The Washington Post: “Perhaps tired of winning, the United States falls in World Happiness rankings – again”

The United States has fallen in the rankings of the World Happiness Report for the second year in a row. Currently, the US is ranked eighteenth out of more than 150 countries, making it the worst ranking since the annual report began being published in 2012. The report, published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), an initiative of the United Nations, measures levels of happiness and changes in happiness globally. This year, along with the usual rankings, the report focuses on migration within and between countries. “The most striking finding is the extent to which happiness of immigrants matches the locally born population,” John Helliwell, a University of British Columbia economist who co-edited the report, tells the Washington Post. “The happiest countries in the world also have the happiest immigrants in the world.”

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Diplomats and Their Special Privileges

Over 100,000 representatives of foreign governments, including their dependents, are in the United States, and many of these foreign representatives are entitled to some degree of diplomatic immunity and certain privileges. We have written about a variety of immigrant and nonimmigrant visa types for foreign nationals, but diplomats are, in a word, special. We thought we’d take a closer look at visa types for diplomats as well as their privileges while in the US and, importantly, whether they are really responsible for those unpaid parking tickets!

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New York Times: "A Mother’s Love? Of Course. Her Citizenship? Not So Fast"

Twenty-seven countries around the world do not allow or limit the ability of mothers to pass on their citizenship to their children and a non-citizen spouse, according to data from the United Nations. In countries such as Iran and Qatar, for example, restrictive laws state that women cannot pass citizenship onto their children even if the children are left stateless, while in Nepal or the United Arab Emirates, there are exceptions if the father is unknown or stateless himself. Such laws restricting citizenship can potentially leave children and stateless parents without identity documents, access to education, health care, or employment. The New York Times explains:

The laws are not just a measure of the unequal treatment of women. They can also have grievous consequences for the children who, as citizens of nowhere, may be kept from being able to go to school. Syrian refugees born in Lebanon, for instance, may be in especially dire straits because so many of their fathers are dead or missing; Lebanon and Syria are among the 27 countries, and Lebanon is among the most restrictive.

While some countries will let a woman pass on citizenship when she is unmarried—and prevent her from doing so when married—advocacy group Equality Now says this reinforces the belief that “a woman, once married, loses her independent identity[.]”

Examining the UN data and other sources, the Pew Research Center found that these types of laws and policies preventing women from transmitting citizenship were present in most countries around the world sixty years ago. Gradually countries have revised their laws, and recently in the past five years, multiple countries, including Kenya, Monaco, Yemen and Senegal, have decided to change their laws to allow women to transmit citizenship. Only last month, Suriname changed its law and now allows women to transmit citizenship to children and non-citizen spouses.

Such restrictions regarding citizenship are most common in the Middle East and North Africa, where twelve out of twenty countries have restrictive nationality laws. In Jordan, the law prohibits women married to non-citizens from passing citizenship to their children. This potentially affects the 84,711 Jordanian women who are married to non-citizens and their 338,000 children, a figure from a recent statement from the country’s Interior Ministry. Laws in Saudi Arabia prevent women married to non-citizens from transferring citizenship to their children; moreover, they are required to obtain government permission prior to marrying a non-citizen, a rule that also applies to Saudi men who want to marry a non-citizen from outside the Gulf Cooperation Council member states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates). Eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa have laws or policies limiting women’s ability to pass citizenship to their children, even though three of these countries—Burundi, Liberia and Togo—have “enshrined the principle of gender equality” in their constitutions. Men in these listed countries have few if any barriers in transmitting citizenship to their children and non-citizen spouse.

In the Asia-Pacific region five countries have laws or policies limiting women in their ability to pass citizenship to their families. Two in the Americas have similarly restrictive laws, including in the Bahamas, where the law “makes it easier for men with foreign spouses than for women with foreign spouses to transmit citizenship to their children,” according to a State Department Human Rights Report.    

The United Nations tracks citizenship laws as part of its mandate to monitor stateless populations, particularly stateless children who cannot acquire nationality from either parent. While in most circumstances children can obtain nationality from their father, if the father is stateless, the child may also be at risk to become stateless. With nearly one in one hundred people displaced from their homes, the highest amount since World War II, stateless peoples and children are especially vulnerable and at risk.

Vox: "Where the world's migrants go, in one map"

"Most Popular Destination for Each Country's Migrants" by DMan9797.

"Most Popular Destination for Each Country's Migrants" by DMan9797.

The most popular migrant destinations for each country around the world have been mapped and color coded. Created by Devinn Jani, aka Reddit user DMan9797, the very cool map uses 2013 United Nations data to show country-specific global migration. The map reveals some interesting facts about migration (but note that when looking at the map in addition to color coding, it also labels countries with the most popular country migrant destination of that country—e.g., USA is labeled as Mexico and Argentina is labeled as Spain—and so for those who haven't memorized all the countries a world map may be useful):

  • Unsurprisingly, the United States (whose immigrants are colored in red) is the most popular destination for the geographically-close countries of Mexico, Canada, Honduras, Guatemala, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, among others, but also for such countries as diverse and culturally unique as Japan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Germany, Sweden, and Iran.
  • More interesting to us is seeing that the United States is not the most popular migrant destination for many countries that nevertheless have had many migrants come to the US. Not for Russians, whose nationals immigrate to Ukraine; not Colombia, whose nationals immigrate to Venezuela; and not for China, whose citizens immigrate to Hong Kong; 
  • There are other surprises too. Indians tend to immigrate not to the United States, United Kingdom, or Australia but instead the United Arab Emirates. Mongolians tend to go to South Korea. Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe, is not only the top destination for the bordering countries of Poland, Czech Republic, and Austria but also Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, and Sardinia.

This map is helpful to correct the assumption that the US is the first and most popular destination for all global migrants. As we've reported before, the US ranks 65th worldwide in terms of the percentage of population that is foreign born—data also based on 2013 UN numbers. But according to a report by the US Census Bureau this could change by 2060 when a projected 18.8 percent of the US population will be foreign-born (currently it's at 14.3 percent but back in 1890 it was 14.8 percent). This is not because of a dramatic increase in immigrants but rather because the US birth rate is projected to decline. The census report also has some good news for those who are a fan of diversity: the fastest growing share of the population in the US will be Americans of two or more races, which "has the potential to totally scramble racial categories as they exist today." For those really into maps (hey, maps are fun) and immigration and who want more, Vox has thirty-five maps that "explain how America is a nation of immigrants."