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Talk by Edward Alden on “International Trade and Investment with Special Reference to Immigration”

17th March, 2014 @ 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

The Takshashila Institution in collaboration with ISPIRT invite you to a talk – “International Trade and Investment with Special Reference to Immigration” by Mr Edward Alden.

About the talk: Immigration and international trade are in many respects just two different sides of the globalisation coin. American companies seeking to compete, for example, can exports goods and services from the United States and hire immigrants to strengthen their capabilities. Alternatively, companies can invest overseas, hire primarily foreign workers, and use those facilities to produce goods and services for a particular region or even to export back to the United States. 

Yet in the American policy, there is a firewall between trade and immigration. Congress delegates negotiating authority on trade to the administration, but jealously guard its authority to set immigration quotas. Rules government mobility of people have occasionally found their way into US trade agreements (limited visas for professionals under NAFTA and the US- Singapore FTA, and the “Mode 4” rules of the WTO), but the United States strongly prefers to keep these issues out of trade agreement. For example, there is no ‘mobility’ chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. The question then is, what are the prospects, if any, for immigration and mobility issues being dealt with more fully in trade agreements? RSVP your participation here

About the Speaker: Elward Alden

Edward Alden is the Bernard L Schwartz senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), specialising in US economic competitiveness, and directs CFR’s Renewing America initiative. The former Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times, his work focuses particularly on immigration and visa policy, and on US trade and international economic policy. Mr. Alden is the author of the book The Closing of the American Border: Terrorism, Immigration, and Security Since 9/11.

Mr. Alden’s most recent publication is the May 2013 CFR Working Paper Managing Illegal Immigration: How Effective is Enforcement?, which was co-written with economists Bryan Roberts and John Whitley. Many of the recommendations in the paper were adopted by the House of Representative’s Committee on Homeland Security, which unanimously passed H.R. 1417, the Border Security Results Act of 2013. He is also co-author of the recent CFR Policy Innovation Memorandum “Faster, Safer, Smarter: A Modern Visa System for the United States.” He has testified to Congress numerous times on U.S. immigration and visa policies.

He has lectured widely on immigration and economic competitiveness issues to such venues as the World Affairs Council, the World Bank, the Foreign Service Institute, Stanford, Duke, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania. Mr Alden is currently working on a book that examines how the United States has responded to its growing integration into the global economy since the 1970s.  

About the chair: Nitin Pai

Nitin Pai is a co-founder of the Takshashila Institution and a graduate of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore), Nanyang Technological University and National College, Bangalore. His policy research areas are geopolitics, strategy, national security and social capital. Nitin spent over a decade working in the Singapore government in various capacities, including deregulation, broadband infrastructure development and strategic technology foresight. Earlier in his career, Nitin designed part of a satellite payload, bits of radio-frequency equipment and was involved in building India’s the first private undersea cable.

About The Takshashila Institution

The Takshashila Institution is an independent, non-partisan think tank on India’s strategic affairs and public policy, registered in Chennai and with offices in Bangalore. It has pioneered modern public policy education in India through its graduate programme targeted at working professionals in the media, politics, NGOs and the corporate sector. Takshashila conducts policy research in a number of policy domains, supports an active community of bloggers and has been publishing Pragati—The Indian National Interest Review, a monthly magazine on public affairs since April 2007.

Details

Date:
17th March, 2014
Time:
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Event Category:

Venue

InMobi Campus
7th Floor, Block Delta, B Block, Embassy Tech Sqaure, Kadubeesanahalli Village, Outer Ring Road, Varthur Hobli,
Bangalore., Karnataka India

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