Some links: longevity, real estate, migrations, the future

I have been away on vacation in Venice--more on that later--but I am back now.

• Old age popped up as a topic in my feed. The Crux considered when human societies began to accumulate large numbers of aged people. Would there have been octogenarians in any Stone Age cultures, for instance? Information is Beautiful, meanwhile, shares an informative infographic analyzing the factors that go into extending one’s life expectancy.
• Growing populations in cities, and real estate markets hostile even to established residents, are a concern of mine in Toronto. They are shared globally: The Malta Independent examined some months ago how strong growth in the labour supply and tourism, along with capital inflows, have driven up property prices in Malta. Marginal Revolution noted there are conflicts between NIMBYism, between opposing development in established neighbourhoods, and supporting open immigration policies.
• Ethnic migrations also appeared. The Cape Breton Post shared a fascinating report about the history of the Jewish community of industrial Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, while the Guardian of Charlottetown reports the reunification of a family of Syrian refugees on Prince Edward Island. In Eurasia, meanwhile, Window on Eurasia noted the growth of the Volga Tatar population of Moscow, something hidden by the high degree of assimilation of many of its members.
• Looking towards the future, Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen was critical of the idea of limiting the number of children one has in a time of climate change. On a related theme, his co-blogger Alex Tabarrok highlights a new paper aiming to predict the future, one that argues that the greatest economic gains will eventually accrue to the densest populations. Established high-income regions, it warns, could lose out if they keep out migrants.

Some news links: history, cities, migration, diasporas

I have some links up for today, with an essay to come tomorrow.

• JSTOR Daily considers the extent to which the Great Migration of African-Americans was a forced migration, driven not just by poverty but by systemic anti-black violence.
• Even as the overall population of Japan continues to decline, the population of Tokyo continues to grow through net migration, Mainichi reports.
• This CityLab article takes look at the potential, actual and lost and potential, of immigration to save the declining Ohio city of Youngstown. Will it, and other cities in the American Rust Belt, be able to take advantage of entrepreneurial and professional immigrants?
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow. That immigrant neighbourhoods can become largely self-contained can surprise no one.
• Guardian Cities notes how tensions between police and locals in the Bairro do Jamaico in Lisbon reveal problems of integration for African immigrants and their descendants.
• Carmen Arroyo at Inter Press Service writes about Pedro, a migrant from Oaxaca in Mexico who has lived in New York City for a dozen years without papers.
• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that immigration retention rates on PEI, while low, are rising, perhaps showing the formation of durable immigrant communities. Substantial international migration to Prince Edward Island is only just starting, after all.
• The industrial northern Ontario city of Sault Sainte-Marie, in the wake of the closure of the General Motors plant in the Toronto-area industrial city of Oshawa, was reported by Global News to have hopes to recruit former GM workers from Oshawa to live in that less expensive city.
• Atlas Obscura examines the communities being knitted together across the world by North American immigrants from the Caribbean of at least partial Hakka descent. The complex history of this diaspora fascinates me.

Some news links: fertility, population aging, migration, demography is not destiny, Eurabia

Over the past week, I've come across some interesting news reports about different trends in different parts of the world.

• The Independent noted that the length and severity of the Greek economic crisis means that, for many younger Greeks, the chance to have a family the size they wanted--or the chance to have a family at all--is passing. The Korea Herald, meanwhile, noted that the fertility rate in South Korea likely dipped below 1 child per woman, surely a record low for any nation-state (although some Chinese provinces, to be fair, have seen similar dips.)
• The South China Morning Post argued that Hong Kong, facing rapid population aging, should try to keep its elderly employed. Similar arguments were made over at Bloomberg with regards to the United States, although the American demographic situation is rather less dramatic than Hong Kong's.
• Canadian news source Global News noted that, thanks to international migration, the population of the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia actually experienced net growth. OBC Transeuropa, meanwhile, observed that despite growing emigration from Croatia to richer European Union member-states like Germany and Ireland, labour shortages are drawing substantial numbers of workers not only from the former Yugoslavia but from further afield.
• At Open Democracy, Oliver Haynes speaking about Brexit argued strongly against assuming simple demographic change will lead to shifts of political opinion. People still need to be convinced.
• Open Democracy's Carmen Aguilera, meanwhile, noted that far-right Spanish political party Vox is now making Eurabian arguments, suggesting that Muslim immigrants are but the vanguard of a broader Muslim invasion.

On the ongoing depopulation of Cape Breton

The other day on my personal blog, I linked to a CBC News report describing how a Cape Breton store and bakery, desperate for workers, was offering free land to people who would move to that Nova Scotian island and work for them.

A family-run business is trying a unique approach to recruit people to live and work year-round in rural Cape Breton by offering two free acres of land to people who are willing to relocate.

Farmer's Daughter is a general store and bakery in Whycocomagh, N.S., which has a population of about 800. Sisters Sandee MacLean and Heather Coulombe took over the business earlier this year from their dairy farmer parents, who started it nearly 25 years ago.

MacLean told CBC News that the store has great employees — but it needs more of them to expand their operations.

"We have big ideas about what we'd like to do," she said.

The business would like to increase the number of year-round employees from 12 to at least 15, but hasn't gotten much response to traditional "help wanted" ads. Many young people have left the community to work in places like Halifax or Alberta.

This story has gotten quite a lot of attention nationally. I would be entirely justified, alas, in suspecting that any bump in migration will be as minor as that which occurred this February when the Cape Breton If Donald Trump Wins website briefly went viral. This humour website did get quite a lot of attention, and apparently did result in at least some inquiries. By this July, though, it seems as if the only migrants the website attracted were temporary ones, in the form of tourists.

A three-ringed binder, tucked into the corner of a small visitor information centre in Nova Scotia, may contain the proof of what many Cape Bretoners have suspected — that more Americans are descending on the island this year.

And locals say Donald Trump is the reason.

All day, tourists flow in and out of the one-room visitor information centre in the village of Baddeck, asking for advice on what to see and how to make the most of nearby attractions. A glance at a visitors' book — marked "Where are you from?" in block capital letters — reveals various American locations: Connecticut, Florida, New York City.

[. . .]

Room nights sold across the province rose by three per cent compared to the first half of 2015, but Cape Breton saw a boom of 16 per cent.

There was also a 12 per cent increase of visitors to Nova Scotia from the United States, while visitation from overseas declined seven per cent.

Although there are clearly many American tourists, it's harder to come by Americans who are actually following the website's advice and immigrating.

Back in January 2015, I looked into the phenomenon of out-migration from Atlantic Canada, the easternmost region of Canada and one that has consistently failed to share in the relative prosperity of other provinces. This out-migration does not occur at the same rate throughout. In the province of Nova Scotia, for instance, the capital city of Halifax has continued to experience some growth close to the Canadian average. At the other end is Cape Breton Island, a mountainous island in the northeast of the province famed as the last stronghold of Canadian Gaelic language and culture and as a land with a sadly dysfunctional industrial economy. Once, before the world wars, coal mining helped sustain a cosmopolitan industrial working class, living in the cities and towns which now constitute the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. But now, the mines are shut and nothing has replaced them. With no local economic motor and not nearly enough subsidies and income transfers coming from outside, the population of the entire island has been collapsing for decades, as the incipient natural decrease of the island's population is accelerated by emigration.

Nova Scotia's Finance and Treasury Board has noted the scale of this collapse. Rural Nova Scotia--Nova Scotia outside of Halifax, even--has been in steep decline for some time.



Cape Breton has done much worse than the average. Chris Shannon's widely shared 2014 Cape Breton Post article looks at the scale, and the inevitability, of this.

Fifteen-year-old Taylor O’Brien says the lure of more opportunities in the West has her thinking a move to Alberta is in her future after she completes Grade 9 at Bridgeport school in Glace Bay this June.

She says the plan is to move to Fox Creek, Alta., a town in the heart of that province’s oil industry. Her father lives there and O’Brien says she wants to move in July, in time to get settled and begin high school there in the fall.

“I really thought it through. I want to move,” she says.

“I’m too used to being stuck around here. It gets old after a while … seeing the same places. I see the Mayflower Mall like 10 times a week. I just want to explore.”

Sydney resident Thérèse Begg, 32, along with her spouse, intend to leave Cape Breton in the next couple of years for either Ontario or British Columbia.

It’s due to a lack of nightlife in the downtown and the small number of quality restaurants, she says.

Despite making a decent living as a baker and her partner being a machinist, Begg says it’s the lifestyle that’s driving them away from her hometown.

“There’s no variety of anything to do. Everybody goes to the hockey game, go to Tim Hortons, and they go to the movies. And that’s pretty much all there is to do,” says Begg, who grew up in Sydney but lived in Halifax for 10 years before returning in 2010.

The statistical trends in 2014 were grim. They have not changed at all.

CBRM’s economic development manager John Whalley says he’s more concerned about the rate of decline, which isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

“It’s actually accelerating,” he says.

“Cape Breton Island, in terms of rate, saw the biggest decline of any region in the country, according to this (Statistics Canada) data, and CBRM, obviously, constitutes a big part of that.”

In 2012-13, the figures show the CBRM lost 931 people to interprovincial migration to other parts of Canada, and a further 301 people moved to other areas of Nova Scotia (known as intraprovincial migration).

The other municipalities in Cape Breton are worse off with declines in population from the 2006 to 2011 census years at 4.6 per cent for Richmond County, 5.7 per cent for Inverness County, and 6.3 per cent for Victoria County.

Whalley says long-range projections from consulting firm Stantec estimate the CBRM’s population in 2031 would be approximately 78,000.

The island’s population is estimated to shrink to 102,000 from its current size of 134,535 people.

My Prince Edward Island, in marked contrast, is projected to experience relatively strong growth over that timeframe, having surpassed the declining population of Cape Breton just a few years ago.

All I can do is note this trend, rooted in the very deep-seated issues described. Cape Breton is beautiful--its natives agree, its visitors agree--but relatively few of these people actually want to live here. It's difficult to see how this could change, barring something completely unexpected and--frankly--unimaginable. At most, the ongoing slowdown in Alberta might slow down emigration, for a time. (Or, perhaps more plausibly, it might redirect it.)

On Alberta, and Canada, after the end of the oil advantage

The collapse of oil prices worldwide has hit many oil-exporting economies hard. Here in Canada, Alberta has been hit particularly hard. A recent CBC post illustrating a Facebook post
which went viral underlines the issue.

An oilpatch worker's widely shared social media post accuses Justin Trudeau of ignoring Alberta's economic pain and pleads for help during the economic slump.

Since Lloydminster's Ken Cundliffe posted the letter on Jan. 10, it has been shared thousands of times.

"Since you will not acknowledge what the low oil prices have done to our own people, I will," wrote Cundliffe, an operator with Husky Oil. "It's hard to say in words how scared and desperate people are becoming."

The letter paints a dire picture of layoffs and unemployment insurance running out for many, alongside a jump in theft and suicide rates.

"Alberta has not taken an equalization payment for over 50 years and has done more than its fair share in supporting the East in that time. Now that the Alberta economy is struggling due to low oil prices, why do you refuse to acknowledge the problem?" he wrote, questioning why the Liberal government has given away "BILLIONS of Canadian taxpayer dollars to other countries."

"Please start helping our own people through these tough times," the letter urged.

Some might disagree with the angst, but the scale of the collapse is real. Jason Markusoff's article in MacLean's, "The death of the Alberta dream", outlines the scale of Alberta's issues.

the great oil rout of 2014-15 seemed, at least at first, to be following a similar pattern to other busts. Some big oil sands projects get delayed, rig and well activity shrivels and Employment Insurance rolls spike, leading to knock-on effects: Calgary towers thin out, the real estate market softens, and cuts spread to everything from shops to restaurants. Yet past plunges were reliably followed by a bungee-like snap back in growth, as oil prices regained their upward momentum. It’s a pattern a generation of Albertans has come to expect, after the 1998 Asian financial crisis, the 9/11 terrorism shock and the 2008 financial crisis.

But the broad optimism of early 2015 has gradually given way to dread. This feels more like the awful 1980s, with no swift recovery to come—not in a world glutted by oil, as Saudi Arabia battles to squeeze out higher-cost producers like Russia and the United States. Before Christmas 2014, as prices thudded from above US$100 per barrel to below US$60 for the first time since the Great Recession, oilpatch observers wondered how soon US$80 oil would return. Instead, the OPEC cartel’s decision to keep pumping, and the surprising resilience of U.S. producers, have pushed oil down to below US$40.

Energy companies are preparing for a grim 2016. Analysts predict budgets will get slashed further, and that more energy firms may have to cut staff, having already laid off thousands. Ongoing oil sands construction projects will continue to wind down with little to replace them, hitting both the residential and commercial real estate sectors hard. For instance, in nearly one-sixth of all the office space in downtown Calgary, the fluorescent lights now shine on empty cubicles, and it’s forecast to get worse. Reports of the symptoms pop up almost daily: more insolvencies, more business for moving trucks and repo crews, even a noticeable uptick in suicides. The Calgary Stampede itself has been forced to lay off staff, as its offseason event bookings dried up. In November, the Alberta unemployment rate came within one-tenth of a percentage point of the national average, the closest it’s been since 1989. Those trend lines are expected to cross over next year, making it more clear to Canadian job-seekers that the Alberta dream is in decline.

The rest of the country isn’t immune from those ominous grinding sounds coming from Canada’s longtime economic engine. Canadian GDP dipped into recession territory in the first half of 2015 on the oil shock, and though the country managed a rebound in the third quarter, Alberta’s troubles—as well as slumps in other oil-rich provinces like Saskatchewan and Newfoundland—have left a gaping wound. The energy sector had long driven Canada’s trade surplus, papering over weakness elsewhere while soaking up large numbers of unemployed and underemployed people from regions like the Maritimes and hard-hit southwestern Ontario. Many economists predict a gradual rebound, but nothing head and shoulders above national growth rates, as had been typical for Alberta. “Average growth” is an unfamiliar term in Alberta, and will take some getting used to.

But even average growth seems a ways off, as troubles keep filtering through the province. In Alberta’s southeast, Medicine Hat drew international acclaim in the spring of 2015 after it became the first city in Canada to eliminate homelessness, having pursued an ambitious five-year agenda to put people into subsidized housing within 10 days of them landing in emergency shelters. After so much progress, Medicine Hat’s Salvation Army shelter is back to averaging 17 clients a night, up about one-third since 2014—too many to promptly find them all affordable housing. Local demand for donated clothing and household items also rose by more than a quarter over the last year, says manager Murray Jaster. But donations slumped too, and he had to reduce staff. When he’s out along the Trans-Canada Highway that dissects Medicine Hat, Jaster has noticed more hitchhikers than he’s seen in years—people looking to take the long road home, or perhaps to wherever in Canada the jobs may be. “Man, we’re a have-not province all of a sudden,” Jaster says. “Who can believe it? I can’t.”

As Toronto Star writer Antonia Zerbiasias noted in her "Ottawa’s focus on Alberta oilsands is killing manufacturing jobs in Eastern Canada, economists say", many of these returning migrants won't find jobs at home. The high Canadian dollar of previous years, sustained by high oil prices, may have inflicted Dutch disease on the Canadian industrial sector.

In his report, Coulombe and his co-researchers determined that our petro-currency was responsible for 42 per cent of job losses between 2002 and 2007. That translates to at least 140,000 manufacturing jobs gone as a direct result of the oilsands development.

It didn’t get any better after that. Our manufactured exports dropped another 12.6 per cent between the second quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2011.

If Dutch Disease is allowed to spread, Coulombe and other economists warn, Canada’s ailing manufacturing sector will face still more job losses, while consumers, farmers and non-oil producing industries will feel increasing pain through inflation and gas prices at the pump.

The long-unprofitable oilsands, which require the expensive and water-intense extraction of tarry bitumen, suddenly became economically feasible.

That increased oilsands development boosted crude exports. By 2006, oil became our biggest export, displacing autos and auto parts. The loonie surged against the weakening U.S. dollar. That made our manufactured exports — long dependent on a low Canadian dollar — more expensive. And that cost factory workers jobs.

Over the past year, alarm bells have been sounding.

As noted by the CBC in relation to the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia, the returned workers have nothing to look forward to but lower incomes and higher levels of unemployment. Some local companies have taken advantage of the returnees to alleviate worker shortages, but this cannot be a general solution.

What next? I, personally, am not sure I want to know.

On the inevitability of out-migration from Atlantic Canada

Halifax, capital of the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia, has some serious demographic issues. In May of last year, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald's Brent Bundale and Davene Jeffrey summarized the findings of the Halifax Index 2014. Bundale had noted in 2012 that a relatively strong Haligonian economy could be threatened by labour shortages. This has become a serious problem.

Halifax is facing a population crisis as fewer people move to the city and more pack their bags for other parts of the country, a new report says.

Immigration to Nova Scotia’s biggest city hit an eight-year low last year, while outmigration to other parts of Canada spiked to its highest level in over a decade, the report found.

Halifax’s population grew 0.4 per cent last year, half the municipality’s normal rate and lagging behind most Canadian cities.
“If our population declines, our fiscal sustainability is threatened,” Paul Kent and Fred Morley, both with the Greater Halifax Partnership, said in an introduction to the Halifax Index 2014.

“The biggest challenge we face as a community is hanging on to our new graduates and attracting immigrants.”

Parts of the index mirror findings of the Ray Ivany-led report released earlier this year on improving the province’s economy. A key finding of the Ivany report was that Nova Scotia must grow its population through immigration and encouraging students to stay.

One noteworthy thing about all this is that, by the standards of Atlantic Canada, Halifax is in relatively good shape. It attracts large numbers of migrants from throughout Atlantic Canada and from Nova Scotia, and it attracts a disproportionately large share of Atlantic Canada's immigrants. Port Hawkesbury, a Cape Breton town and noteworthy source of migrants whose mayor was interviewed in connection with the collapse of the new migration of Atlantic Canadians to Alberta, is not so favoured at all.

John Phyne and Linda Harling-Stalker's paper "'Good to be Alberta Bound?': Out-Migration, In-Migration and the Strait Region of Nova Scotia, 2001-2006", concentrating on the area of northern Nova Scotia including Port Hawkesbury, is a solid paper combining economics and ethnography. It makes a case that, outside of relatively favoured areas like Halifax, substantial out-migration is inevitable. With limited options for well-paying employment, a dispersed and highly rural population structure, a century-long perspective on migration seeing it as an inevitable life stage, little lasting in-migration (whether from other regions of Canada or from non-Canadian sources), and sustained below-replacement fertility rates, the authors predicted the decay of that region's fabric. That decay, I would suggest, can be generalized to the whole of the area.

These constraints on the labour force will limit the region's growth. A Toronto Dominion February 2012 report, "Estimating Longer-Term Growth Prospects in Canada's Provincial Economies", makes just this point.

Québec, the Maritimes, and Manitoba rounded out the middle-to-bottom positions. We see that productivity gains among the group were tightly clustered (1.1-1.5%). Therefore, the difference in the headline GDP growth number among these five provinces stemmed primarily from labour supply growth. Québec generally had a lower labour force participation rate than the others in large part due to an older populace. However, this did not translate into lacklustre labour supply growth because of the province’s ability to attract about 15-20% of all new immigrants admitted to Canada each year. Of the group, Prince Edward Island (PEI) recorded the highest labour supply growth of roughly 1.0% per year from 1990-2007. While annual population gains within PEI were not significant, the labour force participation rate did increase by more than three percentage points over the benchmark period. In comparison to both Québec and PEI, the remaining three provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Manitoba) fell somewhere in the middle on labour supply growth front. In spite of their underlying differences, economic growth among the five provinces in this group came in at 1.8-2.4% per year.

Worse will come.

The expected outflow of individuals to other parts of the country, combined with struggles to attract international migrants, weigh down the labour supply prospects for Québec and the Atlantic provinces. Our projections have Québec clocking in at a mere 0.3% labour supply growth over 2016-21. The numbers for the Atlantic provinces are not much better. Combining these disappointing numbers, with lacklustre productivity gains, results in economic growth range from 1.1% to 1.4% per year in each of these provinces.

In response to these demographic constraints, papers like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business' October 2009 "The Future of Atlantic Canada: Dealing with the Demographic Drought" (authored by Amelia DeMarco and Bradley George) and the Centre for the Study of Living Standards' December 2009 "The Productivity Performance of Atlantic Canada" (authored by Peter Harrison and Andrew Sharpe) have identified improving productivity as the only way forward for the Atlantic Canadian economy. The problem, as especially the last paper notes, is that there have been many calls to imrpove productivity in Atlantic Canada but little success. The economic structure of the region, concentrated in low-productivity resource industries and retail, is resistant. What economic convergence has come, in Newfoundland and Labrador, has come from offshore oil driving strong growth in the past decade. Will this last even for Newfoundland? Will the remainder of Atlantic Canada enjoy similar bounty? I have my doubts.

In the meanwhile, as a 2013 Canadian Press report drawing on Statistics Canada's migration information notes, there are entirely rational reasons for Atlantic Canadians to continue to migrate.

BMO economist Robert Kavcic said inter-provincial migration was well established in the early 2000s as Alberta emerged as the country’s growth engine, but stalled somewhat during the 2008-09 recession.

“Now we’re at the part of the cycle where Alberta (is growing strong again), the unemployment rate is down to around four per cent, and Atlantic Canada has lost a lot of momentum because a lot of the fiscal stimulus there has wound down,” he explained.

He noted that while all provinces are losing workers to Alberta and to a lesser extent Saskatchewan, the drain was especially dramatic in Atlantic Canada, where out migration hit 11,000, or 0.5 per cent of the population, during the last 12-month period for which there is data.

The major factor for the movement is availability of work, the report says. Alberta and Saskatchewan lead the nation with unemployment rates of 4.4 and 3.6 per cent respectively, well below the 6.9 per cent national average. The four Atlantic provinces, meanwhile, have jobless rates ranging from 9.1 per cent in Nova Scotia to 11.0 per cent in Newfoundland and Labrador.

As well, average hourly wages are now $6 higher in Alberta than they are in Atlantic Canada — the highest gap on record — and about $4 higher than in Ontario and British Columbia.

[. . .]

Among the least attractive of the 19 areas surveyed, BMO listed Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, London, Ont., and New Brunswick in that order from the bottom.

The inevitability of further out-migration from Atlantic Canada, to Ontario or Alberta or Saskatchewan or anywhere sufficient jobs are availabile, seems inescapable. Equally inescapable is the likelihood that, the more out-migration occurs, the more there will be economic incentives for out-migration as the region's economy continues to fall further behind its peers. As Phyne and Harling-Starker's paper noted, Ireland only managed to reverse similarly high levels of emigration with by developing an economic miracle. Even that didn't last. Absent something surprising, I fear Atlantic Canada might be heading into a feedback loop. Certain favoured areas, like Halifax, might do well. The rest, though?

On what the attenuation of the Alberta advantage might mean

One of the most popular posts on Demography Matters is my November 2012 post "On the Albertan advantage over the United States". There, I noted that the exceptional prosperity of that Canadian province's oil-based economy was attracting very large number of migrants from across North America, including from the United States. A March 2014 Global News report drawing upon recent Statistics Canada data noted that the province's labour market was so strong that it was exerting a pull on the rest of the country.

In 2013, the rest of the country (save Saskatchewan) witnessed an exodus of folks from their province of origin[.]

Where did they go? Virtually all to Alberta.

“A whopping 43,000 people flocked to Alberta last year,” BMO economist Robert Kavcic said in note published Thursday.

The surge in inter-provincial migration – the biggest in 23 years – bumped Alberta’s population up by 1.1 per cent, according to Kavcic.

The demographic contrast between Alberta and the rest of the country is stark, but closely mirrors what’s happening on the jobs fronts [. . .]

[T]he [Conference Board of Canada] nevertheless expects the province to generate nearly 47,000 net new jobs which will push the province’s unemployment rate down to 4.4 per cent by the end of the year.

The national unemployement rate, meanwhile, is stuck at 7.0 per cent. In B.C., it’s 6.4 per cent, and in Ontario and Quebec, the rate is 7.8 and 8.7 per cent, respectively.

The population shift serves to underscore the “starkly different labour market conditions in different areas of the country,” BMO’s Kavcic said.

You'll note that I said Alberta's strong economy was based on oil. At a time when oil prices are collapsing worldwide and given Alberta's failure to diversify its economy away from oil, this is a vulnerability. (The provincial government has found its revenues cut back so severely that consideration is now being lent to instituting a provincial sales tax.) This vulnerability is especially problematic given that much of Alberta's investment, and many of the migrants, have been directed towards developing the environmentally problematic and high cost Athabasca oil sands (or tar sands in the north of Alberta. With lower prices for oil, as MacLean's' Andrew Leach notes, many of the projects aimed at extracting oil from the sands and exporting it to consumers might not even bee needed in the case of lower prices.

Alberta is now getting used to the idea that it may enter into a recession. As CBC's Kathleen Petty noted, while some hope that this might lead to a less oil-based economy that could lead to a weaker currency and potentially a stronger industrial sector, rebalancing the Canadian economy, this outcome is not at all clear.

Between 1995 and 2014 the average annual employment growth rate in Alberta dwarfed all the other provinces. Alberta's average employment growth over a 10-year period was 2.50 per cent a year; Ontario was a distant second at 1.44.

What now? As economists and politicians peer over the precipice, looking for the bottom for oil, Ontario's premier is predicting a turnaround for her province.

Kathleen Wynne says "we have a diverse economy and it can be a buffer in a time like this, against some of that volatility." Perhaps, but will it be enough?
[. . .]
As Todd Hirsch, the chief economist at Alberta's ATB Financial, points out, "many manufacturers in Ontario and Quebec have actually been tied into Western Canada's oil and gas sector.

"While the auto sector used to be the largest area of growth for manufacturing, over the past 10 years, it has been specialized equipment, boilers, pumps and other inputs used in the extraction of petroleum" that has kept Ontario's manufacturing sector alive.

Hirsch says Wynne is correct in saying Ontario can be a "buffer", but it won't "be enough to propel overall Canadian growth higher in 2015."

And as Petty goes on to note, without Albertan economy growth to drive national figures up, the Canadian economy and the Canadian labour market would be in a rather different place. With substantial layoffs expected and net migration to Alberta expected to drop, many Canadian job-seekers who could have found employment out west just won't have access to such a strong labour market. This will be a problem throughout the rest of Canada, but I would suggest--on the basis of my personal knowledge and acquaintances, granted--that the effect might be particularly strong in Atlantic Canada. There, over the past decade especially, in the absence of anything like a strong economy with high-paying jobs a whole culture of temporary migration has built up, people moving west to work and earn income for months on end before returning home to spend some time with their families in their home communities. Without the chance to earn this income, the future will be grim for these people.

The thousands of Cape Bretoners who work in the Alberta oil patch are bracing for a grim Christmas -- and even grimmer New Year -- if crude oil prices continue their downward sprial. The collapse in oil prices means tradespeople and labourers may not be called back after the holidays - and many may lose their homes.

Billy Joe MacLean, the mayor of Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia, says the impact could be devastating for Cape Breton depending on how long oil prices stay low. "There will be hundreds and hundreds of people, coming back to Cape Breton, who may be able to survive for four to five months," Mr. MacLean tells Carol.

"But that's the limit. And then you're going to see the tragedy and the devastation of foreclosures on houses, and the seizures of goods," he adds.

Melissa Blake, the mayor of Fort McMurray and the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo, acknowledges there will be an impact on her town as well, and that growth will stall, but the effect will not be as drastic as Atlantic Canada, where the visiting workers come from. "We've got two distinct workforces," she tells Carol. "We have the one that's involved in permanent operations and the one that comes to us as guest workers from other communities." The permanent workforce in Fort McMurray is much more stable, she adds.

More on this Monday.

On the outports of Newfoundland as a globally-relevant paradigm

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine wrote an essay about the outport communities of Newfoundland, an essay titled "On Futility". The outport is a form of community unique to Newfoundland, a densely-populated coastal village with a population in the dozens or hundreds dependent on the once-abundant cod fisheries. A 2008 article by Jenny Higgins for the Newfoundland Heritage site points out how low living standards and the attractiveness of other areas--urban Newfoundland, mainland Canada, maybe even points further--created a tradition of emigration that only intensified after the collapse of the same fisheries in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

[The Newfoundland fisheries] existed for centuries and employed thousands of people, with many more engaged in processing, exporting and transporting the catch.

Then it got overfished. It collapsed in the early 90s, and it crashed hard: in some areas, stocks declined 99% over 50 years.

The fisheries have been under a moratorium for exactly 20 years now. There has been no improvement. Instead, the ecosystem is changing: invasive species are moving in, predators are devastating the remaining populations, and there is little to no evidence of a recovery. The Newfoundland fisheries are, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Large numbers of Newfoundlanders refuse to accept this. They demand that the fisheries be re-opened, as if the fish are merely hiding: the second a boat hits the water, the cod will come leaping out of the surf by the thousands, eager to be caught.

Others have accepted that the fisheries are dead, but insist that the jobs need to find them: they’re going to sit tight and wait for the government to find an industry for each and every teeny, tiny dot on the map. Even the towns with only a dozen residents. Even the towns accessible only by sea. Even the towns without reliable electricity or running water.

The hinky thing is that the young people seem to get it.

The exodus from the outports, and rural Newfoundland, is continuing to this day. There have been news reports of a very partial recovery of cod stocks last year, not nearly enough to justify the revival of the fisheries outports. A 2011 essay by sociologist Deatra Walsh--in Walsh's case, the town of Lewisporte--points out that many rural communities of Newfoundland may survive, service towns and the like, but that the outport is doomed. A 2001 paper (PDF) by Hamilton and Butler, "Outport Adaptations: Social Indicators through Newfoundland’s Cod Crisis", emphasizes that rural Newfoundland managed to retain a fair amount of social cohesion in the decade after the mortatorium in 1992, thanks to off-the-book employment and federal subsidies. In a 2012 opinion piece in the National Post, Newfoundland-born columnist Rex Murphy points out that the collapse of the outport has significant cultural repercussions for Newfoundlanders.

The end of the cod fishery stirred the greatest in-country migration of Newfoundlanders of modern times. Thousands of fishermen and plant workers and their families, scattered through all the towns and villages of Newfoundland’s meandering coastlines, were forced to look elsewhere for sustenance and employment. They were forced to abandon what they knew best, the environment of their families for generations, the peculiar set of skills that goes with fishing, and go out of province to an abruptly new life.

The moratorium brought on a seismic alteration in Newfoundland. The outports have been drained of their most active people; the long chain of continuous living from the sea and living on its very borders has been broken beyond repair. Many of the famous towns and outports — names that have been in songs and stories almost forever — are now whittled to half their size and less. Some old people remain. The younger come back every little while to visit, see parents, or just to savor time close to the water. But the dynamic life of the majority of outports is over with the fishery that gave birth to it.

It’s a striking, very melancholy change. While the outports dwindle into mere picturesqueness, the capital city of St. John’s explodes with activity and commerce from the offshore. There’s a Calgary feel to how fast things are moving in St. John’s. The offshore oil developments came at a very providential time. They also, I think, take the mind away from the stark prospects of Newfoundland outside the city.

[. . .]

Those who have left for good know how deep the change was. Those who remain carry the largely unspoken insight that outport Newfoundland, which gave birth to such a singular culture, rich in humour and pathos, indented with hardship and tragedy, and irresistible to those who felt its appeal, is on the point of vanishing.

All this is true. And yet, I'd suggest that the movement away from the outports towards urban areas--places like the capital city of St. John's, or like any number of destinations in Canada like the big cities of Ontario or Alberta--is a good thing for the people who lived there, or who would have lived there. Isolated one-industry villages capable of providing only marginal standards of living aren't good places to live. I'd question, like Wonkman, if it's a good idea to spend resources keeping non-viable communities alive at an artificial level of activity, as opposed to allowing for a certain amount of planned decline. Certainly the young people of the outports don't seem interested in staying in communities which have outlasted their economic base.

A few population-related news links

This evening, I thought I'd share a few interesting population-related news links I've collected in the past couple of weeks.

* The Discover Magazine blog 80 Beats summarized a recent study of young game-playing children in Beijing suggesting that these children are less trusting and more risk-averse than one might expect.

* On a perhaps-related note, an article in the latest issue of The National Interest by John Lee examines at length the consequences of China's rapid aging on its economic model, among other things.

* An article in The Guardian contrasting a relatively prosperous Chinese northeast with a stagnant Russian Far East makes the point that Russia need not fear millions of Chinese crossing their country's northern frontier. What incentives would there be for them to leave?

* The Taipei Times covered a recent statement by the head of the South Korean central bank calling for more immigration to ameliorate the effects of population aging.

* An Inter Press Service article notes that rising life expectancy for Japanese women is, unfortunately, being accompanied by falling incomes.

* The Population Reference Bureau's Behind the Numbers blog notes that birth rates have continued to decline throughout India.

* In Canada, a recent article in The Globe and Mail notes that there's an east-to-west income gradient for immigrants in Canada, immigrants in Québec enjoying substantially lower wages than their counterparts in Ontario who in turn earn less than their counterparts in western Canada.

* In the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia, meanwhile, the provincial government is trying to boost its attractiveness to immigrants in the face of declining immigrant numbers and a local population tending to decrease.

* In Europe, the Portuguese-American Journal notes that statistics indicate that more than one million Portuguese have left the country in the past fourteen years. This sort of emigration, which if anything seems to be accelerating, has obvious consequences.

* In the nearby Spanish region of Galicia, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Swissinfo takes a look, in the article "From Galicia to the Jura", at one community in Galicia that has been marked by emigration to Switzerland as a natural life stage for a half-century. (Likewise, emigration isn't slowing down.)

* A New York Times article profiles the Chinese of Barcelona, who have apparently so far resisted the effects of the Eurozone recession well.

Some population-related links

Over the past couple of months, I've collected links to blog posts on population-related issues. I present them here to you.

• In an extended essay at Geocurrents, Martin Lewis describes "The Many Armenian Diasporas, Then and Now". The most recent diasporas, first a mass migration from Anatolia after the Armenian genocide then economic migration from post-Soviet Armenia in the 1990s, were products of war. Earlier Armenian diasporas, however, were triggered by positive incentives to migrate, establishing mercantile networks stretching from central Europe to South Asia.


• After a half-century or so, Brazil is starting to become a noteworthy destination for immigrants, rather than a source. Jim Russell at Burgh Diaspora concentrates on one element of this, in the growing attractiveness of São Paulo to New Yorkers looking for the next global city.


• Patrick Metzger at the Toronto-centered blog Torontoist reacts to findings from the 2011 Canadian census revealing that Alberta's population has been growing significantly faster than Ontario, and that for the first time, more Canadians outside of Ontario live west of the province than east (in Québec and Atlantic Canada). To what extent is this shift product of Albertan growth as opposed to Ontarian decline? The debate's ongoing.


• Another post at Geocurrents notes the recent acceleration in population growth in Saskatchewan, perhaps connected with new energy developments. Will rapid population growth shift that Canadian province's traditionally left-wing political culture?


• At Crooked Timber, Maria Farrell's thoughtful personal essay "Things I have learnt from and about IVF" describes her own experiences with assisted reproduction.


• Two posts at Eastern approaches, the Economist's central and eastern Europe blog, deal with ethnic tensions in the Baltic States complicated by transnational ties. The first, on the recent referendum in Latvia on giving Russian official status, describes the polarization in Latvian society on ethnolinguistic lines that acts as a significant complication. The second, on growing Polish-Lithuanian tensions over Lithuania's Polish minority, makes the point that despite the two countries' shared history ion Poland-Lithuania they perceive this history in different ways. Rapid population aging and shrinkage in Lithuania, too, may--as commenters point out--encourage more of a siege mentality.


• A Victor Mair post at Language Log explores tensions in Hong Kong between Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese, often recent migrants to the autonomous city-state, with the two different populations being marked by the literal shibboleth of dialect: Cantonese-speaking Hong Kongers versus Putongua-speaking Chinese. Interesting and worrying stuff.

The problems with sub-national immigration policies

Earlier this month, the Burgh Diaspora reflected on the history of immigration to the United States, the variant forms of immigration sought by different states, the tensions between different American states over differing attitudes towards immigration and immigrants, and made a proposal: why not let subnational entities control their own immigration policies?

I think we should embrace the anti-federalist mood swing. Allow states such as Pennsylvania to embrace talent immigration as each sees fit. Better yet, let cities decide. H-1B visas effectively tie foreign born labor to the employer through sponsorship. Municipalities could act in the same capacity, making the visa contingent on urban residence and site of work. Various schemes could be concocted to enhance geographic mobility. Green cards would issued after a few years, well before the end of the federal queue.

This does make a certain amount of sense. In the realm of actually existing subnational immigration policies, I'm most familiar with that of Québec, where--as I wrote in June of last year--concerns over the growth of English led to the adoption of a policy explicitly favouring Francophone and French-leaning immigrants over others (French and Senegalese and Congolese versus Britons and Indians and Guyanese, say). This shift has arguably made immigration more popular in Québec, removing the fears of language shift from French, and has the potential to provide Québec with the workers--including skilled workers--that it will need as the provincial population ages. The rest of Canada obviously doesn't share the priorities of Québec and wouldn't be as responsive to local concerns. So, inasmuch as the subnational jurisdiction of Québec's control over immigration policies go, it seems a relative success.

The problems with sub-national immigration policies? Immigrants don't necessarily fit the slots allotted to them. As I noted above, the gap between immigrant and native-born wages in Québec is even worse than in the rest of Canada, a product of many things including the non-recognition of skilled workers and difficulties with social integration. In many cases, it's not especially clear that local control over immigration would be an improvement.

The second problem is that of mobility. For municipalities to have control over immigration, as the above blog goes on to sugget, strikes me as a very bad policy move. Immigrants have to be mobile, geographically as well as socially, and a municipality doesn't necessarily offer sufficient scope. In Québec the overwhelming majority of immigrants may be concentrated in Montréal, but this isn't because they're forced to live there. Rather, immigrants are concentrated in Montréal because that's where immigrant communities have formed neighbourhoods, dense social networks, and the like. Restrictions on mobility are especially problematic if--as some propose--immigrants are assigned residences in hinterlands in an effort to try to boost stagnant or declining populations. The waste of potential in those cases is arguably as much a moral problem as an economic one.

Finally, there's the question of whether immigrants will stay in their localities once probationary periods are up. My native Prince Edward Island has an immigrant retention rate of 25%; for cited reasons of wages (the poorest province in Canada) and social integration, most immigrants do not stay. Many sub-national jurisdictions may not keep as many immigrants as planned--in Canada, the differences between the have and have-not provinces on this metric is notable.

In conclusion? Sub-national immigration may be a useful idea, but it's one that definitely has its serious issues. It may produce short-term gains, but those gains can quickly be dissipated with bad planning and bad underlying conditions. Beware.

On arrival cities

Tonight, I was lucky enough to see Canadian journalist Doug Saunders present his new book Arrival City here in Toronto. This book, examining the global phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration--in low-, middle-, and high-income countries, within countries and between countries--makes the case, as summarized by Mark Kingwell in his recent review, that rural-to-urban migration is a very good thing for human beings.

In the terms of economics, cities are full of externalities – spillovers to market transactions. I might hate the noise created by the cafés and bars on the busy street near my house, but I welcome the romantic opportunities created by the very same nightspots.

Both positive and negative externalities are everywhere in urban life, and that’s one clear reason humans have been, for centuries now, progressively abandoning other ways of life and migrating to large, sometimes very large, conurbations.

Another reason, as Doug Saunders argues in this timely contribution to the discourse on global cities, is the simple desire of parents to offer their children a better time than they had.

Indeed, Saunders argues the cultivation of what he calls arrival cities--places where immigrants can find niches, residential, occupational, and otherwise, with as few restraints on all kinds of mobility as possible--is key. What is the arrival city?

The arrival city can be distinguished readily from other urban neighbourhoods, not only by its rural-immigrant population, improvised appearance and ever-changing nature, but also by the constant linkages it makes, in two directions, from every street, house and workplace.

It is linked in a lasting, intensive way to its far-off, originating villages, constantly sending people, money and knowledge back and forth. It finances improvements in the village, the care of older generations and the education of younger ones, while also making possible the next wave of migrations.

It is also deeply engaged with the nearby, established city. Its political institutions, business relationships, social networks and transactions are all footholds intended to give new village arrivals a purchase, however fragile, on the larger society.

The arrival city gives them a place to push themselves and their children further into the centre, into acceptability and connectedness.

The ex-villager enclave located on the periphery of our vision and beyond the tourist maps has become the setting of the world's next chapter – driven by exertion and promise, battered by violence and death, strangled by neglect and misunderstanding.

The first chapter is excerpted here; you'll have to buy the book for more. The concept of the arrival city does strike me as a very strong one. My own biography has connections of a sort to the concept of the arrival city: my parents left easternmost Prince Edward Island for the provincial capital of Charlottetown, where they enjoyed far more educational and occupational and other opportunities that their would have in their home district, settling in a suburb on the fringes of the city. That was an example of a well-regulated arrival city in a high-income countries; a century ago in Toronto, up to one-third of the housing stock was built pell-mell, shantytowns mostly on the fringes of the city. And in the metropoli of the world--Paris, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Mumbai--the same phenomenon that hit Toronto a century ago is being repeated now.

Saunders' key element for successful arrival cities lies in their openness, in their ability to let immigrants join the labour market, find homes and neighbourhoods where they can build useful social networks, assimilate however they do into the host culture, and do so with as little hindrances as possible. China's hukou system, which limits the possibility of rural migrants' settling in cities, is an example of what not to do (although the forced savings of isolated workers plays the useful role of providing the Chinese government with the money necessary to prop up state-own ed enterprises); Turkey and Brazil, which have regularized slums and are now actively trying to support the creation of civil society there, are doing much better. Even in the developed world, there are huge contrasts between a Germany that has let its Turkish population remain culturally and socially isolated, a France that has absorbed its immigrants culturally but left them on the edges of the economy and society, a Spain that had the luxury of planning the integration of its immigrants, and a Canada that was very very lucky.

I'm going on at length, I know. Suffice it to say that Arrival City is easily one of the more important books on migration recently published, and that this blog's readers would do well to pick up a copy for themselves.

On population aging and Newfoundland's blood supplies

The aging of populations has any number of consequences in any number of countries for any number of reasons. One consequence that I hadn't imagined at all was a falling number of potential blood donors in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Statistics Canada's latest demographic projection singled out Newfoundland and Labrador as the province with the fastest aging population.

As well, under a low-growth scenario, Newfoundland and Labrador is the only province that could see its population decline over the next 25 years.

"As this demographic shift happens, it will have a two-fold effect on our blood supply," said Sharon Bala, a communications official with the Canadian Blood Services in St. John's.

"First, we'll need more blood and then second, there'll be fewer donors available to donate, so that's why it's really important for us to engage younger people to pick up the torch."

In 2009, the median age of blood donors in Newfoundland was 41, meaning that half of the people who gave blood were older than that.

Bala said Canadian Blood Services has launched a new campaign targeting teens. She said organizers want to recruit donors at a younger age and to foster donation habits that will last for years.

In Canada, as in many other countries, blood is frequently in short supply. Part of this is because (circa 2008)a third of committed donors did not showing up, but as one source notes the demographics of blood donors are become less and less favourable.

Currently, despite the fact that almost everyone will need to use donor blood at some point in their life, less than 4% of eligible donors give blood.

By examining the records from the Canadian Blood Services, several patterns were observed. Firstly, the 15-24 age group showed the strongest likelihood to be donors, whilst those of working age (25-54) were the least likely to be donors. The authors predict that due to an ageing population this reliance on the younger generation will be unsustainable.

The study also showed positive ties between level of education and ability to speak English with donation likelihood, whilst immigrants and the wealthy were less likely to donate. The paper shows that those living in a big city were much less likely to donate blood than those living in smaller cities or towns, coining the phrase "the stingy big-city effect". According to Páez, "The fact that those who possessed a higher level of education were more likely to donate lends weight to the assertion that, with 25% of Canadians thinking there are some risks in donating blood, educating the public would help expand the donor database".

This last may be a consequence of fears dating back to the early and mid-1980s, when many people believed that they could become infected with HIV not only by receiving blood products but by donating blood. Older people with more commitments just find it difficult to set aside the time necessary.

Saberton et al's very extensive and highly recommended study suggests that, in Canada the proportion of blood donors as such doesn't very much by region, with (as noted above) fluency in English and residency in small towns playing more of a role. Newfoundland's very badly off in this regard, with underserviced rural areas and a most unfavourable age pyramid, with low completed fertility compounded by mass emigration of the young and working-age population.

What goes for Newfoundland probably also goes for other countries facing similar demographic issues. Where will the blood needed for surgeries come from in the future? Perhaps the blood could be manufactured. (But how?) Perhaps the blood could be imported. (But the memory of the tainted blood scandals common to most of the developed world will surely prevent this.) It's the sort of conundrum that doesn't seem to have been considered, honestly. Maybe it should.

On the lumpiness of nations and migrations and the importance of details

Over at the Middle East/North Africa-focused blog 'Aqoul, Matthew Hogan has an interesting post ("Class Demographics Explain Better MENA/Muslim Integration in USA?") that makes the point that comparisons between the levels of integration enjoyed or not enjoyed by Muslims in the United States and Europe are owing at least as much to the characteristics of the migrants as to the policies and attitudes of the receiving countries.

While I do enjoy a nice dose of American exceptionalism, and I do think it may apply here in some ways, let me nevertheless throw out a less nationalistic hypothesis on relative integration levels. I am too lazy and busy to find and crunch the appropriate numbers and surveys to confirm or refute it, but here it is: Could some of the relatively better Muslim/MENA integration in America be simply due to the fact that Muslim immigrants there have tended towards the educated professional and middle class, rather than being a large class of laborers as may be the case in lots of Europe?

Immigration-engendered social stress induced by large numbers of peasants coming up from the south is in the USA an issue associated with Mexican, and not Muslim and/or MENA, immigration. (There is no religious identity or practice fault-line, however, related to USA Mexican migration because Mexicans are typically Christians. The historic Catholic-Protestant divides of yesteryear's America and Greater Anglo-Saxonia have long since faded into insignificance.)

But on the issue of Mexican immigration, there is alot of overlap with European-type fears of Muslim/MENA immigration - namely the deeper fears engendered by the preceived phenomenon of lots-and-lots-of-brown-people-who-look-talk-and-act-funny-and-are-sucking-down-our-welfare-and-still-speaking-their-language-and-not doing-stuff-our-way.

But that type of fear may be less active where immigrants are more educated or entrepreneurial, thereby speaking the language well and living in (and selling to) mainstream communities. They also interact more frequently with different groups in the workplace. Such relative interaction seems to be the case of Muslim immigrants to the USA, many of whom came here to get an education and a profession, or start wholesale or retail-oriented businesses. They don’t manifest the isolation levels of MENA/Muslim immigrants in Europe, or Mexicans in North America for that matter.

Is this at all surprising?

National populations don't exhibit uniform demographic behaviours, with these instead varying according to such factors as ethnicity, region, class, or religion--East Germany within Germany is a perfect example of this. Migration is a notoriously "lumpy" phenomenon, depending critically on all manner of formal and informal links between sending and receiving areas, links which don't exist in the same way for different populations. One-third of the Mexican-born population in the United States was born in three west-central Mexican states (Jalisco, Guanajuato, Michoacán) where only 15% of the Mexican population lives. A wildly disproportionate share of Japan's emigrants have come from the Ryukyu Islands, centered on Okinawa, virtually an independent state until the late 19th century. A disproportionate number of the Atlantic Canadian province of New Brunswick's Francophones (and perhaps Francophones elsewhere in Atlantic Canada) move to Québec. And yes, a disproportionate number of the immigrants to the United States from Muslim countries were professionals, while European countries which received immigrants explicitly recruited immigrants for unskilled labour.

When you're talking about population trends, it's very important to take note of the details. Without the details, any conclusions one might hope to reach will necessarily be flawed.

A few more news links

For your reading pleasure, here's some population-related news links that I thought might interest you.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Nikola Krastev observes that even though populations are aging, fiscal issues and social isolation is making the lives of the elderly difficult.

Turkey's Today Zaman observes that Turkey's population is aging swiftly, its elderly population growing more quickly than its youth population.

Ha'aretz' Lily Galili notes that ex-Soviet Jews, by virtue of their removal to the very different environment of Israel, have enjoyed a much greater lifespan than they otherwise would have and are being assimilated to Israeli norms.

The CBC comments that Nova Scotia's rapidly aging has led to serious and growing economic problems in a depopulating rural Nova Scotia.

Billboards in Atlanta claiming that relatively high abortion rates among African-American women is threatening the survival of that community are as controversial as you'd expect.

Kenya's Daily Nation reports that remittances to Kenya, about half from North America and one-quarter from Europe, reached $609 million dollars in 2009.

French Pearce in the Guardian suggests that the sharp decline in Bangladeshi fertility rates can be explained by a combination of a Green Revolution that reduced the need for labour on farms and the economic empowerment of women.

Three Atlantic Canadian articles

Population increase (or decrease) is entirely determined by a combination of natural increase (or decrease) and either minus or plus migration. In Atlantic Canada, the trends are definitely pointing towards a decrease.

In the Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson writes ("Newfoundlanders return, but the outports are still in peril") about how in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, an oil-driven economic boom and remittances haven't reversed a tendency towards population decrease, especially in the outports--isolated mid-sized fishing communities--scattered liberally on the coastline outside of the Avalon Peninsula area that includes the capital.

At least rhetorically, Newfoundland governments have always been for keeping the rural part of the province alive and thriving. And there have been some spotty successes.

Some of that money earned from Alberta has returned to outports to rebuild or spruce up homes. People from “away” have found these communities delightful and purchased second homes there. Sometimes, although not often, Newfoundlanders have returned to the outports to retire, although most of them prefer to be nearer large medical complexes. And, of course, tourism has shown sprightly growth in recent years, giving an economic boost to some places.

The overall numbers, however, do not lie. Half the population now lives in the Avalon peninsula, home to thriving St. John's. The strong economy in and around the provincial capital explains why the recession has struck Newfoundland somewhat less heavily than other parts of Canada. The housing market in and around St. John's is among the hottest in Canada. In a province with an 18-per-cent unemployment rate, it's often hard to find skilled workers to build or renovate houses, some of that labour having gone to Western Canada.

A double migration has hit rural Newfoundland: to St. John's and to other parts of Canada.

Meanwhile, the attempts by Prince Edward Island to attract permanent immigrants that I blogged about earlier seem, according to the CBC ("Majority of immigrants to P.E.I. leave: report"), to be pretty futile. Bad management of the programs involved don't help.

The Provincial Nominee Program has been a revolving door for the majority of immigrant families who participate, according to a report released Wednesday by the University of Prince Edward Island.

The program, commonly known as PNP, matched foreign investors who wanted to immigrate to Canada with P.E.I. companies they could invest in. In return for their investment, applicants would have their immigration application expedited.

The study, conducted with help from the P.E.I. Association for Newcomers, looked at 44 immigrant families who arrived in the province through the PNP in the last four months of 2006.

When the report's authors checked back 2½ years later, they found all but 11 of the families had left a retention rate of 25 per cent.

Shine-Ji Youn Chung, a co-author of the study and an international student at UPEI, said she understands the frustration felt by many immigrants who came to the province through the PNP.

"They're feeling like, 'Okay, I am not part of this community, we are not welcome, even though we are here.'

Finally, MacLean's blogger and journalist Aaron Wherry reports on how a Conservative member of the Canadian parliament was backtracking on his condemnation of unemployed Nova Scotians for their refusal to do farm work.

Gerald Keddy, yesterday. If anyone ever stops Nova Scotia farmers from hiring migrant labourers to harvest their crops, they would destroy a lot of businesses because unemployed Nova Scotians don’t want those jobs, says Gerald Keddy, the Conservative MP for South Shore-St. Margarets. ”Nova Scotians won’t do it — all those no-good bastards sitting on the sidewalk in Halifax that can’t get work,” Mr. Keddy said Monday.

Gerald Keddy, today. Conservative MP Gerald Keddy is apologizing for referring to some unemployed Haligonians as “no-good bastards.” Keddy, MP for the Nova Scotia riding of South Shore-St. Margaret’s, issued a statement Tuesday saying he was sorry for the “insensitive comments.” ”In no way did I mean to offend those who have lost their job due to the global recession, nor did I mean to suggest that anyone who is unemployed is not actively looking for employment,” he said.

In truth, farm work is one of those 3-D jobs--dirty, difficult, and dangerous--that has always attracted relatively badly off people, especi8ally migrants who aren't included in the social contract. Just because a region has high overall unemployment, as commenters note, doesn't mean that uts labour market wouldn't be segmented.

A note on one Canadian periphery

My birthplace, the Canadian province of Rrince Edward Island, population 140 thousand, isn't often considered in relation to wider demographic trends. While it's true that the Island is peripheral even in the Canadian context, with its population of 140 thousand being smaller than those of a dozen Canadian cities and an economy based primarily on the service sector (including tourism) and slowly declining primary industries like agriculture and fishing, it's also true that Prince Edward Island's demographic prospects and futures prefigure the demographic issues facing peripheral areas throughout the First World. Scott Peterson wrote last week about how falling populations is reshaping the landscape of many depopulating parts of Europe; Prince Edward Island has faced this trend for more than a century. Although there is now intense human presence on the landscape of Prince Edward Island, with more than half of the Island's land being used for agricultural or other purposes, in the late 19th century an evenly distributed population of farmers occupied the near-totality of the Island's territory. This geographic distribution of population changed when, soon after Canadian confederation, Islanders began to participate in the ongoing mass emigration from Atlantic Canada.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the exodus was primarily to the ‘Boston states.’ It reached crisis proportions in the 1880s when our industrial boom began to go bust. Despite efforts to staunch the outward flow, it continued unabated until the United States closed the border during the 1930s Depression. Scholars estimate that between 1851 and 1931 some 600,000 people left the Maritimes, nearly 50 percent of the population still present in 1931. Following the Second World War, out-migration again became acute as villages dependent on farming, fishing, forestry, and mining expelled their people to the booming Ontario economy. The oil crisis of the 1970s shifted the emphasis to jobs in Alberta.

[. . .]

Scholars debate the impact of out-migration asking whether it was a cause or a result of the region’s poor economic showing. It was undoubtedly both. Living on the edge of two cradles of industrialization in the nineteenth century – New England and the St Lawrence-Great Lakes heartland – it was difficult to establish a third node of development on the Atlantic coast. People were inevitably attracted to the new growth centres. With dwindling numbers, provincial grants declined as did political clout in Ottawa. Economic growth thus became even more difficult to sustain against the centralizing tendencies of Canada’s National Policy. Head offices of banks and businesses followed the money and people were obliged to do likewise. It is unclear whether these trends can ever be reversed.

As a province with a relatively more agricultural economy than its neighbours, Prince Edward Island experienced relatively higher out-migration, with outright population decline being the main trend for most of the first half of the 20th century and many territories which once were farmed being allowed to return to nature. Out-migration slowed down over the second half of the 20th century, as federal transfer payments began to subsidize seasonal economies, the standard of public services improved sharply, and the tourism sector began to take off. The net resutl of all this is that Prince Edward Island faces less potentially damaging demographic challenges than any of the other three Atlantic Canadian provinces. For instance, the Island's fertility and birth rates are higher than in most other Canadian provinces, while the province actually benefits from interprovincial migration: more Canadians move to Prince Edward Island than leave. The tourism sector plays a major role in this second trend; tourism campaigns have successfully promoted an image of Prince Edward Island as a pleasant territory with beautiful natural scenery and an engaging, friendly population, this industry attracting migrants and helping to boost levels of employment. If Prince Edward Island's economy didn't make spectacular leaps forward, this economic strategy may well have helped the province avoid the massive out-migration that has dominated Newfoundland and Labrador's demographic trends for decades. It's worth noting that this strategy isn't dissimilar from Spain's recent economic and population growth, driven so heavily by (among other migratory trends) the movement of northern Europeans to the Costa del Sol and other tourist destinations.

All of this isn't to say that Prince Edward Island doesn't face serious demographic issues. The definitely sub-replacement fertility rate, among other factors, ensures that the number of students (and future workers) in Prince Edward Island may fall by one-fifth by 2020, and Prince Edward Island's development minister has warned that the aging of Island's population and the province's development into a "retirement province" risks creating serious labour shortages, especially if immigrant retention rates don't rise. Even now, as Zena Olijnik ("Immigration: Give us your skilled") wrote recently in Canadian Business, flawed guest worker programs and local populations unwilling to undertake dirty and dangerous jobs are threatening the viability of some industries, leaving some people in these same outlying areas to propose economic revitalization strategies like wildly uneconomic ferry routes. The only thing that can be said about these issues is that the Island has managed to buy itself some time in which to adapt to its new demographic environment. Here's to hoping that this time will be well-spent.