President Fox To Head New Cabinet Level Agency For Mexican Migrants 

President Vicente Fox announced Tuesday the creation of a Cabinet-level agency that will lobby for the interests of Mexico’s citizens abroad. Fox said he would head the agency and soon appoint a Mexican living outside the country to act as a coordinator of its advocacy and assistance programs.  

Last month Fox abolished a presidential office he created in 2000 for the same purpose and allowed the Foreign Relations Department to absorb its duties. Since then Fox has received criticism from those saying he has turned a deaf ear to Mexico’s 22 million expatriates. 

California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante said, “Expectations have been raised, and Fox understands that. That’s why he put himself as the presiding officer of the new council. There’s a need to raise the level of service to Mexicans abroad.” 

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Returning Indonesian Expatriates Find Themselves In Limbo 

Indonesian illegal migrant workers being deported from Malaysia are returning to a country reluctant to welcome them home. The workers have been banned from several provinces designated as entry points, which are also transit sites to their hometowns. 

Many of those returning tried to flee Malaysia at the last moment before that government’s strict new immigration laws went into effect the first of this month. Now nearly half a million jobless people have flooded Indonesia’s borders, waiting to return home. 

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Tibetans Will Be A Minority in Their Own Capital 

Within the next few years, as ethnic Chinese migrants file into Lhasa, Tibetans will become a minority in their own capital city. It is part of a drive to stimulate the economy there, said Jin Shixun, deputy director general of Tibet’s Development and Planning Commission, in a news conference Wednesday. 

He said the influx of skilled labor will bring unprecedented prosperity and stability to the remote Himalayan region. It was one of the boldest admissions yet by a Chinese official on the sensitive issue of ethnic Chinese migration to Tibet. Critics say Beijing is encouraging the migration in order to dilute Tibetan culture. 

For now, the population in Lhasa stands at around 200,000, about half of them Chinese migrants. China's Communist government has ruled Tibet since its troops entered the region in 1950. Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has lived in exile in India since fleeing his homeland in 1959. 

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Top Australian Court Rules Asylum Rejections Invalid 

Australia’s High Court has ruled in two damning judgments against the Government's process for determining refugee claims by ruling invalid thousands of decisions by the Refugee Review Tribunal. The bench ruled that asylum seekers had been denied procedural fairness in cases before the tribunal. 

The decisions directly affect 7600 refugee claimants who had participated in a class action suit, the largest to appear before the High Court. Those whose applications were previously rejected can again pursue their asylum claims. Legal experts and refugee groups claimed the ruling could extend much further, calling into question the tribunal's handling of refugee cases all the way back to its creation in 1993. 

In two rulings of 7-0 and 5-2, the bench said that the tribunal's handling of refugee claims is fundamentally flawed and has failed to look at all favorable evidence available to it.