The crisis in Asia is leading to the adoption of more "free market" policies. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) insists that, for example, the Indonesian government must abandon state control of the economy in order to be "rescued". So it's ironic that the Asian crisis is also starkly revealing how one market - the market for labour - is anything but open. If Asian governments decided, in a crisis, to kick out rich foreign investors, the international media would be in uproar. But when those governments told poor workers to shift because they're no longer wanted, there was hardly a word about it.

Virtually alone in this part of the world among the mainstream press, Britain's most liberal daily newspaper, the Guardian, gave big, page-one coverage to the fact that the Thailand government is sending 1.5 million migrant workers back to Burma and Bangladesh, that the Malaysian government is sending 1 million workers back to Indonesia and the Philippines, and that the South Korean government aims to repatriate 270,000 people back to Nepal and the Philippines. When it comes to ordinary people, the limits to free movement and globalisation become apparent - and most media's interest wanes.