Some followups

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

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

On potentially unsustainable immigration in Singapore

The demographic structure of Singapore, is characterized equally by a very low fertility rate among the population of Singaporean citizens and a very high rate of immigration, has become a major political issue in Singapore. An very open immigration policy that implements the principles of replacement migration in their purest form is politically unpopular.

Singapore, which is boosting infrastructure to accommodate a population of 6.9 million by 2030, said the number of people in the city state will be “significantly” lower than what it is planning for.

The government won’t decide on a population trajectory beyond 2020, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in Parliament yesterday as lawmakers from his ruling party endorsed a white paper that outlined proposals including allowing more foreigners into the country to boost the workforce. Opposition members rejected the motion, saying immigration as a policy to spur economic growth is not sustainable.

Record-high housing and transport costs, public discontent over an influx of foreigners and infrastructure strains in the country of 5.3 million people are weakening approval for Lee’s party. Singaporeans are planning a protest next week against the government’s population projections for 2030, which could see citizens, including new ones, making up only one of every two people on the island smaller in size than New York City.

“We will track and control the number of non-Singaporeans and the inflow of immigrants so that we are not overhauled just by the sheer flood of people coming in,” Lee said. “We are not deciding on a population of 6.9 million for 2030 now.”

Lee’s administration is under pressure to placate voters without disrupting the entry of talent and labor that helped forge the only advanced economy in Southeast Asia. His party lost two by-elections after returning to power in May 2011 with the lowest share of the popular vote since independence in 1965.

Much of the public opinion I've come across is hostile. This expatriate blogger and this Singaporean blogger, for instance, each favour letting the Singaporean population age and eventually decline, if it helps prevent a deteriorating quality of life for Singaporeans. The dramatic consequences of very low fertility in Singapore don't seem to matter. (An April 2012 government presentation suggests that, at current birth rates and without increasing citizen numbers through naturalization, the Singaporean citizen population will start experiencing negative decrease around 2025. This seems about right.)

What are the reasons for low fertility in Singapore? Numerous papers--"Below-Replacement Fertility in East and Southeast Asia: Consequences and Policy Responses" by Gubhaju and Moriki-Durand, published in 2003 in the Journal of Population Research; the 2011 paper "The Determinants of Low Fertility in Singapore: Evidence From a Household Survey" by Hashmi and Mok; the East-West Centre's May 2010 paper "Very Low Fertility in Asia: Is There a Problem? Can It Be Solved?" by Westley, Choe, and Retherford--trace the causes for very low fertility in Singapore, as elsewhere in high-income East Asia, to contradictions between the policies which promote high economic growth and policies which promote marriage and family formation, and conservative norms for women in families and as mothers which encourage many women to postpone marriage. As a consequence, marriage rates have dropped while non-marital fertility remains low. (The two factors seem of comparable importance.) In the context of a very competitive economic environment made increasingly more so by deregulated labour market and immigration, it makes sense for individuals to postpone family formation and instead work on accumulatng the capital necessary to live. These are compounded by the very high cost of living in an increasingly densely-populated Singapore, and the economic cost associated with parenthood.

Gavin Jones' paper "Late marriage and low fertility in Singapore: the limits of policy", published in May 2012 in The Japanese Journal of Population, makes the point that--to a certain extent--Singapore's three decades of heavy government involvement in fertility, starting in the 1980s with relatively crude baby bonuses but proceeding to increasingly sophisticated schemes for government childcare and paid parental leave, may have helped keep fertility high. Recorded fertility in mostly-Chinese Singapore may be lower than that of the Chinese living in the Malaysia that Singapore was once part of--the Malaysian situation was profiled here at Demography Matters in 2009 (1, 2)--but it's higher than that of other East Asian cities.

Comparison[s] with low-fertility East Asian countries [raise] some interesting observations. First, Singapore’s fertility is in the same league as these countries, though it has never gone as low as recent figures for Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. Bearing in mind, however, that Singapore is a city-state, comparisons with other cities in the region are appropriate. When this is done, we find that Singapore’s fertility rate is approximately 15% to 50% higher than in cities including Tokyo, Seoul, Busan, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, and Hong Kong [. . .] There may be some elements of policy in Singapore that are partly responsible for these differences. Second, fertility differs substantially among the different ethnic groups in Singapore. Malay fertility is substantially higher, and Chinese fertility lower, than the average. However, given the three fourths weighting of Chinese in the resident population, the overall fertility level is heavily influenced by the fertility of Chinese Singaporeans (whose TFR fell to a historic low of 1.08 in 2009). Malay fertility rose substantially for some time after being the first Muslim population in the world to reach replacement level fertility in 1976, but it has recently fallen sharply to reach its 2009 TFR level of 1.8.

[. . .]

Fertility has not responded as hoped, and this may well reflect the fact that the baby bonuses and tax concessions for children are not substantial enough to make much of a dent in the high monetary costs of raising children. Moreover, the culture in many Singapore workplaces remains unfriendly to those who prioritise family over responsibilities to the firm, and this discourages women from having a child that may hurt their career prospects and relationships with workmates. Nevertheless, it could well be that Singapore’s more comprehensive policies to support marriage and childbearing go a long way towards explaining why fertility rates in Singapore, though disappointingly low from the perspective of the Singapore government, are higher than in other major cities in the region, as noted earlier.

Granted that it's unlikely that the Singaporean government can do anything about the high cost of living in Singapore, or that it will be able to enact anything more than slow change in the cultural norms which keep fertility rates low, skepticism about the results of the latest government push seems justified.

"My mother-in-law hates me and she says I'm selfish, but I don't really care," says [Penelope] Sim, a human resources consultant who's been married for six years. "Everything's crazy expensive and life's already stressful enough here without children. If there's no one to carry on the family name, then so be it."

Sim, 33, embodies Lee's challenge to persuade Singaporeans to wed younger. While the birth rate was about 1.3 children per woman in 2012 - barely enough to replace one parent - a backlash against soaring immigration forced the government to curb the influx of foreigners, leading to labour shortages and slower economic growth.

Measures since 1987 to reverse declining fertility, including handouts of as much as S$18,000 (HK$113,600) and extended maternity leave, haven't worked. The nation's birthrate in 2010 and 2011 were the lowest in 47 years of independence. About 36,000 babies were born to residents in 2011, compared to nearly 50,000 in 1990.

The failure to encourage more births means the country will face a shrinking pool of workers and consumers - a deterrent to investment. It will also increase the burden on younger employees to pay for an ageing population. Lee says higher taxes will be needed in the next two decades as the government boosts social spending to support the elderly.

Measures released on January 21 on a government website called "Hey Baby", include boosting Singapore's annual budget on marriage and parenthood to S$2 billion from S$1.6 billion, including spending on matchmaking, housing grants, childcare and fertility treatments and cash gifts for babies. In 2001, the budget was S$500 million.

The prime minister, who has four children, is encouraging couples to start a family earlier by giving priority public housing to those with children below 16 years of age. With some of the most expensive real estate in Asia, government-subsidised homes are the only affordable option for most young couples, and waiting lists for new apartments can extend years. The government will make a S$3,000 contribution to childhood medical expenses and last week announced measures to make childcare more affordable.

Is immigration the answer? In the short term, it may be, but as Mukul G. Asher noted in 2008--see this short presentation that was expanded in this paper--Singapore will be competing for immigrants with other destinations, many of which may do a better job of reconciling economic and family needs. The fertility of new Singaporeans is likely to converge with the old. In the medium term, unless unrealistically large numbers of immigrants come to Singapore, the population is still going to age spectacularly. In the long term, a bigger problem may be created. (The conclusion of the South Korean segment of the United Nations' report on replacement migration that, in order to keep potential support ratios at the level of 1995 given prevailing fertility, 5.1 billion people would need to immigrate by 2050 comes to mind.) William Pesek, below, may be right to call this "the human equivalent of what Bernard Madoff did with money", “Ponzi demography.”

All this leaves aside the issue of whether or not immigration on the scale envisaged by the Singaporean government is going to be popular, or even politically possible; authoritarian though Singapore might be, it's still a parliamentary state with elections. Clinging to an economic model requiring politically unsustainable--perhaps physically unsustainable, given Singapore's small size--level of immigration brings to mind Paul Krugman's argument that high economic growth in East Asia, especially Singapore, was the consequence less of productivity growth and more by inputs of labour and capital. At some point, something will have to give. William Pesek's Bloomberg News opinion piece, "Singapore's Population Bubble", highlights the potential fragility of the current political consensus.

The signs of overcrowding and urban stress are palpable to any visitor. Prices are surging, public services in a nation famed for nanny-state tendencies are slipping and some of the finest infrastructure anywhere is bucking under the strain. Locals blame the influx of immigrants, which Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s ruling party touts as one key to Singapore’s success in the years to come.

The city-state, with about half the area of New York City, has 3.3 million citizens and 2 million foreign residents, many of whom have contributed greatly to Singapore’s growth in finance and construction. Yet complaints that overseas workers deprive locals of jobs and drive up housing prices fill the air. Singapore is the third-most-expensive Asian city and ranks as the sixth most costly in the world, according to an Economist Intelligence Unit ranking of 131 cities.

[. . .]

Sadly, some of the rants one reads in the media and online veer toward xenophobia. If Singaporeans are so livid, they should stop supporting Lee’s party. After all, isn’t the government, by seeking to import more human capital, telling its own people that they lack the skills to compete? Anyone who doubts Singapore is serious only has to look at accelerating efforts to reclaim land from the sea for development, giving the city the room for population growth.
[. . .]
Singapore needs to find another way. The era of easy growth is over. Just as economies such as Japan and South Korea are seeing the limits of their export-led models, Singapore’s formula has run its course. Raising the productivity of its current workforce would be more potent for a developed, open economy looking to compete in a region dominated by the cheap labor and manufacturing of China and India. Singapore should focus as much energy on incentives for its existing residents to innovate and start new businesses as on adding more bodies.

Bangladesh entering the 2010s

The Economist's Asia blog Banyan has a post up exploring the mechanics of Bangladesh's upcoming census. The quality of information available to date, the reader learns, is poor and quite debatable.

According to the adjusted 2001 census figures, Bangladesh’s population stood at 129.3m (an initial count put it at 124.4m; an adjustment for the standard rate of undercounting then boosted the figure). Those familiar with the census mechanics tell of a muddle, marked by “multiple technical problems” starting with some official’s decision to procure inferior paper, which fouled up the optical-scanning process…which in turn undermined the quality of the data set. This time, donors are handling the pens and paper—the EU is chipping in over €10m ($14m), or more than a third of the total cost of the census.

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ population clock claims that, at midnight today, that number had risen to 150,220,172. But many think the clock is running too slow. Bangladesh’s statisticians have almost certainly underestimated the natural population growth since the last census, according to the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. Researchers at the Dhaka-based international research institution—it has been monitoring the country’s population for 40 years and has the longest-running and most comprehensive demographic data in the developing world—put Bangladesh’s current population at 162m.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) agrees, almost to the letter: it put the population at 164.4m in 2010. It is the UN body’s estimate that has enraged Bangladesh’s politicians, some of whom care about these things. A.M.A. Muhith, the finance minister, has called the UN estimate—which suggests that the government may have 14m citizens it would appear to prefer not to have—“condemnable” and “unauthorised meddling”.

The difference reflects UNFPA’s pessimistic assumptions about the speed of fertility decline. Helped along by one of the world’s most expensive fertility-reduction programmes, Bangladesh has seen a dramatic fall in its total fertility rate. In the late 1970s, women had seven children on average; by the early 1990s just over three. The fertility decline settled at a plateau in 1993-2002, but has resumed sliding since. It has not, however, made up for that lost time. In 2010, the year Bangladesh’ s National Population Policy aimed to achieve the replacement level fertility of 2.2, it still hovered at 2.5.

[. . .]

Arithmetically speaking, it is a battle over the size of a denominator—many indicators of economic development are expressed as a proportion of the total population. Politically, a small population is a nice thing to have. This is because the smaller it is, the more impressive Bangladesh’s progress on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will look (and the warm feeling would be mutual). This refers to progress made towards the goal of halving the proportions of poor and hungry people. So the size of the population matters, either directly or indirectly, for it serves as a denominator in the vast majority of indicators by which progress on the goals in the MDG framework are measured.

A good place to start an overview of the Bangladeshi population might be to compare it with the Pakistani population. Until 1971, after all, Bangladesh was known as "East Pakistan", the eastern wing of the state that was supposed to include the Muslim-majority territories of the former Raj. The underrepresentation of East Pakistan in the country's affairs led to a regionalist movement that became a separatist movement that led to a Bangladeshi declaration of independence and eventually liberation by India. Of the two wings, East Pakistan was the most populous; estimates gave East Pakistan had 70 million versus 60 million in West Pakistan. In the early 1970s, after the half-million killed in the 1970 Dhola cyclone and the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of civilians killed by Pakistani soldiers in the 1971 war, Bangladesh was seen as having far worse development prospects than rump Pakistan, called a "basket case" by Henry Kissinger, the sort of "hopeless" land that Paul Ehrlich would have callously abandoned to famine and mass death.

Instead, things have reversed. Even the highest estimates for Bangladesh's population place it behind the population of Pakistan, and the difference will continue to grow as Bangladeshi fertility rates remain below the comparable Pakistani figures. Bangladesh is catching up on the Human Development Index, too; indeed, Bangladesh has seen some of the highest rates of HDI growth in the world. While still lagging behind Pakistan on metrics like literacy and life expectancy, Bangladesh is catching up quickly. The Bangladeshi economy, too, has done reasonably well since the 1990s, driven by a successful garment industry and famously the home country of microcredit institutions. Tahmina Anam is right to conclude that more things are going right in Bangladesh than wrong.

Regarding Bangladeshi demographics, Mohammad Shahidul Islam at Roubini.com suggests that Bangladesh is set to enjoy the economic dividends of its advanced demographic transition.

Based on the stylized facts of the demographic transition model, one can see the dynamics of Bangladesh’s population transition. According to the United Nation’s Population Prospects 2008 database, total fertility rates (TFR) in Bangladesh have declined, from 6.85 children per woman in 1971-75 to 2.36 in 2005-2010. The TFR is projected to approach a replacement level (2.1) in the period 2015-2020. The population growth rate declined from 2.67 per cent in 1970-75 to 1.42 per cent in 2005-2010. The crude birth rate and the crude death rates in the country are now 21.6 and 6.3 (per 1000 population) respectively.

Based on these statistics, Bangladesh is now at the beginning of Stage III of population transition. In other words, it has entered the stabilization era of population transition. Bangladesh’s population transition has been following nearly the same pattern that Europe and East Asia experienced.

[. . .]

Bangladesh’s dependency ratio has declined, from 92 in 1975 to 53 in 2010. A nation’s demographic window generally opens when the dependency ratio (non-working to working age population) goes below 50. In South Asia, Bangladesh and India are projected to enjoy a large demographic window (2015-2050) thanks to a sharp decline in their dependency ratios.

[. . .]

Until the 1980s, Bangladesh’s per capita income growth was very low owing to a high dependency ratio. With a high birth rate, low death rate and subsistence economy the country’s economic development till the 1980s resulted in poor per capita income growth. However, the scenario has changed since the late 1980s and early 1990s when Bangladesh witnessed a sharp decline in population growth and a steady increase in GDP growth with low volatility.

Of special note, Bangladeshi sex ratios are better than elsewhere in the region.

Moreover, Bangladesh has done much better than many of its neighbours, including India, in terms of gender-related demographic statistics. This development will provide additional impetus to Bangladesh’s demography. With an improved sex ratio, the females’ share is approaching half of the total working age population in Bangladesh. Studies show that the actual growth rates of South Asia and other lagging regions were at least one percentage point lower than their potential growth due to gender imbalances.

I've come across anecdotal press reports of Bangladeshi women being valued as potential marriage partners in Indian states like Punjab lacking in marriageable women. Interesting possibilities lie here.

This connects to the phenomenon of Bangladeshi emigration. It is large, in absolute numbers and relative to receiving areas, as Banyan notes. There is an overseas Bangladeshi diaspora numbering somewhere in the area of four million people, mostly concentrated in Middle Eastern migrant-receiving countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as to Malaysia, but including large communities in the United Kingdom and the United States, even the nucleus of a Bangladeshi-Canadian community here in Canadian Toronto. Much larger in absolute size is the scale of Bangladeshi immigration into India, most controversially into the northeastern state of Assam where the presence of Bangladeshis--Bengalis, generally--has become a political issue frequently erupting into violence, but also into culturally kin West Bengal and elsewhere in India.

This emigration, frankly, is inevitable. Before Bangladesh was East Pakistan it was East Bengal, a region with a Muslim majority separated from the region and British imperial province of Bengal certainly not because it was a self-contained unit with economically viable frontiers (as noted by Nafis Ahmad in a 1950 paper for Economic Geography) but because it had a Muslim majority population. Under British rule, East Pakistan was a producer of commodities, raw materials to be transferred to the Bengali industrial centre and port in Calcutta. The inter-state frontier led to East Pakistan being cut off from its natural hub, now in the Indian state of West Bengal. While Bangladesh has since developed its capital Dhaka as a new industrial centre and port in Chittagong, it still lags behind West Bengal economically. Critically, despite the state frontiers separating Bangladesh from neighbouring Indian states Bengal remains a functional human region in a way that--say--the Punjab divided between India and Pakistan does not, with a shared language and culture and a famously porous border and communal relations generally less fraught. In Partition, for instance, Bengal lacked the same scale of communal violence as in Punjab, while the dwindling of the Hindu proportion of the Bangladeshi population from 40% a century ago to a bit more than 9% now has as much to do with lower Bangladeshi Hindu birth rates as it does with the forced migration and/or massacre of Hindus. (A highly disproportionate share of the murdered and displaced civilians in 1971 were Hindus, targeted by Pakistanis--not their fellow Bengalis--for persecution by virtue of their religion.)

All things considered, it would be more surprising if Bangladeshis didn't Emigrate, to India and elsewhere. Whatever notable degree of economic development Bangladesh has achieved, it is ultimately still dependent on the wider world for its future, and Bangladeshi migrants are a critically important resource for their homeland, the mostly unskilled and semi-skilled labourers sending back huge volumes of remittances to their homeland despite their vulnerability--as now in Libya--to events in their adopted homelands.

Malaysia's relatively declining Chinese and South Korea's interracial children

Here's two follow-up posts, each looking at Malaysia's changing ethnic demographics and South Korea's unexpected new melting pot.

Over at the Malaysia Insider, Helen Ang examines ("Honey, I Shrunk the Chinese!") the relative decline of Malaysia's Chinese from a plurality to an increasingly small minority. She emphasizes the extent to which emigration from Malaysia has been concentrated among ethnic Chinese, but considers the demographic transition only inasmuch as it reflects the moral decay of younger Malaysian Chinese relative to their elders and their lamentable lack of ethnic versus regional identity.

The New York Times' Martin Fackler suggests ("Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea") that, owing to discrimination against non-Koreans, language issues, immigrant women's lack of agency, and the concentration of immigrant women in relatively deprived areas and social strata, children born in South Korea to couples of mixed nationality are expected to face a hard time of it despite their country's need for young people.

On Indonesia and migration

The name of Conrad Barwa is probably familiar to at least some of you, since there's some overlap between the readerships of Demography Matters and the sadly hiatused Head Heeb. I'd like to thank him for bringing to my attention a recent article from Time, Mark Scliebs' "Rape and the Plight of the Female Migrant Worker". Indonesian female migrants, sadly, are often subject to sexual abuse.

No one knows if 1-year-old Yunus will ever see his mother again. Like 6 million other Indonesians, she traveled far from home to find employment. She was hired by a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia. But one day, while on her boss's property, she went to check on some goats and, according to what is known of her tale, was raped by two men. Yunus was conceived of that assault.

[. . .]

While globalization has turned much of the world into a wide-open labor market, it has also created complex human and societal dramas. Women account for up to 50% of the world's 100 million–strong migrant-worker population — and there is no effective entity to protect their rights and dignity. In 2008, Indonesians working abroad, commonly as domestic staff in the Middle East and parts of Asia, contributed about $6.8 billion to their national economy via remittances, according to the World Bank. And while statistics are difficult to come by, there are increasing reports of many who are physically abused, raped and — in some cases — killed by their employers.

While cases of death at the hands of overseas employers are relatively rare, Normawati says she has seen countless pregnant Indonesians coming through the gates of Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport after working abroad. She says the most disturbing of experiences can be heard again and again from the lips of different women: "The boss tells the woman, 'You must be with me.' Then rape."

[. . .]

The abuse of Indonesian workers in some countries has become so notorious that Jakarta is considering placing bans on labor migration to specific destinations. Manpower and Transmigration Minister Muhaimin Iskander says workers may soon be prevented from entering Saudi Arabia and Jordan if a "thorough review" shows that those governments are providing insufficient protections for Indonesian workers.

Indonesia is a rising country. A recent Economist country briefing made the point that the country is a success in the post-Suharto era, with stability as a rambunctious democracy, a strong civil society, and a dynamic economy. Recently, Indonesia has been nominated as a potential candidate for BRIC status, as a country with a national population that already significantly exceeds those of Russia and Brazil and a GDP per capita higher than India's. The Goldman Sachs projections behind the BRIC phenomenon do estimate that by 2050, if all goes well, Indonesia's GDP will exceed that of South Korea and all of the G-7 powers save the United States.

And yet, the country's overlooked. I can only imagine that ignorance about Indonesia stems from lazy assumptions that the country's unstable and a basketcase. The only exception to this I can think of can be found in Australia, where long-standing fears of being invaded, associated with East Timor, and John Marsden's Tomorrow series which sees teenagers fight a guerrilla war against invaders who come from the north, looking for land and resources. All this notwithstanding the exceptional implausibility of such an invasion.

Science-fictional fears of Indonesians aside, the Indonesian population is becoming very mobile. The form of Indonesian migration most familiar to the interested is the very controversial transmigrasi program that saw the sponsored migration of millions from the central and exceedingly populous islands of Java and Madura to relatively low-density areas in places like Borneo and West Papua. Growing internal migration is also a major phenomenon, with long-term migrant labour and rural-urban commuting. As Indonesia becomes globalized, international migration is becoming a major phenomenon for the first time, as Graeme Hugo observed in 2007 at Migration Information. Migration to OECD countries is notable.

The largest community of expatriate Indonesia-born people is in the Netherlands, the country's former colonial ruler. An important component is the aging "Moluccan" group that opted to move to the Netherlands when the Dutch recognized Indonesian independence after 1949.

In 2002, an estimated 137,485 individuals born in Indonesia were living in the Netherlands. There were 264,100 second-generation Indonesians in the Netherlands in 1998, the most recent year for which estimates are available.

The fastest growing Indonesian communities are in the "new" migration countries, led by the United States and followed by Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

In Australia, the number of foreign born from Indonesia increased 40 percent between 2001 and 2005. An important component in this movement has been the number of Indonesian-born students (mainly university level) studying in Australia as well as in other OECD nations. Although the student flow peaked in the year of the financial crisis, the number of students has held steady at around 20,000 per year.

Far more important is the migration of Indonesians into Malaysia, often welcomed because of the ethnic affiliations between Malays and many Indonesian ethnic groups, as often subject to the sort of hostility and mistreatment common to poor workers.

The largest numbers are in neighboring Malaysia, which has a similar language, culture, and religion. Permanent settlement of Indonesians dates back five centuries, but migration was especially significant during colonial times. According to the 2001 Malaysian census, there were 1.38 million foreign born in the country, more than half of them from Indonesia.

However, the scale of recent permanent settlement of Indonesians in Malaysia is not known. Significant numbers of unskilled labor migrants settle permanently in Malaysia, but many do not become legal residents as permanent settlement of unskilled Indonesians is opposed.

The tendency for migrant workers to become permanent or long-term residents has been particularly marked in East Malaysia. The population of the state of Sabah has soared from 697,000 in 1979 to almost 3 million in 2004, and migration from Indonesia and the Philippines) has played a major role in this growth. There are an estimated 100,000 irregular migrants in Sabah and 138,000 in the West Malaysia state of Selangor, the majority of whom are Indonesians.

The expense and danger of detection at the border has encouraged some migrant workers from eastern Indonesia to settle permanently, or on a long-term basis, in Sabah rather than regularly return to their nearby Indonesian homes. One consequence has been an increase in the number of "stateless" Indonesians who have no status in Malaysia and whose Indonesian passports have expired. Some 35,000 Indonesian passports were issued to such "paperless" citizens in Malaysia in the first four months of 2006.

With significant smaller numbers of Indonesian migrants in other Southeast Asian countries, the Middle East is the biggest recipient of Indonesian migrants outside of Indonesia's region. And yes, on account of the exclusion of Indonesians from the social contract, conditions are often dire.

At least 5 thousand Indonesian workers will be repatriated this week from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan. This was decided by the government in Jakarta in response to the increasing instances of harassment and ill-treatment of fellow emigrants. Muhaimin Iskandar, Indonesian Minister of Labour, announced that his country intends to suspend the sending of people seeking employment to the three Middle Eastern states.

In Saudi Arabia alone there are an estimated 600 thousand Indonesian immigrants, 90% of whom are employed as domestic workers, labourers and drivers. Didi Wahyudi, head of the Jakarta consular service to Jeddah, explains that the number of returnees “is limited and represents only 1% of Indonesian workers in the country. But it has become an increasingly significant figure".

The system that regulates the immigration of workers from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, and all Gulf countries except Bahrain, requires the employer to ensure a visa, usually of two years. This procedure puts the immigrants in a state of total dependence on those who employ them thus exposing them to abuse, exploitation and violence.

Didi Wahyudi said that the huge market for domestic workers usually attracts foreigners. An immigrant who arrives in Saudi Arabia to work in this sector receives a top salary of 800 rials per month, about 140 Euros, the minimum set by the Regulations. When they discover that foreign workers can earn up to 2 thousand rials they leave their employers, sometimes even before the expiry of two year visa, and chose to stay in the country as illegal immigrants.

The Saudi newspaper ArabNews says that in the month of September, about a thousand Indonesian immigrants, especially waiters, drivers and unskilled staff, went on trial for illegal residence in the country.

Indonesia might be a plausible candidate BRIC country, but like the four established BRIC countries it remains poor and continued emigration is certain. The question of how Indonesia is to manage its external migration flows and protect its labour diaspora can be expected to become a major question as these migration flows continue to evolve, the characteristics of the mifrant flows change (will Indonesians fill more highly-skilled jobs?) and identities remain in flux.

On Singaporean population trends

The latest Singaporean census has revealed that immigration is driving sharp population growth in the island city-state.

Singapore's population has grown to almost 5 million and a quarter of that is foreign workers, whose influx has sparked concerns among its citizens about competition for jobs and living standards.

The non-resident population in the financial and shipping hub, from Swiss bankers to Filipino maids, climbed nearly five percent in 2009, following on from two years of even stronger growth when booming Asian markets attracted workers.

The government's annual population report said the number of foreigners getting permanent residency status also surged more than 11 percent in 2009. Foreign workers looking to avoid having to leave the city-state after losing their jobs could account for part of that increase, analysts say.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said earlier this month the government will restrict the flow of foreign workers after the global economic recession hit Singapore's growth, while still recognising the city-state still needs foreigners.

"For a small country like Singapore, acquiring and nurturing human talent is a matter of survival," Lee said in a speech on Tuesday at a conference on human capital. The government has said it wants to raise long-term economic growth by increasing the population by 35 percent over the next 40-50 years through immigration, a policy that has drawn plenty of criticism from Singaporeans, themselves mostly immigrants from China, India and Southeast Asia in the past two centuries.

Ethnically and linguistically diverse, the Singaporean population has continued to grow, despite a very sharp fall in birth rates, thanks to immigration. Interestingly, the author notes that fertility rates by ethnic group diverge in Singapore roughly the same way as in Malaysia, a subject that I blogged about last month.

On fertility and ethnicity in Malaysia

This news item got a certain amount of coverage, here thanks to Aslak as well as more widely.

An increasing number of Malaysian couples are seeking fertility treatment as the country's birthrate declines, a newspaper has reported.

A recent United Nations report showed the country's fertility rate dropped from 3.6 babies per couple in 1990 to 2.6 babies currently, the New Sunday Times said.

A key reason for the decline is an increasing fertility problem among Malaysian women, with as many as half of those who visit gynaecological specialists asking for treatment to help them conceive, Health Minister Liow Tiong Lai said.

"Many of the couples will remain childless unless they are helped using the 'assisted reproductive technology' technique," Liow told the paper.

Liow said between 10 and 15 percent of childless couples in the country, aged between 30 and 40, had fertility problem.

A 2004 government study predicted that Malaysia's fertility rate would decline 0.1 percent every five years, as women postpone marriage and having children.

The study also revealed the number of children being born varied widely according to the educational level of the mother. Women with no formal education had almost twice as many children as those with a tertiary education.

What this news item doesn't begin to mention is that Malaysia's population is famously diverse, and that this diversity has strongly influenced the country's population history and future. Malaysia is home to three major ethnic categories. The largest ethnic category, now numbering some 15 million, are the Malays, a relatively diverse category including tribal populations of Sabah and Sarawak, as well as partially assimilated communities with diasporic links, like those uniting the Minangkabau of Sumatra with their co-ethnics in Negeri sembilan state or those linking the Cham of Vietnam and Cambodia with Kelantan. Their defining bond is use of the Malay language and profession of Islamic faith, their perceived indigeneity leading the country to define members of this group as bumipetera deserving of special state subsidies in business and education. The second-largest major community is that of the Malaysian Chinese, numbering more than seven million and concentrated in urban areas. The smallest of the three major communities are the Indians, mostly descended from Tamil migrant workers in rubber plantations and now relatively badly off. Other minority populations, mainly migrants from Malaysia's poorer neighbours, are relatively unimportant.

Fertility, whether TFR or cohort, varies very considerably between each of these populations.

Between 1957 and 1977, the total fertility rate (TFR) in Peninsular Malaysia fell from 6.2 births per woman to 4.0, with all of the principal ethnic groups (Chinese, Indians, and MALAYS) Registering fertility declines. However, in 1988, the TFR among the Chinese and Indians was 2.3 and 2.8 births per woman, respectively, but the rate among the Malays was 4.5 births per woman. The leveling of Malay fertility in the past 10 years is mainly due to a rise in fundamentalist Islamic principles, coupled with pronatalist governmental policies. Data from the 1984-1985 Malaysian Population and Family Survey indicate that currently married Chinese and Indian women are considerably more likely than Malay women to practice contraception (64% and 66% vs. 41% respectively). Furthermore, between 1974 and 1985, use of effective contraceptive methods increased among Chinese and Indian women, but declined among Malays; by 1985, a higher proportion of Malay women were using traditional folk methods of contraception than were using the pill, which had previously been the most popular method.

why? The spatial and occupational distribution of the different ethnic groups in colonial Malaya differed from the start, with the traditional Malay society surviving--as evidenced by its very unusual monarchy--alongside Chinese and Indian migrants who immigrated to Malaya under British auspices to extract local resources, like tin and rubber. Once displaced, these migrants urbanized fairly rapidly, eventually producing significant disparities, particularly between Malaysian Chinese and more traditional Malays. One consequence of this greater Malay traditionalism, as Puzziawati Ab Ghani concluded in the paper "Modelling of Cohort Fertility Changes Among Major Ethnics in Peninsula Malaysia", which compared cohort fertility schedules of Malaysia's three major ethnic groups, meant that Malay cohort fertility patterns over three generations did not obviously differ. "Marital fertility schedule of the granddaughters’ cohort tends to espouse that of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ especially after certain reproductive age. For the Malays, fertility experiences acquired by the mothers throughout their reproductive age and values of children in a family seems to be shared or passed down to their daughters. [. . .] This phenomenon leads us to conclude that intergenerational continuities in fertility behaviour are evident among the Malays, but not among the Chinese and the Indians.

As Tey Nai Peng describes "Social, Economic and Ethnic Fertility Differentials in Peninsular Malaysia", despite general economic growth, signfiicant differences in the spatial and occupational distribution of ethnic groups cotninue to exist.

The various ethnic groups are at different stages of demographic transition. Mortality rates have fallen to a low level for all segments of the population, with a crude death rate of less than 5 per thousand population. The infant mortality rate is lowest among the Chinese (5 per thousand live birth) and highest among the Malays (9 per thousand live births), with the Indians in-between. Female life expectancy ranges from about 73 years for the Malays to 78 years for the Chinese (Department of Statistics 2001b). Substantial fertility differentials still exist among the various sub-groups of the population.

With increased rural-urban migration, about two-thirds of the population now lives in urban areas, compared with just 25% in the 1960s. In the past, most Malays were in the rural areas and engaged in agricultural activities, while the non-Malays were mainly in the urban areas. However, the Malays have been urbanising rapidly in line with the objectives of the economic policies implemented since 1970. The urbanisation rate of the Malays increased to about 54 per cent in 2000, up from about 15 per cent in 1970. During the same period, the rate of urbanisation of the Chinese and Indians has increased from 47 to 87 per cent and 35 to 80 per cent respectively (2).

Peng's description of regional patterns of fertility follows the expected lines, more rural, less economically developed, and more conservative areas producing higher fertility rates than more urban, more economically developed, and more untraditional areas.

The total fertility rate varies widely across states and regions. The pronounced state level differentials in fertility can be attributed largely to differences in socioeconomic structures. In 1998, total fertility rate is highest in the predominantly Malay East Coast states of Kelantan and Terengganu. These two states are currently ruled by PAS, an Islamic fundamentalist opposition party. Both states have relatively low level of urbanisation. The TFR was lowest in Pulau Pinang and the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur where the Malays made up less than half the population, and where the majority of the population lives in urban areas. The fertility level is negatively correlated with household income at the state level. The mean age at marriage among women in the high fertility states is about 3-4 years younger as compared to those from states with low fertility. At state level, total fertility rate is negatively correlated with contraceptive prevalence rate (see Table 2).

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Within each state, substantial fertility differentials can be observed between urban and rural areas, and between the ethnic groups for each location. Hence, it may be inferred that social cultural factors and differential response to government policies has resulted in fertility differentials among sub-group that are exposed to the same level of socio-economic development (6-7).

The most obvious consequence of these differences for Malaysia lies in the changed proportions of different ethnic categories. Swee-Hock Saw in his 2007 The Population of Malaysia expects the Malaysian population to reach a total of some 41 million people by 2035, with natural increase flagging first among the Malaysian Chinese, then among the Malaysian Indians, with the Malays following in behind. He doesn't expect any of these populations to experience negative growth. As a result of this, he expects the percentage of Bumiputra citizens will rise from 65.9% to 2005 to 72.1% in 2035.

But. Asan Ali Golum in his Growth, structural change, and regional inequality in Malaysia suggests that the major migratory trends in Peninsula Malaysia are directed away from relatively poor areas in the north and east--i.e. the least developed and more traditional areas of Malaysia--towards the prosperous southern and western regions. This migration, accompanied by the continuing intrusion of modern values throughout Malaysia can't help but alter demographic patterns, perhaps more radically than expected. As this study concluded, education and the number of living children seemed to play the most significant role in completed fertility regardless of ethnicity. As Saw concluded in a 1990 study comparing Malaysia and Singapore, there is little reason to expect Malays to retain high fertility rates indefinitely. "By 1987, the Malays experienced the highest fertility rate in Peninsular Malaysia, while the Chinese had the lowest rate in both countries. It is noted that the Chinese fertility rate in peninsular Malaysia (Malays 4.51, Chinese 2.25, Indians 2.77) is greater than the Malay's fertility in Singapore (Malays 2.16, Chinese 1.48, Indians 1.95)." Some of the major differences separating high-fertility Malaysia from low-fertility Singapore was more traditional gender mores, lower incomes, and less urbanization. Later data shows that between 1991 and 2003, Bumiputra fertility rates fell sharply, from exceeding Chinese TFRs by 68% down to a smaller if still significant gap. Peng's conclusion is worth noting.

Increased education, urbanisation and female labour force participation represent strong social forces that would bring about continuing decline in fertility among all groups. The eventual reduction of direct assistance from the government that looks to promote competitiveness in light of globalisation, will also increase the cost of children among the Malays. The switch from extended families to nuclear families is eroding the family support system for childcare. The Malays are still relatively less urbanised and few are using efficient contraceptive methods, and as such they have a bigger scope for the fertility decline. The religious barriers for fertility decline of the past may also be giving way. This can be seen in the sharp fertility decline in a number of Islamic countries, notably, Indonesia (with a TFR of 2.4), Bangladesh (with a TFR of 3.7), Iran (with a TFR of 2.9), Brunei (with a TFR of 2.7), as well as the Muslim population in Thailand and Singapore that have experienced below replacement fertility (UN, 2000). The sharp decline in the total fertility rate in Kelantan and Trengganu points to the fact that with social and economic development, the fertility level will probably be declining at a faster pace among those that lag behind, resulting in the narrowing of the differentials (17).

Malaysia will very likely become increasingly Malay in terms of population proportions, sure, but not nearly as thoroughly and almost certainly not as quickly as some have predicted. The New Economic Policy adopted after ethnic riots in 1971, heavily subsidizing businesses, education, and sundry other elements of Malays, has accelerated this trend by bringing Malays fully into the Malaysian economy. As all Malaysians continue to progressively adopt the same sort of low fertility rate regime that being taken on by other middle-income countries, that assisted reproductive technology will certainly be more common used by people of all ethnicities.