Some migration-related news links

Al Jazeera has hosted a few interesting articles exploring different kinds of migration. Alia Malek's "Daughters of Diaspora: two Algerian sisters, one in Texas, one in Paris" looks at the experiences of two Algerian sisters, one immigrating to France and the other to the United States, in the very different enviroments of their two adopted countries. Alia Malek's "Shaped by the decisions their mothers made, two cousins grapple with assimilation in both the U.S. and France" notes the substantial flight of ethnic Armenians from Syria to their ethnic homeland, quite possibly the largest post-Soviet migration to Armenia since the end of the Soviet Union. Anna Nigmatulina's "Brazil’s urban Indians confront city life head on, with headdress off" examines how Brazilian indigenous peoples fare in the cities of Brazil, while "Charity offers hope to Mexico's Mixtec elderly" by John Holman looks at how elderly Mixtec left to themselves by younger generations of migrants cope.

Portugal, meanwhile, remains a country of migrations. Bloomberg's Henrique Almeida and Joao Lima "Portuguese With No Pay From Oil Bust in Africa Go Home to No Job" describe how many Portguese emigrants to Angola have been forced to return in the aftermath of the end of the Angolan oil boom, while Raphael Minder's "Azorean Diaspora Can’t Resist the Powerful Pull of Home" in The New York Times looks at how Azorean migrants and their descendants in North America relate to their ancestral archipelago.

Vice's Maurice Chammah described in " Why Are Nigerians Flocking to Work in Texas Prisons?"

a remarkable story of chain migration, from West Africa to Texas, driven by employment opportunities in Texan prisons.

Taking a look at Jonathan Last's arguments on migration

Demographics writer Jonathan Last (Wikipedia article, official site) has gotten a fair bit of attention for his Wall Street Journal essay "America's Baby Bust", wherein he argues that the United States' slowing economy is directly connected to low fertility. Much of the reaction to his analysis has been critical. Writing in The New Republic, Rui Texeira questions Last's dismissal of immigration and his piecemeal remedies for low fertility (tax breaks as opposed to government programs). It's taken apart scathingly by Love, Joy, Feminism!'s Libby Anne, who rightly finds Last's equation of Chinese forcible one-child policy with small American families ridiculous, Last's dismissal of the idea that things could be done to make family life easier on the grounds that people shouldn't necessarily expect happiness ill-guided, and makes an argument that Last's focus on fertility of well-off white American women reflects the "race suicide" rhetoric of early 20th century American eugenicists.

Me, I'd like to take a look at a Los Angeles Times op-ed that got published on the 8th of February, simply titled "Fertility and Immigration". I think this to be one of those articles that could benefit from a fisking.

In Washington, politicians are trying to reform America's immigration system, again. Both President Obama and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are proposing "paths to citizenship" for an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. Other proposals abound, including finishing the border fence, creating a better E-Verify system for employers and passing the last Congress' Dream Act.

All of these ideas, however, fundamentally misunderstand immigration in America: Future immigration is probably going to be governed not by U.S. domestic policy choices but by global demographics.

1. In Last's defense, he does say "probably".

2. Against Last, he really does overlook the importance of policy in determining major migration flows. Consider the movement of Poles to Germany. Large-scale Polish migration west dates back to the beginning of the Ostflucht, the migration of Germans and Poles from what was once eastern Germany to points west, in around 1850. By the time Poland regained its independence in 1919, hundreds of thousands of Poles lived in Germany, mainly in the Ruhr area and Berlin. Leaving aside the exceptional circumstances of the post-Second World War deportations of Germans from east of the Oder-Neisse line, Polish migration to (West) Germany continued under Communism, as hundreds of thousands of people with German connections--ethnic Germans, members of Germanized Slavic populations, and Polish family members--emigrated for ethnic and economic reasons. In the decade of the 1980s, up to 1.3 million Poles left the country, the largest share heading for Germany. Large-scale Polish migration to Germany has a long history.

And yet, in the past decade, by far the biggest migration of Poles within the European Union was directed not to neighbouring Germany but to a United Kingdom that traditionally hasn't been a destination. Most Polish migration to Germany, it seems, is likely to be circular migration; Germany missed out on a wave of immigrants who would have helped the country's demographics significantly. Why? Germany chose to keep its labour markets closed for seven years after Poland's European Union admission in 2004, while the United Kingdom did not, the results being (among other things) that Polish is the second language of England.

Regulations matter. I've already noted that in Mediterranean Europe, the large majority of immigrants don't come from North Africa, notwithstanding reasonably strong trans-Mediterranean ties. Why? Restrictive migration policies. Other examples can be easily found. Migration to different countries occurs largely at the will of different countries. There are no hordes battering down the doors.

For the last 30 years, a massive number of immigrants has poured into the U.S. from south of the border. Today there are 38 million people living in the United States who were born somewhere else. That's an average of more than 1 million immigrants a year for three decades, a sustained influx unlike any we've seen before in U.S. history. And regardless of what policies Washington decides on, that supply is likely to dry up soon.

[. . .]

When it comes to immigration, demographers have a general rule of thumb: Countries with fertility rates below the replacement level tend to attract immigrants, not send them. And so, when a country's fertility rate collapses, it often ceases to be a source of immigration.

1. That's not a hard-and-fast rule. Looking to the post-Second World War era, for instance, even though fertility rates in North America and western Europe were substantially above replacement levels, these regions still attracted large numbers of immigrants. Why? Simply put, economic (and political) conditions in these countries were sufficiently attractive to migrants, who could easily find work.

2. A collapsing fertility rate does not mean a country stops being a source of immigration. Look at post-Communist Europe, if you don't believe me. Now, it is true that if fertility falls to low levels and stays at low levels, the size of the cohorts of potential emigrants will eventually shrink. I don't think it a coincidence that Romania has emerged as a source of immigrants as the cohort of children born under Ceaucescu's pro-natalist policies comes of age. That shrinkage by itself does not mean a diminished propensity to migrate, however. Look, again, at Romania. The ability to migrate, whether we're talking about being able to afford the various costs and benefits of the movement or the non-existence of barriers to migrate (or even the existence of incentives to migrate is more substantial a factor than the mere presence of a cohort of people of which some may become potential migrants.

Consider Puerto Rico. In the 1920s, Puerto Ricans began to trickle into the United States. Their numbers accumulated slowly, and by 1930, there were 50,000 Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. (nearly all in New York City). Over time, however, the community reached a critical mass, and by the mid-1940s, 30,000 Puerto Ricans were arriving every year. The Puerto Rican wave continued, and grew. In 1955, 80,000 Puerto Ricans came to the United States.

But from 1955 to 2010, the number plummeted. Even though the population of Puerto Rico had nearly doubled in that time, the total number of Puerto Ricans moving to the United States in 2010 was only 4,283.

Why? After all, migrating to the United States from Puerto Rico had become easier, not harder. And while economic conditions in Puerto Rico brightened somewhat, the opportunities and standard of living in the U.S. are still superior.

What happened is that Puerto Rico's fertility rate imploded. In 1955, Puerto Rico's total fertility rate was 4.97, well above replacement. By 2012, it had fallen to 1.64 — even further below the replacement line than the United States'.

I went to the Penn World Tables and pulled data on Puerto Rico for the 1950-2011 period.

"Brightened somewhat" is faint praise indeed for the Puerto Rican economic miracle. PPP-adjusted GDP per capita in Puerto Rico rose from a shade over 18% of the United States average in 1950 to 58-59% in 2010, depending on the exact method used. It grew by 250% in the two decades after 1950, experienced a brief regression and slow recovery in the 15 years subsequent, and since 1985 has continued to converge notably. All this economic growth has come has the population of Puerto Rico has almost doubled, and as the American economy has of course continued its own growth.

Living standards in Puerto Rico have risen hugely. If they hadn't, and all things remained the same, Puerto Ricans would still be leaving their island for the United States in very large numbers. Total numbers might be smaller, but the propensity to leave would not have diminished palpably.

Many Latin American countries have already fallen below the replacement level. It's not a coincidence that sub-replacement countries — such as Uruguay, Chile, Brazil and Costa Rica — send the U.S. barely any immigrants at all. The vast majority of our immigrants come from above-replacement countries, such as Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico.

One thing that Last seems to have overlooked completely is that the countries with sub-replacement fertility in Latin America that he named are (by and large) not only the more economically developed countries in Latin America and therefore would be less likely to send migrants than less developed ones, but that these countries have ties outside of Latin America to countries other than the United States. (The small republics of Central America and the Caribbean are quite poor, and are almost as dependent on the United States in many ways as, oh, Puerto Rico. Mexico is the exception, mainly because Mexico borders directly on the United States. If it didn't, there would not be somewhere in the area of forty million people of Mexican background in that country.)

For instance, Last says that there aren't many Brazilians in the United States. That's true; as the Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell recently noted, many Brazilian migrants are returning to their country. That said, Brazilian emigration is overwhelmingly not concentrated on the United States. There are at least as many Brazilians living in Japan as in the United States, and more Brazilians living in western Europe. The United States is not the world.

Consider Mexico, which over the last 30 years has sent roughly two-thirds of all the immigrants — legal and illegal — who came to the United States. In 1970, the Mexican fertility rate was 6.72. Today, it's hovering at the 2.1 mark — a drop of nearly 70% in just two generations. And it's still falling.

The result is that from 2005 to 2010, the U.S. received a net of zero immigrants from Mexico.

Stricter border control has, of course, played no role in this.

Last is right to note that the global demographic transition will diminish numbers of potential migrants. He is wrong to conclude that it will diminish the propensity of people to migrate, and doesn't take into consideration the critical role of public policy in either enabling or disabling flows of migrants. Give it a C minus.

Three demographics-themed links in the blogosphere

I thought I'd share with our readers three interesting links from the blogosphere.

1. Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell believes that the close links between Brazil and Boston--driven by migration, at first strictly economic but then driven by interest in Massachusetts' institutes of education as Brazil tries to improve its workforce's skill levels--could serve Boston quite well relative to other American cities.

Demography Matters has touched on Brazil before, both as a source of immigrants and as a destination. Back in 2009, I'd even linked to an article on Brazilian migration to New England (building substantially on the links of other Lusophone immigrant-sending countries, including Portugal and Cape Verde, to the region) that made the point that, as the American economy declined and the Brazilian economy grew, migration was starting to become circular; Brazilians weren't moving to the United States to look for a new life abroad, but rather to accumulate capital that could be taken back to the homeland. As a commentor notes at Burgh Diaspora, will the increased volume of temporary migration from Brazil to New England result in strong linkages between the longest-settled region of the United States and one of the rising BRICs? If Brazilians assimilate quickly and/or maintain few links with Boston and New England, that's open to question.

2. Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig deflates the myth that Chinese men (lacking spouses owing to a male-biased sex ratio at birth) will flood into Russia (especially Siberia) looking for Russian women (lacking spouses owing to a high male death rate). Among other things, there actually isn't much of a shortage of theoretically marriageable men in a Siberia that has traditionally had more balanced sex ratios than European Russia going back at least a century.

Neither Russia’s female bias nor the higher sex ratio in Siberia than in the European Russia are new. A preponderance of women has been observed since the first modern census of 1897, when Russian Empire had the average of 94.52 males per 100 females. [. . . T]he female bias has been observed in all population groups in all censuses except for the urban population in 1897. The much higher urban sex ratio at the time, 112.99 males per 100 females, stemmed from the fast-paced urbanization and industrialization of the country, with more men than women moving from villages into cities and joining the factory-working proletariat. During the early Soviet period, the female bias grew and the sex ratio went down to 90.25 in 1926 and 89.21 in 1939, as Stalin-era collectivization and purges impacted men much more than women. The peak in the female bias is evident in the first post-World War II census of 1959: the sex ratio had plummeted to just 80.45 males per 100 females, lower than in any Russian region today. Although the female bias has since gone down, it has not yet attained the prewar level.

According to Elizabeth Brainerd of the Economics Department of Williams College, the peak in the female bias in 1959 is due to the devastating Soviet population losses during World War II, currently estimated at 27 million or nearly 14% of the prewar population. These losses, Brainerd shows, disproportionately affected young men, significantly influencing marriages, fertility, and health among both men and women in the postwar period. Crucially, however, wartime demographic decline affected the European part of Russia much more than Siberia. A large part of the western Russia (as well as Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states) was under Nazi occupation (see map on the left). While many women and children were evacuated from the occupied zone, most men either stayed behind or were shipped to the front. The military units stationed in the European part of the Soviet Union took a huge hit during the early months of the war. Massive disorganization led to extraordinarily high casualty figures, with the survivors either fleeing to the east or becoming prisoners of war, an experience that few survived. Siberian military units – which included 400,000 men, 5,000 guns, more than 3,000 tanks – were shifted to the Soviet Union’s Western front only in the late fall of 1941, after Stalin became assured that the Japanese would not attack the Russian Far East. These Siberian units were instrumental in the Red Army’s first counteroffensive at the gates of Moscow and later in turning the tide of war in the streets of Stalingrad. Trained as children to hunt and shoot, Siberians were a force to be reckoned with. “The Siberian… is tougher and stronger and possesses considerably more capacity to resist than his European countrymen,” the Chief of Staff of Germany’s Fourth Army reported ruefully at the time of their retreated from Moscow (quoted in W. Bruce Lincoln’s The Conquest of a Continent. Siberia and the Russians, p. 362). More importantly, Siberian units received better direction from the top of the Soviet military command, which resulted in lower – if still enormous – casualties.

Overall, a higher proportion of Siberian men survived the war than those of European Russia. The factories that were relocated to the Urals and beyond during the war, as well as the growing exploration and exploitation of natural resources in the post-war period, attracted even more men to the east. As a result “marriages” (legal or otherwise) between ‘white’ men and indigenous women became common. This higher wartime survival rate of men in Siberia, along with the post-war influx of men into the region, also had a positive effect on the second-generation (and perhaps beyond). As Brainerd shows, boys born to women in areas of higher sex ratios (Siberia) attain better health and nutritional status than boys born to women in areas of lower sex ratios (European Russia). This interesting finding suggests that sex ratios are to a degree a self-perpetuating phenomenon: having a higher sex ratio in a given area (community, or age cohort) at a given time promotes a higher sex ratio in the same place in the next generation as well, and similarly having a lower sex ratio results a vicious circle, which may be difficult to break.

(I've earlier mentioned here that the balance of migration between Russia and China is increasingly balanced, as China booms, Chinese migrants become more picky, and Russians start to be attracted to their prosperous southern neighbour).

3. Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes issue with a recent New York Times article on the sex trade in Spain. Sensationalized coverage of the sex trade, and of abusive practice associated with it especially insofar as migrant workers and their experiences are concerned, isn't a substitute for good analysis.

I wonder if future historians will track how misinformation about migration and sex work was so willfully reproduced during the present period, how news publications with a reputation for actual investigation began to copy chunks of pseudo news and paste them together, were satisfied to quote only society’s most predictable, official and reductionist sources and failed to admit that the police force of any country is not the place to find out about complex social problems.

Any authentic interest in the topic at hand could not be titled In Spain, Women Enslaved by a Boom in Brothel Tourism – a cartoon-like story full of the most superficial sensationalist cliches, mostly derived from police sources and a few abolitionist advocates. Yet this is the story The New York Times published on its front page the other day, complete with a ludicrous photo of a young woman in high red boots worthy of the cheapest rag. As the story claimed to be about brothels (indoor venues), why did they illustrate the story with a picture of street prostitution – again, on the front page? I know of no serious research that talks about brothel tourism, by the way. On the other hand, men who live in places where no venues are available have always been known to cross borders or travel distances to get to them. There is no news about that.

The issue is failure to investigate and report dysfunctional migration policy and how growing economic inequalities promote the taking of unregulated, unprotected jobs in in underground economies, including in the sex industry.

Go, read.

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.

On African immigration to Latin America

A Deutsche Welle English-language article pointed me to an interesting new phenomenon, that of African immigration with Latin America as a final destination--most notably Argentina, but also Brazil. I first heard about the phenomenon back in 2009, but this largely anecdotal phenomenon seems to be getting more attention of late.

It's rush hour on Avenida Rivadavia in the buzzing, pulsating quarter of Once in Buenos Aires. On the pavement, street vendors have put up small stands every two meters: Earrings, watches and sunglasses are spread out on big shawls on the floor, they pile up in suitcases, or dangle from umbrellas.

"It's cold," says one of the vendors, rubbing his hands. Koaku Bu Date Rodrigue was born in Ivory Coast. The 25-year-old came to Argentina two years ago.

"My country is in a civil war. I was forced to fight in a rebels' group," says Koaku. "One morning I managed to escape. I made my way to San Pedro port and hid in the container room of a ship." Koaku doesn't remember just how long he had to hide for. When the ship stopped moving he was in Argentina.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Africans leave their home countries. Many want to go to Europe. But the EU has been sealing off its external frontiers.

"I had heard of Europe, but I didn't know how to get there. You need money and you need to know people," says Koaku.

Like Koaku, many Africans are therefore now considering other destinations, such as Latin America. In Argentina, the number of African migrants and refugees has more than doubled since 2005.

The national refugee commission CO NA RE has registered more than 3,000 over the past five years. Illegal immigrants from Africa today make up the second largest group of asylum seekers in Argentina. Most of them come from Senegal or Ivory Coast. Neighbouring Brazil reports similar developments.

Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, it's worth noting, are arguably the two West African countries most closely integrated with global migration flows. A Reuters article goes into greater detail.

In Brazil, Africans are now the largest refugee group, representing 65 percent of all asylum seekers, according to the Brazil's national committee for refugees.

There are now more than 3,000 African immigrants living in Argentina, up from just a few dozen eight years ago. The number of asylum seekers each year has risen abruptly, to about 1,000 a year, and a third of them are African.

"We're seeing a steep increase in the number of Africans coming to the country and seeking asylum," said Carolina Podesta, of the Argentine office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

This is still low compared to the tens of thousands of immigrants who make the journey to Europe each year, but Africans are expected to come to Latin America in increasing numbers.

"It's a search for new destinations," Podesta said, adding that many were being pushed by tougher European immigration and security policies put in place after September 11, 2001.

[. . .] Africans might arrive on cargo ships or commercial planes and then seek asylum or overstay tourist visas. In Argentina, they can obtain temporary work visas shortly after arriving and renew them every three months.

"The migratory policies of the country are very favorable," said Manzanares. "It's a reflection of history. What happened with European immigrants 100 years ago is now happening with African immigrants."

The Democratic Republic of Congo is also a major source of migrants, given the ongoing horrors, while Brazil has been connected with Lusophone Africa--Angola and Mozambique particularly--even since the post-independence migrations.

The accounts of African immigration to Argentina and Brazil emphasize the similarities between this 21st century migration and the migrations from Europe to South America which began in the late 19th century, driven by the search for economic opportunity. (Parallels with the African slave trade that inflicted so much suffering, thankfully, haven't been raised.) The critical difference between these two migrations is that the African migrants number in the thousands, while the Europeans numbered in the millions. This may change--with the increasing difficulty of getting into Europe or even the Maghreb, the relative attractiveness of Argentina and Brazil as immigration destinations, the apparent relative ease of legalization in Argentina, and what may be the beginning of chain-migration networks set up by these first African immigrants, the phenomenon may indeed take on the proportions of the earlier European migration. Certainly it merits watching.

On the Portuguese predicament

The title of Barry Hatton's Associated Press article "Europeans seek new lives in old colonies" is a bit misleading. The article doesn't deal with "Europeans" generally, but rather is concerned almost entirely with Spain and Portugal, with passing mention of Greece and Ireland.

Portuguese are packing their bags for booming Angola and Mozambique in Africa, and for emerging economic powerhouse Brazil, where there is a shortage of engineers to prepare the country for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Spaniards are being drawn to their former colonies in Latin America.

While analysts say the true scale of the new migration is still hard to determine because official statistics lag behind trends, anecdotal evidence and fragmentary data point to what's going on.

Portugal's Emigration Observatory says the number of Portuguese registered at consulates in Brazil jumped from 678,822 in 2009 to 705,615 the following year. In Angola, the number went from almost 57,000 in 2008 to just over 74,500 in 2009. The number of Mozambican residence permits granted to Portuguese in 2010, meanwhile, was up almost 13 percent on the previous year, to nearly 12,000.

Spanish electoral registers show around 30,000 Spaniards moved to Argentina between June 2009 and November 2010 — an 11 percent increase over that period. Some 6,400 went to Chile — a jump of 24 percent in the same timeframe — and 6,800 headed for Uruguay, an increase of 16 percent.

Between Spain and Portugal, Hatton implies that the situation in Portugal is much more serious. Before the economic crash, Spain not only enjoyed sustained--if unviable--economic growth and became a very significant net receiver of immigrants. Portugal, in contrast, suffered a lost decade with little economic growth, a consequence of low productivity and underdeveloped human capital, competition from China and post-Communist Europe in low-end manufactures, and a strong Euro that weakened competitiveness.

"The emerging markets are where it's happening, that's where the jobs are," says Jorge Borges, a 35-year-old Portuguese civil engineer.

Disheartened by bleak career prospects in Portugal, whose crippling debt crisis pushed it this week to seek a bailout like Greece and Ireland, Borges crossed the border five years ago and tapped into Spain's building boom.

Then the overleveraged Spanish economy also collapsed, and Borges recently lost his job. Now he wants to move on again, but Europe's wretched economies are not an option — and his online job hunt is targeting vacancies in Brazil and Angola, distant Portuguese-speaking countries.

"The first chance I get, I'm going overseas," Borges said from Zaragoza, Spain, where he is awaiting the call to go abroad.

Brazil in particular is a magnet. The Latin American giant is recruiting foreign civil engineers and architects to meet demand for major public works projects, including more than $200 billion — close to Portugal's annual GDP — in energy infrastructure. Brazil's economy grew 7.5 percent in 2010, the highest growth rate since 1986, and is expected to expand by more than 5 percent a year through 2014.

Angola and Mozambique, too, are absorbing large numbers of Portuguese emigrants. Lusophone countries are hardly the only destinations for Portuguese: large Portuguese communities exist elsewhere, in Canada and the United States, in France and Switzerland and Luxembourg, and now in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. If Portuguese go abroad, they have options. Not so in their homeland.

Portugal's low-voltage economy can't absorb the best-educated generation in its history.

More than 60,000 graduates are idle in their prime. Many more are in low-pay, dead-end jobs.

A recent song by pop group Deolinda set young people's grievances to music and went viral online as it struck a chord with a generation. The song, called "What a fool I am," lists their gripes, including being stuck at home with their parents despite investing years to polish their CVs.

One group of twenty-something graduates turned the music into a battle cry. Through a Facebook page they organized national protest marches last month, and more than 100,000 turned out in a dozen Portuguese cities.

"Not taking advantage of our generation ... is national suicide," says 25-year-old Alexandre Carvalho, one of the organizers.

Carvalho and his co-organizers want to pursue careers in Portugal but, he says, "it's hard to stay. We'll probably end up going abroad."

"Parva que Sou" is a moving song.



The mass emigration is something I commented on back in 2009. The situation has deteriorated further, bad news for the future since a recent Eurostat press release notes that fertility has fallen sharply from 1.44 children per woman in 2003--definitely sub-replacement, but higher than elsewhere in southern Europe--to 1.32. Portugal is fast running out of its existing youth cohorts and isn't going to replace them in the long run.

(As João Peixoto and Catarina Sabino, in their 2009 Real Institut Elcano paper "Immigration, Emigration and Policy Developments in Portugal", observe, the immigrants from the Lusophone world and eastern Europe who came in the 1990s have been leaving for some time. Replacement migration is not an option.)

"No place like home: Brazilian immigrants leave US for better job prospects

Last month, I blogged about the history and reality of Brazilian immigration to New England's island of Martha's Vineyard. (Incidentally, the relatively heavy incidence of Portuguese, Brazilian, and Cape Verdean immigration to New England suggests the existence of Lusophone migration networks.) This month, the Christian Science Monitor's Taylor Barnes writes about how economic downturns in the United States and economic upturns in Brazil are causing a substantial amount of return migration.

The outflow is leaving its mark on places like downtown Framingham, Mass. The Boston suburb, founded in the 1600s by English settlers, began to acquire its Latin flair in the late 1990s when placards in Portuguese and the green, yellow, and blue of the Brazilian flag began popping up in once-vacant downtown storefronts. By mid-2005, one-quarter of Framingham’s residents was foreign-born, the vast majority of them Brazilian. An estimated 70 percent of the stores downtown are Brazilian-owned.

In the past two years, however, the number of Brazilians living here has dwindled. Local estimates vary widely – up to 40 percent have left, according to the owner of one prominent local flower shop.

“There’s [fewer] immigrants out on the streets,” says Gilberto Yoshida, president of Chang Express, which has been selling plane tickets to South America for 16 years. His company saw a “tremendous spike” in one-way tickets to Brazil sold last winter, which is when seasonal construction and outdoor work tend to dry up. What is clear is that almost no new immigrants are coming in.

“Zero. Zero. Zero. No one is coming from Brazil,” says Manuel Barilio, as he counts the handwritten entries in his spiral notebook where immigrants register to say they’re looking for work. Mr. Barilio, director of the Bom Samaritano social services center in Framingham, says he now gets at most a handful of entries each day.

The change is evident statewide. Massachusetts, once a top destination for Brazilian immigrants, along with Florida, New Jersey, and New York, used to receive about 50,000 a year during the boom years, says Fausto da Rocha, executive director of the Brazilian Immigrant Center in Allston, Mass. In the past two years, about 17,000 of the state’s approximately 200,000 Brazilians have gone back home, he estimates.

"How migration transformed Martha’s Vineyard"

Readers may be interested in Daniela Gerson's excellent article in the Financial Times, "How migration transformed Martha's Vineyard". In it, Gerson descreibes how the tourist island of Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, acquired a permanent population of which 20% was of Brazilian background, in a classic example of chain migration.

One December morning in 1986, a Brazilian immigrant named Lyndon Johnson Pereira strode down the ferry dock of Martha’s Vineyard, an island south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. A job tip had lured the young man with shaggy brown hair and blue Converse sneakers to leave Boston, where he had been working as a dishwasher for a little over a year. But as he took in the deserted streets and weather-beaten buildings, he worried he had made a mistake. “The island appeared poor, badly maintained,” a now middle-aged Pereira recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘What am I going to do here?’”

With those unsteady steps Pereira would forge a link between his home town in the backwaters of Brazil and what was, contrary to appearances, the holiday retreat of many of America’s richest and most influential citizens. During that first winter he had a hard time believing anyone would choose to live there. Then the sun emerged, turning the steely ocean a brilliant blue. Fudge shops, fried-clam shacks and chic boutiques opened their doors. And boatloads of vacationers arrived hourly, filling the old whaling towns with summer revelry.

Pereira was in the thick of it, helping to start a new restaurant on prime real estate just off the same wharf where a young Teddy Kennedy swam ashore after his accident on the nearby island of Chappaquiddick almost two decades earlier. Soon, the Brazilian immigrant was making more money in his 100-hour working week than he could in a year at home.

Gerson sensitively explores the issue, covering everything from the mechanics of chain migration and the benefits to the community to the problems regarding the immigrants' integration and their popularity in the time of the credit crunch. Go, read.

Some notes on Brazilian migration trends

A recent article by the Irish Times's Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, "American Dream, Brazilian Reality" takes a detailed look at many of the trends behind Brazilian emigration, starting with the city of Governador Valadores in the prosperous central Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.

Governador Valadares doesn’t look like a city in the throes of a great social upheaval. Set amid an endless sweep of coffee plantations and tropical forest in landlocked Minas Gerais state, and reached by way of a turbo-prop plane that swings low into the valley on its twice-daily approach, the city has the detached, languid air of a remote country town.

Brasilia is 1,000km to the west, Sao Paulo almost as far to the south. Were it not for Ibituruna, a soaring volcanic peak that lures intrepid paragliders, or the gem mines that mark the surrounding countryside, you might think, Valadares would scarcely attract a glance from the outside world.

And yet the city has made quite a name for itself by turning its own attention outwards. Ask about emigration in Brazil and the conversation invariably turns to Valadares, a town which, more than any other in the country, is synonymous with the high emigration of the past two decades.

In that time, it is estimated, more than 80,000 people – about a third of its current population – have left here for New England and Florida. Today, nearly every family has someone living in the US. So important has been the flow of American currency back to the city – it amounted to half the city budget until recently, by some estimates – that some had taken to calling it Governador Vala dolares.

The city’s link to the US stretches back to the 1940s, when American companies first came to the area seeking mica, a heat-resistant mineral, to help the war effort. That contact led the first migrants to be seduced into moving north and set in train a flow that would define the city for the rest of the century. Today, beyond the veneer of the Brazilian everytown, signs of the link abound. There seems to be an English-language school or a travel agency at every turn, while on the outskirts of the city the large houses modelled on Hollywood’s cliché of American suburbia are hard to miss.

Mac Cormaic goes on to explain that the city's economy has come to depend heavily on the remittances provided by Valadarese migrants to the United States, most of these migrants present illegally, the remittances fueling consumption and business investments. With the onset of the global recession, Governador Valadores' economy is starting to come unglued.

Brazil, like the other BRIC countries, has become a country of mass emigration. As Amaral and Fusco wrote in 2005 "Shaping Brazil: The Role of International Migration", economic turmoil has made a Brazil with the long history of immigration to Brazil that made the country one of the most multicultural countries in the world one providing an increasingly large number of emigrants.

Beginning in the second half of the 1980s, Brazilians from various socioeconomic levels started to emigrate to other countries in search of economic opportunities. High inflation and low economic growth in the 1980s, known as the "lost decade", followed by the government's unsuccessful liberal economic policies in the 1990s, meant that even educated Brazilians could make more money doing low-skilled work abroad.

By the 1990s, over 1.8 million Brazilians were living outside the country (see Table 1), mainly in the United States, Paraguay, and Japan, but also in Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Israel. There were no specific policies implemented by the government to encourage or discourage this emigration process.

In 2000, Brazilian consulates and embassies registered eight hundred thousand Brazilian in the United States, concentrated in New York, Miami and Boston, more than four hundred thousand Brazilians in Paraguay, mostly in the east of the country, and a quarter-million in Japan, mostly Japanese-Brazilians recruited to work in the industrial sector, with another four hundred thousand living in other countries. Eduardo L.G. Rios-Neto, in "Managing Migration: The Brazilian Case", suggests that half of Brazilian emigrants come from the prosperous southeast.

Against this, nearly seven hundred thousand immigrants lived in Brazil, particularly the southeast, as "56.3 percent of Brazil's total foreign population came from Europe, 21 percent from South and Central America, and 17.8 percent from Asia." Migrants from elsewhere in South America are also starting to become more prominent, with skilled migrants coming from Argentina and Chile and unskilled migrants arriving from Andean countries. Many of these immigrants are illegal; President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva recently signed into existence a law that regularized the status of many of these.

The future of migration with Brazil is open. Inasmuch as emigration is concentrated particularly among the relatively well-off and well-educated classes of the southeast, Brazil could face a problem of brain drain. The country is not one of the top emigration countries, per capita or even absolutely, but in the context of BRIC countries, Brazil is relatively most affected by emigration--the number of emigrants from Brazil is absolutely much smaller than India or China but relatively larger, while between Brazil and its near-peer Russia, slight net emigration in Brazil and net immigration in Russia is driven by the relatively unattractiveness of Brazil as a destination for migrants from its neighbours. Unlike Russia, Brazil's population is expected to grow: The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the Brazilian population will reached 260 million by 2050, versus a projection of less than 110 million people in Russia. Moreover, if Brazil continues its steady growth, it may yet become a migration magnet acting on its neighbours, just as the United States acts on its less-developed neighbours.