Opinion

In the tempestuous debates about immigration policy, the humble H-1B temporary visa tends to be overlooked. Streams of desperate Central Americans marching toward the border tend to evoke strong emotions on all sides, while tech professionals from India working in Silicon Valley elicit fewer objections. But H-1B workers are important to national prosperity, and the program is under threat from ...

Whoever came up with the Article 50 process for leaving the European Union probably never thought it would be used, let alone turned into a maddening form of procedural torture worthy of Kafka. Brexit was meant to have been wrapped up in March, yet the UK’s inability to decide what it wants has frustrated the best-laid plans of Brussels’s technocrats. ...

Masayoshi Son just pulled off a deal that gives him the best of both worlds. He’s found a way to keep a foot in WeWork without getting it stuck in the company’s quicksand of cash. SoftBank Group Corp.’s chairman announced that he’s increasing the company’s stake in WeWork to 80% ( from 29%). And yet, the parent isn’t welcoming the ...

Some good news for the European Central Bank (ECB). The German government has nominated Isabel Schnabel, an accomplished economist at the University of Bonn, to replace her compatriot Sabine Lautenschlaeger on the ECB’s executive board. Lautenschlaeger is quitting after the central bank’s decision to restart large-scale bond purchases (known as quantitative easing). It’s an anachronism that Germany, France and Italy ...

Driven in part by soaring public debt, Indonesian President Joko Widodo is going soft as he starts his final term. He’s emphasising “soft infrastructure’’ such as legal reform, education and counter-corruption while quietly easing back on the physical airports, roads and the like that were the key priority in the first five years. But he should beware of putting Indonesia ...

India’s best-known software exporter is facing an impossible trinity of sorts: Out of sales, margins and governance, Infosys Ltd. can hit only two goals at a time. Or so it would appear from yet-to-be-proven whistle-blower allegations against Chief Executive Officer Salil Parekh and Chief Financial Officer Nilanjan Roy that they used hyper-aggressive accounting practices to hide from investors the lack ...

Someone had to take the fall for the latest disastrous turn in Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis and that someone appears to be commercial airplanes chief Kevin McAllister. Boeing abruptly announced that McAllister is stepping down. He joined in 2016 from General Electric Co. and oversaw the unit responsible for the troubled Max, which has been grounded for seven months ...

No one has worked more aggressively to trigger impeachment than the president. You may remember that, during the campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump suggested that, should he win, he might become one of the most “boring” presidents in history. There was in this curious pledge — which, as we now know, has been broken along with many other campaign promises — ...

Five years ago, I emigrated to Germany from Russia, because it had abandoned any pretense of wanting to be a European country. Now, I’m watching in amazement as Britons are doing the same, in droves, for the same reason. It’s well known that tens of thousands of UK citizens have obtained second passports from Ireland as insurance against a post-Brexit ...

As we count down to this month’s meetings of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve, both of which are expected to maintain their monetary easing stance, the US yield curve has been quietly undoing the inversion that had raised alarms in the corridors of the world’s two most systemically important central banks. Over the last few weeks, the ...