Recession Cools Worldwide Migration

Even with high unemployment, Americans walk off too-hard job

(NEWSER) - John Harold is trying to do the right thing when it comes to harvesting his 1,000-acre Colorado farm, by hiring only legal foreign workers and, this summer, offering more positions to unemployed locals. But “it didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Harold tells the New York Times . That's how long it took for the local workers he'd hired to start walking off the job, many because the work was too hard. Harold salvaged his season only by rushing in new workers from Mexico. More»

Sexually assaulted and beaten, she reveals horrors facing UK's migrant workers

(NEWSER) - A migrant worker in Britain took what looked like a plush job as a diplomat’s nanny—only to be treated as a sex slave with little recourse to the law, the Independent reports, uncovering a predicament faced by other workers. “I was trapped. I was paid nothing, never allowed to leave the house, and only given scraps to eat”; she was beaten and sexually assaulted, she says. More»

They screamed an hour before driver halted

(NEWSER) - Police yesterday discovered the bodies of 54 Burmese migrant workers who suffocated in a truck heading across the border to Thailand. Workers crammed in the 7-by-20-foot space, almost all women, say when they finally managed to alert the driver, he fled. Each worker paid $314 to be smuggled into Thailand, according to some of the 67 travelers who survived the ordeal, reports CNN. More»

Yacht fuel eating up too much of your budget? You're not alone.

(NEWSER) - Still looking for ways to cut costs in these tough economic times? Let these actual rich people, as overheard by Nell Scovell, guide you. She recounts their advice in Vanity Fair :

• “With diesel at the marina up over $3 a gallon, we’re trying to keep the Hinckley’s motor off and let the sails do more of the work.”
• “We got rid of the dog-walker; I like to run with the pinschers on the beach for exercise, anyway.”

(NEWSER) - The collapse of the Celtic Tiger is prompting another mass exodus from Ireland's rural west, the Wall Street Journal reports, with young workers once again abandoning their hometowns for London or the US. After a rare decade in which emigrants were flooding back to the island, as many as 40,000 people a year are expected to look for work elsewhere the next few years. The exodus is so large that some towns have found they can't even field a 15-man team for the traditional Irish sport called Gaelic football, a mixture of soccer and rugby. More»