Some news links: public art, history, marriage, diaspora, assimilation

Some more population-related links popped up over the past week.

• CBC Toronto reported on this year’s iteration of Winter Stations. A public art festival held on the Lake Ontario shorefront in the east-end Toronto neighbourhood of The Beaches, Winter Stations this year will be based around the theme of migration.
• JSTOR Daily noted how the interracial marriages of serving members of the US military led to the liberalization of immigration law in the United States in the 1960s. With hundreds of thousands of interracial marriages of serving members of the American military to Asian women, there was simply no domestic constituency in the United States
• Ozy reported on how Dayton, Ohio, has managed to thrive in integrating its immigrant populations.
• Amro Ali, writing at Open Democracy, makes a case for the emergence of Berlin as a capital for Arab exiles fleeing the Middle East and North America in the aftermath of the failure of the Arab revolutions. The analogy he strikes to Paris in the 1970s, a city that offered similar shelter to Latin American refugees at that time, resonates.
• Alex Boyd at The Island Review details, with prose and photos, his visit to the isolated islands of St. Kilda, inhabited from prehistoric times but abandoned in 1930.
• VICE looks at the plight of people who, as convicted criminals, were deported to the Tonga where they held citizenship. How do they live in a homeland they may have no experience of? The relative lack of opportunity in Tonga that drove their family's earlier migration in the first place is a major challenge.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, in many post-Soviet countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine, ethnic Russians are assimilating into local majority ethnic groups. (The examples of the industrial Donbas and Crimea, I would suggest, are exceptional. In the case of the Donbas, 2014 might well have been the latest point at which a pro-Russian separatist movement was possible.)

Some demographics-related news links

* I was quite surprised by the news, reported by the BBC among others, that the most recent German census revealed that the country's overall population was overestimated by 1.5 million. The whole set of discrepancies between updated estimates for West and East Germany and the 2011 census is described in detail at the website of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, here, here, and here. It's noteworthy that the biggest overestimate by far occurred among foreigners, whose numbers were overestimated by 1.1 million.

* News from Europe's periphery is generally dire. The Inter Press Service's Zoltán Dujisin argues that Hungary is starting to experience a brain drain of professionals to western Europe, a consequence of deteriorating economic and political conditions. The Portugal News observes the continuing fall in Portuguese birth rates, noting that poverty--not just a lack of funding for families, but absolute shortages of necessities like money and even food--is preventing any possibility of a quick recovery. Reporting from Skopje, Balkan Insight notes that more than a tenth of the population of Macedonia is recorded to have emigrated between 1998 and 2011, Eurostat additionally noting that this does not capture irregular migration. Also from the Balkans, the BBC has a depressing profile of the employment situation for young people in Greece. Where emigration is not a realistic option, volunteering is often the only possibility for young Greeks to do something in the hope that, one day, they might enjoy a salary.

* At New Eastern Europe, Filip Mazurczak writes about demographic policies in the former Communist world, arguing that the discontinuation of perfectly helpful policies like workplace childcare after the end of Communism may have contributed to the collapse of birth rates. Estonia is singled out as one country that has made noteworthy progress, as is Russia. The Baltic Course takes a look at the balance of migration in Estonia. Emigration and immigration have both surged in recent years, with just under eleven thousand people leaving in 2012 and a bit over four thousand immigrating. Finland and United Kingdom are the major destinations for Estonian emigrants, while Finland and Russia are the major sources of immigrants. Estonia is uniquely favoured among the Baltic States in having a migration partner so close at hand in Finland.

* The Daily Mail notes that rural and even exurban areas of the United States are facing population decline and aging, as dismal economies and shrinking opportunities encourage migration to cities.

* The Economist observes the rapid and thorough demographic transformations of Latin America, with sharply falling fertility rates, radically changed gender roles, and the rise of new family forms including cohabitation. The article's conclusion that Latin America risks wasting its demographic dividend if it doesn't transform its educational and pension systems in time to, respectively, maximize the coming generation's human capital and prepare to finance its retirement.

* Also at the Economist, the Buttonwood blog examines Spanish youth unemployment, placing the relative reluctance of young Spanish workers to migrate to Germany (compared to their Greek, Romanian, and Polish counterparts) to the relatively better conditions they experience and argues that youth unemployment estimates wrongly include students and mothers of young children.

* The South China Morning Post notes that in Hong Kong, the ongoing fall in fertility rates now means that one-child families outnumber their two-child counterparts for the first time in the city-state's history. In adjacent Macau, meanwhile, population growth is dominated by immigration, 60% of immigrants coming from China but a quarter from the Philippines and Vietnam.

* Australia's ABC News argues that Australia's much-hyped baby bonus didn't contribute to the uptick in fertility rates in that country, that the recuperation of postponed fertility is a more likely explanation.

* Finally, on the lighter end, the Czech capital of Prague has assigned subway cars to singles and the Hungarian government is setting up dance parties, all in efforts to boost birth rates. The Atlantic's Jordan Weissman wonders, meanwhile, if spending on pets and pet ownership is growing as people of parent age respond to the growing costs of children by switching to less expensive substitutes.

What last year's natural increase in Estonia means

Thanks to Facebook's Urmas for letting me know the surprising news that Estonia has become--so far as I know--the first former Soviet republic in Europe (Azerbaijan and the rest of the Caucasus, perhaps, excluded--thanks for the correction, Anatoly) to experience an excess of births over deaths since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yes, there seems to have been some improvement--I posted recently about Russia, after all--but it still stands out remarkably. Compare neighbouring Latvia's ongoing collapse.

According to the revised data of Statistics Estonia, in 2010 35 people more were born than died. The population of Estonia was 1,340,194 on 1 January 2011.

15,825 people were born and 15,790 people died in 2010. The number of births exceeded the number of deaths last 21 years ago in 1990.

In 2010, 62 children more were born than a year earlier but the number of births was still smaller by about 200 than the last decade’s record in 2008 when more than 16,000 children were born.

On the contrary the number of deaths has been rapidly decreasing during the last three years and in 2010 291 people less died than a year earlier. Thus the positive natural increase was mainly achieved due to the decrease in the number of deaths.

617,757 males and 722,437 females lived in Estonia at the beginning of 2011. Population growth continued due to the natural increase in Harju and Tartu counties.

Harju County's is Estonia's most populous, its 524 thousand people amounting to 39.2% of the Estonian population, while Tartu County is Estonia's third most populous, home to just shy of 150 thousand people and 11.2% of the total population.

It's noteworthy that Idu-Viru County, Estonia's third by population and located in the northeast of the country around the city of Narva on the Russian frontier, does not figure in this; so far as I know, Ida-Viru is continuing to experience continued natural decrease.

One of the most important facts about Estonian demographics is the ethnic cleavage between ethnic Estonians (now roughly 70% of the total, up from 60% in 1990) and Russophones, largely descended from Soviet-era migrants attracted to industrial jobs and a higher standard of living than they could find in other Soviet republics like Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. See this 2007 post from Itching for Eestimaa for a decent overview of the situation. The two populations behave differently in many ways, including in demographic patterns. The three most populous counties fit into three different categories, Harju being roughly 60% ethnically Estonian by population, Tartu ~85%, but Ida-Viru 20%. (Somewhat ethnically mixed up to the Soviet era, post-war displacement of ethnic Estonians and mass immigration to the northeast's industrial centres created the only one of Estonia's fifteen counties with a non-Estonian majority population.)

I've a draft of a much longer post hidden in the archives. Briefly, I would like to say that this all fits with my noting of with ethnic Estonians now inclining to a relatively Nordic pattern (relatively high fertility, significant postponement of births, very significant extramarital fertility) and Russophones behaving in the opposite manner. See Puur et al.'s brief abstract "Fertility patterns among foreign-origin population: the evidence from Estonia" for an outline.

The analysis reveals a remarkably strong contribution of foreign-origin population to the total number of birth. In the 1970s and 1980s it accounted for more than a third of births registered in the country, leaving a long-term imprint on the ethnic and linguistic composition of the population. The cessation of massive inflow after the turn of the 1990s has somewhat reduced the proportion of births to women of immigrant background. In the recent years it has accounted for less than 30% of the total.

The comparison of completed cohort fertility rates allows to distinguish between two different patterns among women of immigrant origin born during the 20th century. In older cohorts, born in the first quarter of the century, the foreign origin population shows noticeably higher fertility, reflecting the later onset of fertility transition in the regions from which the immigrants originate. The progression of fertility transition in the latter resulted in the continuous decline and the convergence of levels with the native population in the birth cohorts of the late 1920s. However, the state of convergence proved temporary and in the generations born in the 1930s and later, the levels diverged again with foreign origin women having a systematically lower fertility compared to their native counterparts.

The examination of parity progression ratios and the ultimate parity distribution reveals that the lower completed fertility stems mainly from the less frequent progression to a second, and in particular, to a third birth among the foreign origin population. Compared to the native population, the corresponding measures have been twice or even more than twice lower, demonstrating the largest difference across parity distribution. On the other hand, the proportion of women with one-child has been markedly higher among immigrants. At the same time it is interesting to note that childbearing has typically occurred at an earlier age among the foreign-origin population.

Meanwhile, as Lars Agnarson notes in his paper "Estonia’s health geography: West versus east – an ethnic approach", partly because of Russophone concentration in Soviet-era industry--exactly the sorts of industries which got hit by the post-Communist transition--Russophones evidence significantly higher mortality than their ethnic Estonian co-residents, mortality rates apparently rising in proportion to the homogeneity of Russophone communities. Between 2000 and 2009 the populations of ethnic Estonians and ethnic Russians each decreased by roughly nine thousand, but the ethnic Russian population is less than 38% of the size of the ethnic Estonian.

What does this imply? For Estonia as a whole, last year's natural increase might indicate that Estonia is moving from a post-Communist demographic system (low fertility, high mortality) to a Nordic one characterized by relatively high subreplacement fertility, low mortality, and a post-modern approach to family relationships. The question of emigration is noteworthy, and over the 2000-2008 period Estonia does seem to have seen the emigration of 13 thousand people. The volume of emigration has been significantly less than in Latvia or Lithuania, however, and much of it has been directed towards a Finland that is both geographically and culturally quite close to Estonia, Helsinki and Tallinn being separated by no more than a ferry ride. Much of what Estonian emigration has developed may be more temporary in nature. Estonian-Finnish migration is even bidirectional: Estonia can offer job opportunities for Finnish workers, too, and the lower cost of living in Estonia compared to Finland may be a long-run advantage.

It's also worth noting that a relatively less dire demographic situation than that of neighbouring Latvia may well provide Estonia with if not advantages, fewer disadvantages--including economic ones--over its southern neighbour, and others, too.

Within Estonia, if the past two years' sustained difference between a relatively high fertility/low mortality ethnic Estonian population and a relatively low fertility/high mortality Russophone population remains, then the continued shrinkage and aging of the Russophone population is inevitable. This will have significant effects on everything from the spatial distribution of the Estonian population (what will happen in the northeast) and the futures of economic sectors depending heavily on Russophone labour to the balance of political power in Estonia and Estonian relations with its neighbours.

Expect more later, please; consider this a taster.