Immigrant men and youth have suffered the highest unemployment, largely due to shrinking of male-dominated industries such as construction. Women fared substantially better, according to the report.

Seeing fewer economic opportunities in developed countries, many would-be immigrants are staying put. This applies to legal as well as illegal immigration, according to the report:

Inflows to the United States fell in almost all temporary work visa categories, including a 23 percent drop in intracompany transfers and a 50 percent decline in visas issued to low-skilled seasonal workers. But, other legal flows have also been affected. Even family immigrants who have waited several years to receive a green card granting legal permanent residence in the United States seem to have become less willing to take up their visa when they reach the front of the line. In some countries, such as Ireland and the United States, foreign-born populations have actually fallen.

In some cases, such as for illegal immigration, the lower immigration numbers could be considered a silver lining to the recession. Still, this information points to an important side note when discussing how to decrease illegal immigration: While increased border security measures and enforcement can account for some of the drop in illegal immigration, the economy is also a major factor.

As for legal immigrants, the recession has shown they need more aid to avoid passing poverty to the next generations, the BBC World Service/Migration Policy Institute report argued:

Perhaps more critically, the recession has exposed an underlying weakness in the longstanding assumption that, as in the past, a dynamic labor market alone would effectively integrate the latest wave of immigrants to the United States. A growing body of research points to the importance of the social safety net in limiting the intergenerational transmission of poverty among the less educated.

One answer, according to the nonpartisan report, would be comprehensive immigration reform. If done properly, reform could aid with some of these problems by creating long-term solutions to limit illegal immigration and integrate legal immigrants into the United States.

President Obama at the G-20 Summit in Toronto on June 27 (Xinhua/ZUMApress.com)

BERLIN — President Obama’s push for additional economic stimulus is not just hitting a wall in Congress. The president has also been rebuffed by the largest European countries — with potentially profound consequences for the U.S. economy and Obama’s national agenda.

[Economy1] In the run-up to the G-20 summit in late June, the Obama administration went on a PR offensive, urging other wealthy nations to keep pumping stimulus into their economies. But with the Greek budget crisis heightening anxieties over public debt, conservative governments in Berlin, Paris, London and Rome are all on an austerity track. Instead of a pledge to inject more capital into their economies, all Obama got at the Toronto conference was a communique that emphasizes savings over stimulus.

Some economists fret that Europe’s fiscal retreat threatens to tip the U.S. deeper into recession. Meanwhile, leading analysts in Germany, the continent’s largest economy, say the trans-Atlantic spending spat underscores Obama’s limited maneuvering room in his effort to steer the fragile recovery back home.

“America is having enormous difficulties,” said economist Gustav Horn of the Macroeconomic Policy Institute, part of a labor-affiliated foundation in Düsseldorf, Germany. “At the moment, [the U.S.] is dependent on the rest of the world offering it a friendly economic environment.”

For Obama, the environment is less friendly than he would like. In an open letter to other G-20 heads of state before the summit, the president wrote that leaders should “learn from the consequential mistakes of the past when stimulus was too quickly withdrawn.” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, meanwhile, told the BBC, “Growth in the future around the world can’t depend on the United States as much as it did in the past.”

Some economists warn that austerity in the largest European economies, combined with severe budget cuts in countries such as Greece and Spain, could push the continent into a double-dip recession. If so, the consequences for the U.S. could be severe. A European downturn, Horn said, would hurt American exports, both by lowering demand and by strengthening the dollar. Perhaps more importantly, he added, a stumbling Europe could weaken crucial U.S. trading partners in Asia. Likewise, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently warned that the resistance to more stimulus in Europe and the U.S. raises the specter of a depression.

But the dominant view in Germany is that such fears are misguided. Supporters of budget consolidation note the country is on an upswing, with GDP growth expected to reach as high as 2 percent this year as exports accelerate. Moreover, they argue that fiscal retrenchment will spur private-sector spending. A recent report by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, a Munich-based think tank with government funding, says cuts would lead to an “expansive confidence effect on German consumers and investors.”

The fear that a European slowdown could hurt American trade underscores a more fundamental challenge that German economists say the U.S. must tackle: expanding exports as a source of economic growth.

“Before the crisis, we had a consumption boom in the U.S. that was not sustainable,” said Ifo economist Klaus Abberger. “And so we think there is a need for some redirection.”

That redirection, economists say, will be outward.

“The growth driver you’ve got left is ultimately net exports,” said economist Christian Dreger of the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research, another government-funded think tank.

The Obama administration has come to a similar conclusion. In his State of the Union speech in January, the president announced a new initiative to double American exports within five years, though many analysts called the goal unrealistic.

“For too long, America served as the consumer engine for the entire world,” the president said in follow-up remarks in March. “But we’re rebalancing. … Countries with external deficits need to save and export more.”

But the future of U.S. exports is not entirely under American control. The country can only reduce its trade deficit if the rest of the world has sufficient buying power, Horn said. The G-20 has been touting a new initiative to ease trade imbalances, which would require net exporters like Germany to buy more from net importers like the U.S. But it remains to be seen whether there will be any action to follow the talk.

Obama’s inability to induce Europe to boost its stimulus spending is rendered even more discouraging by the limited traction his spending proposals are getting in Congress. And it does not help that Obama is looking increasingly isolated among world leaders in pushing a more expansive fiscal policy.

“You don’t win something in Congress by saying, oh, Europe’s doing this,” said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “[But] you don’t want the U.S. to look like an outlier.”

The president should not get his hopes up for a hand from Berlin, though. As the Berliner Zeitung newspaper declared of Germany’s chancellor in a recent headline: “Merkel won’t listen to Obama.” The country has a culture of thriftiness to rival even the fiscal-conservative wing of the Republican Party. The traumatic hyperinflation that racked the Weimar Republic during the 1920s has made Germany hyper-sensitive to price stability. The country last year amended its constitution to include limits on government debt. Deep concern that the aging of the population will soon make Germany’s welfare state unaffordable have made people here anxious to get back to budget cutting. Meanwhile, unemployment is lower than in the U.S., so the economic pain is less acute.

Deficit hawks here also argue the turmoil in Greece is a warning to profligate governments across the continent.

“We saw with the Greek crisis how vulnerable highly indebted countries are to [speculative] attack,” said Norbert Barthle, a member of the German parliament from the ruling center-right Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) who specializes in budgeting.

The American economy has managed impressive growth so far this year, but it has largely been driven by the effects of government stimulus, Horn said. And the looming dry-up of stimulus funds around the world amounts to a serious problem for the American president.

“He has to do more if other countries do less,” Horn said. “And in that sense, his worries are absolutely understandable.”

David Dagan is a freelance journalist living in Berlin.

In her speech, highly critical of the US’s conduct during the war on terror, the former secret service chief implied that the leadership in Washington was inspired by watching the TV espionage thriller 24. She said: “Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld certainly watched 24″. Dame Eliza said: “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing.” She insisted that she had been unaware of what was going on until her retirement in 2007.

That’s via Gawker.

Years ago, in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer explored the permeable membrane in the public consciousness between “24″ and actual counterterrorism.

The protection of confidential information is essential to strong, effective security and intelligence cooperation among allies. The decision by a United Kingdom court to release classified information provided by the United States is not helpful, and we deeply regret it.

The United States and the United Kingdom have a long history of close cooperation that relies on mutual respect for the handling of classified information. This court decision creates additional challenges, but our two countries will remain united in our efforts to fight against violent extremist groups.

Marc Ambinder was clearly right to guess that the White House was only bluffing about the Mohamed disclosure limiting U.S.-U.K. intelligence cooperation.

Miliband is before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee right now, outlining a few expectations for what the conference will produce. Some of it is vague: “coherence and clarity of the plan for Afghanistan” among the 70-odd foreign ministers expected to attend is the “biggest deliverable of all,” Miliband said. But Miliband set a specific expectation by saying a new mechanisms for persuading Afghan insurgents to come in from the cold were crucial for success, adding that he referred to “structures I hope that President Karzai will announce next Thursday.”

It’ll be interesting to see what Karzai might outline. There is a longstanding political consensus on the need for integrating insurgents and reconciling with those fighters who have no ties to al-Qaeda. But the mechanisms in place to date have yielded only sporadic results.

Another thing to expect from the conference: a new civilian counterpart to Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Mr. Johnson said Mr. Abdulmutallab’s application to renew his student visa was rejected in May after officials determined that the academic course he had given as his reason for returning to Britain was bogus. He was then placed on the watch list, Mr. Johnson said, a procedure that would normally involve American authorities being informed of the action Britain had taken.

So, uh, what happened to that U.S. visa?

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The four men — Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal al-Harith — were captured in late 2001 in Afghanistan and transferred to Guantanamo in early 2002. They were returned to the United Kingdom in 2004.

Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Washington, D.C., lawyer Eric Lewis, the four men sued former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior military officers for prolonged arbitrary detention, torture, cruel and unusual punishment, and denial of their religious rights. The former prisoners say they were subjected to repeated beatings, sleep deprivation, extremes of hot and cold, forced nakedness, death threats, interrogations at gun point, menacing with unmuzzled dogs, and religious and racial harassment.

I’m hearing from allied diplomats that some nations may be more inclined to contribute additional troops at a scheduled late January summit on Afghanistan in London. Allied governments are still studying the Obama administration’s adjusted strategy. Some of them want to see if they can harmonize troop contribution agreements amongst European countries before pledging anything. One diplomat described this process to me as “fast-moving,” and another issue, inevitably, will be whether there is a sense of internal NATO diplomatic momentum in favor of adding troops in two months. Italy and Britain have already announced troop increases. More may yet come, even after the Brussels ministerial ends.

I made clear that we would increase the number of British personnel in Afghanistan only if we were assured that it would continue to be the case that every soldier and unit deployed is fully equipped for the operations they are asked to undertake. At this morning’s meeting of the Afghanistan and Pakistan national security committee, the Chief of the Defence Staff gave that assurance – that this condition has been met both for the existing force and the additional 500 troops.

A lot is made in the U.S. about NATO’s seemingly paltry contributions in Afghanistan. But very often there’s little perspective provided about the Europeans’ actual military capabilities. The active-duty British Army is nowhere near the size of its U.S. counterpart, numbering only about 98,000 soldiers. The active-duty U.S. Army, by contrast, comprises more than half a million. With Brown’s new deployment, this means over a tenth of the entire British Army will be deployed in Afghanistan.

So: who’s next?

This is a breakthrough for Mohamed, because while he claims that he was tortured while detained in Pakistan and interrogated by U.S. and British agents, he’s never been able to obtain evidence from the U.K. government that he says will prove his allegations. Meanwhile, the British Foreign Secretary had urged the British court not to make Mohamed’s specific torture claims public, citing a risk to relations between the United Kingdom and the United States, suggesting that the U.S. had urged him to keep the charges hidden.

Friday’s ruling, reported by JURIST over the weekend, reversed the previous decisions to redact Mohamed’s allegations, saying that “the public interest in making the paragraphs public is overwhelming” and “the risk to national security judged objectively on the evidence is not a serious one.”  The court’s earlier opinion therefore will be re-issued with the paragraphs restored.

More details on the court’s decision can be found at JURIST, and more on the strange and difficult case of Binyam Mohamed, who was released from Guantanamo and returned to the United Kingdom last February, can be found here and here.

The U.S. government tried to convince Mohamed to sign an agreement upon his release promising not to discuss his treatment by U.S. authorities. He refused.