Tag: bangladesh
Tariffs, Jobs And Why You Should Care About Poverty In Bangladesh

Tariffs, Jobs And Why You Should Care About Poverty In Bangladesh

I’ve returned from Europe to the United States. Miraculously, my flight to Newark landed on time. So this seems like a good day to write about … Bangladesh. I’ll explain shortly.

First, a note on the current state of the trade war. Many people, including many small investors, still believe and/or hope either that Donald Trump will soon negotiate many trade deals or that he will claim he has, declare victory, and back off his massive tariff hike. They’re deluding themselves.

Consider what we’ve learned about Trump as the negative fallout from his tariffs has started to become obvious.

First, he’s invincibly ignorant. The collapse of imports from China has businesses terrified and warning both of soaring consumer prices and of looming shortages. But Trump says it’s all good:

We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars. Very simple.

Hey, remember those empty shelves during Covid? Americans were doing great! Think of all the money they saved by not buying toilet paper, because there was none to be had. Very simple.

Second, when he’s in a hole, he just keeps digging. His talk about making Canada the 51st state had a decisive effect in Canada’s recent election, hugely bolstering anti-Trump forces. But yesterday, meeting with Prime Minster Mark Carney, who kept his office thanks to this backlash, Trump kept pushing the idea.

Carney remained polite — he is, after all, Canadian — but his facial expressions during the meeting were something to behold.

The best bet, then, is that the trade war will proceed, even intensify. There will be some winners, at least in terms of global influence, including China, which gains from America’s loss of credibility, and the European Union, which unlike Trump’s America can be trusted to honor its agreements. The United States will be a big loser, both politically and economically.

But the biggest losers will be poor countries that have become less poor largely thanks to exports and are about to see their hopes of progress dashed.

Possibly the most hated article I’ve ever written was a 1997 piece for Slate titled “In Praise of Cheap Labor,” which was mainly aimed at left-wing critics of globalization. I argued that much as the sight of low-paid workers producing cheap goods for rich countries may — and should — disturb us, labor-intensive exports are often poor countries’ best hope of progress.

This argument has only become stronger over time. The New York Times recently had a very good article on Bangladesh, which 50 years ago was the poster child for warnings about mass famine driven by overpopulation. Instead, the South Asian nation became, not a banana republic, but a pajama republic, one of the world’s leading clothing exporters. It’s still a poor country, with wages and working conditions that are appalling by advanced-country standards. But as the chart at the top of this post shows, Bangladesh is about four times as rich as it was in the 1980s, when its exports began rising.

But now the country faces the possibility of economic catastrophe, made in America. Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade plan would have imposed a 37 percent tariff on imports from Bangladesh. That plan is temporarily on hold, but it seems all too possible that it or something as bad or worse will come back.

OK, I know that most Americans don’t care about Bangladeshi living standards. They should, even on selfish grounds: condemning 170 million people to deeper poverty would be a threat to global stability. But here’s the thing: Throwing up barriers to Bangladeshi exports doesn’t involve a tradeoff, helping American workers at others’ expense. It’s pure loss, hurting both nations.

Why? Because making imported clothing more expensive here won’t create U.S. jobs. Apparel production, still largely carried out by people hunched over sewing machines, is just too labor-intensive to be economically feasible in the United States, no matter how high the tariffs.

Trump’s people don’t seem to get that. True, Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, famously claimed that tariffs could indeed create jobs in labor-intensive activities, although he didn’t use clothing as an example:

The armies of millions of people- well, remember, the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little- little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America.

Um, no it isn’t, and shouldn’t.

Taxes on imported clothing will, however, raise Americans’ cost of living. The poor and the working class, who are more likely to buy inexpensive imported clothing, will be hurt worst. But hey, Trump says that children don’t need multiple dolls; why do their parents need multiple pairs of underwear?

Not incidentally, Greg Sargent looked into what it would actually take to manufacture dolls in the United States. Even if it could be done, it would produce only a handful of jobs — and the jobs would be terrible and pay badly.

The point is that Trump and his team have done something remarkable: They have started a trade war that is bad both for Americans and for countries that sell to us. But Trump is unlikely to change course. The economic punishment will continue until morale improves.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack, where he now posts almost every day.

Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman.

Refugee Children, Close To Death, Found In Van In Austria

Refugee Children, Close To Death, Found In Van In Austria

By Karin Strohecker

VIENNA (Reuters) — Three young children suffering from dehydration and close to death have been rescued from a van crammed with 26 refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, Austrian police said on Saturday.

The two girls and a boy, aged five and six, were found in a dire state when police stopped the vehicle after a chase near the Austrian town of St. Peter am Hart on the border with Germany, a police spokesman said. They are recovering in hospital.

“The emergency doctor told us they would not have made it much longer — two, maybe three hours,” said David Furtner, police spokesman for Upper Austria province.

The incident follows the discovery of the corpses of 71 refugees in an abandoned lorry on an Austrian highway on Thursday — victims of an unfolding tragedy as refugees and migrants escaping conflict and poverty in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East flock to Europe in unprecedented numbers.

The International Organization for Migration estimates a third of a million people have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year, leaving from Libya, Turkey, and other countries to land in Europe.

Hundreds have drowned in shipwrecks but the recent deaths on land have exposed another horrific side of the people-smuggling racket.

“The driver did not give a damn about the people in the back. We would not transport animals under these conditions on our roads in Austria,” said Furtner, referring to Friday’s discovery.

Austria lies on the way from poorer countries in southern and eastern Europe where many refugees first land, such as Greece, to more prosperous nations in the north and west.

Driver Arrested

The 29-year-old Romanian driver of the van found on Friday, registered in Romania, was arrested. The children and their parents were taken to the hospital in Braunau, where they are now in a stable condition.

Among the dead found in the lorry on Thursday, four were children, one of them a baby girl, police said on Saturday. They were presumed to be from Syria — in the grip of a four-year-old civil war — or possibly Afghanistan.

Three Bulgarians and an Afghan arrested in Hungary in connection with the deaths made their first appearance in a court in the central Hungarian town of Kecskemet on Saturday. They were given one month’s detention pending further proceedings.

A prosecution spokesman told journalists the truck had left Kecskemet and picked up the migrants near Hungary’s border with Serbia, before taking them through Hungary to Austria.

Police hoped to identify the dead refugees by examining mobile phones found on some of the bodies. Searches of backpacks, luggage, and clothing had provided few clues apart from one Syrian travel document, said Helmut Marban, a police spokesman in Burgenland province.

Marban was speaking in front of a former customs hall where the lorry was parked on a tarpaulin to catch fluids, with investigators in protective suits gathering forensic evidence.

Police estimated the refugees could have been dead for up to two days and the truck might have been standing on the hard shoulder of the highway for as long as 24 hours.

“It seems unbelievable,” said Marban, asked about how 71 people could have fitted into the medium-sized refrigeration lorry.

“At first when they got in they were of course standing, but when we had to bring them out they were (entangled) all together.”

In nearby camps, refugees said the news had left them stunned, but they saw little choice but to flee to Europe.

“We had to walk so much, it was so dangerous, in the forest and in the water,” said 21-year-old Qariburahman, who had been on the road for a month before Austrian police picked him up and brought him to the Nickelsdorf refugee reception center.

“When I came from Afghanistan, about three people died on the way, the way is very dangerous,” he said.

His journey had cost him $5,000.

A Syrian refugee in the camp of Traiskirchen south of Vienna said people had no choice but to go with traffickers.

“We didn’t know what the car was, maybe it’s a truck, maybe it’s a van. And we had to follow [the trafficker] because in his area, he is the boss,” he said, his pregnant wife and baby son close by.

“My wife, she told me, oh maybe we were supposed to be one of them … maybe it is one of my friends, maybe it is one of my brothers on that truck.'”

“Mass Grave”

On another front in the crisis, Libyan authorities arrested three people on suspicion of involvement in launching a boat packed with migrants that sank off the country’s Mediterranean coast, killing up to 200 people, a security official said.

The vessel, with up to 400 African, Syrian, and Asian migrants on board, capsized on Thursday after setting off from the town of Zuwara, close to the Italian island of Lampedusa and a center of operations for people smugglers exploiting the anarchy in Libya, a country with two rival governments.

By Saturday, 115 bodies had been recovered and about 198 migrants rescued, officials said.

Arrests of smugglers are rare in Libya, where the judiciary has little power since the country is effectively controlled by former rebel groups which helped to oust Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The head of the European Parliament meanwhile said the “glaring failures” of some European countries to take in refugees were turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave.

Martin Schulz, a German Social Democrat, said those European governments that had resisted European Union proposals to agree to a common plan must do more to deal with the crisis.

He did not single out any states. However, Hungary, which is part of Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone, is building a fence along its border with Serbia to contain what it calls a threat to European security, prosperity, and identity.

“The Mediterranean becomes a mass grave, gruesome scenes play out at borders, there is mutual blame — and those in greatest need, seeking our protection, are left without help,” Schulz told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper.

Germany’s highest court on Saturday overturned a weekend ban on assemblies in an eastern town that was the scene of violent protests against refugees. More than 30 policemen were injured in clashes in the town of Heidenhau, near Dresden, last weekend.

Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to Heidenau on Monday and condemned the protests. Germany expects the number of asylum seekers to quadruple to about 800,000 this year.

(Additional reporting by Marton Dunai in Kecskemet, Anna McIntosh in Traiskirchen, Shadia Nasrallah in Vienna and Ahmed Elumami in Tripoli; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Photo: Police escort suspects in the deaths of 71 refugees found in a truck on an Austrian motorway, in Kecskemet, Hungary, August 29, 2015. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh

Indonesia And Malaysia To Allow Stranded Migrants To Come Ashore

Indonesia And Malaysia To Allow Stranded Migrants To Come Ashore

By Jonathan Kaiman and Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

BANGKOK, Thailand — Indonesia and Malaysia agreed Wednesday to allow thousands of migrants stranded at sea to come ashore, while the United Nations said it would repatriate Bangladeshis detained in three countries for entering illegally.

The announcements following a meeting of three Southeast Asian nations in Malaysia appeared to signal that a weekslong migrant crisis was easing after fishing boats packed with refugees from Myanmar and job-seekers from Bangladesh were abandoned by their captains and blocked from reaching land by governments unwilling to take them in.

Bowing to international pressure, Indonesia and Malaysia, which along with Thailand had said for weeks that the migrants were not welcome, reversed course and said they would be allowed in temporarily to receive humanitarian aid.

But the countries called on the international community to provide financial assistance to help shelter and care for the migrants, many of whom are suffering from severe hunger and dehydration after days or weeks at sea, and to repatriate or resettle them in a third country within one year.

“We commend the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia, in particular, for committing to continue to provide humanitarian assistance to the some 7,000 irregular migrants still at sea,” William Lacy Swing, director general of the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, said in Geneva.

The foreign affairs ministers of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia said in a joint statement “that necessary measures have been taken by the three countries on humanitarian grounds, beyond their international obligations, in addressing the current influx of irregular migrants and further underlined that the issue cannot be addressed solely by the three countries.”

Thailand’s foreign minister skipped a joint news conference following the meeting in Malaysia. Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman said Thailand had agreed to provide humanitarian aid but would not shelter refugees.

The Thai government has previously said it cannot take in any more migrants since it already hosts tens of thousands of refugees from Myanmar.

The IOM said it would bring back between 2,000 and 3,000 Bangladeshi citizens who are believed to be jailed in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia for migrating illegally to those countries.

Asif Munir, IOM spokesman in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, said the organization had set up a $1 million emergency fund to resettle the detainees.

“This is one of the recognized ways to bring back illegal migrants from the landing country to their motherland,” Munir said.

The fates of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar, who are fleeing persecution in their home country, remained unclear. Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry officials said their nation would not take in the Rohingya, who are denied citizenship in Myanmar and face state-sponsored discrimination.

While many Rohingya refugees fled from Myanmar, others left on boats from southern Bangladesh, where some 500,000 are registered as refugees.

Bangladesh had faced intense criticism at home for failing to rescue its own citizens who were stranded at sea in recent weeks, after a crackdown by Thailand and Malaysia resulted in many of the boats being abandoned by their captains and left adrift in the Andaman Sea and Straits of Malacca.

Late Tuesday and early Wednesday, more than 370 migrants landed in Indonesia after floating for months on overcrowded boats, Indonesian officials said.

More than 3,000 migrants have reached land in Southeast Asia in recent weeks, about half of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province. Many have spoken of abysmal conditions on the boats. Some say smugglers beat and tortured them then fled off the coast of Thailand, leaving them adrift without food or water. Many have died, leading experts to warn of an epidemic of “floating coffins.”

The Thai government is planning a conference of Southeast Asian nations on May 29 to discuss the issue. Thailand’s deputy foreign minister said Wednesday that Myanmar, which had previously said it would not participate, had accepted an invitation to the meeting, according to The Associated Press.

(Los Angeles Times staff writers Kaiman reported from Bangkok and Bengali from Mumbai, India. Special correspondent Mohiuddin Kader in Dhaka contributed to this report.)

Photo: Jonathan Kaiman/Los Angeles Times/TNS

Bangladesh Ferry Carrying 250 Capsizes, Many Missing

Bangladesh Ferry Carrying 250 Capsizes, Many Missing

By Nazrul Islam, dpa

Dhaka (dpa) — At least two people were killed and more than 100 were missing after a ferry carrying an estimated 250 people capsized in a river in central Bangladesh Monday, police said.

Rescuers were searching for victims in the district of Munshiganj, about 30 kilometres south of the capital Dhaka, police officer Toffazal Hossain said.

He said the rescuers had found two bodies in the river.

Local residents and divers rescued about 100 passengers from the Padma river after the boat carrying some 250 people sank, said local government official Mohammad Khalekuzzaman.

He said divers from the Fire Service and Civil Defence and the Navy had joined the rescue operation.

They had not yet found the sunken ferry itself, he said.

A salvage vessel was en route to the scene, an official at Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority said.

The ferry was overloaded with more than 250 passengers, and overturned in gusty winds, survivor Syed Mohammad Sadi told private broadcaster Channel 24. His wife and children were among the missing.

The government launched an investigation, ordering officials to report within 10 days.

Ferry accidents in Bangladesh are frequent due to poor safety measures and lax implementation of laws.

AFP Photo/Munir Uz Zaman

Interested in world news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World