Globalization: Current Constraints and Promising Perspectives

Recent statistics indicate that more than 200 million people worldwide live in a country other than the one in which they were born, with more than a third having moved from an underdeveloped to a developed country and at least another third having moved from one developed nation to another. Although the United States is the world leader as a host country, Europe’s migrant population in 2005 exceeded that of North America by almost 50 percent and Western Asia’s share of the world’s migrants now exceeds 25 million (United Nations, 2011). Most pronounced is an unprecedented migration of persons to the developing world that is both a cause and a consequence of globalization.