Word: migrant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...factory to itself. The artisans were indispensable cogs in the Qin and Han imperial machinery. Barbieri-Low splendidly reanimates their lost lives, and gives them due credit for greasing the wheels of China's first empires. It's the same sort of credit due to those shunned migrant workers now constructing Olympic stadiums in Beijing, anonymously propping up the superpower of tomorrow...
...nostalgic cast to the race - Obama is running Austin television ads that are vaguely Woodstockian with smiling faces and young, casually dressed supporters cheering and waving. "We can save the world!" the graphic exclaims. In the Rio Grande Valley, now a booming trade center but once home to shabby migrant labor camps, Clinton is running ads featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the grandson of United Farm Workers icon Cesar Chavez. And the aging lion of the Democratic Party, U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy, has been holding rallies on college campuses in South Texas rousing young voters with a vigorous version...
...there is nothing more important to the central government than making sure economic growth continues, and that the benefits of that growth are spread widely. More than anything, this is what gives the communist leadership legitimacy. All across China, towns like New Songjiang are built on the backs of migrant workers - people who have moved from other provinces to earn better money as construction workers. An estimated 114 million workers in China now are migrants, and roughly 15% work on construction sites throughout the country, usually far from their home towns or villages. Unlike manufacturing work, where millions of unskilled...
...Jintao, China's President, has said repeatedly that the gap between rich and poor is one of the government's central concerns. In New Songjiang, the reasons for his insistence become obvious. Theoretically, migrant workers are supposed to receive some health-insurance benefits from the companies that hire them. But many, particularly day laborers who hook up with small contractors, do not. I spent one evening a few months ago in the emergency room of the huge, modern hospital in New Songjiang. In the space of about three hours, five construction workers were admitted, including one who had tumbled three...
...migrants, of course, hope to move on. Before my wife and I bought a car here, we used to call a guy named Shi Guozheng, 27, from Anhui, who was a taxi driver of sorts. Shi had a battered old van, and made a living transporting migrant workers back and forth to their home towns. He was married, and often his wife, Lin, was in the car on our journeys into town. Over time my wife and she became friendly. One day last summer, they had tea together and Lin told Joyce she was pregnant, and that...