The Globe and Mail on the Syrian refugee population in Canada

In The Globe and Mail, journalist Joe Friesen's data-driven analysis "Syrian exodus to Canada: One year later, a look at who the refugees are and where they went" takes a look at how the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees resettled Canada are doing.

The initial surge of arrivals was fuelled primarily by privately sponsored refugees whose applications were already in the pipeline under the previous Conservative government. Many of them have family ties in Canada and their first year is subsidized by their sponsor group. In Quebec, where roughly half of Syrian-Canadians were believed to reside, about 80 per cent of Syrian arrivals were privately sponsored. By contras, in Saskatchewan, only a very few have been privately sponsored and the overwhelming majority are government sponsored. In the first years after arrival, privately sponsored refugees, who often have advantageous family networks and higher levels of education, tend to fare better economically, studies have shown. Government-sponsored refugees are typically selected based on humanitarian need, which will often present social and educational challenges and they tend to take longer to establish themselves.

Ontario and Quebec, Canada’s two largest provinces, took in the largest number of refugees. Alberta, where there are established networks of private sponsorship groups, including large organizations run by Catholic groups in Calgary and Edmonton, surged ahead of its larger neighbour British Columbia to take third spot. New Brunswick took in refugees at a rate far higher than its share of population, exceeding the numbers seen in more populous provinces such as Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, Canada’s three largest cities, are always magnets for immigrants, so it’s no surprise that they would see the largest influx of Syrian refugees. All three have Syrian-Canadian residents who will have helped drive sponsorships. They also have effective refugee-sponsorship organizations, such as churches and secular groups, that provide an infrastructure for the new arrivals. On a per-capita basis, it was the mid-size Canadian cities that saw the greatest proportional impact of the Syrian refugee movement. Trois-Rivières, a Quebec city of 135,000 people, had the highest per-capita rate of arrivals. Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, said there is a large and well-organized Armenian-Syrian community in Quebec that has contributed to sponsoring and settling a sizable number of the new arrivals. London, Ont., a city with a sizable Muslim community, welcomed the fourth-highest total, proportionally.

Friesen goes into more detail. There are some problems which may hinder the refugees' integration into Canada, with shortfalls in education and sometimes a lack of fluency in either official language.

On the growth and the aging of Canada's population

CBC was one of the several news sources to announce earlier this week that Canada's population has grown to surpass the 36 million mark.

A record number of immigrants and refugees arriving on Canadian shores helped push Canada's official population over 36 million as of July 1, Statistics Canada says.

The data agency says there were 437,815 more people living in Canada than there were on the same day a year earlier, bringing the official population to 36,286,425.

In absolute terms, that's the biggest annual surge since 1988. In percentage terms, the population grew by 1.2 per cent.

The "increase is one of the largest increases since the baby boom in the 1950s," BMO economist Doug Porter said, "although this recent increase is driven more by immigration."

Indeed, the numbers show that some 320,932 immigrants arrived in Canada between the two Canada Days. More than 30,000 Syrian refugees are included in that figure, as they are classified as permanent residents by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

"The country had not received such a large number of immigrants in a single annual period since the early 1910s, during the settlement of Western Canada," Statistics Canada said in a release.

The relevant tables are here.

As Bloomberg noted in a recent article, this growth is not nearly enough, not to rejuvenate Canada's working-age cohorts and not to drive economic growth to hoped-for levels.

Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz gave a blunt speech last week, saying that five decades of expansion powered by the Baby Boom generation is ending, and Canada's potential economic growth has slowed to 1.5 percent. That pace is almost a full percentage point below the average gain in gross domestic product over the last 35 years.

For Canada, at least, business leaders should now count themselves lucky to earn a "pretty good return'' of 4 percent like some companies in Asia, he said. Young people must think about working longer and saving more to fund the retirement their parents had, and governments must make tougher decisions on tax, trade and immigration policy in the hopes of salvaging marginal gains in future income growth, Poloz said.

``Those folks have been entering retirement for the past few years, and potential economic growth has been slowing as a direct result,'' Poloz said last week in Quebec City. ``We cannot just sit back and wait for these slow-moving forces to reverse.''

The biggest gain in the population over the past 12 months has been the 55 years and older set, which rose almost six times more than the so-called prime age population aged 25 to 54.

It's a trend mirrored in most industrialized nations such as Japan, where the central bank is struggling against deflation and anemic growth. Central banks around the world have set near-zero or negative interest rates aiming to regenerate inflation. Slow global growth hurts Canada's trade-dependent economy by curbing exports of crude oil, machinery and minerals.

The fading job market means the Bank of Canada's 0.5 percent policy interest rate won't need to rise as soon or as much in past economic recoveries to keep inflation in check. The so-called neutral rate that keeps the economy in balance could be as low as 0.75 percent now from as high as 5.5 percent before the global financial crisis, Poloz said.

Some demographic perspectives on Brexit and the future United Kingdom

I've been spending today taking in the fact that the vote in the British referendum on European Union membership went in favour of the Leave camp. There's certainly going to be repercussions in Canada, with Torontoist noting the impact on Toronto-based businesses of British instability, the Toronto Star observing that the United Kingdom has become a less attractive platform for European business, and the CBC observing that British departure jeopardizes a Canadian-European Union free trade agreement that has taken seven years to bring to the point of completion. (Brexit proponents hoping for a quick deal should take note.)

The first important thing that needs to be said about Brexit, at least from a perspective relative to population, is that the desire of Brexit proponents to somehow come up with a new relationship with the European Union that will keep the single EU market as before while keeping out EU migrants looks impossible. The freedom of movement of workers is one of the foundational "four freedoms" of post-war European integration, one of the elements of this internal single market, and it's very difficult for me to imagine a circumstance in which a seceding member-state would be allowed to pick and choose what elements of its old membership it could keep. What would be the incentive for any polity to give that prerogative to a seceding member-state? The proposals of Québécois and Scottish sovereigntists for continued integration with their parent states, on the terms of the separatist entities and only in the areas they wanted (only, I would add, in the areas that people were unsure the separatists could handle like monetary policy) come to mind.

Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein do belong to the European Economic Area, often mentioned, but they have no ability to pick and choose. Switzerland is not a formal member of the EEA but it comes quite close, with a tailored package of treaties which provides it with access to the single market. Switzerland's decision two years ago to limit free migration following a 2014 immigration referendum has triggered a continuing crisis with the European Union still far from being solved. Britain's negotiating partners in the European Union may well be willing to accept EEA membership, but I would be surprised if free movement of people would be sacrificed. Yet if that did not happen, how can a post-Brexit government drawing its support substantially from anti-immigrant sentiment accept such a deal? There will be economic shocks ahead.

It can't be doubted that immigration, perhaps most recently the Middle Eastern refugee crisis but also post-2004 immigration from central Europe, helped trigger Brexit, as noted by Migration Information.

The topic of migration has been central to the referendum debate. For an astonishing nine consecutive months, voters have identified immigration as among the most important issues facing Britain (based on Ipsos MORI polling). In April, 47 percent rated immigration as the most pressing concern; just half that number identified the economy as the most important issue. However, when asked specifically about their vote on Europe, respondents cite the economy as their primary consideration, with migration a close second.

The public debate on migration has encompassed several dimensions, including whether being part of the European Union enhances or decreases security; what the United Kingdom’s response should be on accepting refugees for resettlement and providing additional funds to help resolve the refugee crisis; and above all what migration flows will look like in the future and whether restrictions on migration are compatible with Brexit (and the resultantly-necessary new EU trade deal). The underlying theme is to what degree and at what cost the national government can control and restrict migration by leaving the European Union.

Not surprisingly after the Paris and Brussels attacks, both sides share a general concern over terrorism and security related to migration. Remain campaigners claim improved intelligence sharing between EU countries will increase security, while Leave proponents argue that the United Kingdom’s greater ability to prevent movement once outside the European Union and increased border security will reduce threats.

With EU Member States having received more than 1 million asylum seekers and migrants in 2015, both sides contend the crisis will dramatically influence voting decisions. The United Kingdom has played a highly limited role in the refugee crisis thus far (refusing for example to take part in the EU scheme to relocate 160,000 refugees across Member States). Coupled with relatively low numbers of spontaneous arrivals of refugees and the absence thus far of a terrorist attack on UK soil, suggestions that terrorism and Europe’s refugee crisis will decide the referendum appear exaggerated.

Public opinion on future migration flows and restrictions currently matter more to voters. The most passionate Leave supporters (representing around one-quarter of the UK public) are very strongly correlated with the most anti-immigrant UK voters. Voters strongly attached to an “English” (as opposed to a “British”) identity—a disproportionately Conservative-leaning group crucial to the outcome—favor leaving the European Union. Furthermore, anxieties over migration extend beyond this group, with two-thirds of the public favoring migration restrictions.

I'll quote at length from the introduction to Open Europe's April 2016 study "Where next? A liberal, free-market guide to Brexit". Migration, the authors suggest, is not likely to fall even in the case of Brexit.

Immigration

a) While there would be political pressure to reduce immigration following Brexit, there are several reasons why we believe headline net immigration is unlikely to reduce much:

The business case for maintaining a flexible supply of labour. The evidence suggests that, with a record high employment rate, the UK’s labour market is already tightening;

the political and economic challenge of finding policy alternatives to relieve pressure on the public finances caused by ageing demographics, where immigration can help smoothen the path to fiscal sustainability;

the effects of globalisation on migration flows, which the UK is not alone in experiencing;

and the likelihood of some constraints on UK immigration policy under a new arrangement with the EU.

b) Nevertheless, free from EU rules on free movement, the UK would likely pursue a selective policy more geared towards attracting skilled migration, which could be more politically acceptable.

c) Open Europe would recommend a system seeking to emulate the points-based systems of Canada and Australia. The system could be weighted strongly towards those with a job offer, but also offer a route for skilled migrants seeking work. Such a system could give priority to UK industries and employers suffering skills shortages but also allow a flexible supply of skilled workers to enter the UK labour force subject to a cap which could be varied depending on economic circumstances. However, there is likely to be a continued need for migrant labour to fill low-skilled jobs. Therefore, the UK would also need a mechanism to fill low-skilled jobs or meet labour shortages where employers have recently relied on EU migrants.

d) However, there is likely to be a trade-off between the depth of any new economic agreement with the EU and the extent to which the UK will have to accept EU free movement. The evidence from the precedents of Norway and Switzerland suggest that the deeper the agreement, the more likely the UK will need to accept free movement. This might mean building in preferential treatment for EU citizens in the UK’s new points system, which would give EU nationals priority over non-EU nationals, or it could create a separate temporary migration scheme for migrants from the EU.

e) The UK is far from alone in its migration experience in terms of developed economies. Between 2000 and 2015 the UK received 3.7 migrants for every thousand people, which puts it just above the average but below countries such as Canada, Australia, Norway and Switzerland. If the UK had experienced the same level of immigration as Canada or Australia there would have been an additional 3 million or 4.4 million migrants respectively coming to the UK over the past decade – though of course the UK is a more crowded country.

A points system, as The Independent has argued, might well lead to more immigrant admissions. I've observed here, at least as far back at 2012, that British anti-immigrant sentiment is general. Whether European Union, Commonwealth, or other, immigrants just aren't welcome.

A post-Brexit United Kingdom will become less attractive for migrants. It may, between hostile policies and a worsening economy, become much less attractive. I feel justified in discounting scenarios where Britain will become more attractive, more open to immigrants. If the resulting shortfalls in labour last, this may well lower the United Kingdom's long-term potential for economic growth. What a waste of potential!

Who knows? If things get bad enough, we might even see emigration on a substantial scale. CBC reported that the number of Britons googling how to move to Canada after the referendum results has sparked sharply. I would not at all bet against seeing here in Toronto a wave of British immigrants not at all unlike the Irish immigrants who came just a few years ago.

(For further reading, I recommend the Brexit site of the Migration Observatory.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the past year, alarm bells have been sounding.

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

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

On Paul Krugman, Portugal and debt and demographic debt spirals

Paul Krugman's recent blog post, "Debt at Demographic Spirals", briefly considered if too much emigration could be a bad thing for Portugal, and countries like Portugal.

We used to think that high labor mobility was a good thing for currency unions, because it would allow the union’s economy to adjust to asymmetric shocks — booms in some places, busts in others — by moving workers rather than having to cut wages in the lagging regions. But what about the tax base? If bad times cause one country’s workers to leave in large numbers, who will service its debt and care for its retirees?

Indeed, it’s easy conceptually to see how a country could enter a demographic death spiral. Start with a high level of debt, explicit and implicit. If the work force falls through emigration, servicing this debt will require higher taxes on those who remain, which could lead to more emigration, and so on.

How realistic is this possibility? It obviously depends on having a sufficiently large burden of debt and other mandatory expenditure. It also depends on the elasticity of the working-age population to the tax burden, which in turn will depend both on the underlying economics — is there a strongly downward-sloping demand for labor, or is it highly elastic? — and on things like the willingness of workers to move, which may depend on culture and language.

We've looked at the specific example of Portugal before. I made a brief post in October 2009 about the resumption of mass emigration in Portugal and a longer post. Edward Hugh has written in greater detail, in March 2013 speculating that Portugal was being hollowed out by the shrinkage of its working-age population and in August of that year suggesting that Portugal's demographic issues had been hindering economic growth since at least 2000. Let's not forget a May 2015 guest post speculating that Portugal had been turning Japanese for some time.

My personal sense is that there is some risk of this, especially in countries with contemporary traditions of emigration. From the perspective of European Union policymaking, some sort of fiscal union uniting pension and other social welfare system might well be necessary, producing rather less problematic results than wholesale fiscal collapse in the worst-effected labor-exporting areas.

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

On the transformation of Canada's temporary foreign worker program

Today in Canada is a notable day in Canada's immigration history, for today is the day that changes in the Temporary Foreign Worker program are going to have a significant but as yet uncertain effect on the lives of people in the Canadian labour market. David P. Ball's article in British Columbian newsmagazine The Tyee, "Foreign Worker Exodus Expected as New Rules Kick in" outlines the situation.

Changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program will force the removal of tens of thousands of workers from the country starting today.
This will have an immediate impact not only on workers who have been in the country for more than four years, but also on industries that use foreign workers such as restaurants, construction and the agricultural sector.

The new rules will apply to an estimated 70,000 temporary workers, migrant advocates claim, but the exact number is not known and has not been revealed by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Under the rules, workers who have been in the country longer than four years must leave. Once out of the country, they can't re-apply for another work permit to enter Canada for another four years, hence the "four-in, four-out" description.

There are more than 300,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada.

The "four-in-four-out" policy was announced in 2011 amid public debate over whether the program was replacing Canadians' jobs and exploiting non-Canadian labourers at the same time.

Last year, as a consequence of media reports that a significant number Canadian employers were bringing in temporary foreign workers in circumstances where there was no need--not only bringing in skilled labour, but bringing in unskilled labourers at a time of high domestic unemployment, the federal government clamped down significantly on the program. This extended analysis by the CBC's Tracy Johnson makes the point that, even now, basic information about the numbers of workers who will be affected remains vague. Betting on tens of thousands of people, perhaps--I speculate--as many as a hundred thousand--seems safe..

Here's what we don't know — how many are set to leave April 1. Temporary workers who have been working in Canada since April 1, 2011, will see their visas expire, unless they were given the one-year reprieve.

Migrante Canada says that based on the number of people asking for help in Alberta, 16,000 are vulnerable. But that doesn't mean they all have to leave April 1.

"Well it's a rolling number," says Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour. "Because it depends on when their employers got their approval and the workers got their visa."

In June, the federal government made changes to the temporary foreign worker program after numerous abuses were reported by CBC
News.
The changes included a ban on low-wage temporary foreign workers in regions where the unemployment rate is higher than six per cent and ultimately a 10 per cent cap in areas where unemployment is lower. Low-wage temporary foreign workers are defined as workers who earn less than the median income of approximately $20 per hour, depending on your province.

The consequences for the workers themselves will be severe: Without any chance to return to Canada for four years, these workers and their dependents will face significant issues. As reported by Torontoist' Desmond Cole, this could well lead to many of the former temporary foreign workers overstaying their visas, perhaps giving Canada a significant problem with overstaying--illegal--migrants. At the same time, the impact on the Canadian labour market could be significant. Will Canadians take up the newly-available jobs in substantial numbers? Do the demographics of the Canadian labour force, with a diminishing number of young people able and willing to fill these "starter" jobs, support this? Will employers improve the working conditions they offer so as to be more competitive?

More will come later. I'm still thinking through the consequences of this. I would be interested to hear from our readers about what they think of all this. Is this a good strategy to increase levels of unemployment? Is this a fair strategy, for Canadians and for foreign workers alike? Will it work?

On Jollibee, the Philippines, and diaspora economics

Over on my blog this evening, I noted that Philippines I based fast food chain Jollibee was set to open its first Canadian location later this year in Toronto. Apparently part of the chain's plans for global exchange expansion, with more locations slated to open up in the United States, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East, the Toronto restaurant is being created as part of a diaspora events red strategy. instead of competing head-on with established chains, for the foreseeable future Jollibee in Canada--and elsewhere?--will be targeting communities with larger Filipino populations. Already familiar with the chain, the thinking seems to be that these communities will hopefully serve as the base for future growth.

This strategy makes sense to me. Is Jollibee's expansion globally based on a similar strategy? If so, I wonder if a South Korea with its own rapidly growing ties with the Philippines might also be targeted. One strategy common to many immigrant groups around the world, as they grow in number and start to become business owners s, is to specialize in food. To the best of my knowledge, Jollibee is unique in being a fast food chain. Are there comparable cases elsewhere in the world that I am missing? I am quite curious. I also wonder if, given likely future growth in Filipino-originating communities around the world, Jollibee might be a good investment.

Two news articles on the demographic exception that is France

Tonight I thought I'd share two links to English-language articles taking a look at the demographic exception that is France, specifically to a period TFR now somewhat higher than the United States'.

The first is Noah Smith's Bloomberg View article "Fixing America's Baby Bust". In this article, the United States is contrasted negatively with France.

What is France’s secret sauce? It helps to think about the reasons that it’s so hard to raise a family in a developed country. Raising a kid costs huge amounts of money. First of all, you probably have to get a bigger house. Food and transportation are big expenses. Health care, including extras like braces, takes a big bite. And then there’s college, which is becoming out of reach for more and more families.

But the biggest cost of raising a child may simply be time. Time that you spend taking care of the kids is time that you don’t spend at work earning money. In the ideal situation, both parents would have flexible work situations, and both would take time off to share child-care duties. Unfortunately, most of us don’t live that dream. Many have rigid work schedules, and often put in many extra hours at home or at the office -- Americans work longer hours than almost anyone in the developed world. And many are single parents. What that means is that a lot of American parents are forced to make an all-or-nothing choice between the workplace and child care.

The demanding U.S. workplace may also be preventing women from fully joining the workforce. French women don’t just have more babies than American women, they also are more likely to get a job. The U.S., which was a leader in female labor force participation in the 1990s, has fallen behind. These days, even Japanese women are more likely to work than their American counterparts.

The second, longer article is over at The Guardian, Anne Chemin's "France’s baby boom secret: get women into work and ditch rigid family norms". Drawing heavily on interviewers with French demographers, it makes the argument that polities and cultures which exhibit greater flexibility around the idea of what a family could be are likely to see greater rates of family formation and reproduction than their more rigid counterparts.

[T]here is nothing mysterious about the approach that is working in both France and Scandinavia. It combines the idea of a modern family based on gender equality and powerful government policies. “Nowadays, both ingredients are needed to sustain the population,” Lesthaeghe asserts. “At first sight it seems a simple recipe, but it’s far from easy to put into practice: it takes a lot of time to design and establish a new family model.”

There is nothing straightforward or natural about “the family”. It is a very complex world based on social norms, what the American sociologist Ronald Rindfuss calls the “family package”. “In Japan, for instance, this package involves many constraints,” says Ined demographer Laurent Toulemon. “A woman entering into a relationship must also accept marriage, obey her husband, have a child, stop working after it is born and make room for her ageing in-laws. It’s a case of all or nothing. In France the package is more flexible: one doesn’t have to get married or have children. Norms are more open and families more diverse.”

Most countries in southern Europe are based on something akin to the Japanese package, with fairly rigid family norms in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Malta and Greece. There is social pressure on women not to work while their children are still young, just as it is ill-thought of to live with someone or have a baby outside wedlock. In all these countries the proportion of births outside marriage is below 30%, whereas in France, Sweden and Norway it exceeds 50%. In Japan the traditional family package clearly has a dramatic impact on fertility, with fewer than 1.4 births per woman.

The picture is very different in Scandinavia and France. “In these countries the family norm is much more flexible, with late marriages, reconstituted families, single parents, much more frequent births outside marriage and divorces than further south,” Toulemon adds. “People are far less concerned about the outlook for the family [as an institution].” The positive impact of this open-ended approach to families on fertility is borne out by the statistics, at more than 1.8 children per woman in Sweden, Norway, Finland and France.

The principle of gender equality and the necessary corollary of women being free to work are the key factors in this family model that emerged at the end of the 20th century. Yet in the 1960s-70s advocates of traditional family values claimed that the birthrate would be the first thing to suffer from this trend. Fifty years on it seems they were mistaken: fertility in Europe is higher in countries where women go out to work, lower in those where they generally stay at home. “Women’s freedom of decision is essential to this system,” Toulemon asserts.

The underlying theme of both of these articles is the question of whether or not what we might call the Franco-Nordic model can be copied easily, to other European countries, to high-income East Asia (Chemin specifically mentions Japan and South Korea), and beyond. An additional, interesting, question is whether or not this would make a difference. Even if Germany did switch tomorrow to the high-fertility French model, there would still be much demographic momentum tending towards poulation decline needing to be overcome. Thoughts?

Some St. Patrick's Day notes on how Irish immigrants became integrated into Toronto

I'm writing this post in the dying minute of St. Patrick's Day. (No, I'm not celebrating today. I save that for the weekend.) I found a few interesting links on the subject of the holiday. I liked this CBC analysis of the extent to which the modern holiday is actually a product of Irish-Americans seeking to consolidate their community and assert their identity in the face of a skeptical majority, or a pair of blog posts observing the notable divergence between Ireland and Irish-Americans on matters of sexual orientation, or a Universe Today post noting the green and red aurorae visible from Alaska complete with photos.

Here in Toronto, St. Patrick's Day is notable, not least as one of the first "ethnic" holidays brought by immigration. I've made two posts here, one in November 2012 and another in March 2013, commenting on modern-day Irish migration to Toronto and to Canada, concentrating on how, among other things, Gaelic football helped migrants find jobs. (This immigration is still going on, incidentally. The Irish Independent notes that Canada is becoming a major destination for migrants.) The origins of Toronto's Irish Catholic community in the catastrophe of the 1840s was described today by blogTO's Chris Bateman.

The vessels that carried roughly a million Irish across the Atlantic were called "coffin ships" for a reason. Hellish conditions that bred typhus, dysentery, and lice, were common. Coupled with a lack of food or water, hundreds died during the six-week crossing. Many were buried at sea or at the quarantine station on Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence--the first port of call in Canada.

Those that made it Toronto still faced an uphill battle. In 1847, 38,560 Irish--roughly twice the existing population of the city--stepped from ships, many of them sick with deadly typhus, a disease spread by bites from infected lice. The diseas was characterized by a severe fever that, without an effective treatment, frequently resulted in death.

[. . .]

Within five years of the 1847 migration, roughly a quarter of Toronto was Irish Catholic. As Allan Levine writes in his book Toronto: Biography of a City, the sudden rise of Catholicism resulted in a push back from the city's established Protestant population. Signs reading "No Irish Need Apply" on the outside of businesses were common.

Levine writes that "irrational fears about the power of the pope to usurp Protestantism across the world; highly exaggerated notions that all Irish Catholics were supporters of Fenianism, the early IRA-style anti-British radical militant movement based in the United States ... and the linking of Irish poverty with widely held stereotypes of Irish Catholic social ills and immorality" were also factors in the anti-Irish sentiment of the late 1800s.

George Brown, the founder of the Globe newspaper and the namesake of the modern day college, was also publicly sceptical of Catholicism. "Rome means tyranny, and has for its mission the subversion of the civil and religious liberty of the masses," he wrote in 1857. At the height of the typhus crisis, Brown's Globe suggested the newcomers would soon "sink down into the sloth to which they had been accustomed at home." Headlines in the paper called them "the curse of the land."

In an article published this weekend in the Toronto Star, Eric Andrew-Gee described in the article "19th-century Toronto Irish immigrants a lesson in upward mobility" how these immigrants, starting with so little and living in the face of strong hostility, ended up becoming a well-integrated--while still distinctive--component of Toronto's community.

It surely helped that the Irish spoke English, allowing them to sidestep the language barrier that would slow the integration of later generations of newcomers.

Physical mobility was another Irish advantage. Corktown and neighbourhoods like it may have served as landing pads for the new immigrants, but they rarely stayed in one place for long.

“By the 1890s, they’re everywhere,” said McGowan, himself descended from famine refugees. “If you went to an American city, there would be these long-standing Irish enclaves. You don’t have that here.” This geographic dispersal helped bring Catholics and Protestants into closer contact, driving mutual understanding and even encouraging intermarriage. “Cupid was probably more important than denomination at a certain point,” McGowan said.

At the same time, immigrants from other parts of the world began trickling into Toronto, loosening the Irish monopoly on the fears and resentments of the WASP majority.

“From the 1880s, Toronto started getting immigrants who were even more scary from the majority perspective,” said Allan Levine, author of Toronto: Biography of a City.

“Number one, Catholic Irish immigration peters out, so there are fewer paddies with cloth caps and accents in the downtown area,” said William Jenkins, a professor of North American Irish history at York University, and himself the proud owner of a lilting Irish accent. “People basically just forget about the Irish.”

In the meantime, the community was working doggedly to improve its lot. Mutual aid societies, church parishes, sports teams, card parties, and temperance leagues created a thick support net for Catholics trying to climb the social ladder or simply to avoid destitution.

“They created their own infrastructure,” said Levine. “They looked after themselves.”

All kinds of lessons can be taken from this particular experience.

Three links on African immigration to China

1. I'd like to point people towards Africans in China, a blog maintained by researcher Roberto Castillo. This blog concentrates on the African immigrant community in Guangzhou, its development and its issues.

2. Yucheng Liang's study "The causal mechanism of migration behaviors of African immigrants in Guangzhou: from the perspective of cumulative causation theory", published in 2014 in The Journal of Chinese Sociology, draws on ethnographic interviews and statistical analyses to argue that African immigraiton to China can be expected to continue and that China should innovate accordingly to try to minimize potential problems.

This study tests international migration theory, especially cumulative causation theory, by looking into the causal mechanisms of international migration behavior among African immigrants in China by using the respondent-driven sampling method since African immigrants in China belong to a small hidden population. This method collected a representative sample (N = 648) from two locations in 2011. The paper reveals that the immigration behaviors of African immigrants in China from 2005 to 2011 have characteristics similar to international immigrants in initial stages - the cumulative causal effects of immigrants' social capital was continually strengthened during the reproduction of migration behavior in the sending countries. Consequently, given the sustainable economic growth and maintenance of a stable society in China, the scale of future transnational immigration (including illegal migration) will continue to expand. The paper proposes that at the present stage, existing policies should raise the entry threshold of African immigrants into China in order to mitigate the speed and scale of migrants' social class decline.

It's also quite interesting to note that, far from Guangzhou and the south of China, in the Zhejiang city of Yiwu in the lower Yangtze basin, another African immigrant community is starting to take form. I point readers specifically towards the 2010 article "From Guangzhou to Yiwu: Emerging facets of the African Diaspora in China" (PDF format), written by Adams B. Bodomo and Grace Ma and published in the International Journal of African Renaissance Studies - Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity. This article suggests that, owing to a variety of factors, Africans have better experiences here than in Guangzhou.

Yiwu Africans also experience constraints in their Chinese sojourn but these are not different from what any foreigner living in China would experience: linguistic misunderstandings, cultural differences, and even having to put up with socially unacceptable practices like spitting profusely. But Yiwu Africans, in most cases, are treated respectfully by Zhejiang law enforcement officers. Civil liberties are well respected. For instance, freedom of worship among these Africans seems to be one of the highest in China. There may be a number of reasons why this difference is there. One, it may be that Africans who number less than 30,000 in Yiwu can be contained easily. Two, most of the Africans in Yiwu are from the Magbreb region of Africa, while most Africans in Guangzhou are from Sub-Saharan Africa. My fellow West Africans in Guangzhou report that even the brutal Guangzhou police treat Arab Africans more respectfully than Black Africans. But, third, and more importantly, the difference, we propose here, is due to the differences in efficiency and fairness on the part of Yiwu law enforcement officers such as the police and immigration officials. We propose here that, partly as a result of these differences in treatment, and also if Yiwu gets more developed into an international trade centre, it may overtake Guangzhou as a model residential city for Africans and many foreign businessmen from developing parts of the world, such as West Asia and Latin America. In that sense then, Guangzhou is missing an early opportunity as a model multi-racial business city in China.

If in fact the majority of African migrants in Yiwu are from the Maghreb, this does suggest at least the potential for Yiwu to start attracting migrants from the wider Arab world. The role of Islam in binding together Chinese and non-Chinese Muslims, meanwhile, is also noteworthy.

Three links from The Diplomat on demographic issues in Asia

I discovered the Internet magazine The Diplomat, concerned with affairs in the Asia-Pacific region, via Robert Farley's posts at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Three recent posts at The Diplomat have dealt with demographic issues Demography Matters has looked at in brief.

Paul R. Burgman Jr.'s "China: Embracing Africa, But Not Africans" makes the argument that racism, and problems with integration of Africans and China and of Chinese in Africa, complicate Chinese-African relations.

Although Chinese involvement in financing infrastructure projects, debt forgiveness, and scholarships for African students to Chinese universities had given China a net positive image among various African countries in a 2013 Pew Research Global Attitudes Report, there remains room for improvement. While many African countries are very grateful for the economic partner that Beijing has shown it can be, allowing these countries to abandon or mitigate their sometimes rigid economic partnerships with the West, China must still convince Africans that its interest in their continent is authentic. By improving people-to-people relations, understanding, and mutual respect in a relationship that many Africans feel reeks of European colonial stereotypes, China and Africa can strengthen one of the 21st century’s most dynamic economic and strategic partnerships.

In a 2014 Al Jazeera report on African migrants in Guangzhou, journalist Jennifer Marsh highlighted the plight of African migrants trying to achieve their own Chinese dream in one of China’s most populated southern cities. Marsh writes “While the central government publicly welcomes the migrants, recent draconian visa legislation has sent a clear signal: Africans in China – even highly prosperous, educated economic contributors – are not welcome.” The Al Jazeera journalist’s story highlights the story of Cellou Toure, a Malian migrant whose small business suffered because of his inability to get a Chinese visa despite being married to a Chinese woman and having three Malian-Chinese children. Many Africans view situations like Toure’s as the hypocrisy of the Chinese government’s goodwill towards Africa, as African migrants witness firsthand the business success of Westerners who marry Chinese women and are allowed prosper legally in small and medium enterprises under the protection of the law.

All one has to do is scour the internet under the keywords, “Chinese prejudice against Africans in China” to discover a litany of blogs and articles on the experiences on young African migrants, students and travelers, many of whom are proficient in Mandarin, as they recount their experiences in China. In A Minority in the Middle Kingdom: My Experience Being Black in China former African-American expat, Marketus Presswood witnessed the racially charged atmosphere in his Chinese school and classroom, finding it increasingly difficult to hold on to his teaching jobs as an influx of white Westerners flooded the Chinese education market in the early 2000s. Presswood remembered overhearing one of his students remarking, “I don’t want to look at his black face all night.”

In "South Korea's Foreign Bride Problem", Philip Iglauer takes a look at the relatively high rates of domestic violence experienced by the country's many foreign-born wives.

Foreigners account for just 2.5 percent of the population in South Korea, but with a comparatively high number of deaths involving foreign women since 2012, experts from government and nongovernment organizations agree that migrant women here are particularly at risk to domestic violence.
They disagree on much else. According to a senior official at the Gender Equality and Family Ministry, language and cultural barriers are largely to blame for the domestic violence that caused the slew of disturbing killings.

“Think about it. Several decades ago, Korean women emigrated to Japan or America. They were poor. They didn’t even know who their husbands were. They didn’t speak English, so they couldn’t really often get out of the house. Their husbands started to ignore them. The wives didn’t work, they couldn’t cook American food,” said Choi Sung-ji, director of multicultural family policy at the Ministry of Gender Equality & Family, in explaining the domestic violence faced by migrant women in South Korea.

“The situation is similar in Korea now. Women from Southeast Asian countries come here for a better living without really knowing who they are getting married to. They didn’t get married out of love.”

“Rather, they met them but through marriage brokers,” she said, adding “If they don’t speak the Korean language and do not understand Korean culture, then they are at a disadvantage. There cannot be an equal relationship. “

Mark Fenn's "The Harsh Life of Thailand’s Migrant Workers", meanwhile, looks at the difficult situation of migrant workers in Thailand.

There are an estimated two to three millions migrants from neighboring countries in Thailand, most of them undocumented and more than 80 percent of them from Myanmar, according to the International Labour Organization. Many have fled ethnic conflict, oppression and poverty at home.

Migrants make up around 10 per cent of Thailand’s workforce and are employed in a variety of sectors, including construction, agriculture, manufacturing, fishing and domestic work. In some sectors, such as seafood processing, they represent around 90 percent of the workforce.

Yet despite the vital contribution they make to the Thai economy, migrant workers too often face exploitation, low pay, and abusive working conditions. Often they are placed in jobs by illegal brokers and then have to pay back hundreds of dollars or more, meaning they are trapped in a form of bonded labor.

Many earn considerably less than the 300 baht ($9 dollars) a day minimum wage, and are forced to work longer than the eight hours a day mandated by law. They rarely get the one day off a week they are entitled to, and many are lucky to get even one day off a month, according to labor rights activists.

Work on construction sites and fishing boats can be dirty, dangerous and exhausting, and migrant workers are often at the mercy of abusive employers. Threats and intimidation are common, and beatings, rapes and killings have been reported by rights groups. In the fishing industry, where many migrant men and boys are literally sold by brokers, murder is said to be “obscenely common.” According to a 2009 United Nations survey, nearly 60 percent of 49 Cambodian men and boys trafficked to work on Thai fishing boats said they had witnessed a murder by the boat captain.

"Damage from cancelled census as bad as feared, researchers say"

On the front page of today's issue of Toronto's The Globe and Mail was Tavia Grant's article reporting that the scrapping of the long-form census once collected by Statistics Canada, ordered by the Canadian federal government for inscrutable reasons of its own, has really caused a lot of damage.

The cancellation of the mandatory long-form census has damaged research in key areas, from how immigrants are doing in the labour market to how the middle class is faring, while making it more difficult for cities to ensure taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely, planners and researchers say.

Statistics Canada developed a voluntary survey after Ottawa cancelled the long-form census in 2010. Many had warned that the switch would mean lower response rates and policies based on an eroded understanding of important trends. Now researchers – from city planners to public health units – say they have sifted through the 2011 data and found it lacking.

Their comments come as a private member’s bill to reinstate the mandatory long-form census will be debated in the House of Commons Thursday. The bill, expected to be voted on next week, has slim odds of passing, given the Conservative majority. But it is drawing attention to the impact of the switch, which has created difficulties in determining income-inequality trends, housing needs and whether low-income families are getting adequate services.

The impact isn’t just on researchers. Cities, such as Toronto, say it’s become more expensive and requires more staffing to obtain data that’s of lower quality. The key areas of concern are tracking long-term shifts and understanding what’s going on at the neighbourhood level.

The last census in 2011 cost a total of $652-million, including an extra $22-million due to the change to the voluntary National Household Survey. The total budget for the 2016 census won’t be decided until February or March, Statscan has said. But the current plan is to hold another voluntary survey. All told, 35,000 people will be hired for this effort.

The article goes on to describe groups and cities and provinces and economic classes with specific needs which can't be met by the low-quality data collected in place of the long-form census. I quite like the observation made in the final paragraph of Grant's article.

Sara Mayo, social planner at the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton, says the result of the census changes has been less data for more money. “In terms of fiscal prudence, this made no sense. Why would any government want to pay more for worse-quality data?”

"Greece: The Impact of Austerity on Migration"

A Marginal Revolution commenter linked to a study at the blog Multiplier Effect by Gennaro Zezza providing hard numbers on the scale of Greek population decline and emigration. (Germany seems to be a major destination.)

The Hellenic Statistical Authority (ElStat) has recently released the new quarterly data on employment and the labor force, which includes a measure of the population aged 15 or more (Table 1). While the series published in the previous release exhibited a stable upward trend (reported in green in the chart), the new estimates show that population peaked at 9.437 million at the end of 2008, and then started declining, reaching 9.296 million in the first quarter of this year, i.e. it went back to its 2004 level. (The reasons for the change in the series are due to ElStat incorporating the latest census data: details are available in the ElStat web site).

As ElStat does not publish an up-to-date measure of net migration, we assume this could be measured by the distance between the pre-crisis population trend and the actual values. We therefore computed a simple linear trend on the 2001-2008 data, which shows that population would have now been at 9.686 million, had the previous trend continued. The difference between this value and the population reported for the first quarter of 2014 is thus approximately 390,000 people (4 percent).

ElStat makes available the detail by age groups (Table 2), reported in our second chart, which shows that younger Greeks are declining steadily in number – a trend which is common to many developed countries who chose to reduce the average number of kids per family – while the number of older people is steadily increasing – again a trend common to many countries, linked to longer life expectancy. Summing up the 15-29 groups to the 45+ groups, we find that the decline in the younger population accelerated after 2007, compensating the increase in the number of Greeks aged 45 and over, so that the inverted U-shape of the population in our first chart can largely be attributed to the decline in Greek residents aged 30-44, who are now 2.442 million against a peak of 2.544 million at the end of 2008.

On why demographics mean a near-term recovery in Greece is unlikely

Yesterday's Greek legislative election which placed a SYRIZA-dominated government in charge of the country got quite a lot of attention for a lot of things in the blogosphere. Some, like blogger Charlie Stross, wondered if SYRIZA's election might lead to a global economic shift. Others have noted ways in which the new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, is breaking from the past, rejecting a religious oath of office as befits his atheism. Common to almost everyone, however, has been concern as to how the election of SYRIZA might change Greece's relationship with the rest of the Eurozone and the European Union. Could Greece get a better deal? Might Greece end up breaking from the bloc altogether?

I'm not at all sure that SYRIZA will be capable of this change, if only for demographic reasons. Helena Smith's recent article in The Guardian, "Young, gifted and Greek: Generation G – the world’s biggest brain drain", provides an idea as to the scale of Greece's demographic issues.

Call them Generation G: young, talented, Greek – and part of the biggest brain drain in an advanced western economy in modern times. As the country lurches towards critical elections this weekend, more than 200,000 Greeks who have left since the crisis bit five years ago will watch from overseas.

Doctors in Germany, academics in the UK, shopkeepers in America – the decimation of Greece’s population has perhaps been the most pernicious byproduct of the economic collapse which has beggared the country since its brush with bankruptcy.

“Greece is where I should be,” says Maritina Roppa, 28, a trainee doctor who left Greece three years ago for Minden, north-west Germany. “It’s such a pity that people like me, in their 20s, have had to go.”

Of the 2% of the population who have left, more than half have gone to Germany and the UK. Migration outflows have risen 300% on pre-crisis levels, as youth unemployment soars to more than 50%. Around 55% of those affected by record rates of unemployment are under 35, according to Endeavour, the international nonprofit group that supports entrepreneurship.

“It is a huge loss of human capital whose affects will only begin to be felt in the next decade,” said Aliki Mouri a sociologist at the National Centre for Social Research. “People who have been educated at great cost, both to their families and the public purse, are now working in wealthier countries which have not invested in them at all,” she added, acknowledging that even in good times Greece had difficulty absorbing the surplus of professionals its universities produced.

[. . .]

Despite the first signs of economic recovery – in November figures showed that Greece returned to growth for the first time in six years, its worst recession in postwar history – the exodus is not abating. Increasing numbers want to join the already record 50,000 Greeks estimated by the OECD to be studying abroad. Schools are being inundated with requests by students to be enrolled on courses for international exams that could prepare them for foreign fields.

“Greece doesn’t allow you to progress,” said Carmella Kontou, an aesthetician considering moving to the US. “You can’t even begin to think of having a family or achieving things that elsewhere in Europe would be considered totally natural.”

One major trend that Greece shares with much of the rest of Europe is rapidly-aging population with fertility that has been well below replacement levels since the mid-1980s. Domestically-produced human capital was already quite scarce. Immigration to Greece, meanwhile, as noted in Charalambos Kasimis' March 2012 profile "Greece: Illegal Immigration in the Midst of Crisis" has become increasingly problematic. Many immigrants who came to Greece when the country was prosperous have returned to their homelands. The plight of illegal migrants, entering Greece from across the Aegean from the Middle East and elsewhere, has meanwhile become legendary. It's worth noting IRIN News' Preethi Nallu and Bloomberg's Jonathan Stearns have noted that, while these migrants welcome SYRIZA's victory, they do so largely because they think that a SYRIZA government will help them leave for other, more prosperous, European countries.

Rokan Mondal, who says he spent six months walking from his native Bangladesh to Greece in 2008, believes Alexis Tspiras will ensure that he doesn’t have to go back.

Mondal, 23, was among a crowd of hundreds who turned out to cheer Tsipras as he arrived at Syriza party headquarters in Athens late Sunday after his election victory. He said he hopes a Tsipras-led government will make it easier for him to acquire Greek citizenship. At the moment, he has a card that lets him reside in Greece only and not elsewhere in the European Union.

“I believe I’ll get the passport,” Mondal said as he mingled with a handful of other Bangladeshis who rushed forward as Tsipras appeared. “Then I can think about Italy, Germany, Spain.”

Mondal encapsulates some of the expectation both at home and abroad that falls on Tsipras. His party, also known as the Coalition of the Radical Left, ousted the government implementing austerity, while the anti-immigrant far right party Golden Dawn placed third.

If the Greek population is set to start shrinking, with many of its most talented young people leaving their country to find work and with few people moving to replace them, I'm hard-pressed to imagine how the Greek economy can recover to pre-2008 levels of output. Where will the workforce come from? The scale of investment required to finance economic growth in Greece given the shrinking workforce does not strike me as likely to be realized. Who will provide the funds? Even if SYRIZA manages to achieve the debt renegotiation its thinkers and leaders have hoped, can it be enough?

On the inevitability of out-migration from Atlantic Canada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worse will come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[. . .]

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

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

On what the attenuation of the Alberta advantage might mean

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

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

Where did they go? Virtually all to Alberta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on this Monday.

Looking to the science fiction of Monica Hughes and the demographics of the future

Just this week, I've had the occasion to reread prolific Canadian young adult science fiction writer Monica Hughes' 1991 novel Invitation to the Game. I read the book back when it came out in hardcover, as a Grade 6 student on Prince Edward Island, and was impressed. I'm happy to say that the book still holds up as well, that the novel still deserves my warm memories and the awards and good reviews of others. Understandable as a prototype of the dystopias that seem to predominate nowadays in young-adult literature, Invitation to the Game is a novel that I was surprised to find provided an interesting commentary on some of the demographic issues facing us right now.



The novel starts in the year 2154, as the 16-year-old protagonist Lisse and her friends graduate from their elite private school to their jobless adult lives. There had been a population crash in the early 21st century, precipitated by pollution, and of necessity robots were made to take over much of the day-to-day routines of human society. Even after the population recovered, however, the robots remained entrenched, with the net effect of dooming most of each coming generation to unemployment. Two of Lisse's friends are lucky enough to end up employed, for a time. The remainder are exiled with Lisse to live out their lives in a "Designated Area", an urban district to which they are confined by internal passports, depending on stipends from a resentful employed minority and grey-market jobs to live. Without any hope of escaping their condition, the young graduate drift into despair until they are invited to "The Game," a mysterious but detailed virtual reality scenario that allows them to escape to another world. Eventually, they do.

This post is not a ridiculous post about space colonization being a solution to issues of unemployment and underemployment, to marginalization and anomie. Any kind of program of space colonization is no kind of answer at all to these issues. Author Charlie Stross' 2007 essay "The High Frontier, Redux" makes the point that, even if there are economically exploitable resources in space, the optimistic dreams of human settlement are unlikely to be realized because human beings are just too fragile to persist. Many things would have to change radically for this to happen, and we don't even know if these radical changes are possible.

This is, however, a post that's concerned about the ethics of this. In this world, as in Hughes' fictional future world, people are a resource. In many parts of the world, people are an increasingly scarce resource, especially people belonging to particular demographics or possessing certain skills. Despite the value of people as a resource, and despite these local scarcities, in many cases people are being prevented from being useful. This might be because of barriers to migration. This might be because of mistaken government policies that prevent others from realizing their talents. Whatever the precise cause, it's fundamentally ill-thought and--I'd suggest--in many ways quite wrong. As Hughes' characters note, this kind of waste might even be very problematic for the survival of any numbers of regimes.

"[I]t seems the Government's not interested in any new ideas."

"That's the problem with this society," Trent interrupted. It is uninterested. Dead in the water. We should scrap it and start over."

"How?" Karen asked, her big voice booming. "Societies tend to go on until they run down by themselves or rot from inside."

"Can you afford to wait that long?" Trent pushed his sharp face aggressively at Karen. "I can't." (13-14)

When considering demographic issues, now and in the future, it's also worth considering the extent to which particular treatments are, or are not, sustainable. Various marginalizations--keeping people out, keeping people down--might be politically convenient, but they might equally be politically dangerous.