, narratives. On the one hand, there is immense despair, frustration, and anger among the various sets of respondents on the current state of legal life at the grassroots. At the same time, however, there is a surprising level of hope and optimism towards what the law and the lower courts can potentially – and at times do – offer. This sentiment, as we show, is held by those working within this environment, and more significantly, by litigants desperately seeking to gain relief from long-endured grievances.

Siddique on the Continuing Influence of Colonialism on Law Reform in Pakistan

Out soon from in Cambridge Studies in Law and Society is Pakistan's Experience with Formal Law: An Alien Justice, by Osama Siddique, an associate professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences.  Here is the press’s description:

Law Reform in Pakistan attracts such disparate champions as the Chief Justice of Pakistan, the USAID and the Taliban. Common to their equally obsessive pursuit of 'speedy justice' is a remarkable obliviousness to the historical, institutional and sociological factors that alienate Pakistanis from their formal legal system. This pioneering book highlights vital and widely neglected linkages between the 'narratives of colonial displacement' resonant in the literature on South Asia's encounter with colonial law and the region's post-colonial official law reform discourses. Against this backdrop, it presents a typology of Pakistani approaches to law reform and critically evaluates the IFI funded single-minded pursuit of 'efficiency' during the last decade. Employing diverse methodologies it proceeds to provide empirical support for a widening chasm between popular, at times violently expressed, aspirations for justice and democratically deficient reform designed in distant IFI headquarters that is entrusted to the exclusive and unaccountable Pakistani 'reform club.'

As Professor Siddique further explains, "[T]he book endeavors to present a new typology and framework for analyzing the literature on India's experience of colonial law and traces post-colonial India and Pakistan's approaches to the formal legal system and law reform while adhering to colonial legal structures and norms."

Ruskola's "Legal Orientalism"

Teemu Ruskola, Emory Law, has just published Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law, with the Harvard University Press:

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day.

The first Sino–U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish–American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late-nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.

TOC here; blurbs after the jump.

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Ruskola on "The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty"

Teemu Ruskola, Emory University School of Law, has posted Canton is Not Boston: The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty, which originally appeared in the American Quarterly: 57 (September 2005): 859-84.  Here is the abstract:

Although the United States began its international legal career in 1776 as an outlaw, a rebel against the European legal order, it soon established itself as a juridical equal among the so-called Family of Nations, consisting of “civilized” European states. Yet it is a remarkable historical fact that when the British launched the Opium War in 1839 to coerce China to participate in free trade (freedom of trade not including the right not to buy opium), most Americans sided with the Chinese, against the British. With confiscated British opium being flushed into the Canton harbor, the events echoed the still not-so-distant Boston Tea Party — two heroic acts of struggle against British imperial interventions in trade, in China and America, respectively. However, after China was indeed successfully opened for “free trade” at the end of the Opium War, in 1844 President Tyler sent the first American minister to China to negotiate a trade treaty that would create a framework for American participation in the that trade as well as the basis of the United States’ political and legal relations with China until 1943. Tyler’s plenipotentiary Caleb Cushing — a New England lawyer as well as future U.S. Attorney General — ended up exceeding his instructions and (with the backing of gunboats), negotiating an extraordinary Treaty of Peace, Trade, and Amity which ultimately placed China in a semi-colonial relationship vis-à-vis the United States. Most notably, the Treaty of Wanghia of 1844 gave Americans the privilege of extraterritoriality: even while on sovereign Chinese territory, American citizens would not be subject to “despotic” Chinese law, until such time that the Chinese had created a “civilized” (i.e., modern liberal) legal regime. This article tells the little-known story of the beginnings of Sino-American legal relations and of the foundation it laid for the emergence of an extraterritorial empire of U.S. law in the Asia Pacific, ultimately ranging from China to Japan, Korea to Siam, Borneo to Tonga, and beyond. Long before the United States came to practice European-style territorial imperialism at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War 1898, the United States became a global leader in the institutionalization of a kind of legal imperialism in the Orient. In addition to analyzing the history of U.S. extraterritorial jurisdiction in Asia, this article outlines the changing global claims to sovereignty among Europe, the United States, and China over the course of the nineteenth century.

L&HR 31:2 (May 2013)

Law and History Review’s 31:2 issue (May 2013) is up on the Cambridge Journals website.  Here are the articles

Protective Labor Legislation in the Courts: Substantive Due Process and Fairness in the Progressive Era, by Claudio J. Katz

Constitutional Principle, Partisan Calculation, and the Beveridge Child Labor Bill, by Logan Everett Sawyer

“Equals of the White Man”: Prosecution of Settlers for Violence Against Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown, Colonial Western Australia, by Amanda Nettelbeck

Jews or Germans? Nationality Legislation and the Restoration of Liberal Democracy in Western Europe after the Holocaust, by David Fraser and Frank Caestecker

“Our Militancy is in Our Openness”: Gay Employment Rights Activism in California and the Question of Sexual Orientation in Sex Equality Law, by Katherine Turk

Book reviews after the jump.
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Dorsett and McVeigh on Salmond and the Persona of the Jurist

Shaunnagh Dorsett, University of Technology, Sydney, Law, and Shaun McVeigh, Melbourne Law School, have posted The Persona of the Jurist in Salmond's Jurisprudence: On the Exposition of 'What Law is...,” which appeared in the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 38 (2007).  Here is the abstract:   

If Sir John Salmond is taken as being an inaugural or founding father of not only a law school, but also of a New Zealand jurisprudence, two questions arise: What might have been inherited from Salmond's jurisprudence? And, How might that inheritance be received today? This article offers a response to these questions by considering Salmond's jurisprudence in terms of a conduct of life organised around the office and persona of the jurist.

Sharafi on Parsi Legal Culture

Over at Mitra Sharafi’s South Asian Legal History Resources, Professor Sharafi, Wisconsin Law, has posted a pointer to an audiorecording of her presentation in the spring of 2011 to the University of Wisconsin’s Center for South Asia on her forthcoming book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947.

States and Jurisdiction: Three Essays

During April, Comparative Studies in Society and History is providing access to three essays, each of which treat how states make jurisdictions and how people manage or fail to work around them.

Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire by Eric Lewis Beverly

Nineteenth-century European colonialism produced a textured and uneven legal terrain rather than homogeneous imperial units. The fragmentation of sovereignty between empires and subordinated states created frontier zones that unsettled the workings of governance. This article views the developing landscape of power in high colonial South Asia from the loosely controlled frontier zone between Hyderabad, a Princely State ruled by sovereign Muslim dynasts titled Nizams, and the Bombay Presidency, part of Britain's Indian Empire, or Raj. I argue that the heterogeneous legal terrain along the border was a useful resource for administrators and subjects. State officials of both Hyderabad and Bombay justified various projects there; subjects of the two states shopped forums in a legal pluralist environment; and populations on either side of the border whose livelihoods and political agendas ran afoul of social pressures or the economic and cultural imperatives of state projects fled there from adversity. I examine cases of alleged cattle rustlers, bandits, and prostitutes and their engagements with police and courts to explore the political challenges and possibilities the frontier offered different groups. Colonial attempts to extend racialized policing practices across the frontier were frequently met by machinations of marginal people trying to avoid imprisonment or extricate themselves from oppressive social structures. Such figures could use the ambiguity of frontier legal authority to their advantage. The picture that emerges is one of a brute and often-arbitrary colonial power offset by alternative malleable sovereignties that resourceful subjects could play against one another.

Jurisdictional Borderlands: Extraterritoriality and "Legal Chameleons" in Precolonial Alexandria, 1840-1870 by Ziad Fahmy

This essay highlights the role of thousands of nineteenth-century Alexandrian residents with multiple extraterritorial legal identities. The manner with which extraterritoriality was practiced in Egypt effectively gave Western consulates legal jurisdiction not only over their citizens but also over all those able, through whatever means, to acquire protégé status. Many Alexandrians acquired legal protection from multiple consulates, shifting their legal identities in order to maximize their immediate social and economic interests. These legal realities present historians with the dilemma of how to account for and “classify” this highly flexible and syncretic society. I strive to answer this question through the use of a borderland lens. Realizing that the heart of Egypt's borderland society was legal has led me to consider the concept of “jurisdictional borderland” as a productive method for examining the complexity of Egypt's nineteenth-century heterogeneous population. I define a jurisdictional borderland as a significant contact zone where there are multiple, often competing legal authorities and where some level of jurisdictional ambiguity exists. Jurisdictional borderlanders have their own unique and independent agenda that often conflicts with many of the competing “national” or imperial positions. Without an allegiance to any single government—be it Egyptian, Ottoman, or Western—and living in a peripheral environment with multiple, separate, and often competing “national” institutions, these borderlanders thrived in the jurisdictional spaces created in between multiple authorities. I conclude by suggesting how a jurisdictional borderland lens is useful for globally investigating other colonial and precolonial cities, many of which had similar extraterritorial legal systems.

Turk and Jew in Berlin: The First Turkish Migration to Germany and the Shoah by Marc David Baer

 In this paper I critically examine the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explore the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examine Turkey's relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I show how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, Turkish and German anti-Semitism, and Turks and Jews are. Bringing together the histories of individual Turkish citizens who were Jewish or Dönme (descendants of Jews) in Nazi Berlin with the history of Jews in Turkey, I argue the categories “Turkish” and “Jewish” were converging identities in the Third Reich. Untangling them was a matter of life and death. I compare the fates of three neighbors in Berlin: Isaak Behar, a Turkish Jew stripped of his citizenship by his own government and condemned to Auschwitz; Fazli Taylan, a Turkish citizen and Dönme, whom the Turkish government exerted great efforts to save; and Eric Auerbach, a German Jew granted refuge in Turkey. I ask what is at stake for Germany and Turkey in remembering the narrative of the very few German Jews saved by Turkey, but in forgetting the fates of the far more numerous Turkish Jews in Nazi-era Berlin. I conclude with a discussion of the political effects today of occluding Turkish Jewishness by failing to remember the relationship between the first Turkish migration to Germany and the Shoah.

Kim, "The Story of the Tattooed Lady"

The Fall 2012 issue of Law & Social Inquiry includes "The Story of the Tattooed Lady: Scandal and the Colonial State in British Burma," by Diana Kim (Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago). Here's the abstract:

This article centers on Branded Woman v. Unknown, an unusual 1889 trial that gave birth to the “ordinarily accepted significance” of Burmese tattoos. What began as a snippet of gossip from a colonial village became a scandal involving the highest echelon of Britain's metropolis. I explain why this dynamic of escalation occurred and how colonial officials in Burma utilized a courtroom to transform tenuous fictions of tattooing into a seemingly coherent fact about Burma. My argument that this process—shaped through cues from a fragmented audience of peers (rather than a single audience of subordinates)—represents the production of an elite public transcript highlights how colonial scandals worked as eventful moments for an always precarious state to reconfigure its claim to power by prompting local agents to enact expressions of certainty. It further carries implications for scholarship on symbolic state power and the construction of legal facts and public knowledge.

Subscribers to the journal may access the full article here.

The Changing Face of the Catholic Population Around the World

In light of the recently announced resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published an analysis detailing how the distribution of Catholics has drastically changed over time. In 1910, 65% of the Catholic population could be found in Europe, while only 24% of Catholics resided in Latin America and the Caribbean, and less than 1% lived in Sub-Saharan Africa. By 2010, the Catholic population significantly decreased in Europe but increased in the developing world. As of 2010, 39% of Catholics lived in Latin America and the Caribbean, followed by 24% in Europe, and 16% in Sub-Saharan Africa. Interestingly, the distribution of Catholics has remained stable in North Africa and the Middle-East over the past 100 years. In 1910, less than 1% of Catholics resided in the Middle East-North African region, and a century later the percentage of Catholics in the region still remains under 1%.

Upon examining the percentage of Catholics within each region, the Pew Research Center also found that Catholics overwhelmingly dominated Latin America. Nearly 72% of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean is Catholic, followed by 35% in Europe, 26% in North America, 21% in Sub-Saharan Africa, 3% in the Asia-Pacific region, and 2% in the Middle East.

U.S. Immigrant Population Continues to Grow

According to Pew Research Center, the immigrant population in the United States was 40.4 million, a record high for the country.  In 2011, the 13% of immigrants living in the United States was slightly lower than the nation's peak at 15%, which occurred between 1890 and 1920.  The 40.4 million immigrants in the United States are distinctly comprised of Latin Americans (50%) and Asians (27%), as opposed to the influx of European immigrants in the period between 1890 and 1920.

The population of unauthorized immigrants, a segment of the 40.4 million immigrants in the United States, were down slightly since 2007, from 12 million to 11.1 in 2011.  Highlighting other trends relating to unauthorized immigration, Pew links to further analysis in other articles, which can be found here.

More Chinese Women in Labor Force than Indian Women

Recent findings released by Gallupindicate that China’s female labor force participation rate (70%) is significantly greater than India’s (25%).  Not only are Indian women less likely to be present in their country’s labor force than Chinese women, women in India’s labor force are three times more likely to be unemployed (with an unemployment rate of 15%) than their Chinese counterparts (with an unemployment rate of 5%). Furthermore, women in China are nearly twice as likely to be employed full-time than women in India (21% verses 11%).  In addition, 53% of highly educated Chinese women reportedly hold a “good job” whereas only 17% of Indian women who received tertiary education maintain a “good job”.  There are also significant discrepancies in the literacy rates of Chinese females (91%) and the Indian females (50%).   In sum, Chinese women are much more likely to receive even a basic education than Indian women, and, among Chinese and Indian women who receive higher education, Chinese women are much more likely to find full-time employment. While the Chinese economy (with a 9% growth rate) is currently out-performing India’s economy, (with a 6.8% growth rate) China’s growth is expected to stall due to low fertility rates and an aging population. On the other hand, India’s population of working-aged citizens is expected to steadily increase until about 2030 and this can lead to major economic growth if India encourages greater female labor force participation.