Asian Migrants in Europe: the Need for a Global Perspective
Over the past ten years Asian migration to the European Union (EU) has gradually gained in importance as an area of policy making.1 The Amsterdam Treaty (1997, enacted in 1999) and the Tampere Council (1999) are the most important hallmarks of this trend: they reflect the widely felt need among policy makers at the top of the EU, in particular within the European Commission, to liberalize external migration and thus fulfil the EU’s fundamental commitment to the principles of liberal democracy (Angenendt and Hernandez, 2004, p. 3; Batistella, 2002). Nevertheless, progress is slow, and EU policies have retained their defensive character: they serve to control and restrain external migration flows rather than facilitate them (Angenendt and Hernandez, 2004, pp. 6–8; Angenendt and Kruse, 2004, pp. 100–1).
CHINESE MIGRANTS IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC
The post-cold war period marked the end of ideological affection between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and East Central Europe (ECE). While the latter chose parliamentary democracy and market economy, the former reemphasized its Marxist foundations while seeking to reinvent its economy. The economic reforms in China fostered strong economic growth, revived entrepreneurial spirit, and generated domestic migration of peasants and urbanites searching for jobs or new business opportunities. Some of these migrants, either unsatisfied with the business environment in the PRC or wealthy enough to venture beyond China, sought opportunities abroad. The ECE economies– which included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia– were hungry for investment and so granted entry to Chinese prospective investors and business individuals. Ironically, 1989 marked the end of the camaraderie between the PRC and ECE and the beginning of the fraternity between the peoples of China and East Central Europe. Ten years after the Chinese began their ECE odyssey, the topic of Chinese migration to the former communist countries remains largely underresearched. Only the Chinese community in Hungary has received sufficient academic attention.1 The scarcity of research on Chinese migration to ECE is
REJOINDER TO BLOCK'S DEFENSE OF EVICTIONISM
I AM THANKFUL TO WALTER BLOCK (2010) for his comprehensive and perspicacious engagement with my critical remarks regarding his theory of evictionism (Wisniewski 2010). I also appreciate his kind words about what he sees as the merits and strong points of my argumentation. However, as one could easily surmise from my decision to write this rejoinder, I found his defense of evictionism unconvincing, though certainly informative and thought-provoking. Without further ado, let me now proceed to explaining why.