Some followups

For tonight's post, I thought I'd share a few news links revisiting old stories

• The Guardian notes that British citizens of more, or less, recent Irish ancestry are looking for Irish passports so as to retain access to the European Union in the case of Brexit. (Net migration to the United Kingdom is up and quite strong, while Cameron's crackdown on non-EU migrants has led to labour shortages.
• NPR notes one strategy to get fathers to take parental leave: Have them see other fathers take it.
• Reuters notes that the hinterland of Fukushima, depopulated by natural and nuclear disaster, seems set to have been permanently depopulated. Tohoku
• Bloomberg noted that East Asia's populations are aging rapidly, another article noting how Japan's demographic dynamics are setting a pattern for other high-income East Asian economies.
• In Malaysia, the Star notes that low population growth among Malaysian Chinese will lead to a sharp fall in the Chinese proportion in the Malaysian population by 2040.
• Coming to Alberta, CBC notes how the municipality of Fort McMurray has been hit very hard by the end of the oil boom, as has been Alberta's largest city and business centre of Calgary.
• On the subject of North Korea and China, The Guardian wrote about the stateless children born to North Korean women in China, lacking either Chinese or North Korean citizenship.
• The Inter Press Service notes that, as the Dominican Republic cracks down on Haitian migrants and people of Haitian background generally, women are in a particular situation.
• IWPR provides updates on Georgia's continuing and ongoing rate of population shrinkage, a consequence of emigration.
• On the subject of Cuba, the Inter Press Service reported on Cuban migrants to the United States stranded in Latin America, while Agence France-Presse looked at the plight of Cuba's growing cohort of elderly.

On the upcoming ethnic cleansing of supposed Haitians from the Dominican Republic

Haiti has been mentioned here at Demography Matters a few times. In January 2010 after the devastating earthquake, for instance, I described the evolution and prospects of the substantial Haitian diaspora and also explained why a quixotic offer by the Senegalese president to resettle Haitians in Africa was not likely to lead anywhere, June 2010 mentioning that French-using Haiti was major source of immigrants to Québec and then in December 2011 noting how a migration of Haitian professionals to post-colonial Congo in the 1960s seems to have been the key movement that introduced HIV/AIDS to the Atlantic world. The Dominican Republic has come up more rarely, in 2006 and in 2009 being mentioned as a Caribbean Hispanophone society that has consistently seen more rapid population growth than once-dominant Cuba. As far as I can tell, the long and entangled history that has led, via migration from low-income Haiti to the middle-income Dominican Republic, to a population of Haitian origin in the latter country amounting well over a million people has never come up here.

It's coming up now. As The Guardian's Sibylla Brodzinsky reports, a new citizenship law is set to strip hundreds of thousands of these people of their citizenship in Dominican Republic, rendering them liable to deportation from the land of their birth and statelessness.

[Yesenia Originé] was born in the Dominican city of San Pedro de Macorís to Haitian parents. But because she has no papers to prove it, she, like thousands of other people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, risks being rounded up and deported to the neighboring country.

Many people in Originé’s situation are fearing the worst ahead of the Wednesday deadline for an estimated 500,000 undocumented persons living in the Dominican Republic to register with government authorities. The country’s authorities have reportedly lined up a fleet of buses and established processing centers on the border with Haiti, prompting widespread fears of mass roundups of Dominicans of Haitian descent.

“If they send me there, I don’t know what I’ll do,” says 22-year-old Originé who lives in a batey – a company town for sugarcane workers – in the south-west of the Dominican Republic.

A 2013 court ruling stripped children of Haitian migrants their citizenship retroactively to 1930, leaving tens of thousands of Dominican-born people of Haitian descent stateless. International outrage over the ruling led the Dominican government to pass a law last year that allows people born to undocumented foreign parents, whose birth was never registered in the Dominican Republic, to request residency permits as foreigners. After two years they can apply for naturalisation.

However many have actively resisted registering as foreigners because they say they are Dominican by birth and deserve all the rights that come with it – for example a naturalised citizen cannot run for high office.

Abby Philipp at the Washington Post went into more detail about the racism motivating this denationalization. Following the once Spanish Dominican Republic's separation from formerly French Haiti, the young republic set out to define its national identity in direct contrast to that of its neighbour. This meant, among other things, strong anti-black and anti-Haitian racism that culminated at least in the 20th century in an act of genocide.

There was a time when that split between the two countries was drawn with blood; the 1937 Parsley Massacre is widely regarded as a turning point in Haitian-Dominican relations. The slaughter, carried out by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, targeted Haitians along with Dominicans who looked dark enough to be Haitian -- or whose inability to roll the "r" in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, gave them away.

The Dajabón River, which serves as the northernmost part of the international border between the two countries, had "risen to new heights on blood alone," wrote Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat.

"The massacre cemented Haitians into a long-term subversive outsider incompatible with what it means to be Dominicans," according to Border of Lights, an organization that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the massacre in 2012.
[. . .]
Cassandre Theano, a legal officer at the New York-based Open Society Foundations, said the comparisons between the Dominican government's actions and the denationalization of Jews in Nazi Germany are justified.

"We've called it as such because there are definitely linkages," she told The Washington Post this week. "You don't want to look a few years back and say, 'This is what was happening and I didn't call it.' "

Julia Harrington Ready, also of the Open Society Foundations, is right to call this ethnic cleansing.

The potential consequences of this for the two nations of Hispaniola, and for the wider region, cannot be understated. Even if this population at risk of mass deportation actually was Haitian, even five years after the earthquake Haiti is in no position to handle hundreds of thousands of deportees. For the Dominican Republic, meanwhile, I would be willing to bet that whatever nationalists might think they would gain in terms of a homeland rid of these people will be outweighed by the actual losses experienced. (Getting rid of large chunks of your workforce generally does not do good things for the economy.) Meanwhile, this ethnic cleansing will be certain to produce substantial numbers of people who will likely need resettlement outside of these region, just like other ethnic cleansings in the recent past.

This is not good. This is really not good at all. Be alarmed, readers. Maybe we can do something to prevent this catastrophe.

Some more population-related links

The immigration of white South African farmers to Georgia, according to Eastern approaches, is actually occurring.

In August 2010, showing commendable imagination from a 5,000-mile distance, the authorities in Tbilisi invited South African farmers wanting a change of scene to consider an alternative: farming in Georgia. The country has an exuberantly pro-business government, low crime rates, and soil that positively squelches with underexploited potential. Once an agricultural power-house, Georgia now farms less than half of its arable land. It has less than half the number of cows and one-third of the pigs that it had in 1990. Agriculture employs over half the population, yet contributes less than a tenth of GDP. Ridiculously, this fertile country now imports 70 percent of its food. As a result, many of Georgia’s poorest people live in the countryside. Agriculture contributed over 16% of GDP in 2005, but only 8% in 2010.

[. . .]

Many local farmers are still suspicious. Most of them are subsistence-level producers; nation-wide, the average farm is less than one hectare. Seeing a government that has long paid them little attention suddenly court South Africans has produced mixed feelings. Last year, local farmers demonstrated in the village of Zeghduleti, near Gori, after common pasture that they had long used for grazing was cleared for sale to a foreign investor. After a number of arrests, the farmers were eventually advised to slaughter their cattle or graze them further afield. Georgia’s impatient government has a taste for dramatic change and short-term results. But as farmers know better than most, patience can be a virtue too.

Marginal Revolution observes that the incumbent Haitian president might be expelled from office if it turns out that he has been hiding a foreign citizenship, dual citizenship being unpopular in Haiti as a general rule and potentially even cause for banishment if a dual citizen involves himself in politics.

Marginal Revolution wonders why more Americans aren't moving to booming western Canada. The general consensus in the comments seems to be that Americans find it more difficult to move to Canada that you'd expect, for legal and cultural reasons as much as anything else.

The Population Reference Bureau's blog notes that improvements in sex ratios at birth in Indian states have stagnated for the time being.

The northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana have been the worst offenders. Haryana, formerly part of Punjab, was created in 1966 and borders Delhi to the north, west, and south. In 1999-2001, these states had very low SRBs of just 775 and 803, respectively. While they have since risen to 836 and 849, the last three SRS reports show a worrying tendency for the SRB rise to have leveled off. A low birth rate is often considered motivation for sex-selective abortion as male children could be more valued when couples have few children but that pattern is definitely not uniform across India. In Punjab, the total fertility rate (TFR — the average number of children a woman would bear in her lifetime in the birth rate of a particular year were to remain unchanged) was 1.9 in 2008 and 2.5 in Haryana. But it was also low in Karnataka (2.0) and Kerala (1.7), states with SRBs in the normal range. And, the two states with the highest TFRs, Bihar (3.9) and Uttar Pradesh (3.8), have low SRBs. Together, those latter two states hold 300 million population, one-fourth of India’s total.

Anatoly Karlin's brief post at Sublime Oblivion makes a convincing case that Russian demographics are no longer uniquely dre, with rising fertility, falling mortality, and net migration.

Five notes from Jacques Pepin's The Origins of AIDS

My response to World AIDS Day on Friday was a post at my blog reacting to the new book by doctor and Université de Sherbrooke professor Jacques Pepin, The Origins of AIDS. This book is a detailed examination of the origin of AIDS, piecing together the chain of events that allowed HIV to transition from minor zoonotic transfer that killed only a relatively few chimpanzee hunters and their intimates to being a global pandemic with tens of millions of dead and infected.

The mechanics behind the transfer of HIV from chimpanzee hosts to humans infected by blood during hunting and butchery are simple enough, while modern surveillance of the epidemic from the early 1980s on gives us a knowledge of how the disease is transmitted into new populations, how it takes hold and how it can be stopped. But how did HIV manage to make the transition from minor zoonosis to aspirant global epidemic?

Pepin argues that HIV wouldn't have seeded a global pandemic had it not been for a perfect storm of events occurring under colonial rule in Central Africa, of which two of the most important are the widespread use of unsterilized hypodermic needles to (among other things) inoculate French colonial subjects against local pandemics and patterns of urban migration in the Kinshasa-Brazzaville conurbation that encouraged the growth of a sex trade suited to accelerating the virus' spread. (For Pepin's purposes, "central Africa" comprises several discrete groups of territories: French Equatorial Africa, a federation of four colonies later countries (Gabon, Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Chad), the French Cameroons that began as a German colony, later became a French mandate under the League of Nations, and eventually dominated; the Belgian Congo produced by the 1908 nationalization of the Congo Free State founded by royal génocidaire Léopold II on his own initiative; and, the non-Francophone anomaly of Equatorial Guinea, at one point the only Spanish holdings in sub-Saharan Africa.)

Pepin's book is all about populations, not only how they die and grow sick but how they live and structure their lives in very challenging situations. A few of the points that Pepin made struck me as worth sharing with Demography Matters' readership.

1. The relatively small populations of central Africa compared to central Africa's colonizers

One thing that jumped out at me when I opened Pépin's book was the ratio between the populations of colonized central Africa and its European colonizers. Central Africa was very sparsely populated.

While the quality of historical demographic data in central Africa is not very high at all, it is fair to suggest that for every person living in central Africa in the 1920s, perhaps four people lived in France and Belgium. The ratio was particularly low in French Equatorial Africa, a region of some two million square kilometres that was estimated in the late 19th century to have had a population of some five million people, more recent estimates suggesting a population that may have been half that. The former German colony of Cameroon had a population somewhere between two and three million people. Even the Belgian Congo, a veritable "subcontinent" as Pépin called it, in the 1920s had a population roughly the same size as its Belgian colonizer of seven or eight million people.

The difference in terms of population densities was vaster still, since central Africa's land area of some 4.7 million square kilometres is eight times the 582 thousand square kilometres of metropolitan France and Belgium combined. Central African populations, well into the lifetimes of many of the people reading this post, were small and (on average) widely dispersed.

Things have changed hugely. Now in 2011, central Africa has approximately twice the population of its colonizing region in Europe, and this ratio of central African population to Franco-Belgian is certain to continue to increase sharply to the relative advantage of the former region. I don't think it's at all speculative to suggest that this change in population ratios has much to do with the end of the French and Belgian empires in this vast area, since imperialism over a vast territory is easier if there isn't a vast population living on it that might contest the imperium's claims.

2. The vulnerability of central African populations to external forces

The small size and very low density of central African populations before the 20th century, and their very rapid growth after that point reflects the terrible vulnerability of populations in the region to outside forces.

Slavery had a hugely negative impact on the region, whether the transatlantic slavery of the European trade directed towards the New World or the Arab trade directed towards northern Africa and the Indian Ocean. Pépin cites estimates that eight hundred thousand slaves may have been taken by European slavers from the central African areas of his study; he doesn't provide estimates for the numbers taken by African slavers. This massive forced migration, sustained over centuries, had demographic impacts apart from the direct one of people leaving their lands of birth. The long-term effects of the central African slave trade included the destruction of much of the human and social capital necessary for the formation and maintenance of large-scale trading networks and polities, this in turn limiting the carrying capacity of central Africa relative to other world regions. The Kingdom of Kongo was destabilized over the long term by the export of people via the Portuguese based in neighbouring Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe.

The formation of European colonial empires in central Africa was also associated with terrible mortality. Much of this mortality was intentional, most famously in the Congo Free State where in the space of a generation the population shrunk by perhaps half from twenty to ten million, produced by a combination of very elevated death rates caused by mass killings, overwork, and their second-tier consequences (famine, disease, migration) and the lowered birth rates of potential parents who opted not to become parents in a country that amounted to an open-air extermination camp. A similarly sharp population decline also occurred in French Equatorial Africa as a result of the region's conquest and its sequelae.

To the best of my knowledge, central Africa is one of the few areas of the world in the modern era where populations consistently declined. Empire can be blamed for this.

3. The vulnerability of central African populations to disease

In my post last December on the dire demographics of the Roman Empire (and by extension, all pre-modern cultures), I followed Vaclav Smil in his identification of central Africa as the closest contemporary proxy for the Roman Empire's high birth rates and almost equally high death rates. In the early 21st century, such an analogy is somewhat strained, since although the region's health indicators--life expectancy, maternal mortality, and the like--lag world norms considerably they've considerably in advance of pre-modern standards.

A century ago? Not so much. Even now, Sub-Saharan Africa generally suffers from a higher burden of endemic disease than other low-income world regions, this substantially a consequence of sub-Saharan African environments. Consistently high temperatures and humidity support the mosquitos that sustain malaria, for instance. What one source identifies as "neglected tropical diseases", a broad collection of parasitical and protozoan diseases generally not present elsewhere in the world or not present to the same degree, seriously hinder the health and economic development of the region's peoples. Central Africa, a region that then as now had comparatively little developed health infrastructure, is and was especially vulnerable.

Tsetse fly-borne trypanosomiasis was the biggest threat to central African populations. Becoming especially widespread in central Africa over the 19th century following the intensified migrations and trade associated with colonial conquest, trypanosomiasis seems to have threatened the depopulation of large regions, with outside observers claiming that the populations of some regions like lowland Uganda or parts of the Congo basin were halved by the parasitic disease.

In Pepin's account, the French responded to this existential threat to the populations by establishing a fairly thorough compulsory medical program relying heavily on the use of hypodermic needles as delivery mechanisms for medicines. Most unfortunately, the hypodermic needles used were not sterilized, the idea of viral contamination of syringes only becoming known in central Africa until after the Second World War. This, Pepin suggests, may have been the thing that took HIV from being a rare zoonotic infection of chimpanzee hunters to being a plague with the potential for far wider spread. In his 2010 paper "Iatrogenic Transmission of Human T Cell Lymphotropic Virus Type 1 and Hepatitis C Virus through Parenteral Treatment and Chemoprophylaxis of Sleeping Sickness in Colonial Equatorial Africa", Pepin's study of a population in the Central African Republic that had received treatment for trypanosomiasis more than sixty years previously revealed that only a small fraction of the people who had been treated and expected to survive to the present actually did: "From historical data, we predicted that 59% of Mbimous 65 years and older would report treatment for trypanosomiasis before 1951; only 11% did so." Why? Noting that the rapid progression of human beings from infection with HIV to death in the space of a single decade made his hypothesis impossible to confirm, Pepin noted that use of unsterilized needles in the region was quite common--"In 1917–1919, of 89,743 individuals screened in Oubangui-Chair (now Central African Republic), 5347 were diagnosed as having trypanosomiasis and treated (mostly with subcutaneous drugs) using only 6 syringes."--and that other viruses known to be transmitted via the same routes as HIV, including Hepatitis C and HTLV-1, were present among the survivors.

HIV may have started as a zoonosis, but Pepin argues that it's only the widespread use of needles in the medical campaigns of France that allowed the rapid transmission of the virus beyond the relatively enclosed networks of kinship that once would have contained the virus. HIV could plausibly have been transmitted to very large numbers of people, some of whom who eventually would make their way to the cities of central Africa.

4. The role of unbalanced sex ratios, specifically, and anti-family sentiments generally, in the amplification of STDs

Central African cities are generally young, often founded as outposts by European colonizers and only seeing rapid growth after the Second World War, when rural-to-urban migration (only sometimes triggered by humanitarian catastrophes) and economic growth made urban life more appealing. In the case of central African cities, rural-to-urban migration was something undertaken mainly by men, as economic actors who (unlike women) had the autonomy as individuals necessary to move. Particularly in the Belgian Congo, migration by women was restricted in a vain effort to prevent the formation of families in urban areas and the entrenchment of urban living as a viable alternative. (This Belgian policy might be best considered as one of a clutch of policies, including the limitations on higher education of Congolese subjects, aimed at keeping the colony firmly under the control of the metropole.)

With the populations of Central African cities being composed disproportionately of young men with active sexual appetites, the unbalanced sex ratio created an opportunity for women to establish lucrative careers as sex workers. Pepin identifies numerous different trends in the sex trade, everything from women who had stable and lucrative relationships with a limited number of people to less fortunate women who exchanged sex anonymously with large numbers of people for pittances. As the economy of independent Congo deteriorated over the 1960s, the latter practice became more common. The formation of large open-ended sexual networks created a perfect environment for HIV's rapid spread. It didn't help that, as Pepin notes, Belgian medical policy in the future Kinshasa for STDs made full use of the coercive power of the state to provide medical treatment for anyone possibly infected with a STD, even the many people infected with yaws and thus providing a false positive for syphillis tests, and that the main medical centre also used unsterilized needles.

It's not a coincidence at all that this model of rural-to-urban migration, encouraging the migration of working-age men to urban centres but discouraging the migration of women and children to same in the hope of limiting permanent urban settlement, is exactly the same model of rural-to-urban migration instituted in southern Africa under apartheid that led to the current stratospheric rates of HIV prevalence throughout the wider region. Belgium echoed South Africa's sustained underinvestment in the human capital of its non-white subjects, and AIDS reaped the benefits.

5. The potential novelty and superficiality of migration-related links

(This principle applies to viruses and human beings alike.)

We could, if we really wanted, blame the HIV/AIDS epidemic outside of sub-Saharan African on la francophonie. After Belgium's hasty withdrawal from the Congo, in the 1960s the country was left without the trained professionals necessary to run the Congolese state. In order to fill the gap while Congo's own higher education system came online, the United Nations recruited thousands of French-speaking Haitian professionals and their dependents, fleeing the dictatorship of Duvalier. Many stayed; some few were infected with HIV; one unfortunate Haitian brought the virus back to his homeland sometime around 1966, as shown by the 2007 research of research of Worobey et al.. From Haiti, HIV made its way to the United States in 1969 and eventually seeded the epidemic in the North Atlantic world that led to the disease's recognition in the developed world a decade, perhaps, after it had become a major killer in central Africa. In the early 1980s in North America, in fact, AIDS was strongly associated in the popular imagination with Haitians, who formed a disproportionate number of the first diagnosed AIDS cases, especially in Québec and Florida where the Haitian immigrant diaspora was most visible. (Randy Shilts' book on the early epidemic, And the Band Played On, quotes a bathhouse owner in Florida who went so far as to say that AIDS was nothing gays in Florida had to be concerned with.)

How did all this happen? The chance historical events that established central Africa as a collection of territories run by Francophone powers, the ill fortune in Haiti that made emigration--not only to obvious destinations in the North Atlantic world, but even to remote central Africa--a good life choice, and the shared use of French in both the sending and the receiving country. Yes, as Paul Farmer noted in his generally quite good take on the Haitian AIDS epidemic, AIDS and Accusation, neither Haiti nor Congo (then Zaire) are as Francophone as France (as France now, at least; Eugen Weber's 19th century France was quite different), but neither had to be. In Haiti, French remained a socially more prestigious and internationally useful language than Haitian Creole; in Congo, a very complex language situation with four regional languages of note and official standing dozens of local languages did give French a privileged position as an official language. That shared language made Haiti and Congo appear in the perspective of the other.

The shape of the modern AIDS epidemic was chance, at many levels. The unfortunate Haitian who seems to have transferred the virus out of Africa might not have been infected, or might have died without transmitting the virus further. In that case, the transmission of HIV outside of Africa could have been delayed by decades, and by the 21st century AIDS would be seen as an overwhelmngly African disease, with the chance associations of the epidemic with gay men and Haitians not coming up. Conceivably, differences in colonial policy towards urbanization and public health, or maybe heightened concern for the possibility of medical contamination, could have slowed down or even aborted the epidemic. If different colonial powers had been active--perhaps the Portuguese, building on the long history connecting between the Portuguese and their Angolan colony with Congo--then even if the same sorts of things that caused the AIDS epidemic occurred it would have progressed in different directions. (Angola and Brazil are both quite lucky to have avoided the large epidemics often predicted for them, and the misuse of improperly sterilized hypodermic needles in Guinea-Bissau under Portuguese rule does seem to have unleashed HIV-2, the less lethal and much rarer variant of HIV, on the world.) Ubangi Shari --> Kinshasa --> Port au Prince --> New York City was not an inevitable trajectory for AIDS, nor was the size or shape of the epidemic to date.

What the Roman Empire's demographics were like and what they mean

Vaclav Smil is a writer and researcher who occupies an enviable niche with his studies the interactions between human beings, the societies they create, and the natural environments that they inhabit, aiming to determine things like the factors influencing the sustainability of human civilization. One of his more recent books, this year's Why America Is Not A New Rome, was written with the aim of taking apart the myth that the United States is a new Roman Empire, complete with decadence and empire and ultimate collapse. This analogy works, I grant you, except for the many, many ways in which 21st century America and the 2nd century Roman Empire are fundamentally different. The United States is much more technologically and socially innovative than Rome ever was; by all accounts, Americans behave more realistically with regards to the wider world, and are certainly less prone to inhumanity; and at every level, most unlike Rome, the United States is part of a highly complex and globally integrated economy.

One chapter of particular interest to Demography Matters readers is his fourth, the simply-titled "Life, Death, Wealth." For students of demographics, the biggest problem with studying the populations of the classical era lies in the lack of data. What we know about the populations of the Roman Empire (and there were numerous distinctive regional populations, thanks to deep-seated environmental, cultural, and technological differences between Rome's provinces, as opposed to a single Roman Empire population) is a combination of careful analysis of surviving documents, archeological studies, and analogies with modern societies. Rome, Smil points out, was a society trapped in the first stage of the demographic transition, with very high fertility rates largely counterbalanced by very high death rates. Walter Scheidel's papers on classical demography go into detail on specific areas of the classical world; Wikipedia's article on classical demography provides a useful overview; Wikipedia user G.W.'s detailed primer goes into much greater, and gorier, detail.

Inhabitants of the Roman Empire had a life expectancy at birth of about twenty-five years. Although the figure relies more on conjecture than ancient evidence, which is sparse and of dubious quality, it is a point of general consensus among historians of the period. It originates in cross-country comparison: given the known social and economic conditions of the Roman Empire, we should expect a life expectancy near the lower bound of known pre-modern populations. Roman demography bears comparison to available data for early twentieth-century India and rural China, where life expectancies at birth were also in the low twenties.

About 300 census returns filed in Egypt in the first three centuries CE survive. R. Bagnall and B. Frier have used them to build female and male age distributions, which show life expectancies at birth of between twenty-two and twenty-five years, results broadly consistent with model life tables. Other sources used for population reconstructions include cemetery skeletons, Roman tombstones in North Africa, and an annuities table known as "Ulpian's life table". The basis and interpretation of these sources is disputed: the skeletons cannot be firmly dated, the tombstones show non-representative sample populations, and the sources of "Ulpian's life table" are unknown. Nonetheless, because they converge with low Roman elite survival rates shown in the literary sources, and because their evidence is consistent with data from populations with comparably high mortality rates, like eighteenth-century France, and early twentieth-century China, India, and Egypt, they reinforce the basic assumption of Roman demography: that life expectancies at birth were in the low twenties.

As no population for which accurate observations survive has such a low life expectancy, model life tables must be used to understand this population's age demography. These models, based on historical data, describe 'typical' populations at different levels of mortality. For his demographic synopsis of the Roman Empire, Bruce Frier used the Model West framework, as it is "the most generalized and widely applicable". Because it is based on only one empirical input, the model life table can provide only a very approximate picture of Roman demography. On two important points, the table may seriously misrepresent the Roman situation: the structural relationship between juvenile and adult mortality, and the relative mortality rates across the sexes. In any case, Roman mortality should be expected to have varied greatly across times, places, and perhaps classes. A variation of ten years would not have been unusual. A life expectancy range of between twenty and thirty years is therefore plausible, though it may have been exceeded in either direction in marginal regions (e.g., malarious urban districts on one end; high-altitude, low-density settlements on the other).

The specifics of any ancient age distribution, moreover, would have seen heavy variation under the impact of local conditions. In pre-modern societies, the major cause of death was not the chronic, end-of-life conditions that characterize mortality in industrialized societies, nor primary malnutrition, but acute infectious disease, which has varied effects on age distributions in populations. Pulmonary tuberculosis, for example, characterized much of the Roman region in antiquity; its deaths tend to be concentrated in the early twenties, where model life tables show a mortality trough. Similarly, in pre-modern societies for which evidence is available, such as early modern England and early eighteenth-century China, infant mortality varies independently of adult mortality, to the extent that equal life expectancies at age twenty can be obtained in societies with infant mortality rates of 15% to 35% (life table models omit this; they depend on the assumption that age-specific mortality ratios co-vary in uniform, predictable ratios). No ancient evidence can gauge this effect (there is a strong tendency to overlook infant death in the sources), and the model life tables may overstate it, but comparative evidence suggests that it is very high: mortality was strongly concentrated in the first years of life.

Smil notes, quite rightly, that the classical demographic pattern has no parallels in our contemporary world.

Today an analogue of these Roman values exists only in terms of continuing high birth rates and total fertility rates in Western, Eastern, and Central Africa; in 2007 these regions had average birth rates of, respectively, 42, 41, and 46/1,000, and average total fertilities of their countries ranged between 5.5 and 6.4. But even in these sub-Saharan countries, where the demographic transition has yet to run its full course, death rates have been already reduced quite significantly, to between 5 and 17/1,000, still nearly twice the current global mean of 9/1,000 but only about 35%-40% of the high Roman value (123).

[. . .] There is no modern population--even among the worst-off countries of sub-Saharan Africa--whose growth, longevity, and age structure would even remotely resemble the ancient Roman pattern. Perhaps the best contemporary analogy would be to imagine a population that is even more destitute and desperate than those of Sierra Leone or [Burkina] Faso and then to contrast it with the long-lived, formerly fast growing and now rapidly aging U.S. population, whose mean life expectancy at
birth is more than three times as high as the Roman Empire's (126).

Taking a look at a list of the world's countries by life expectancies, the only countries that come close to the likely life expectancy of the average Roman are a long list of terribly poor countries, all but Afghanistan located in sub-Saharan Africa, most with very high levels of HIV infection in addition to any number of other illnesses. But even the worst-off country, Swaziland, comes at 39.6 years at least a decade ahead of the Roman average and on par with the luckiest Roman districts. Combine this with the very high disease load of the average Roman and sustained undernourishment--Smil cites evidence suggesting that, at least as measured by average height, the food supply improved after the Roman Empire's collapse in the west--and the picture of a congenitally unhealthy ppopulation is inescapable. Combine that with the abundant evidence for the exceptionally unequal distribution of wealth and power within the Roman Empire, and with the significantly lower level of economic output (estimated by Smil to be inferior to that of central Africa and, of course, lacking the imported technologies available to central Africans) and you have a Rome that stands few comparison with even the worst-off countries of our 21st century world.

Wikipedia's G.W. pointed out that--to say the least--mortality and illness on this scale hampers economic growth.

Mortality on this scale discourages investment in human capital, hindering productivity growth (adolescent mortality rates in Rome were two-thirds higher than in early modern Britain); it creates large numbers of dependent widows and orphans; and it hinders long-term economic planning. With the prevalence of debilitating diseases, the number of effective working years was even worse: health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE), the number of years lived in good health, varies from life expectancy by no more than eight percent in modern societies; in high-mortality societies such as Rome, it could be as much as one-sixth beneath total life expectancy. A HALE of less than twenty years would have left the empire with very depressed levels of economic productivity.

It's difficult to avoid concluding that death and suffering on this scale had an effect on the cultures of the time. Smil remarks that, even though Romans accepted the fundamental humanity of slaves, Roman slaveowners--like their counterparts in the Atlantic slave/sugar economy more than a millennium later, in pre-revolutionary Haiti say--were still quite willing to treat their human property quite inhumanely (137-138). This habituation to extreme suffering, this coarsening of human sensibilities, isn't the sort of mindset that would support the sorts of rational, non-zero-sum social and political bargains that created the institutions undergirding the 21st century world.

Demographic patterns not too far removed from the Roman Empire's are normal for human beings, almost 95% of whom lived on Earth before it broke from the established demographic patterns in the 20th century. Even in favoured long-prosperous Canada, they prevailed within a century of my birth.



Sadness
Originally uploaded by etherflyer

(This photo of a late 19th century Torontonian child's grave was taken by a friend of mine, and used here and in another blog post of mine; he's since taken others.)

We at Demography Matters are concerned with seeing where established trends will take us. Tonight, a day before the new year, I thought I'd take a look back to see where we escaped. It's worth gauging the distances between then and now, I think.

A few links

Hi, everyone! My apologies for taking this much time off. While I generate some actual content, here's a few links for you to peruse!

The Toronto Star reports that many displaced people from Port-au-Prince have found refuge in Haiti's smaller towns and cities.

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin reproduces economist Paul Romer's argument that Haitians should be helped by letting them immigrate to countries where they will able to prosper, instead of forcing them to stay in their impoverished country while hoping for massive political and economic improvements that may well not come.

Elliott Abrams makes a similar argument in the Washington Post, arguing that a much larger Haitian diaspora would be able to send more remittances back to Haiti, thus helping the Haitian economy.

The Inter Press Service reports that high rates of poverty have made most of Nicaragua's young want to emigrate, joing a diaspora amounting to 13% of Nicaragua's 5.5 million.

Yabiladi.com reports that a tenth of Italy's foreigners are Moroccan.

The New Straits Times's Chi Mei Ling writes about the vast improvements in opportunities that migrants to richer countries could enjoy, and argues that some countries--Malaysia is specifically raised--could do a better job of enabling this improvement.

The New York Times takes a look at the controversial nature of daycare and the all-day school system in Germany, steps towards more equal labour-sharing within the household and greater opportunities for women, part of an effort towards boosting cohort fertility. Interestingly enough, East German women raised with the GDR's tradition of female daycare and high rates of female participation in the labour force are wondering why it took West German women so long.

Radio Australia describes a major problem facing foreign immigrants in Japan when it notes that out of one thousand nursing applicants from Indonesia and the Philippines, "30 were able to qualify for training in Japan, and of those, just five passed the national exam, giving them the right to work as nurses." Mastering the Japanese language, especially all three of its scripts, was a major problem; without the language, they couldn't get in.

In Canada's, the population of the province of Saskatchewan--recently a net exporter of immigrants--has grown as economic opportunities have improved.

The Latin American Herald Tribune notes that Chile's birth rate has fallen by more than half since 1950, from "an average of five children each in 1950 to fewer than two apiece in 2007" to a current TFR of 1.8.

The Inter Press Service's Chen Siwu and Li Yahong describe the provinces of China's "ant tribe," the well-educated young Chinese who have difficulties finding a job.

People in Mali are organizing to help and protect the sizable Malien labour diaspora in Europe, especially in France, lobbying for the regularization of this diaspora's members and helping Maliens deported back to their country.

Taiwan News notes the correspondence between Taiwanese women's low participation in Taiwan's labour force and the island nation's low cohort fertility.

On Haiti's diaspora

It's difficult to underestimate the tragedy of Tuesday's earthquake in Haiti. I first learned of the catastrophe in the comments of this Marginal Revolution post, where Tyler Cowen was talking about how tourism was slowly taking off. With tens of thousands of dead and the country's infrastructure and capital destroyed, it's difficult to see how Haiti can recover.

If it does, the Haitian diaspora will play a critical role in financing a recovery. Haiti, like other Caribbean countries, is an island nation with a history defined by demographics: the destruction of the indigenous populations, the forced settlement of African slaves and the migration of Europeans attracted by prosperity of the sugar economy, followed by economic decline and migration. Haiti's independence came quite early, as African slaves revolted against brutal French rule and held off successive invaders for more than a century to become the second independent state of the Americas and the first modern black republic. Perhaps because of the subsequent depopulation--perhaps a third of the country's population died in the war--and Haiti's self-identification as a homeland for the African diaspora, the nation was briefly a destination for free African-American immigrants. By the early 20th century, Haiti's terrible poverty and political instability changed this altogether, with the beginnings of seasonal migration to the sugar cane fields of Cuba and the Dominican Republic, followed by a shift to North America.

The population growth rate in Haiti's rural areas has been lower than the rate for urban areas, even though fertility rates are higher in rural areas. The main reason for this disparity is outmigration. People in rural areas have moved to cities, or they have emigrated to other countries, mostly the United States and the Dominican Republic. An estimated 1 million people left Haiti between 1957 and 1982.

Many of the emigrants in the 1950s and the 1960s were urban middle-class and upper-class opponents of the government of François Duvalier (1957-71). Throughout the 1970s, however, an increasing number of rural and lower-class urban Haitians emigrated, too. In the 1980s, as many as 500,000 Haitians were living in the United States; there were large communities in New York, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Thousands of Haitians also illegally emigrated to the United States through nonimmigrant visas, while others entered the United States without any documentation at all.

The first reports of Haitians' arriving in the United States, by boat and without documentation, occurred in 1972. Between 1972 and 1981, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) reported more than 55,000 Haitian "boat people" arrived in Florida. The INS estimated that because as many as half of the arrivals escaped detection, the actual number of boat people may have exceeded 100,000. An unknown number of Haitians are reported to have died during their attempts to reach the United States by sea.

Though poorer than earlier immigrants, the boat people were often literate and skilled, and all had families who could afford the price of a passage to Florida. About 85 percent of these boat people settled in Miami.

[. . .]

Since the early twentieth century, the Dominican Republic has received both temporary and permanent Haitian migrants. The International Labour Office estimated that between 200,000 and 500,000 Haitians resided in the Dominican Republic in 1983. About 85,000 of them lived on cane plantations. In the early 1980s, about 80 to 90 percent of the cane cutters in the Dominican Republic were reported to be Haitians. Through an accord with the Haitian government, the Dominican Republic imported Haitian workers to cut cane. In 1983 the Dominican Republic hired an estimated 19,000 workers. Evidence presented to the United Nations (UN) Working Group on Slavery revealed that the Dominican Republic paid wages that were miserably low and that working and living conditions failed to meet standards set by the two governments. According to some reports, Haitian cane cutters were unable to leave their workplaces, and they were prevented from learning about the terms of the contracts under which they had been hired.

Emigration helped moderate Haiti's population growth. Furthermore, annual remittances from abroad, estimated to be as high as US$100 million, supported thousands of poor families and provided an important infusion of capital into the Haitian economy. At the same time, emigration resulted in a heavy loss of professional and skilled personnel from urban and rural areas.

The continued immiseration of the Haitian economy after the 1980s has certainly not decrease the economic incentive for leaving the country, even with the ever-present risk of death, most recently evidenced by a 2009 shipwreck of a boat of Haitian migrants in the Turks and Caicos. What former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide called the tenth département plays a critical role in Haiti's economy. Migration helps ameliorate terribly low level of human development with remittances providing funding for children's education, while consumption of goods plays a critical role.

Where do Haitians live? Haitians live in the countries with which they have foreign relations, with the United States, with the Dominican Republic, with its Caribbean neighbours, with Francophone aid partners like Canada/Québec and France. The modern diaspora is concentrated particularly in North America, with major concentration of Haitian migrants in the United States in New York City and Florida's Miami-Dade County, in the latter community, geographically closest to Haiti, most visibly in the Little Haiti neighbourhood. The Haitian diaspora in Canada is concentrated overwhelmingly in Québec. Québec's historically close relations with Haiti, the other large officially Francophone society in the Americas, a traditional destination for Québec's foreign aid and a source of Francophone immigrants. Canada's Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean, was born in Haiti herself. More than 1400 Canadians are missing in Haiti. The islands of the French Caribbean also have large numbers of migrants. In the Dominican Republic, meanwhile, pervasive racism renders the lives of Haitians and of Dominicans of Haitian descent exceptionally difficult. In 1937, in fact, Trujillo's genocidal Paisley Massacre killed tens of thousands of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, as chillingly described by Edwidge Danticat in her 1999 novel The Farming of Bones.

Haitians in the diaspora, especially those of foreign citizenship, as observed in 2005 by Ericq Pierre, face a difficult situation, with suspected disloyalty coexisting with their homeland's dependence on their prestige and their moneys.

Although the legislation on nationality leaves many issues open, things are even more complex on the emotional level. It appears that when you change your nationality, for any reason, you somehow feel still more Haitian, still more deeply a native son, especially if you keep some roots in the country. Unfortunately, in the eyes of current laws, one is not completely so. It’s unfair; it’s frustrating; but that’s the way it is until the rules of the game are changed.

The naturalized Haitian feels in his heart that he has never stopped being Haitian, so he generally pays little attention to the legal ramifications that his naturalized condition can have for him in Haiti itself. When he is in Haiti, he rarely wears his adopted nationality on his sleeve. He generally reveals it only when forced to do so, and only to get out of a tight situation. Some even hide it like a shameful disease.

There are several reasons for this, of which a few are rightfully linked to the uncertain status of the naturalized person who returns to live in his native country. A naturalized person is assured to stay in his adoptive country, not return to live near-permanently in his native country. That carries clear risks. These “hybrid” countrymen, who are not entirely Haitian nor entirely foreign, are more often than you would think victims of the arbitrary and high-handed behavior so common in Haiti. In addition, Haitian politicians are suspicious of a member of the diaspora who wants to go into politics. They consider him as taking the foreigner’s side.

Don’t they say that there was an unwritten rule under the François Duvalier regime that allowed those exiled Haitians who wanted to go into politics to quickly be regranted their citizenship as soon as they set foot back on Haitian soil? Unfortunately, the idea behind this “generosity” was the power to throw these exiles into prison with no obligation to report to the authorities of their adopted country. Thus, more people than we think have fallen victim to their dual nationality.

In fact, not until the adoption of the legislation governing the privileges granted to native Haitians and their descendants who have acquired another nationality ( Ref: Le Moniteur of August 12, 2002 and Claude Moise Editorial in Le Matin of October 7-10, 2005), it was obvious that Haitians who have adopted a foreign nationality were among the members of the universal diaspora the ones who were the most downtrodden and abused by the laws of their country of origin. But other forms of exclusion are still in force. The Haitian authorities seem to be interested in them only when they bring back awards for excellence or when they send money. Then they rush to invite them to Haiti to appear in public with them and exhibit them proudly as very special specimens of Ayiti Toma.

If Haiti is to recover, it will need foreign help, including help from its diaspora. It certainly will grow larger: Canada has already fast-tracked Haitian immigrants, while pressure towards the same end is growing in the United States. In the end, a Haiti detached from the globalized economy by its poverty can only be aided by being brought back into globalization's networks. These include globalization's migratory networks.