China is experiencing a huge wave of African migration into major industrial areas such as Guangzhou. There are around 300,000 undocumented Africans residing in the city, many of them in the trading business. About one in ten have Chinese wives or girlfriends. 90 percent of them are undocumented because they failed to obtain a visa. They are frequently seen in the police station detention cells, and hence the stereotype that Africans are associated with criminal activities is commonly shared among Chinese.

In September 2013, new visa and residence permit regulations for foreigners took effect, making it more difficult for individuals without corporate or institutional affiliations to work and do business in China. Once they overstay without a valid visa, they are subjected to a 500 yuan (approximately 80 US dollars) daily fine. According to a widely quoted media report in August 2014, the Guangzhou authorities have only issued about 30,000 resident permits to Africans.

The recent arrest of a “foreign” triad gang called “freedom fighters” provoked an outburst of Chinese xenophobia and overt racism towards African immigrants on the web. The majority of comments were nationalistic with a strong sense of territorial claim, while a few were virulently racist, claiming Africans were of an inferior race.

Considering that China is becoming the dominant outside economic force in Africa, this reaction is ironic. But it is also human. I remember when the Jamaicans arrived in London after the Second World War – the reaction to these by-and-large charming, cheerful and well- educated immigrants, invited to come to Britain to because of the manpower shortage, was similarly hostile, and in some cases simply racist.

Immigration, deemed to be excessive, is a huge problem worldwide. How should we regard it, and how should we deal with it?

Fast Track Trade Authority (TPA) has now passed both houses of Congress, with 28 Democrats in the House and 13 Democratic U.S. senators supporting President Obama and the corporations by voting “yes.” This means that, once the Fast Track bill is signed, Obama will be able to complete the negotiations for one of the two trade agrements, TPP.

Included in the bill was a provision banning the U.S Trade Representative from addressing climate change in trade agrements (yes, you resd it correctly). Excluded was any assistance to workers displaced by trade agreements, an attempt to soften the blow of an expected huge loss of jobs. As for the substance of the two big trade treaties in question, TTP and TTIP, Congress and the public still don’t yet know what is being agreed.

But all is not necessarily lost. Congress will have to vote on TTP, probably this fall. Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, put out a statement saying that once “people see what is actually in the agreement, they are going to force their representatives in Washington to vote that deal down.”

“Today there is an enormous risk that higher education will turn into a series of utilitarian and functional courses, which are simply designed to pass on knowledge and skills to those consumers who somehow manage to acquire enough resources to purchase them.  In such a world, education becomes contractual and mechanistic; the ends justify the means, and the system as a whole simply serves the continual commodification and consumption of knowledge”.

“‘Higher’ education should be radically different. It has a vocation to set us free, raise our vision, discover new horizons of possibility. To be in higher education is to be focused on truth, wisdom, formation, character and virtue – not only the acquisition of new knowledge, but pressing the boundaries of research. Higher education is for personal and social transformation.  It speaks in a language of the soul and the heart, as much as the head; it is higher.” (The Very Revd. Prof. Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford).

I would add:  A successful time in higher education should have encouraged you to think for yourself and not to simply accept the views and habits of mind of those around you.  Secondly, it should have taught you how to set about solving problems; and thirdly, it should have made you good at extracting the main points, or nub, of any written work or report, and setting them out succinctly, in good English. That’s for starters.