Crossing National Borders: Introduction

VIDEO
Introduction by Jessica Mathews
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Temporary Workers in North America Movement of People in the European Union Full Agenda Speakers' Bios

MS. JESSICA MATHEWS: My name is Jessica Mathews. I'm president of the Carnegie Endowment. On behalf of the Reuters/Carnegie partnership, I have the great pleasure of welcoming you to this second debate in our public policy series.

The first debate was held some months ago in London at the London School of Economics. And there Michael Ward, the director general of the WTO, and a number of other experts grappled with the major issues of the trade agenda: the conflicts between North and South, development in developing countries, issues of trade and labor, trade and environment.

And so today's event is a natural progression from that one to explore yet another phase of globalization. Where that debate looked at the movement of goods and services and capital across borders, today we're looking at the movement of people and where barriers have been rapidly falling to ease the movement of money and of goods. They obviously remain quite high with respect to bodies. And where immigrants can certainly help fuel economies, they also make demands on social safety nets, on job availability, and on national identity, all of which we will confront today.

One can't help but be struck by the difference in these two topics where you can talk about rather substantial progress towards global regimes, even in the most contentious areas of trade, investment, banking, air pollution, currency, corruption, money laundering, protection of intellectual property. The list is very long. Even to say the words global regime and migration is to reveal how different the situation is when we're talking about people. These issues are highly divisive still, even in the bilateral context. So we think that today's two debates, one focusing on North America and one on Europe, will help us move understanding forward in areas that very badly need it.

As an organization that spends much of its resources analyzing globalization and addressing its impacts, Carnegie, in particular, is delighted to co-sponsor this series and to host today's event. We have been, as you will hear from some of today's speakers, a leader on many of these issues. Two weeks ago, just as President Bush and President Fox were meeting for the first time in their respective administrations, we released recommendations from the bi-national panel that offered some new approaches for U.S.-Mexican migration issues. And our migration project has also founded and run a huge international project called the Metropolis Project that looks at cooperative approaches for managing particularly the domestic effects of migration. It involves public and private institutions in 18 different countries.

So today's events are also a natural progression for our work -- and we expect them to contribute to that work -- and very much in the flow of what Carnegie would be doing for some time ahead. And our hope, finally, of course, is to find some lessons that may tie policies in the Western Hemisphere with those of Europe. So I want to thank all of you for being with us today for what I think is going to be a wonderful session, and, in particular, our speakers. And let me now turn things over to this morning's moderator, Bill Emmott.