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

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

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

Some news links: Greece, China, Japan, Hong Kong

I thought I'd share three clusters of news links on subjects I've been following here, and one oddity.

• As Greece heads towards a catastrophic meltdown, the theme of emigration from Greece is one of several being explored by the international press. The Guardian and Bloomberg suggest that all kinds of professionally-trained Greeks are looking for a way out of their country, that newspaper later looking specifically to the Greek community in New York City while Reuters notes the dynamics of the Greek community in Australia's second city of Melbourne. (Migration within the Eurozone has not been such a major theme, at least in the English-language media I regularly read, but I don't doubt it's a reality.) With even the best-case predictions for Greece's economic recovery being decidedly dire and the large-scale flight of Greek professionals doing nothing to make this better, I think it's safe to predict that whatever the outcome of this crisis, Greece for the next while will be most notable as a place future generations of immigrants will come from.
• Japan, meanwhile, is facing rapid aging. The Asahi Shinbun notes that the national population fell by more than a quarter-million people, the biggest losers being rural prefectures and the only gainers urban ones (and the outlier of Okinawa). This shrinkage, accompanied by a rapid shrinkage of the work force, is leading to increased pressure on benefits to seniors, while working mothers continue to face problems on the job and in life.
• In adjacent China, the prospect of labour shortages is looming. Marginal Revolution noted earlier this week the costs imposed on the Chinese labour market by protections. This, along with the disappearance of China's rural surplus labour as a consequence of below-replacement fertility and migration, makes me think any number of futures are possible for China demographically. This includes the possibility of international immigration.
• Finally, the Irish Times was one newspaper among many that reported on a half-joking proposal in 1983 by people within the British government to resettle millions of Chinese in Northern Ireland if they so wanted it. (The Guardian goes into more detail about the specifics of the proposal.) This proposal seems at the time to have been a joke born of frustration with the complex situations of Northern Ireland and Hong Kong, yet it raises an interesting question: Why didn't the United Kingdom have programs to attract immigrants from Hong Kong in the years before the handover to China, like other countries around the world

Reflecting on migration in China through Taiwan and Hong Kong

International migration is increasingly a fact of life in Chinese East Asia. We can see this most clearly by looking at Taiwan and Hong Kong, two polities which not only are--at the very least--autonomous from the government of the People's Republic but which, by virtue of their high levels of economic and human development, representing the end goal that much of urban China seems within reach of attaining.

Ji-Ping Lin's January 2012 overview essay at the Migration Policy Institute noted how Taiwan was increasingly seeing substantial international labour mobility, not only across the Taiwan Straits with China but with Southeast Asia. Increasingly strong Taiwanese ties with Southeast Asian economies, demands for particular kinds of labour, along with the common East Asian theme of Southeast Asian women migrating to richer countries to pursue marriage with locals, have led to the migration of hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians to Taiwan, particularly of Vietnamese, Filipinos and Indonesians. As the Taiwanese population rapidly ages while access to the Chinese labour market remains problematic given issues of Taiwanese identity, it would not seem like a good idea to bet against the arugment that Taiwan in coming decades will be increasingly multicultural.

The similar sort of thing appears to be happening in Hong Kong. New immigrants to Hong Kong from mainland China are politically quite controversial, not least because of the alleged propensity of many female migrants to move to Hong Kong with the intent of giving birth to children with Hong Kong residency rights. The position of Filipinos and Indonesians, collectively numbering a quarter-million people and working particularly as domestic labourers, is also noteworthy. Hong Kong is more integrated with China than Taiwan because Hong Kong is in fact part of China, but even this autonomous Chinese city sees substantial migration from both Chinese and non-Chinese sources.

Why does this non-Chinese immigration even occur, when there are so many potential migrants from China? Particularly in the case of Taiwan, restrictions on Chinese immigration have much to do with concerns over national identity and the question of how much integration with China is desirable. Even if these restrictions were not in place, I would also suggest that some amount of international migration would be inevitable. Leaving aside issues like China's hukou system which limits migration to urban areas, Taiwan and Hong Kong are highly international polities. They have abundant and deep ties with non-Chinese regions, perhaps most noticeably for migration purposes with Southeast Asian countries, but not only with these. (One childhood acquaintance from Canada, I've recently learned, now works at an animation studio in Taipei.) How would Taiwan and Hong Kong trade with these non-Chinese countries and populations, invest in these territories, even engage in cultural exchanges with these people, without having some of these people have an interest in immigrating to these areas? Already, the proportions are starting to be noticeable.

My final point for the night is this. To what extent must the experiences of Taiwan and Hong Kong, globally renowned and economically successful, must differ from (for instance) Shanghai and the wider Pearl River conurbation? In an era where China again has the largest economy in the world, where many urban areas of China are already receiving very large numbers of migrants domestically, where shortages of labour are foreseeable given demographic change, and where China is building up all manner of ties with the entire planet, is there any reason not to suspect that globalized and successful China will not also become a notable destination for large numbers of immigrants?

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.

On upper population limits in Manhattan

Amy O'Leary's New York Times article "Everybody Inhale: How Many People Can Manhattan Hold?" isn't just of interest to New Yorkers. Manhattan is arguably the paradigmatic metropolis of the modern world; the question of how many Manhattanites can live, sustainably and in a reasonable degree of comfort, in that territory is universally relevant.

As crowded as the city feels at times, the present-day Manhattan population, 1.6 million, is nowhere near what it once was. In 1910, a staggering 2.3 million people crowded the borough, mostly in tenement buildings. It was a time before zoning, when roughly 90,000 windowless rooms were available for rent, and a recent immigrant might share a few hundred square feet with as many as 10 people. At that time, the Lower East Side was one of the most crowded places on the planet, according to demographers. Even as recently as 1950, the Manhattan of “West Side Story” was denser than today, with a population of two million.

By 1980, with the subsequent flight to suburbia, the population fell to 1.4 million. Then crime dropped, the city strengthened economically, and real estate prices started a steady climb, defying broader downturns in the economy as any dip in the market came to be viewed as a buying opportunity.

But those numbers measure Manhattan at its sleepiest, literally. Census figures count only residents, neglecting, as E. B. White famously wrote, “the New York of the commuter, the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.”

If a whole city can be created and destroyed in a day, Manhattan comes close. During the workday, the population effectively doubles, to 3.9 million, as shown in a new report by the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management of New York University. Day-trippers, hospital patients, tourists, students and, most of all, commuters, drain the suburbs and outer boroughs, filling streets and office space with life. Wednesday, it turns out, is the most populous day of the week, and special events, like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, push the total past five million, offering a glimpse of what an even more crowded Manhattan might feel like.

So if Manhattan’s slow but steady growth continues — and there’s no sign it won’t — how many people can it handle? Answers to this seemingly simple question could fill enough pages to pack a spacious studio apartment, but a quick helicopter tour of future scenarios for Manhattan’s growth shows a tangle of towers and trade-offs.

O'Brien notes that Manhattan's fabric will certainly change radically even with the predicted growth of a quarter-million people by 2030. Low-density areas will be filled, and the skyline is going to rise substantially.

These days, Ed Glaeser, a Harvard economist, inevitably comes up in conversations about how cities should grow. In his recent book, “Triumph of the City,” he makes an argument — which many consider persuasive — that dense places are uniformly better and more interesting than emptier ones, and that they should be allowed to develop unfettered, even if it means building towers where brownstones once stood.

Affordability is the first reason. If you build up, he says, housing prices will fall and more people will be able to live in their own sliver of Manhattan sky. And that’s a good thing, Mr. Glaeser adds, since the energy of all those newcomers will fuel innovation and entrepreneurship, attracting talent and growth to create a virtuous circle. From energy-efficiency to life expectancy to finding a date or something to do on a Saturday night, Mr. Glaeser argues that denser places have the edge.

He’s all for sacrificing charming stretches of the city for more residential space. He favors preserving noteworthy architecture, but suggests a cap on the number of protected buildings at any one time. If you want to protect a new building, he says, another should come off the list.

“There are certainly individual buildings that I feel sentimental about,” Mr. Glaeser said, recalling the memory of watching snow fall on the brownstones and the old Magyar church across the street from his childhood apartment on 69th Street between First and Second Avenues. “Sure, I would feel a little bit sad if that was torn down, but the upside of having thousands more people getting to enjoy New York would outweigh my personal feelings.”

Mr. Glaeser thinks restricting building height is fundamentally unfair. He has proposed scrapping the city’s permitting process in favor of “impact fees” that developers would pay to cover the infrastructure costs associated with their buildings. So if somebody wanted to build a 50-story building, he or she would simply put up the money required to support its water, sewer, power and so forth.

O'Brien concludes that the ultimate upper limits to population in Manhattan may be very high, so long as the city is willing to support investment in innovative solutions to infrastructure. She invokes the memory of the Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong, a very high-density enclave in that high-density city that was demolished in the 1990s. If Manhattan had the Walled City's population density, it would support 65 million people.