12/01/2012

[yoon.]

Signs Multiply of a Serious Slump in Britain

By JULIA WERDIGIER

Published: January 12, 2012

LONDON — A profit warning Thursday from Tesco, Britain’s largest retailer by sales, was the latest sign that the British economy might be heading for a recession — or might be there already.

Tesco warned that profit growth in the coming year would be “minimal” after a disappointing holiday season. The chain, which is the world’s third-largest retailer after Wal-Mart Stores and Carrefour, said it was caught by surprise by consumers’ reluctance to spend and by aggressive price cuts at competitors.

The profit warning shocked some investors used to stellar earnings reports from the supermarket chain. Tesco shares fell 16 percent in London.

The warning also heightened concerns about profitability in the retail sector in Britain and across Europe as consumers, fearful of rising unemployment and government austerity measures, hold back on purchases.

Home Retail, Britain’s largest household goods retailer, warned Thursday of a “significant” cut in its full-year dividend because of a sales slump. Mothercare, a baby clothing retailer; Thorntons, a chocolate maker; and Halfords, the car parts retailer, reported weaker sales figures Thursday and warned of a challenging business environment ahead.

“I’m quite worried about the retail sector and consumer spending,” said David Tinsley, an economist in London for BNP Paribas. He said Britain could already be in the middle of a recession or might be able to just avoid it. “It’s going to be pretty close,” he said.

The retail sector is not the only industry suffering. Royal Bank of Scotland, the bank that is controlled by the British government, announced a new round of job cuts on Thursday, saying 3,500 positions would be eliminated at its investment banking division over the next three years to reduce costs.

Job vacancies in London’s financial industry fell 8 percent last year to less than half of what they were during 2007, according to recruitment firm Morgan McKinley. The firm said that job opportunities might never return to their levels of before the financial crisis.

Not all British retailers struggled during the holiday season. Tesco’s smaller rival JSainsbury topped some analysts’ expectations with its sales during the holiday period as customers bought more luxury food and discounted goods. Tesco said its own price cuts helped to increase sales volume but failed to lift profit.

“This wasn’t the Christmas that I wanted,” Tesco’s chief executive, Philip Clarke, said on a conference call with analysts. He called the British consumer environment “challenging” and said there were early signs of more cautious behavior emerging in other markets.

David McCarthy, an analyst at Evolution Securities, said Tesco was “performing weakly in a weak industry” and that profitability would be squeezed across the entire sector.

Many retailers were hoping for a busy holiday sales period but instead had to cut prices early and to levels last seen in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, the British Retail Consortium said this month. About 36 percent of British consumers are spending less on clothing and footwear and 28 percent are spending less on furniture amid concerns about the crisis in the euro zone and rising unemployment, according to the group. About one in five households has had a recent reduction in disposable income as a result of unemployment, less overtime work and loss of bonuses, it said.

Bankruptcies among retailers in Britain rose 11 percent, to 183 companies, last year with 42 businesses running out of money in the final quarter, Deloitte reported Jan. 9. Among the casualties of 2011 were the shoe retailer Barratts, the wine and liquor retailer Oddbins, and the women’s clothing chain Jane Norman.

The outdoor clothing chain Blacks Leisure and the lingerie firm La Senza almost collapsed before finding buyers.

The Next Immigration Challenge

THE immigration crisis that has roiled American politics for decades has faded into history. Illegal immigration is shrinking to a trickle, if that, and will likely never return to the peak levels of 2000. Just as important, immigrants who arrived in the 1990s and settled here are assimilating in remarkable and unexpected ways.

Taken together, these developments, and the demographic future they foreshadow, require bold changes in our approach to both legal and illegal immigration. Put simply, we must shift from an immigration policy, with its emphasis on keeping newcomers out, to an immigrant policy, with an emphasis on encouraging migrants and their children to integrate into our social fabric. “Show me your papers” should be replaced with “Welcome to English class.”

Restrictionists, including those driving much of the debate on the Republican primary trail, still talk as if nothing has changed. But the numbers are stark: the total number of immigrants, legal and illegal, arriving in the 2000s grew at half the rate of the 1990s, according to the Census Bureau.

The most startling evidence of the falloff is the effective disappearance of illegal border crossers from Mexico, with some experts estimating the net number of new Mexicans settling in the United States at zero. The size of the illegal-immigrant population peaked in 2007, with about 58 percent of it of Mexican origin, according to the Pew Hispanic Center; since 2008, that population has shrunk by roughly 200,000 a year. Illegal immigrants from Asia and other parts of the globe have similarly dwindled in numbers.

This new equilibrium is here to stay, in large part because Mexico’s birthrate is plunging. In 1970 a Mexican woman, on average, gave birth to 6.8 babies, and when they entered their 20s, millions journeyed north for work. Today the country’s birthrate — at 2.1 — is approaching that of the United States. That portends a shrinking pool of young adults to meet Mexico’s future labor needs, and less competition for jobs at home.

If the number of immigrants is declining, what about that other nativist bugbear, assimilation? There’s little doubt that immigrants’ potential as economic contributors turns on their ability to assimilate. Fortunately, recent studies by John Pitkin, Julie Park and me show that immigrant parents and children, especially Latinos, are making extraordinary strides in assimilating.

Today, barely a third of adult immigrants have a high-school diploma. But the children of Latino immigrants have always outperformed their parents in educational achievement. By 2030 we expect 80 percent of their children who arrived in the 1990s before age 10 to have completed high school and 18 percent to have a bachelor’s degree.

But it is immigrants’ success in becoming homeowners — often overlooked in immigration debates — that is the truest mark of their desire to adopt America as home. Consider Latinos. Among those in the wave of 1990s immigrants, just 20 percent owned a home in 2000. We expect that percentage to rise to 69 percent — and 74 percent for all immigrants — by 2030, well above the historical average for all Americans.

Who will be selling these homes to these immigrants? The 78 million native-born baby boomers looking to downsize as their children grow up and leave home. Fortunately for them, both immigrants and their children will be there to buy their homes, putting money into baby-boomer pockets and helping to shore up future housing prices.

Indeed, with millions of people retiring every week, America’s immigrants and their children are crucial to future economic growth: economists forecast labor-force growth to drop below 1 percent later this decade because of retiring baby boomers.

Immigrants’ extraordinary progress in assimilating would be faster if federal and state policies encouraged it. Unfortunately, they don’t. This year, the Department of Homeland Security plans to spend a measly $18 million — far less than a tenth of 1 percent of its budget — on helping immigrants assimilate. Meanwhile, states with large immigrant populations are cutting the budgets of community and state colleges, precisely where immigrant students predominantly enroll.

How do we change course and begin treating immigrants as a vast, untapped human resource? The answer goes to the heart of shifting from an immigration policy to an immigrant policy.

For starters, the billions of dollars spent on border enforcement should be gradually redirected to replenishing and boosting the education budget, particularly the Pell grant program for low-income students. Some money could be channeled to nonprofits like ImmigrationWorks and Welcoming America, which are at the forefront of helping migrants assimilate.

Second, the Departments of Labor, Commerce and Education need to play a greater role in immigration policy. Yes, as long as there remains a terrorist threat from abroad, the Department of Homeland Security should have an immigration component. But immigration policy is all about cultivating needed workers. That means helping immigrants and their children graduate from high school and college. It means that no migrant should have to stand in line for an English class. It means assistance in developing migrants’ job skills to better compete in an increasingly information- and knowledge-based economy.

Thanks to our huge foreign-born population (12 percent of the total), America can remain the world’s richest and most powerful nation for decades. Shaping an immigrant policy that focuses on developing the talents of our migrants and their children is the surest way to realize this goal.

Dowell Myers, a professor in the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, is the author of “Immigrants and Boomers.”

Ethnic Killings Fray Unity Marking Birth of South Sudan

PIBOR, South Sudan — The trail of corpses begins about 300 yards from the corrugated metal gate of the United Nations compound and stretches for miles into the bush. There is an old man on his back, a young woman with her legs splayed and skirt bunched up around her hips, and a whole family — man, woman, two children — all facedown in the swamp grass, executed together. How many hundreds are scattered across the savannah, nobody really knows.

South Sudan, born six months ago in great jubilation, is plunging into a vortex of violence. Bitter ethnic tensions that had largely been shelved for the sake of achieving independence have ruptured into a cycle of massacre and revenge that neither the American-backed government nor the United Nations has been able to stop.

The United States and other Western countries have invested billions of dollars in South Sudan, hoping it will overcome its deeply etched history of poverty, violence and ethnic fault lines to emerge as a stable, Western-friendly nation in a volatile region. Instead, heavily armed militias the size of small armies are now marching on villages and towns with impunity, sometimes with blatantly genocidal intent.

Eight thousand fighters just besieged this small town in the middle of a vast expanse, razing huts, torching granaries, stealing tens of thousands of cows and methodically killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of men, women and children hiding in the bush.

The raiders had even broadcast their massacre plans in advance.

“We have decided to invade Murleland and wipe out the entire Murle tribe on the face of the earth,” the attackers, from a rival ethnic group, the Nuer, warned in a public statement.

The United Nations, which has 3,000 combat-ready peacekeepers in South Sudan, tracked the advancing fighters from helicopters for days before the massacre and rushed in about 400 soldiers. But the peacekeepers did not fire a single shot, saying they were greatly outnumbered and could have easily been massacred themselves.

The attack was presaged by a fund-raising drive for the Nuer militia in the United States — a troubling sign that behind the raiders toting Kalashnikovs and singing war songs was an active back office half a world away. Gai Bol Thong, a Nuer refugee in Seattle who helped write the militia’s statement, said he had led an effort to cobble together about $45,000 from South Sudanese living abroad for the warriors’ food and medicine.

“We mean what we say,” he said in an interview. “We kill everybody. We are tired of them.” (He later scaled back and said he meant they would kill Murle warriors, not civilians.)

Such ethnic clashes were unnervingly common here in 2009, before the final push for independence. More ominous than the small-scale cattle raids that have gone on for generations, the attacks often seemed like infantry maneuvers, fueling accusations that northern Sudanese leaders had shipped in arms to destabilize the south.

But southerners seemed to rally together as the historic referendum on independence from the north drew near. The exuberance brought reconciliation. Major ethnic clashes all but disappeared.

The respite was short lived. Fighting broke out almost immediately along the tense border between north and south. Then, only a month after South Sudan celebrated its independence last July with a new national anthem and a countdown clock that blared “Free at Last,” Murle fighters killed more than 600 Nuer villagers and abducted scores of children. That attack set this month’s massacre into motion.

The makeshift medical clinic here in Pibor now stinks of decaying flesh. It is full of Murle children with bullet holes drilled through their limbs. Many have trudged for days to get here, through swamps and murky rivers, and their wounds are suppurating and gangrenous. The doctors take one look and whisper the word: amputation.

South Sudan’s government has been extremely reluctant to wade into these feuds, because the government itself is a loosely woven tapestry of rival ethnic groups that fought bitterly during Sudan’s long civil war. The Nuer are a crucial piece of the governing coalition, and the Lou Nuer, the subgroup that led the raid on Pibor, supply thousands of soldiers to South Sudan’s army.

“Nuer fighting Nuer?” said a Western diplomat in South Sudan, considering the complications of a military intervention to stop the massacre. “That would be explosive.”

The government has tried to broker peace talks between the Lou Nuer and the Murle, but the negotiations broke down in early December, when the Murle refused to give back abducted children. Nuer leaders then reconstituted the White Army, a fearsome force of Nuer youths that massacred thousands during the 1990s. “We had been begging the government to protect us from the Murle, and they didn’t,” said Mr. Thong, the Nuer organizer in Seattle. The decision was then simple, he said: “to make revenge.”

The government said it was planning a major disarmament campaign for the area, once the rains stopped. Until then, “there’s no justification for anyone to take the law into their own hands,” said South Sudan’s military spokesman, Col. Philip Aguer.

As thousands of Nuer fighters poured into Pibor on Dec. 31, United Nations military observers watched them burn down Murle huts and then march off, in single file lines, into the bush, where many Murle civilians were hiding. Murle leaders have complained that they were abandoned in their hour of need. Neither government forces nor the United Nations peacekeepers left their posts in Pibor to protect the civilians who had fled, and it appears that many Murle were hunted down.

Hilde F. Johnson, head of the United Nations mission in South Sudan, said the peacekeepers had warned residents that the fighters were coming. But she argued that the United Nations troops had little choice but to stay on the sidelines. “Protection of civilians in the rural areas and at larger scale would only have been possible with significantly more military capacity,” she said.

The rampage continued until Jan. 3, but the number of dead is far from clear. Joshua Konyi, Pibor’s county commissioner and a Murle, said more than 3,000 had died. Several United Nations officials said they doubted that the numbers were that high because so many people had fled Pibor before the attack, but they agreed that scores, if not hundreds, were killed.

“There are bodies everywhere,” said one United Nations official who was not allowed to speak publicly. “It’s a big area, so I wouldn’t be surprised by 1,000.”

Many survivors spoke of seeing dozens killed in front of their eyes. One spindly Murle woman named Ngadok was shot in the leg as she fled with her 6-year-old son cinched to her back. After she fell, she said, the Nuer raiders stood over her and executed her boy.

“I’m not thinking about anything now,” she said, staring blankly at the white canvas walls of the makeshift medical clinic. “My child is dead.”

Murle fighters are regrouping and have already hit several villages, killing dozens. And it may not be purely about revenge. The Murle survive off cows, and Mr. Konyi said the community had lost more than 300,000.

A helicopter flies low over the savannah, about 20 miles north of Pibor, and the emerald green grass suddenly turns white, brown and black. Down below are cows, thousands and thousands of them, a huge mass of animals as far as the eye can see. These are the Murle cattle, driven by thin young men who look up quizzically at the helicopter, slowly making their way back to Nuerland.

[Edward12]

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