In-Depth Archive

Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. At their conventions last month, both the Republican and Democratic parties declared that the United States is not in decline. The very fact that they felt compelled to deny such a claim, however, reveals the degree to which the issue has become part of the domestic political debate over America’s role in the world. Republican nominee Mitt Romney has cited the high rate of unemployment (above 8 percent) and slow economic growth […]

During an online forum broadcast last month by the Spanish-language Univision network, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney assured the mostly Latino audience that, if elected, he would achieve sweeping immigration reform, while also promising not to pursue mass deportation of the 10 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. The Romney campaign has invested heavily in ads on Spanish-language media in swing states from Colorado to Virginia, and has deployed his son Craig, who speaks Spanish, to help court Latino voters. These efforts underscore the fact that Latinos are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States […]

In late-September, Mayor Mike Bell of Toledo, Ohio, a city of 290,000 about an hour’s drive south of Detroit, hosted a three-day conference for more than 200 Chinese business executives. Like many other cities across the manufacturing belt of the U.S. Midwest, Toledo has suffered over the past decade, during which some 50,000 jobs disappeared and its population fell by nearly 10 percent. But the depressed local real estate prices that accompanied the downturn have attracted new buyers from an unexpected place: While overall Chinese investment in the United States remains tiny, over the past year one Chinese group spent […]