his article presents a documentation note of the 10th Migration Dialogue seminar held March 7-9, 2002 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Migration Dialogue seminars provide a setting for 40 opinion leaders from Europe and North America to learn about and discuss the major migration management issues of the twenty-first century. The following are three central issues explored in the 2002 seminar. First, the Dominican Republic economy grew rapidly in the 1990s, 6-8 percent per year, as thousands of rural women especially found sewing jobs in free-trade zones. Why did emigration pressure remain so high despite rapid job creation? Are emigration and remittances substitutes for socioeconomic reforms, notably in the education system and the labor market? Do remittances, which account for almost 105 of the Dominican Republic's $16 billion gross domestic product, increase or decrease the desire to emigrate? Second, Hispaniola is a relatively small island shared by peoples with different origins, histories, and languages. The population of the Dominican Republic and Haiti are each 8-9 million. Some 500,000 to 800,000 Haitian nationals live in the Dominican Republic, equivalent to almost 10 percent of Haiti's population.;
This study examines immigrant integration in the low socioeconomic stratum in Trinidad. Integration is operationalized as participation in overlapping societal spheres. The study also focuses on corollary aspects of access and goals. While several factors facilitated participation in the social sphere, labor market participation was inhibited by conditions of open unemployment and underemployment. These exigencies had elicited strategies of subsistence from first generation immigrants whose work-related attitudes, ethics, and wage expectation levels functioned to their advantage and led in their competitiveness in a difficult labor market. Some of the second generation were disengaging themselves from their parents' level of labor market activity but relocating farther from the mainstream labor market into a marginalized peer stratum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];