Good morning. Today, Laura explains how EU migration rhetoric is hardening ahead of a leaders’ summit next week and our Dublin correspondent previews the Irish Taoiseach’s visit to Washington.

Closing the drawbridge

Brussels is preparing for a showdown on migration at next week’s EU summit, as member states converge on the notion that more drastic curbs are needed — though practicable solutions remain elusive, writes Laura Dubois.

Context: The EU’s reformed asylum rules won’t come into force before 2026, prompting countries to look for interim ways to reduce arrivals. In May, 15 countries asked the European Commission to find “outside the box” solutions.

Germany’s recent move to impose controls along all its borders has sent a signal to other capitals that Berlin’s previous squeamishness when it comes to harsher measures on migration has evaporated, and underlined the broader shift in thinking across the EU.

That’s also reflected in the new European parliament, where anti-immigration and immigration-sceptic parties hold a slim majority.

Germany is among those pushing for an extensive migration discussion at next week’s summit of EU leaders. The draft conclusions, seen by the Financial Times, say that “new ways to prevent and counter irregular migration should be considered, in line with international law”.

According to EU diplomats briefed on the discussions, that is code for paying third countries to take in people who are seeking to reach the EU. But how such agreements could be designed without violating EU and international law is still largely unclear.

According to the diplomats, EU capitals are interpreting the loose phrasing in different ways. Some are for instance keen to replicate Italy’s scheme to process asylum applications on Albanian soil, though Albanian premier Edi Rama has made clear it is a one-off.

Another idea is to send rejected asylum seekers to “return hubs” outside the EU to await deportation. One diplomat said that while several member states were open to this option, “you would have to find a third country which would agree to do this”.

“I think that overall there is consensus to a great extent on exploring new ways, innovative ways [to deal with migration],” another diplomat said. “If you don’t have co-operation of third parties, this thing simply doesn’t work.”

The draft conclusions, which are still subject to change, also call for “intensifying co-operation with countries of origin and countries of transit, through mutually beneficial partnerships”.

The EU already clinched partnerships with Tunisia, Mauritania and Egypt, despite concerns over their effectiveness, and human rights records in those countries. Tunisian President Kais Saied has won a landslide victory after jailing opponents, activists and journalists during his re-election campaign.

“There are limitations, you need to have a step-by-step approach,” the second EU diplomat said. “You need to see what works, what doesn’t work.”

Chart du jour: Hungry

Low taxes, temperate weather and fibre cable access made Ireland an EU pioneer of data centres. But the government’s concern about the sector’s huge energy consumption has prompted a rethink.

Biden’s other Harris

Ireland’s Taoiseach Simon Harris is meeting US President Joe Biden at the White House tomorrow as fears grow for the safety of Irish soldiers on a UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, writes Jude Webber.

Context: The US was the first country to recognise Ireland — then called the Irish Free State — in 1924, and outgoing president Biden, who made an emotional trip to Ireland last year, cherishes his Irish roots. The two leaders will mark the centenary of bilateral diplomatic relations.

Historical diplomatic niceties aside, the escalating Middle Eastern conflict will dominate their agenda.

Some 30 Irish soldiers manning a UN border post in southern Lebanon, metres from an Israel Defense Forces deployment, are having to take shelter as Israel bombs Hizbollah. Irish President Michael D Higgins has raged at the threat to the troops, and said Israel’s demand for them to evacuate was “outrageous”.

Ireland and the US have different stances when it comes to the widening war in the Middle East. Ireland is neutral, while the US supplies weapons to Israel.

Dublin has condemned the Hamas attack a year ago that triggered the widening regional conflict and demanded the release of its Israeli hostages. But Harris this year also recognised Palestine as a sovereign state, and insists that “civilians’ lives are of equal value”.

For Harris, the transatlantic trip also offers a chance to burnish his image ahead of a general election widely expected next month.

He is currently favourite to lead the next government — in which case, he could be back in the White House next March for the traditional St Patrick’s Day celebrations, when Ireland flaunts its special friendship with the US.

What to watch today

1. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán holds a press conference at the European parliament in Strasbourg.

2. EU finance ministers meet in Luxembourg.

Now read these

Slated for demolition, the graffiti-covered building close to the inter-Korean border was once a “monkey house”, a clinic for sex workers forced to serve US soldiers protecting Seoul from North Korea.

Activists, including women who were forced into gruesome treatments for sexually transmitted diseases, say the site should be preserved for its historical significance, but the bulldozers will move in this month to clear it for a tourist development.

The fight over the building in the lush forest of Dongducheon is illustrative of the broader struggle for recognition faced by South Korean women who say they were tricked or forced to work in state-run brothels serving US troops.

Unlike the better-known “comfort women” used by Japanese soldiers until the end of World War II, the tens of thousands of victims of state-sanctioned brothels run from the 1950s to 1980s by the South Korean government, have received relatively limited attention.

“It was nicknamed the ‘monkey house’ because the women were kept confined like monkeys,” Choi Hei-shin, a peace activist and researcher, told AFP.

Many women in the brothels, which Seoul’s Supreme Court ruled were illegally “established, managed, and operated” by the state for US troops, were forced to undergo STD treatments against their will to protect their clients’ health.

Kim Un-hui was dragged to the monkey house in Dongducheon in the late 1970s when she was caught by authorities without an STD certificate and forcefully injected with an excessive amount of penicillin.

It was so painful it felt like someone was “stabbing me over and over again,” Kim, now 66, told AFP.

At that point, Kim was not even working in the military brothels, as she had married an American GI. Even so, she says she was detained and forced to share a cramped room with 20 other women.

One woman passed out from the penicillin injection and injured herself by hitting herself against the bedframe while unconscious, she says.

Medical staff “just stood there and did nothing,” Kim told AFP, adding the experience still haunted her.

– No recognition –

A historic 2022 Supreme Court ruling found the South Korean government had illegally been “justifying and promoting prostitution” among its women citizens, causing “loss of human dignity” and “mental suffering”.

Kim said she responded to an advert looking for a waitress but was trafficked by a Korean pimp into a military brothel. She considers herself lucky as she quickly met her husband, one of her first customers, and escaped with him.

Many other women died from the drugs handed out by pimps or from the consequences of the botched medical treatments offered in the monkey houses, according to survivors and historians.

“The authorities administered over ten times the safe amount of penicillin to the victims,” said Kim Eun-jin, director of Durebang, a group of activists supporting the survivors, to AFP.

Some survivors have received small payouts from the Korean state, but efforts to get the United States, which still has tens of thousands of troops stationed in South Korea, to acknowledge its role and apologise have so far been fruitless.

“We have witnessed our colleagues die from illnesses, suicides and crimes,” 73 South Korean survivors wrote in a letter to then-US president Barack Obama in 2009.

“The US military authorities in South Korea intervened directly in the prostitution surrounding military bases for the ‘health and comfort of the US troops’… This was a clear state crime.”

– ‘Erase our story’ –

About six kilometres (3.7 miles) from the monkey house lies a cemetery where up to 70 percent of the graves are likely former sex workers from US military camps, activists say.

They are now being relocated to transform the area into a park.

When AFP reporters visited, most graves were unmarked and completely overgrown with thick weeds. A lone excavator was already relocating remains.

Signs posted at each indistinguishable grave site asked any surviving relatives to get in touch.

Due to shame, many women in the brothels were cut off from their families and kept their identities secret, which explains why “they were buried even without names”, said activist Choi.

But the economy surrounding military brothels in US camp-towns, including restaurants, barbershops and bars catering to American GIs, made up about 25 percent of South Korea’s GDP during the 1960s and 70s.

The state “profited from their bodies, using them merely as tools”, Choi said.

The building is in poor repair: video obtained by AFP showed the interior, covered with disturbing graffiti including a face weeping blood, and local authorities say it is now too late to cancel the demolition.

But survivor Kim says it should be preserved as a way to give her and her colleagues recognition for their suffering.

“We were abused by our own country,” she said. “They’re trying to erase (our story) from history.”

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Companies that rocketed in value by facilitating online gig work and recruitment during Covid-19 lockdowns are putting a new focus on profitability amid slowing growth, as workers migrate back to the office.

The world’s largest digital freelancing websites, Fiverr and Upwork, are both trading at less than a fifth of their pandemic peaks. Meanwhile, annual venture capital funding for digital recruitment and outsourcing companies has tumbled more than two-thirds since 2022, according to figures from PitchBook.

“When you experience incredible growth during a period of time like the pandemic . . . there’s a lapping effect,” said Micha Kaufman, chief executive of Fiverr. “If you fast-forward, then you’re going to see slower growth afterwards.”

As a result, $853mn Fiverr and $1.43bn Upwork, which offer online marketplaces for everything from ghostwriters to virtual assistants and software developers, are pushing to demonstrate profitability to investors.

“In this environment, we know that we need to continue to be laser-focused on our profitability goals,” Upwork chief executive Hayden Brown said at an investor conference in September.

These platforms have sought, in particular, to increase their “take rates” — the amount of money they make on every transaction — in order to offset an overall decline in the amount of individual services being bought and sold.

Both sites have increasingly promoted subscription-based services and premium listing placements, leading Fiverr to report a record “take rate” of 33 per cent in the three months to June. Upwork’s rate was 18 per cent, also a record for the company.

“These were growth-at-all-costs companies during the pandemic,” said Bernie McTernan, an analyst at Needham & Company. “Now, as growth has pulled back, they have really focused on driving margins.”

They have also pushed for higher-end clients and larger projects, with new features aimed at fostering long-term relationships with business clients.

Fiverr in July launched a new hourly-pay option, in addition to its previous task-based payment system, in order to enable vendors with a premium subscription “to tackle bigger, long-term, and ongoing projects”. The company said its new features were part of a transition from a “services-based marketplace into a hiring platform”.

Brown said Upwork was pushing to promote new “value-added services” and subscription programmes, including access to its artificial intelligence chatbot, with a goal of reaching a profit margin of 35 per cent by 2029.

But despite last year reporting their first net profits since going public, shares in both Fiverr and Upwork remain down.

“Those vendors were in such dramatic growth — and they got so much attention in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic — that anything less feels like a shock to them, and to their investors,” said Rania Stewart, an analyst at Gartner.

Private companies are facing a similar battle to prove the sustainability of their business models post-pandemic.

VC funding for digital recruitment and outsourcing companies more than tripled between 2020 and 2021, according to PitchBook, before tumbling back below pre-pandemic levels in 2023.

The rise of AI has also spooked some investors, who believe that tools such as ChatGPT could take jobs from freelancers and hit revenues at platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, according to McTernan.

Both Brown and Kaufman insisted that AI, at least for now, was helping to expand their businesses. Brown said Upwork was receiving an influx of demands for freelancers to add “the human layer” on top of AI-generated outputs that are “not yet ready for primetime”. Kaufman argued AI was, as yet, only replacing “small and cheap work”.

But the biggest challenge might be less technically advanced.

Online gig-work platforms are still competing with traditional staffing companies and office workers, and Fiverr’s Kaufman acknowledged that the pandemic-era working habits that propelled his company’s growth in 2020 and 2021 had not been as durable as he hoped.

“It’s hard to change people’s minds,” he said. “Work is just one of these very old systems that are hard to change.”

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In a September 2023 article for ProPublica, produced in partnership with the Idaho Statesman, Becca Savransky reported that Salmon, Idaho’s elementary and middle schools are at serious risk of falling apart and pose physical threats to students.

Despite several attempts to solve the issue, both state and local legislation have left the schools as-is for decades. Children learn in buildings with failing plumbing, kitchens that fill with sewage, and uneven floors. A statewide assessment conducted and funded by the Idaho state legislature discovered that about 10 percent of school buildings are dangerous and need immediate attention.

Districts across the state of Idaho struggled to pass bonds needed for funding their school repairs due to a two-thirds voting requirement. Instead, lawmakers created the Public School Facilities Cooperative Funding Program, a $25 million dollar loan program intended to help the districts. However, the program proved to be difficult to use.

The program required that the school prove their building presented an unreasonable risk of death, serious injury, or health risk to students. If granted a loan, the program required local control of the school to be surrendered for rebuilding and a state official would have complete control of the money for the school and how it would be used.

A member of the Idaho State Board of Education, Mike Rush, admitted the program was purposely designed to be difficult to use, showcasing the serious flaws within the American education system and how intertwined funding is with politics and class.

“Unless an existing school actually falls to the ground and becomes unusable, I don’t perceive them ever passing a bond,” Josh Tolman, a Salmon school board member, told ProPublica.

 “Inside the Worst Funded Schools in the Nation,” published by ProPublica in April 2023, explains there was a bill, signed in 2022 by Governor Brad Little, meant to allot $330 million to public school districts across the state of Idaho.

However, the majority of that money went towards increasing teacher salaries and benefits rather than updating and replacing the facilities. Data from World Population Review shows that as of 2023 the state of Idaho spends $8,041 annually per pupil, which is the second lowest amount of per-pupil spending in the United States. Even with a seemingly ample amount of funding being made available to improve students’ learning experience, it is nearly impossible for action to be taken.

As of early October 2023, the story of Salmon, Idaho, has seldom been covered by other publications, aside from a few local sources including an editorial in the Idaho Statesman on September 7, 2023, which was republished by other local outlets and Yahoo! News. The story has not been covered by any corporate news outlet.

The corporate news media’s failure to cover stories such as the case of Salmon further marginalizes thousands of schools across the country in desperate need of assistance. Students need access to an environment that is safe and comfortable, not one that is falling apart.

Sources:

Becca Savransky, “Idaho Created a $25 Million Fund to Fix Unsafe Schools. Why is Nobody Using It?” ProPublica and Idaho Statesman, September 6, 2023.

Becca Savransky, “Collapsing Roofs, Broken Toilets, Flooded Classrooms: Inside the Worst Funded Schools in the Nation,” ProPublica, April 13, 2023.

The Editorial Board, “Time for Another Lawsuit over Idaho’s Terrible School Building Conditions, Idaho Statesman, September 7, 2023.

Student Researchers: Giuliana De Los Santos, Jessica Gould, Gianna Merian, Bhavin Mistry, and Grace Triblets (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Faculty Evaluators: Allison Butler and Jeewon Chon (University of Massachusetts Amherst)