Reflecting on migration in China through Taiwan and Hong Kong

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

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

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

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

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

Some 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.)

"Singapore is not serious ..."

The above is the title of a post by The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer that took a look at the actual subsidies, mentioned in passing in the recent post on Singaporean population policy. Briefly, even the various financial incentives offered by the Singaporean government--heavily subsidized fertility treatments, baby bonuses and tax incentives, child care subsidies--aren't that significant relative to the costs of parenthood.

[T]he median income in Singapore is $28,800 per year. For a couple with two children, you get a one-time gift of $9,600. Then you get $5,760 for day care ... which drops in half when the child is no longer an infant. (And does not get you much unless day care is much cheaper than in the United States. Unlicensed housefront operations in Queens Licensed home operations in Upper Manhattan cost more than about $480 a month.) Our hypothetical two-income couple has an income tax liability of $2,232 (calculated using this chart from the Singaporean tax authorities) which unless I am greatly misunderstanding means that the value of the subsidy is effectively capped.

Total annual payments: a one-time first-year gift of $12,792, followed by $5,112 per year until the child enters school. Life-changing, this is not. And worse yet, if you needed fertility treatments, which most older couples do, you needed to think about the cost. (Israel does it differently.)

This is not serious.

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.

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.