Some links: immigration, cities, small towns, French Canada, Eurasia, China, Brexit, music

Another links post!

• Skepticism about immigration in many traditional receiving countries appeared. Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative took issue with the argument of Andray Domise after an EKOS poll, that Canadians would not know much about the nature of migration flows. The Conversation observed how the rise of Vox in Spain means that country’s language on immigration is set to change towards greater skepticism. Elsewhere, the SCMP called on South Korea, facing pronounced population aging and workforce shrinkages, to become more open to immigrants and minorities.
• Cities facing challenges were a recurring theme. This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland’s second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential. Also on Ireland, the NYR Daily looked at how Brexit and a hardened border will hit the Northern Ireland city of Derry, with its Catholic majority and its location neighbouring the Republic. CityLab reported on black migration patterns in different American cities, noting gains in the South, is fascinating. As for the threat of Donald Trump to send undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities in the United States has widely noted., at least one observer noted that sending undocumented immigrants to cities where they could connect with fellow diasporids and build secure lives might actually be a good solution.
• Declining rural settlements featured, too. The Guardian reported from the Castilian town of Sayatón, a disappearing town that has become a symbol of depopulating rural Spain. Global News, similarly, noted that the loss by the small Nova Scotia community of Blacks Harbour of its only grocery store presaged perhaps a future of decline. VICE, meanwhile, reported on the very relevant story about how resettled refugees helped revive the Italian town of Sutera, on the island of Sicily. (The Guardian, to its credit, mentioned how immigration played a role in keeping up numbers in Sayatón, though the second generation did not stay.)
• The position of Francophone minorities in Canada, meanwhile, also popped up at me.
• This TVO article about the forces facing the École secondaire Confédération in the southern Ontario city of Welland is a fascinating study of minority dynamics. A brief article touches on efforts in the Franco-Manitoban community of Winnipeg to provide temporary shelter for new Francophone immigrants. CBC reported, meanwhile, that Francophones in New Brunswick continue to face pressure, with their numbers despite overall population growth and with Francophones being much more likely to be bilingual than Anglophones. This last fact is a particularly notable issue inasmuch as New Brunswick's Francophones constitute the second-largest Francophone community outside of Québec, and have traditionally been more resistant to language shift and assimilation than the more numerous Franco-Ontarians.
• The Eurasia-focused links blog Window on Eurasia pointed to some issues. It considered if the new Russian policy of handing out passports to residents of the Donbas republics is related to a policy of trying to bolster the population of Russia, whether fictively or actually. (I'm skeptical there will be much change, myself: There has already been quite a lot of emigration from the Donbas republics to various destinations, and I suspect that more would see the sort of wholesale migration of entire families, even communities, that would add to Russian numbers but not necessarily alter population pyramids.) Migration within Russia was also touched upon, whether on in an attempt to explain the sharp drop in the ethnic Russian population of Tuva in the 1990s or in the argument of one Muslim community leader in the northern boomtown of Norilsk that a quarter of that city's population is of Muslim background.
• Eurasian concerns also featured. The Russian Demographics Blog observed, correctly, that one reason why Ukrainians are more prone to emigration to Europe and points beyond than Russians is that Ukraine has long been included, in whole or in part, in various European states. As well, Marginal Revolution linked to a paper that examines the positions of Jews in the economies of eastern Europe as a “rural service minority”, and observed the substantial demographic shifts occurring in Kazakhstan since independence, with Kazakh majorities appearing throughout the country.
• JSTOR Daily considered if, between the drop in fertility that developing China was likely to undergo anyway and the continuing resentments of the Chinese, the one-child policy was worth it. I'm inclined to say no, based not least on the evidence of the rapid fall in East Asian fertility outside of China.
• What will Britons living in the EU-27 do, faced with Brexit? Bloomberg noted the challenge of British immigrant workers in Luxembourg faced with Brexit, as Politico Europe did their counterparts living in Brussels.
• Finally, at the Inter Press Service, A.D. Mackenzie wrote about an interesting exhibit at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris on the contributions made by immigrants to popular music in Britain and France from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Some links: longevity, real estate, migrations, the future

I have been away on vacation in Venice--more on that later--but I am back now.

• Old age popped up as a topic in my feed. The Crux considered when human societies began to accumulate large numbers of aged people. Would there have been octogenarians in any Stone Age cultures, for instance? Information is Beautiful, meanwhile, shares an informative infographic analyzing the factors that go into extending one’s life expectancy.
• Growing populations in cities, and real estate markets hostile even to established residents, are a concern of mine in Toronto. They are shared globally: The Malta Independent examined some months ago how strong growth in the labour supply and tourism, along with capital inflows, have driven up property prices in Malta. Marginal Revolution noted there are conflicts between NIMBYism, between opposing development in established neighbourhoods, and supporting open immigration policies.
• Ethnic migrations also appeared. The Cape Breton Post shared a fascinating report about the history of the Jewish community of industrial Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, while the Guardian of Charlottetown reports the reunification of a family of Syrian refugees on Prince Edward Island. In Eurasia, meanwhile, Window on Eurasia noted the growth of the Volga Tatar population of Moscow, something hidden by the high degree of assimilation of many of its members.
• Looking towards the future, Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen was critical of the idea of limiting the number of children one has in a time of climate change. On a related theme, his co-blogger Alex Tabarrok highlights a new paper aiming to predict the future, one that argues that the greatest economic gains will eventually accrue to the densest populations. Established high-income regions, it warns, could lose out if they keep out migrants.

Some news links: Montréal & Calcutta migration, Chinese languages, former Soviet Union, borders

• La Presse notes that suburbanization proceeds in Montréal, as migration from the island of Montréal to off-island suburbs grows. This is of perhaps particular note in a Québec where demographics, particularly related to language dynamics, have long been a preoccupation, the island of Montréal being more multilingual than its suburbs.
• The blog Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta, a 2018 book by Kushanava Choudhury. One brief excerpt touches upon the diversity of Calcutta's migrant population.
• The South China Morning Post has posted some interesting articles about language dynamics. In one, the SCMP suggests that the Cantonese language is falling out of use among young people in Guangzhou, largest Cantonese-speaking city by population. Does this hint at decline in other Chinese languages? Another, noting how Muslim Huiare being pressured to shut down Arabic-medium schools, is more foreboding.
• Ukrainian demographics blogger pollotenchegg is back with a new map of Soviet census data from 1990, one that shows the very different population dynamics of some parts of the Soviet Union. The contrast between provincial European Russia and southern Central Asia is outstanding.
• In the area of the former Soviet Union, scholar Otto Pohl has recently examined how people from the different German communities of southeast Europe were, at the end of the Second World War, taken to the Soviet Union as forced labourers. The blog Window on Eurasia, meanwhile, has noted that the number of immigrants to Russia are falling, with Ukrainians diminishing particularly in number while Central Asian numbers remain more resistant to the trend.
• Finally, JSTOR Daily has observed the extent to which border walls represent, ultimately, a failure of politics.

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

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

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

Some news links: history, cities, migration, diasporas

I have some links up for today, with an essay to come tomorrow.

• JSTOR Daily considers the extent to which the Great Migration of African-Americans was a forced migration, driven not just by poverty but by systemic anti-black violence.
• Even as the overall population of Japan continues to decline, the population of Tokyo continues to grow through net migration, Mainichi reports.
• This CityLab article takes look at the potential, actual and lost and potential, of immigration to save the declining Ohio city of Youngstown. Will it, and other cities in the American Rust Belt, be able to take advantage of entrepreneurial and professional immigrants?
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow. That immigrant neighbourhoods can become largely self-contained can surprise no one.
• Guardian Cities notes how tensions between police and locals in the Bairro do Jamaico in Lisbon reveal problems of integration for African immigrants and their descendants.
• Carmen Arroyo at Inter Press Service writes about Pedro, a migrant from Oaxaca in Mexico who has lived in New York City for a dozen years without papers.
• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that immigration retention rates on PEI, while low, are rising, perhaps showing the formation of durable immigrant communities. Substantial international migration to Prince Edward Island is only just starting, after all.
• The industrial northern Ontario city of Sault Sainte-Marie, in the wake of the closure of the General Motors plant in the Toronto-area industrial city of Oshawa, was reported by Global News to have hopes to recruit former GM workers from Oshawa to live in that less expensive city.
• Atlas Obscura examines the communities being knitted together across the world by North American immigrants from the Caribbean of at least partial Hakka descent. The complex history of this diaspora fascinates me.

Some links from the blogosphere

As a prelude to more substantial posting, I thought I would share with readers some demographics-related links from my readings in the blogosphere.

• The blog Far Outliers, concentrating on the author's readings, has been looking at China in recent weeks. Migrations have featured prominently, whether in exploring the history of Russian migration to the Chinese northeast, looking at the Korean enclave of Yanbian that is now a source and destination for migrants, and looking at how Tai-speakers in Yunnan maintain links with Southeast Asia through religion. The history of Chinese migration within China also needs to be understood.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money was quite right to argue that much of the responsibility for Central Americans' migration to the United States has to be laid at the foot of an American foreign policy that has caused great harm to Central America. Aaron Bastani at the London Review of Books' Blog makes similar arguments regarding emigration from Iran under sanctions.
• Marginal Revolution has touched on demographics, looking at the possibility for further fertility decline in the United States and noting how the very variable definitions of urbanization in different states of India as well as nationally can understate urbanization badly.

Two notes on HIV/AIDS in 2018

Early on the evening of the 1st of December in Toronto, on World AIDS Day, I stopped by the AIDS Memorial. Fresh red and white carnations were woven among the panels as citylight gleamed in the background.



Many of the assembly of links I posted this evening over at my personal blog relating to World AIDS Day dealt with how it was being remembered. Others dealt with successful approaches to the epidemic, to the growing recognition that people being successfully treated cannot transmit HIV to other partners and to public-health approaches like that of Demetre Daskalakis in New York City which destigmatize HIV and make it manageable in a social sense as well as in a medical sense. Still others deal with how, in Russia, prevailing social conservatism is contributing to an accelerated spread of HIV; the Russian Demographics Blog noted the alarming shape of the HIV epidemic in Europe, with increasing success in the European Union being more than counterbalanced by an expansion of the epidemic in Russia.

As for HIV and AIDS, my thinking on this pandemic is dominated by two approaches.

1. As was made clear to me by Jacques Pepin's The Origins of AIDS, which not just traced the modern pandemic to a zoonosis in the interior of central Africa but outlined how a chance configuration of historical events led not only to the HIV pandemic but to the particular shape of the pandemic, the extent to which global catastrophes can be created by chance occurrences is appalling. What catastrophes, epidemiological or otherwise, have been unleashed on an unknowing world now? There may be good sense to the precautionary principle.

2. I remain impressed by the fact, realized by me in a 2016 visit to the AIDS Memorial, that biomedical intervention of a sort that would have been science-fictional in the 1980s can successfully control even HIV. What explanations--what explanations, more, that are not excuses--can there be for this pandemic's survival? If, as an early observer of HIV and AIDS noted, the epidemic immediately showed up the weak points in public health at every level, it still does this now.

Four links on Ukrainian migration futures

I have been wanting for some time to do an extended analysis of the ongoing Ukrainian situation. For the time being, here's four articles which suggest interesting future trends for migration from Ukraine, since the end of the Soviet Union one of the largest sources of migrants in the world.

First up is an October 2014 Open Democracy essay by Judith Twigg, "Human capital and the Ukraine crisis". Here, Twigg outlines the demographic dynamics of Ukraine before 2014, noting here migration trends.

[A]ccording to the International Labor Organisation (ILO), between January 2010 and June 2012, 1.2m Ukrainians (3.4% of the adult population) were working or looking for work abroad. About two-thirds of these were men, and one-third women. Most were relatively young (20-49 years old), and the ratio of rural to urban Ukrainian labour migrants is about 2:1. Most are legal, with only about one in five Ukrainian migrant workers irregular. Several non-ILO studies offer far larger estimates of total Ukrainian labour migration, some as large as 5 to 7m seasonal migrants over summer periods. If these larger estimates are accurate, then Ukraine has replaced now-legalized EU-8 nationals as the major supplier of irregular workers at the bottom of European Union labour markets; and the Ukraine-to-Russia corridor is now the second-largest migration route in the world (surpassed only by Mexico-to-U.S.). According to the ILO, the main destination countries for Ukrainian labour migration (2010-2012) were Russia (43%), Poland (14%), Italy (13%), and the Czech Republic (13%).

[. . .]

Over time, Ukrainian labour migration to Russia is decreasing, and to the EU is increasing. Ukrainian labour migrants tend to fall into two categories: young people leaving permanently due to a lack of job opportunities at home, and circulating migrants engaging in temporary labour. One Ukrainian Ministry of Social Policy study has shown that most Ukrainians seeking work abroad do so because of low wages at home (about 80%), as opposed to unemployment (about 10%). Most Ukrainian labour migrants are working in relatively low-skilled jobs, leading to a mismatch between some migrants’ skills and their current work positions. According to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 65% of Ukrainian labour migrants have completed secondary education, 15% have some higher education, and 15% have completed higher education. This produces a situation where almost half of Ukrainian migrants are employed in work for which they are clearly overqualified, a phenomenon referred to as ‘downshifting’ or ‘brain waste.’

In 2012, an estimated $7.5 billion equivalent in private remittances was transferred to Ukraine, equal to about 4% of Ukraine’s GDP that year (and exceeding 2012 net foreign direct investment, which was around $6 billion). This figure rose to $9.3 billion in 2013. This makes Ukraine the third largest recipient of remittance payments in the world, after India and Mexico. According to the ILO, the Ukrainian economy would have lost about 7% of its activity in 2012 without the stimulus effect from these migrant transfers. Remittance flows were first registered in a significant way in 2006 (about $1 billion) and have increased annually since then. The primary source country for remittance payments is Russia, followed by the United States, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom; these payments are therefore coming from members of the permanent diaspora as well as from labour migrants.

ILO data suggest that Ukraine’s main source regions for labour migration are those in the far west: Zakarpattia and Chernivtsi are classified as ‘very high’ source regions, with Volyn, Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Khmelnytskyi, and Cherkasy ranking as ‘high’ source regions. The central regions are classified as ‘very low’ sources, with all of the southern and eastern regions except Luhansk classified as ‘low’ (Luhansk, along with Rivne, Vinnytsia, and Mykolaiv, are classified as ‘average’). This means that, setting aside refugees from the recent conflict in the east, most out-migration from Ukraine is draining the most demographically stable and healthy parts of the country.

Given the scale of the devastation in the Donbas, with some estimates I've come across suggesting half the population or more has left--reputedly often disproportionately of working age--new sources and destinations are also likely.
In February of 2015, Olga Gulina's essay "Re-drawing the map of migration patterns" noted the likely consequences of the collapse of Ukrainian migration to Russia for the receiving country.

[I]n 2014, the number of migrants from Ukraine far outstripped Central Asia. Indeed, the statistical data for 2014 shows a decline in migration flows from all CIS countries, excluding Belarus (up by 4,455 in 2014) and Ukraine (up by 36,106 in 2014). Both Belarus and Russia have introduced simplified rules for residency and employment for people re-locating from areas affected by conflict in Ukraine.

According to statistics from 20 January, 2015, Russia’s Federal Migration Service (FMS) records show that, from the Former Soviet Union, there are 2,417,575 Ukrainians (5.6% of Ukraine’s population) living in the Russian Federation, alongside 999,169 Tajiks (12.1%), 597,559 Kazakhs (3.5%), 579,493 Azeris (6.1%), 561,033 Moldovans (15.8%), 544,956 Kyrgyz (9.6%), 517,828 Belarusians (5.5%), and 480,017 Armenians (15.9%).

[. . .]

The human capital in the economy of Russia’s big cities will suffer irrecoverable losses. Big cities need cheap labour. The traditional spheres of labour migrants’ employment – services and urban amenities, public catering, construction and transportation – are bound to experience labour shortages. The St Petersburg city authorities have already announced that 30% of labour migrants left their jobs in the city’s urban amenities sector. The Moscow city authorities, summarising the results of 2014, spoke about declining numbers of incoming labour migrants. As a result, the inbound migration growth rate in Moscow fell by 40% in 2014 versus 2013.

[. . .]

The most serious changes in migration policy have affected Ukrainian nationals. The events in Ukraine have created a new layer of migrants in post-Soviet space – humanitarian migrants, for whose support Belarus and Russia simplified immigration law (particularly employment regulation). Additionally, the Russian Federation has allocated 366 million roubles (£3.7million) from the federal budget to regions receiving and accommodating those newcomers. According to FMS, the numbers of Ukrainian nationals coming to Russia are still growing. More than 2.6 million Ukrainians stayed in Russia in 2014, and 245,510 among them applied for refugee status and temporary asylum. In January 2015, the number of Ukrainian citizens in Russia had grown by 1.6%.

But the Ukrainian nationals who arrived in Russia as humanitarian migrants in 2014, will be deprived of their previous privileges in 2015. The head of Russia’s Federal Migration Service, Konstantin Romodanovsky, has already announced that all ‘privileges for Ukrainian nationals will end in 2015. We were exceptionally liberal in relation to Ukrainian nationals in 2014, but we will return to normal regulation and treat Ukrainians according to the rules in 2015.’

The collapse of visa-free travel rules between the two countries is also going to hinder future migration. This, again, is explored at Tass, in Lyudmila Alexandrova's English-language commentary "Labour migrants from Ukraine benefit Russian economy".

The lax migration rules most Ukrainian citizens in Russia have enjoyed since the beginning of hostilities in Dobnass expired last Saturday. The 90-day period of their presence in Russia without proper registration will not be prolonged any more. Those of them who have spent more than three months in Russia will now have one month to legalize their status in Russia. Exceptions have been made for refugees from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. The rules of presence in Russia and the automatic prolongation of their stay will remain unchanged. Those who fail to formalize their status by December 1 will be faced with administrative measures applied to all illegal migrants, ranging from administrative punishment to expulsion and subsequent ban from entering Russia.

There are about 2.6 million Ukrainian citizens in Russia at the moment, says the deputy chief of the Federal Migration Service, Vadim Yakovenko. More than one million of them are from Ukraine’s southeastern regions, and more than 600,000 others are in breach of the migration rules.

Since April 2014 404,000 Ukrainians have asked the Federal Migration Service for temporary asylum or refugee status, and another 265,000 for temporary residence permits.

[. . .]

"Of course, the number of migrants will get smaller," leading research fellow Yulia Florinskaya, of the Russian presidential academy RANEPA, has told TASS. "They will have to either update their licenses and pay big money, something they are not in the habit of doing, or pack their bags. Some of them, the most skilled ones, will leave."

She agrees that the potential of Ukrainian labour migrants is being used not to the full extent: "All experts have suggested giving temporary residence permits to Ukrainians without any quotas."

"We are interested in keeping these people here. Ukrainian migrants play a tangible role in our economy, particularly so at a time when the number of migrants from Central Asia is on the decline. Should these people get up and go, there will be no chance of ever luring them back. This is very bad strategically. Besides, we do have the vacancies for them. Our own able-bodied population has been shrinking by 900,000 to 1,000,000 a year."

I would note, again, that a Russian migration policy that accepts migrants, refugee and otherwise, from the Donbas region and does not accept the same from the rest of Ukraine, particularly given the close links between the Donbas and the Russian Federation, might well create a situation where emigration from a devastated Donbas to Russia will accelerate. The consequences of this for Russia, Ukraine, and the separatist republics could be serious indeed. Who will be left to man the republics' militaries if no one lives there?

Finally, in the commentary "Poland: Immigration or Stagnation" by Thomas Mulhall at New Eastern Europe, an article that looks at the demographic situation of Poland speculates as to the source of that country's immigrants.

Even though a crisis is not imminent in Poland, it is worth looking at where people will come from to fill the inevitable labour shortage when it arrives. The obvious candidate is Ukraine. It is one of Poland's neighbours and its GDP per capita is about a quarter of that of Poland. The countries have historical ties with the western city of Lviv once belonging to Poland. There is also some shared linguistic heritage with many (predominantly older) Ukrainians and Poles both speaking Russian. A smaller number of Ukrainians also speak Polish. Ukraine is also going through a war in the east of the country and an economic collapse that will take years to recover. Poles are genuinely sympathetic to the Ukrainian plight over the situation with Russia and waves of people are already fleeing to Poland, seeking jobs and refuge. The numbers of Ukrainians already arriving/living in Poland’s major cities is very noticeable. Some estimates suggest that the number of unregistered Ukrainians in Poland could be as high as 400,000. Officially, Ukrainians are invited to Poland for temporary or seasonal positions. However, only a small fraction is given residency.

It is safe to say that the Polish society is not very welcoming to the idea of mass immigration. Many Poles look at the effect of immigration on countries such as France and the UK in a very negative way. They hear exaggerated stories of “ghettos” and ethnic tension, and some fear an encroachment of other cultures and identities on their own. [Philippe] Legrain believes that Ukrainian immigration on a large scale would be a good place to start. He states, “If migrants to Poland initially come from places like Ukraine, they will not be that different from resident Polish people, so the cultural shock may be smaller.”

Some notes on the Turkmen, Turkey, and this diaspora's future

Earlier today, on my personal blog I noted, after a friend's observation on Facebook that the Turkish shootdown of a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 on the Turkish-Syrian border, the pilots successfully escaping in parachutes only to be shot dead was Syrian Turkmen Brigades in Syria. This is obviously a critical issue from the perspective of conflict--Robert Farley's post at Lawyers, Guns and Money, and Leonid Bershidsky's Bloomberg View opinion piece, do good jobs of noting the state things are in. My attention was caught by another issue: Who are the Syrian Turkmen?

Simply put, the Syrian Turkmen are a substantial ethnic minority, apparently concentrated near the Turkish border, amounting to the hundreds of thousands. How many hundreds of thousands? Might it even be millions? There's no firm data, it seems, much as there is no firm data on the numbers of Iraqi Turkmen. What is known is that these Turkish minorities are numerous, that their zones of inhabitation overlap at least in part with that of ethnic Kurds, and that they are politically close to Turkey. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp noted, in the particular case of Syria the Turkmen are opposed to Russia.

The Turkmen arrived in what's now Syria centuries ago, as various different Turkic empires — first the Seljuks, then the Ottomans — encouraged Turkish migration into the territory to counterbalance the local Arab majority. Under Bashar al-Assad's rule, the mostly Sunni Muslim Turkmen in Syria were an oppressed minority, denied even the right to teach their own children in their own language (a Turkish dialect).

However, the Turkmen didn't immediately join the anti-Assad uprising in 2011. Instead, they were goaded into it by both sides. Assad persecuted them, treating them as a potential conduit for Turkish involvement in the Syrian civil war. Turkey, a longtime enemy of Assad, encouraged the Turkmen to oppose him with force. Pushed in the same direction by two major powers, the Turkmen officially joined the armed opposition in 2012.

Since then, they've gotten deeply involved in the civil war, receiving significant amounts of military aid from Ankara. Their location has brought them into conflict with the Assad regime, ISIS, and even the Western-backed Kurdish rebels (whom Turkey sees as a threat given its longstanding struggle with its own Kurdish population). Today, the Syrian Turkmen Brigades — the dominant Turkmen military faction — boast as many as 10,000 fighters, per the BBC, though the real number could be much lower.

The Turkmen role in the conflict has put them directly in Russia's crosshairs. The Russians, contrary to their stated goal of fighting ISIS, have directed most of their military efforts to helping Assad's forces fight rebels. The Turkmen have clashed repeatedly with Assad and his allies in the north — which led to Russian planes targeting Turkmen militants last week.

Turkey was not happy, and called in the Russian ambassador to register its disapproval. "It was stressed that the Russian side's actions were not a fight against terror, but they bombed civilian Turkmen villages and this could lead to serious consequences," the Turkish foreign ministry said in a description of the meeting provided to Reuters.

Could, as Beauchamp suggests, the Turkish attack have been a warning to Russia to avoid attacking Turkey's ethnic kin? It's imaginable, at least.

I'm unaware of research conducted on the propensity of Syrian Turkmen to migrate. I might speculate that, given the intensity of the fighting in Syria, the proximity of Turkmen communities to the Turkish border, and the relatively small cultural distance between Turkmen and Turks, there might be great incentives to migrate. More concretely, British Turkish scholar Ibrahim Sirkeci has conducted research on Iraqi Turkmen, specifically the January 2005 report "Turkmen in Iraq and International Migration of Turkmen" (PDF format) and the January 2011 followup "Turkmen in Iraq and Their Flight: A Demographic Question". In these studies, Sirkeci notes that not only do Turkmen in Iraq have great incentives to leave, but that they can leverage their cultural connections with Turkey to emigrate to Europe and elsewhere. Two press reports from last year note that Iraqi Turkmen have encountered problems crossing into Turkey, but given the mutability of the situation I would not count on this lasting.

At my blog, I said--and still say--that I see a tragic irony in this story. At least in part in an effort to diminish the negative consequences from Russia's support of armed ethnic kin against their parent state in Ukraine, Russia has now come into conflict with Turkey's armed ethnic kin as they fight against their parent state. Terrible conflicts, like the one in Syria or like the lower-intensity conflict in Ukraine, tend to result in permanent dislocations of populations, particularly vulnerable diasporas. After the Second World War, for instance, West Germany's economic success led to the absorption not only of millions of East Germans, but of most of the German diaspora that remained. Less catastrophically, after the fall of the Soviet Union ethnic Russians--and others--emigrated to Russia in large numbers. Curiously, comparatively few Magyars moved to Hungary, perhaps indicating the relative contentment of Magyars in Hungary's neighbouring countries and Hungary's lack of attractiveness as a destination. Especially with demographic and economic changes in Turkey that might make immigration necessary, I find it too easy to imagine that, one day soon, there will not be very many Turkmen left in Syria and Iraq at all.

Some assorted blog links

While I'm assembling some original material, I thought I'd point readers to some population-related blog links that appeared on my RSS feed in the past month or so.

• Considering the Mediterranean migration crisis, Crooked Timber featured one essay arguing that European restrictionism is culpable for deaths, while the New APPS Blog praised the bravery of migrants.
• The Dragon's Tales noted that immigration from China and India to the United States has surpassed that from Mexico.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog considered, in the wake of the Nepali earthquake, the ill-regulated international market in birth surrogacy.
• Kieran Healy noted how popular estimates of the composition of the American population are frequently quite wrong, going back to the errors of popular wisdom.
• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer noted that rates of childlessness among American women with post-graduate educations has plummeted. More discussion at the blog.
• The Russian Demographics Blog had a whole slew of interesting posts, including looks at the changing composition of migrants from Russia and changing destinations and volumes of flows to and from the country, along with examinations of problematic data on HIV/AIDS in Russia and an old forecast of the epidemic.
• Window on Eurasia reported on how one Muslim commentator in Russia thinks Russian Muslims should respond to the prospects of a Muslim majority in Russia. (I find it unlikely, and of note mainly as a case study of crude demographic boosterism.).

If you've suggestions as to new blogs I should follow, please, submit them--and any especially interesting posts--in the comments.

Some thematic links: France, Ukraine, Russia, Japan, China, South Pacific

I've been collecting links for the past while, part of my ongoing research into some interesting topics. I thought I'd share some with you tonight.

On the subject of France, second-largest economy in the Eurozone and one of the high-income countries with the stablest demographic structures, Marginal Revolution has linked to some analysts (1, 2) who point out that the French job market is stagnant. This would be a problem in most countries, but is especially a problem in a country with a growing population. Demographics, as a contrast and comparison of France with neighbouring Germany points out, does not determine everything. (French immigration to Québec has taken off.)

What is there to be said about Ukraine? pollotenchegg mapped the demographic collapse of Donetsk oblast even before the recent war, Geocurrents mapped the current state of political divisions in Ukraine, Open Democracy looked at dire population decline and its economic consequences nationally.

Migration in Russia, the resettlement of many displaced Ukrainian refugees--Russian-speaking, I would imagine--in Russia and the emigration of many politically concerned Russians to Latvia.

Japan's ongoing depopulation, meanwhile, was illustrated for me by two sources. The first was a brief Bloomberg article noting the population and then complete depopulation of Japan's Hashima island. The second was a much longer and photograph-filled Spike Japan blog post looking at Yubari, a Japanese town in Hokkaido that has seen very sharp depopulation over the past half-century. It has prepared well for its size, but it did so at a time of relative economic stability. What happens when Japan goes through this more generally?

A pair of articles, a long South China Morning Post analysis and an Al Jazeera photo essay, examined the phenomenon of significant African immigration to the Chinese city of Guangzhou. As China becomes wealthier, stories like this will become more common.

In the South Pacific, the massive emigration from Samoa to a variety of destinations, particularly New Zealand, is noted in a recent Inter Press Service article. This emigration, it should be noted, occurred without environmental disaster.

Some demography-related links for the New Year

I've been collecting a few interesting links--articles, blog posts--for some time. Longer thematic essays will come--Ukraine interests me significantly, for instance, as do some of the topics raised here--but for now here's a selection of what I've been reading.

• First off, writing at io9, George Dvorsky argues that extreme human longevity won't destroy the planet. The Atlantic, meanwhile, featured an article by Jean Twenge arguing that popular wisdom on female fertility is wrong, that in fact it's substantially easier for women in their late 30s and even early 40s to conceive than ill-founded statistics would have it.
• Crooked Timber had two posts in November taking a look at the risks faced by clandestine migrants, one on overland Mexican route and one on the overseas route to Australia.
• In East Asia, meanwhile, the National Interest has warned that the aging and shrinking Japanese population may weaken Japan vis-a-vis China (the Japan Daily Press noting that births have reached all-time lows in the modern era while deaths have reached all-time highs). The Economist's Buttonwood blog uses Japan's fate to meditate on the future of advanced economies.
• Elsewhere in the region, the Taipei Times notes South Korea's continuing problems with integrating immigrants--at least working-class immigrants; according to the Want China Times, investor-class immigrants are doing quite well in Jeju island. The Diplomat observes that immigration from Africa is creating a sizable enclave of immigrants in Guangdong, while Marginal Revolution cited an authority who claimed that one child in five was growing up without their parents, migrant workers in the city.
• In the Middle East, a post by Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money on Syrian refugees caught my attention: of the huge number of forced emigrants, many live in Lebanon, where one resident in three is now Syrian.
• In Singapore, Marginal Revolution examined inequality in Singapore and that city-state's very low birth rate (I think there's a connection), while the Wall Street Journal's Southeast Asia blog wondered if very high rates of immigration are aggravating internal issues.
• NPR, looking to southern Europe, observed Portugal's baby bust and commented on the return of mass emigration in Greece. Eurasianet has observed that Latvia is trying to shut down an investor-class residency program that has been quite attractive to migrants from the former Soviet Union, particularly Russians and Central Asians, part of an effort to avoid a Cypriot-style economic bubble.
• According to Presseurop and the Financial Times, meanwhile, strong economic growth in Poland is starting to attract large numbers of immigrants to that country. (This immigration, it should be noted, exists alongside still high levels of emigration to western Europe.)
• France, a country of emigration? Le Nouvel Economiste warns (in French) that France risks losing its underemployed young, while a Business Week report profiles French workers who commute across the Rhine to work in Germany.
• I rather liked Jamie Mackay's Open Democracy essay explaining how Chinese migrants in Venice were being used as scapegoats for the problems of that city (and country, by extension?).
• In Canada, a recent book by Bob Plamondon critical of long-time Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau has made the argument that the shift in immigration under his rule, specifically shifting priorities from skilled workers towards family reunification, diminished the benefits of immigration.
• Le Devoir discusses (in French) the demographic challenges of Québec, with a rising (if sub-replacement) fertility rate and consistent problems in attracting immigrants. (This came out before the recent CBC report highlighting rising outmigration from la belle province.) In Ontario, meanwhile, the low birth rate means that the cohorts of new university students--as noted in MacLean's--will start to fall.
• The Atlantic Cities had an extended essay by Howard W. French talking about how the growth of African cities, in population and in economic weight and in governance, would reshape the map of the continent.
• The Atlantic Wire and the Washington Post both reported the recent American census finding that population increase in the United States is concentrated among non-white populations; white populations have started to experience negative decrease.
• On the topic of diasporas and ethnic identities, the Volokh Conspiracy linked to a study suggesting that 27% of Jewish children in the United States lived in Orthodox homes, suggesting that Orthodox Jewish birth rates are such that the Orthodox share of the Jewish community will grow sharply. (I've read of similar findings in the United Kingdom.)
• Window on Eurasia has a lot of interesting posts. Paul Goble noted that projected populations for most of the former Soviet republics made two decades ago are vastly overstated, the Central Asian republics being the big exception, and arguing that Russia has only a short time to deal with its, temporarily stabilized, demographic disequilibrium. (The Chechen birth rate is reportedly quite high, making it an exception; five of the seven republics of the North Caucasus now have sub-replacement fertility rates.)

Some demographics-related news links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some notes on the Chechens and Chechen demography

Last Monday's Boston Marathon bombings gave some most unattractive publicity to the Russian autonomous republic of Chechnya and the Chechen people, on account of the ethnicity of the alleged perpetrators, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. One thing that came out in their life stories was they way in which they recapitulated the 20th century demographic history of the Chechens, able summarized in Asya Pereltsvaig's Geocurrents post.

During World War II, some Chechen separatists saw an opportunity to escape Russian domination by siding with the fast-approaching Nazis, who pushed into the North Caucasus in November 1942, attracted by the rich oil fields near Baku (see map on the left). Under that slight pretext, Stalin ordered virtually the entire Chechen population to be herded up and shipped by train to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Siberia on February 23, 1944. Up to 40% of the Chechen nation perished in the process, according to Stanford historian Norman M. Naimark. Houses of the exiled Chechens were offered to refugees from the war-ravaged western regions of USSR. But Stalin sought not only to move the Chechens away from the area of potential German conquest, but to destroy their ethnic identity. Chechen gravestones and cultural monuments were demolished; whole villages were deleted from maps and encyclopedias. In 1956, during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program, those Chechens who had not perished during their harsh 13-year exile were “rehabilitated” and permitted to return back to their homeland. Nonetheless, the survivors of the exile lost economic resources and civil rights. They have also continued to suffer from discrimination, both official and unofficial, and have endured years of discriminatory public discourse.

[. . .]

In the ensuing First Chechen War, the Russian air force and artillery hammered Chechen cities, particularly the capital of Grozny, which is now considered “the most destroyed city in the world”. Hundreds of thousands of Chechen refugees were driven out of Chechnya and into other parts of the Caucasus, particularly Ingushetia and Dagestan (where the younger of the Boston bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, attended school). Others went further afield, to the United States, Europe, or Central Asia, where Chechen communities remained since the exile ordered by Stalin. In the meantime, rebel forces in Chechnya retreated to the mountains, resorting to guerrilla warfare and terrorist attacks. Using tactics similar to those developed by the mujahideen in Afghanistan, rebels wore down the Russian troops; alcohol, drugs, and terror also took a heavy toll on the Russian military enterprise. Russian forces responded by fighting not only the armed rebels but also by inflicting destruction and rape on the peaceful Chechen population. As Russian casualties mounted, public opinion turned against the war. Russia agreed to a ceasefire in 1995, but since the political issues underlying the conflict were not resolved, violence soon resumed. After Dudayev was killed by two laser-guided missiles fired by a Russian aircraft, a new ceasefire agreement was brokered in 1996, calling for withdrawal of Russian forces and a political resolution in 2001.

[. . .]

Initially, the Second Chechen War went better for Moscow than did the First Chechen War. Russia launched massive and indiscriminate air strikes, forcing as many as 400,000 Chechens to flee. However, Moscow quickly became trapped again in an Afghan-style quagmire, while international condemnation mounted. Chechen president Maskhadov made several abortive attempts to cut a deal with the Russians, but found himself dismissed by Moscow and increasingly ignored by his own compatriots. He fled Grozny in 1999, as violence continued to escalate on both sides (eventually, Maskhadov was killed by Russian special forces in March 2005). He was replaced by a Chechen cleric Akhmad Kadyrov, who broke with the anti-Russian resistance movement, in part over its increasing religious radicalism, and began working with Russian authorities. After prolonged and bitter resistance, the Russians finally recaptured Grozny in early 2000, though the insurgency phase continued throughout the 2000s.

Born in a family of mixed ethnicity (Chechen father, Avar mother) in the eastern North Caucasus, moving at an earlier age to Kyrgyzstan an eventually to the United States, maintaining close connections to their homeland, the Tsarnaev brothers represent extremes in many ways. For starters, very few ethnic Chechens live in the United States--the number is approximately two hundred or so. (Most of the Chechens in the United States do live in the Boston area.) The Chechen diaspora, large and growing after the past century of genocides and wars, is concentrated in Eurasia: in Central Asia, particularly Kazakhstan but also Kyrgyzstan, where Chechens were deported in the Second World War and where substantial Chechen communities remain; in the remainder of the Russian Federation, where Chechens have travelled in major cities in the hope for a better life; in Turkey, where substantial Chechen migration dates to the 19th century expulsions of Muslims from the Russian North Caucasus; and, in western Europe. More notably, the Tsarnaev brothers stand out among the Chechen diaspora as the first Chechens to commit a terrorist act outside of Russia, the 1996 hijacking of a Russia-Turkey feerry aside. Olivier Roy (at The New Republic) and Anne Applebaum (at Slate) are probably right to classify the Tsarnaev brothers' alleged bombing as product of the alienation of first-generation immigrant children from their adopted homeland, not some sort of transnational network.

(I made two links posts on the subject Saturday, one of links to interesting blog posts and one of noteworthy news articles.)

Chechnya does stand out in the Russian Federation for any number of factors, of which--as described by Saidova and Zemlyanova the still-high Chechen fertility rate is a notable factor. Despite the terrible casualties of a decade of war, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, Chechnya has one of the highest fertility rates of any unit in the former Soviet Union.

In the last few years after the socioeconomic situation stabilized and population of the Chechen republic returned to peaceful life favorable development trends of demographic situation are being formed with positive factors of natural increase of population and increase in population number.

From the moment when collection of official demographic statistics was resumed in the republic in 2003 the following population dynamics is traced: as to January, 1 in 2004 number of population was 1121 thousands, and by January, 1 in 2009 it increased up to 9.5% and was 1238 thousands. Total fertility rate (TFR) in Chechen republic exceeds the replacement level. In 2008 it was 3.40 per woman at the age of 15- 49. For comparison, in the same year TFR in neighboring Republic of Dagestan was 1.95, in Republic of Ingushetia it was 1.96, in the whole South Federal District it was 1.67 and in the whole Russian Federation it was 1.49.

This does fit into a general trend, outlined by Judyth Twigg's December 2005 analysis, of Muslims in the Russian Federation evidencing higher fertility rates than non-Muslims. However, Valery Dzutsev's November 2010 Eurasia Daily Monitor analysis makes the point that there are good reasons to doubt the validity of the census data, particularly in the context of extremes.

Many experts have expressed doubts about sudden population increases in the North Caucasian republics over the past 10 years. For instance, Ingushetia’s population officially increased from just under 190,000 in 1990 to a whopping more than 455,000 in 2002 and 516,000 in 2010. Chechnya’s population, following two devastating wars that displaced hundreds of thousands people and virtually eliminated the large ethnic Russian minority in the republic, also increased from 1.1 million in the 1990 to an estimated nearly 1.3 million in 2010, according to the official statistics (www.gks.ru, accessed on November 14).

[. . .]

The demographics of Chechnya are a politically sensitive topic, as the population of the republic was significantly reduced by the two wars and the accompanying destruction of its cities and villages in the 1990’s and again in the 2000’s. Because Ingushetia and Chechnya formed a single administrative entity until the disbandment of the USSR, Ingushetia’s population also had to be manipulated to cover up the real losses among the locals.

The prominent North Ossetian sociologist Aleksandr Dzadziev estimated that Chechnya lost at least 455,000 of its prewar population from 1989-2002, as a result of both migration and casualties. Just before the 2002 census, estimates of Chechnya’s population varied significantly, from 650,000 by the Russian statistical committee to 850,000 by the pro-Moscow Chechen government and Dzadziev’s own estimate of 820,000, all of them much lower than the officially announced results of the 2002 census –1.1 million people (http://www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/analyticstext/analytics/id/765541.html).

It is understandable why both Moscow and its puppet regime in Grozny were interested in exaggerating the population numbers for Chechnya in 2002. Moscow wanted to show there were not too many casualties and that the refugees had returned to Chechnya, while the local authorities wanted to receive more funds and thus needed a higher population to justify their demands. However, it is less clear as to why other North Caucasian republics overstated their populations in the 2002 census. Dagestan’s official population was put at 2.6 million, while according to the year-to-year estimates of the Russian statistical service and Dzadziev’s own estimates it should have been only about 2.2 million. The expected population of Ingushetia in 2002 was 430,000, but came out as 469,000. The expected population figure for Kabardino-Balkaria was about 780,000, but it jumped to over 900,000.

The official explanation for the rapidly increasing populations of the North Caucasian republics is that they have higher birthrates. This is especially applicable to Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia. Still, it is doubtful that the people of Chechnya possess the highest fertility rate in Russia –one that is at the same level or exceeds Saudi Arabia’s and Iraq’s fertility rates.

Migration from Chechnya has occurred on a large scale owing to reasons of war and political oppression, but out-migration is a major theme of the North Caucasian Federal District generally, the only one of Russia's eight federal districts to have a non-Russian majority. (Two-thirds of the North Caucasian Federal District's population is non-Russian, a proportion that would rise if the largely Slavic Stavropol Krai was excluded.) The North Caucasus is a poor region, but young, and Russian government plans for the economic development of the North Caucasus seek to encourage migration to regions elsewhere in Russia.

Demographics of the North Caucasus Federal District differ from that of Russia in general. Now the demographic situation in the region is stable to the increase of birth and decrease of death rate, as well as mass migration to the region. The population of the region increased from 1990 to 2009 by 1.68 million people and is now 13.437 million people. In the year 2009 the natural increase of the population in the North Caucasus Federal District was 75.6 thousand people.
[. . . ]

The birth rate in the North Caucasus Federal District is the highest in the Russian Federation. Especially high is the birth rate in Chechnya (29 new-born children per 1000 residents) and Dagestan (19 new-born children per 1000 residents). That is why the percentage of the young people in the North Caucasus Federal District is higher than in other regions of the Federation. Especially high is the percentage of the youth in such subjects of the Federation as Chechnya (32.9%), Ingushetia (28.9%), and Dagestan (25.4%).

[. . . ]

The level of urbanization is rather low due to the traditional agricultural specialization of the region. The percentage of rural population in 2009 was 51.2%, in 2010 51.1% (in Russia this number is 26.9), that means that 4729.1 thousand people live in rural area. In the Republic of Dagestan, in the Republic of Ingushetia, and in the Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia the percentage of the rural population is 56 – 57%. In the Chechen Republic the figure is 64.7 percent. The infrastructure in the rural areas is rather poor and that prevents labour migration and determines low quality of life of the local residents.

The forces migration is another acute problem. Various ethnic and international conflicts force people to migrate to other regions of the Federation. In 2008 population loss due to migration formed 11.9 thousand people. In Dagestan this figure was 9.8 thousand people, in Kabardino-Balkaria 2.9 thousand, in North Ossetia 2.7 thousand, in Karachay-Cherkessia 1.9 thousand, and in the Chechen Republic 1 thousand people. Population increase due to migration was registered in Stavropol Territory.

The problem of migration is to be solved by the Federal Center together with local authorities. This will require a series of political, social, economic and cultural measures. The average annual labour migration from the region to the other regions of Russia should be on the level of 30 – 40 thousand people. This will stabilize the demographic situation in the region and lower unemployment level.

One third of the population of the North Caucasus Federal District is young people. This means that the Government should adopt a sufficient youth policy. Such a policy should focus on the development of youth organizations, trade union and labour market. The Federal Government together with local authorities should support young entrepreneurs and young families, support education and healthcare system, popularize sports and national traditions of the Caucasian people, and tolerance.

The Danish Immigration Service's 2011 report on Chechens in Russia outlines the various pressures on Chechens to migrate from their homeland, and the legal and other problems that they encounter elsewhere in the Russian Federation. Anti-Chechen discrimination and violence, often state-sponsored, is quite common. All this occurs in the context of what is described, in the 2007 paper of Vendina et al, as the "demographic diversification of the North Caucasus, as Russian and other Slavic populations decrease in number while the largely Muslim populations of nationalities indigenous to the North Caucasus grow.

More on the non-occurrence of a Chinese Russian Far East

The fate of the Russian Far East, the easternmost region and federal district of Russia with a land area of 6.2 million square kilometres and a fast-dropping population of 6.3 million as of the 2010 census, is something people have speculated about for some time. We've talked about it, too. Co-blogger Claus Vistesen noted in 2006 the scale of the population shrinkage in the region, product of natural decrease and of mass migration to points elsehwere in Russia. Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig noted in an April 2012 post the extreme case of Magadan Oblast, where the population has fallen by two-thirds since 1989, but by and large significant population shrinkage and aging is a fact.

The supposed threat of a Chinese takeover of the region has been in the air for a century. I don't think it's going to happen. I wrote in September 2009 and again in January 2010 that the evidence just didn't suggest that there was any substantial Chinese migration to the Russian Far East, the most economically marginal area of a Russia that doesn't rank highly for Chinese migrants who want to take the expense to leave their country. I mentioned in August 2010 that there was in fact a long history of Russian immigration to northeastern China continuing even into the present day, and that a northeastern China that was fast surpassing the Russian Far East might become an important destination for people seeking to leave a declining periphery of Russia. Even the relative excess of marriage-age women in Russia contrasted to a surplus of marriage-age men in China isn't likely to propel cross-borer migration: in April of last year I linked to anotherpost by Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig that made the point that, in fact sex ratios in Asian Russia generally are relatively balanced and any Chinese migration to relatively attractive areas in Russia would be directed towards European Russia.

Just last month, writing for Open Democracy Ben Judah produced an article, "Why Russia is not losing Siberia", that reinforces this. He travelled to Birobidzhan, capital of the fabled Jewish Autonomous Oblast hard by the Chinese border, to see how many Chinese were around. For a population supposedly on the verge of taking over a vast territory, the Chinese of the Russian Far East are astonishingly scarce.

Birobidzhan was supposed to be Soviet homeland for the Jews. That obviously failed. But as I researched where to focus my trip, the legendary Chinese settlement of Siberian Birobidzhan kept coming up. It was the Russian province with the highest percentage of Chinese settlement, having leased out 14 per cent of its arable land to Asian farmers. It was together with Khabarovsk region the province that has leased over 7,500 square kilometres for Chinese agriculture. I decided to go – and find out if this area the size of New Jersey was the beginning of the ‘loss of Siberia’ or in the grand scheme of things not very much of Siberia at all.

Experts in both Moscow and Beijing agree there are around 500,000 Chinese in Russia and that most of them live in the capital and St. Petersburg. What is so surprising travelling in the Russian Far East, is that this actually appears to be the case. There are quite simply very few Chinese in the cities of Birobidzhan, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. There are no large ‘China-towns’ and local officials and locals say the numbers have been falling for years.

At first glance in Birobidzhan there appear to be more Jews than Chinese i.e. virtually none in the poor and sinister city where the streets are named after Yiddish poets and official buildings are capped with rusting Hebrew lettering. Locals mock the fears of those in Moscow. The number of Chinese peddlers has been falling for years, as Chinese wholesalers put them out of business. Even in the market the Chinese were absent. ‘Why would rich people like the Chinese work in a market?’ asked one confused Kyrgyz crockery vendor when I asked where they were hiding, ‘The Chinese are the big bosses that do the wholesaling or own the stalls. They don’t get their hands dirty.’

The real striking migration flow was like elsewhere in Russia – Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia. In Birobidzhan, as in Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, there are large numbers of Azeri immigrants, followed by huge amounts of dirt poor Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz. They far outnumber any Chinese in these cities. The most powerful families in Birobidzhan were Azeri immigrants that seemed to have sewn up local politics, food processing, the taxi business and even the local prosecutor’s office.

[. . .]

Locals claimed no Slavs tilled the land any more. Yet independent Chinese settler-farmers had since the mid-2000s also practically gone extinct. The only one who I found (‘Andrei’) in this unhappy outback told me had reached the end of the line. ‘It’s simply too hard here,’ he said in his hut. ‘Life has improved in China and there are now better opportunities there. I’m going back. China got richer, but Russia got nowhere.’ The only people he employed were half-illiterate Russian girls from the village. ‘Chinese workers are too expensive. There are better jobs in China,’ he moaned.

In the far south of Birobidzhan there is some evidence of Chinese land leasing as almost all the fields are electric green from soya and tilled by Chinese migrants. Yet these are not settlers but contract workers living in barracks with no desire to remain in Russia. Instead of working long-term for remittances, they usually do two-three stints in a barracks to save up to start their own business in China and then never come back. They are forbidden to move freely by the companies and frightened of stabbings, hostile drunks and pretty much all Russians.

The director of one of these Chinese agricultural companies operating in southern Birobidzhan explained to me that he was finding it increasingly difficult to recruit enough workers to come to Russia. He estimated there were barely 6,000 in the region and the numbers were falling. ‘To be honest life in China is better than it is in Russia these days,’ he explained. ‘As Chinese wages rise, I am going to start having a serious problem getting these people to come to Russia.’

Judah, I think, is right in tracing the fears of a Chinese takeover of large parts of Russia to fears of a fatal weakness in Russia, to concerns that are fundamentally irrational and/or don't speak to what's actually going on.

A few population-related news links

This evening, I thought I'd share a few interesting population-related news links I've collected in the past couple of weeks.

* The Discover Magazine blog 80 Beats summarized a recent study of young game-playing children in Beijing suggesting that these children are less trusting and more risk-averse than one might expect.

* On a perhaps-related note, an article in the latest issue of The National Interest by John Lee examines at length the consequences of China's rapid aging on its economic model, among other things.

* An article in The Guardian contrasting a relatively prosperous Chinese northeast with a stagnant Russian Far East makes the point that Russia need not fear millions of Chinese crossing their country's northern frontier. What incentives would there be for them to leave?

* The Taipei Times covered a recent statement by the head of the South Korean central bank calling for more immigration to ameliorate the effects of population aging.

* An Inter Press Service article notes that rising life expectancy for Japanese women is, unfortunately, being accompanied by falling incomes.

* The Population Reference Bureau's Behind the Numbers blog notes that birth rates have continued to decline throughout India.

* In Canada, a recent article in The Globe and Mail notes that there's an east-to-west income gradient for immigrants in Canada, immigrants in Québec enjoying substantially lower wages than their counterparts in Ontario who in turn earn less than their counterparts in western Canada.

* In the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia, meanwhile, the provincial government is trying to boost its attractiveness to immigrants in the face of declining immigrant numbers and a local population tending to decrease.

* In Europe, the Portuguese-American Journal notes that statistics indicate that more than one million Portuguese have left the country in the past fourteen years. This sort of emigration, which if anything seems to be accelerating, has obvious consequences.

* In the nearby Spanish region of Galicia, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Swissinfo takes a look, in the article "From Galicia to the Jura", at one community in Galicia that has been marked by emigration to Switzerland as a natural life stage for a half-century. (Likewise, emigration isn't slowing down.)

* A New York Times article profiles the Chinese of Barcelona, who have apparently so far resisted the effects of the Eurozone recession well.

The latest on emigration from Georgia

Back in August 2008, immediately after the South Ossetia War, I wrote at length about Georgia's demographic situation. Briefly put, with a relatively long history of below-replacement fertility, a recent tradition of mass emigration, and continuing political instability and economic underdevelopment, there were good reasons to be concerned for the future of the Georgian labour force.

Things haven't gotten better. A pair of articles by writer Mari Nikuradze, hosted at Democracy and Freedom Watch, reports on to the continuing large scale of emigration from Georgia. First comes the alarmingly-titled article "A quarter of Georgia’s population are missing", which also notes that Georgians continue to have trouble in getting visas to European Union member-states.

23 per cent of Georgia’s population is away from the country, 80 per cent of which are illegal labor migrants and sole bread-winners.

These are some of the findings in a new report made by Liberal Academy Tbilisi, called Visa Facilitation and Readmission: Visa Liberalization Prospects for Georgia.

The report also shows that Georgians have the most trouble with getting a visa to Europe, compared to other countries in the same region. The fraction of rejected visa applications was 17.2 and 15.1 per cent in 2009 and 2010, respectively. These numbers are higher than for Armenia with 10.8, Moldova with 6.9, Ukraine 3.4, Azerbaijan 5.0, Belarus 0.6 and Russia 1.2 per cent in 2010.

The presentation referred to, Visa Facilitation and Readmission: Visa Liberalization Prospects for Georgia, is available here. Tamara Pataraia's October 2011 policy brief suggests that Georgia still has a long way to go to demonstrate to the European Union that it would be a worthy partner.

"Nani is one of Georgia’s missing 23 %", meanwhile, takes a look at the life experiences of a single migrant.

Nani (48) left Georgia about 17 years ago to work in Italy and send money to her family. She’s from Samtredia, a small town in Western Georgia. Her husband works at a local theater, earning a small salary. Her daughter goes to school, while her son is getting higher education in Kutaisi, Georgia’s second largest city.

When Nani’s family was on the edge of hunger, she decided to leave. She tells DF Watch that at first she arrived in Italy illegally, because it was too expensive to get there with all necessary documents and procedures. For several years she gathered all necessary documents and saved money, and for now she’s a citizen of Italy.

Nani works as a servant for big Italian family. Her responsibilities are to clean the house, help with the cooking and look after two children. The family is quite rich and pays her a good salary.

“It’s enough for my living here and I’m sending money to my family in Samtredia. I’m also paying for my son’s education. Higher education isn’t free in Georgia, you know.”

She manages to come to Georgia once a year, during holidays.

“I know it’s not enough, but when I remember our being when I was living there I assure myself that it’s better to be here and help my family from here.”

She sends presents for birthday and clothes for her daughter when school starts in autumn.

Nani says she’s not planning to come back yet, as she is sure she won’t be able to find a proper job.

“Until I’m healthy and capable of work and do what I do here, I’ll stay. But then children will grow up, have their jobs and it will be easier to come,” she says, adding that she would like to spend her old age in her hometown with her grandchildren.

[. . .] According to the World Bank, net migration, which is the difference between emigration and immigration in a year, is always negative. In 1992-1996 it was -544 069; in 1997-2001 the numbers were equal to -390.036; in 2002-2006 -309.021 and in 2007-2011 number decreased to -150.000.

According to the International Organization for Migration, the Georgia’s indicator for emigration of is one of the highest in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and in the group of countries, which recently joined EU.

1 058.3 thousand people are in emigration in 2009, according to World Bank data. 644 390 of this number are in Russia, which is on the top of ten countries, where Georgian emigrants go. Then it is followed by Armenia, where there are 75 792 emigrated; Ukraine – 72 410, Greece 41 817 and Israel – 26 032.

Among EU countries, Greece is on the top of the list, followed by Germany, Cyprus, Spain and Latvia.

A brief article from The Messenger Online reports $US 108 million in remittances over the last three months: "The largest amount transferred comes from Russia, at $56 million USD, followed by Greece with $12 million, Italy with $10 million, and the US with $7 million."

Some further notes.

1. The continued large scale of emigration from Georgia has implications for the long-term economic development of the country. If a high proportion of the work force is working outside the country, economic development will be problematic.

2. The presence of large Georgian migrant communities in countries like Ukraine, but also Latvia, which are themselves sources of very large numbers of migrants may indicate both the survival of Soviet-era connections and Georgia's desperate state.

3. The continued concentration of Georgian emigrants in Russia, despite strongly negative Russian-Georgian relations, is outstanding. The number of labour migrants in European Union countries might be understated owing to illegal immigrants entering despite visa restrictions, but the same factors might also be in play in Russia.

4. The location of the largest Georgian migrant community inside the European Union in Greece signals Georgia's vulnerability to the Greek economic crisis.