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 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.

On Kiribati and climate change and island nation migration

Kiribati, a collection of very low-lying islands in Micronesia almost absurdly vulnerable to climate change and rising sea levels has just announced how it intends to make sure its citizens can find refuge: they'll all become professionals.

In one of the most emotional sessions so far of the Copenhagen climate meeting, officials of the remote atoll nation said Wednesday they are doing everything possible to preserve their low-lying country, which faces inundation and loss of its fresh water to sea level rise.

They appealed to negotiators and world leaders at Copenhagen to reach an effective new global pact to limit carbon emissions, calling it their last hope of saving their homeland.

In Kiribati, climate change and sea level rise "are no longer a matter of speculation. They are a reality for our people," said President Anote Tong, in a videotaped address that showed footage of stands of salt-killed palm trees and waves crashing onto highways and lapping into homes.

But island officials also admitted they are making plans for an eventual "practical and rational" relocation of the atoll's 96,000 people to countries including Australia and New Zealand.

"We are proud people. We would like to relocate on merit and with dignity," said Tessie Lambourne, Kiribati's foreign secretary.

Under the plan, islanders are taking advantage of assistance programs in Australia and New Zealand to train young people as nurses and other in-demand professions. The programs allow successful graduates to remain and seek citizenship.

The hope, Lambourne said, is that the families of immigrants could eventually qualify for immigration as well.

She said she hoped similar training and migration programs would be established in other Western nations, including the United States, Canada and Japan.

"The idea is to have pockets of (Kiribati) communities around the world," she said.

Whether this ambitious plan can be actually realized or not, given the limited financial and other resources of Kiribati, is open to question, although upcoming global skills shortages and workplace shrinking will act in the island nation's favour. While the numbers involved are significantly smaller than, say, the shift of West Africans from the region's interior to the more hospitable coasts that I blogged about in June, the absolute numbers are still significant. Entire countries are vulnerable, nto only to disappearing to to first become uninhabitable.

Long-term climate change, including the increasing frequency and severity of extreme events such as heat waves, high rainfall intensity events, summer droughts, tropical cyclones, windstorms, storm surges, and El-Nino-like conditions are affecting the lives and livelihoods of people in PICs. Coupled with overexploitation of resources, increasing urbanization and population increase, the compounding effect has caused considerable and widespread damage and threatens development in the region. For the low lying atolls, the likely economic disruption could be catastrophic, even to the extent of requiring population relocation into other islands or adding numbers to the Pacific Diaspora, with the subsequent social and cultural disruption having unknown proportions. Failure to reduce vulnerability could also result in loss of opportunities to manage risks in the future when the impacts may be greater and time to consider options limited.

Today, roughly 1 million people live on coral islands worldwide, and many more millions live on low-lying real estate vulnerable to the rising waves. At risk are not just people, but unique human cultures, born and bred in watery isolation. Faced with inundation, some of these people are beginning to envision the wholesale abandonment of their nations. These islands could be rendered uninhabitable by other effects of climate change. Floods and rogue waves raise the saltwater table underlying the atolls, poisoning the staple crops of our atoll societies. Already some farmers have been forced to grow their taro in tin containers, and already some of the smaller islands in the atolls have lost their coconut palms to saltwater intrusion.

On independent Samoa's migration issues

Earlier this year, I've blogged here about the relatively huge scale of emigration from Tonga in particular and the Pacific islands in general, while over at my blog I've written about Tonga's issues and New Zealand's quotes for immigration from the fully independent states of the South Pacific islands.

Another significant current of migration exists between the independent former German/New Zealander colony of Samoa and the considerably richer American territory of American Samoa, as Samoans from the poorer independent state assimilate relatively easy into the workforce of the more prosperous American territory. Ethnic Samoan emigration generally speaking is fairly easy: Evelyn Kellen observed in her 1982 study The Western Samoan kinship bridge, as did Deborah Gough "Mobility, Tradition and Adaptation: Samoa’s Comparative Advantage in the Global Market Place", that this modern emigration fits into a long tradition of migration. Tupuola Terry Tavita, writing in the Samoan capital of Apia, warns in the article "Closing of key American Samoa cannery opens powder-keg of problems" that the closing of a cannery in American Samoa that attracts many Samoans for work could aggravate serious social tensions in independent Samoa.

Since the Second World War – and especially since the 1950s with the opening of the canneries in Pago Pago - thousands from this side of the Aleipata Strait have emigrated to the Territory. The majority from the rural areas.

Hundreds have gained permanent residence status since, hundreds more have gone over on short-term permits. Many have overstayed.

Though figures are sketchy, it is safe to assume that a sizeable portion of the 60,000 or so residents in the Territory comprise of those originally from here and their offspring, many of whom are now American Samoa nationals.

Like emigration to New Zealand, American Samoa and its canneries has served not only as a population control outlet for Samoa but also as an employment safety valve.

It has worked to our favour.

At the price of losing our ablest people, the trade-off is the millions in remittances sent over to prop up families, communities and of course, the churches in Samoa. Remittances, by the way, can also be argued to be a double-edged sword.

As many queue up at the transfer centers to receive their monthly remittance staple, the incentive to cultivate the land has become less pressing. For many families, remittances have become their main source of income.

Also, successive governments have never really had to deal with the pressing issue of finding employment for the thousands of school leavers we churn out each year.

As long as the doorway to New Zealand is relatively accessible and as long as the canneries in Pago Pago remained open and pursuing cheap labour, we could postpone the honest solving of a basic problem, in its full brunt.

And the safety valve can also be argued to be a political one.

As rural-to-urban population drift continues, he wonders, will the growing unemployed start to ask why aren't there jobs in their homeland?

Quelques liens de la francophonie (1)

English isn't the only language out there on the Internet. Other languages--French, for instance--are also present, and other languages--again, like French--feature news article and contents concerning demography, not only in France but throughout la francophonie. Here's a few of the more recent articles. If you can't read French, Google Translate will provide a serviceable translation.

• Ndeye Maty Diagne at Press Afrik reports briefly on Senegal and migration. More than 5% of the Senegalese population lives outside the country, which has become a land of emigration and a land of transit all at once.


• Slate's French-language edition features an article by Gilles Bridier examining how, in the current recession, current migration policies in the developed world are counterproductive even as immigrants experience very hard times.


• Le Monde's Bucharest correspondent Miral Bran reports on the phenomenon of Moldovans using their acquired Romanian passports to access the European Union.


• The French Pacific territory of Wallis and Futuna, the only French territory governed by tribal chiefs, is experiencing both the demographic transit and mass emigration, the latter mainly to the larger and richer New Caledonia.


• In North Africa, Amel Djait reports that Tunisia has become a popular tourist destination for Algerians, in France as well as in Algeria.


• Jeune Afrique's Abdelaziz Barrouhi examines the very difficult path for Tunisian migrants to France.

On Tonga and the Pacific islanders

Hello again!

Recently, I came across the Radio Australia report "Reassigned Tonga guest workers upset local balance". The article describes how Tonga guest-workers, while economically productive and satisfied with their own earnings, are unpopular among native-born residents of the region where they're working.

ADAMS: With harvest over, they begin pruning the almond trees. Wielding the chainsaws are Tonga men who are in Boundary Bend in Victoria on a 7-month temporary work visa.

FANGALOKA: Basically there is no work in Tonga. They don't starve. They are all big healthy boys but there is no... there's a lot of bartering. Most of the guys that have come over are subsistence farmers.

ADAMS: Alf Fangaloka's family migrated in the 1980's, looking for work. They run Tree Minders, employing the Tongans and Australians to manage the region's millions of almond trees. Mr Fangaloka says this pilot program is as much about alleviating labour shortages as it is about helping our Pacific neighbours.

FANGALOKA: Basically the average wage in Tonga would be about $AUD1.50 an hour. The GDP per capita is less than $1000 a year, so it is huge to what they earn here. During the harvest the boys were grossing $1200 to $1300 a week, so its a huge difference to them.

ADAMS: Piliu Kailahi - one of the oldest of the Tongans - smiles broadly as he reveals most of his wage is sent home.

PILIEU: The pay here is more than 8 or ten times the pay in Tonga, so we are so grateful.

ADAMS: All the men have families in Tonga - that's part of the requirement. Some have already put new rooves and extensions on their modest homes.

Emigration from the Pacific islands, especially from the islands of the Polynesia culture region in the South Pacific, is one of the major unsung movements of our time. Yes, the absolute numbers of migrants are relatively small, numberings in the tens of thousands, but relative to the population of these islands the number is huge. Low living standards and a connection to Anglophone countries, especially to New Zealand, has produced a huge diaspora. Smaller countries like Niue and Tokelau have several times as many co-ethnics living in New Zealand as in their homeland, while even in the larger nations like Tonga and Samoa emigration is a major phenomenon. Even now, New Zealand sets aside places in its immigration program for Pacific island migrants.

As I blogged back in 2004, Tongan emigration is a durable phenomenon, motivated by low standards of living, the ability to send vital remittances back to the homeland, cultural traditions of mobility, and a stagnant social and political environment. As Small and Dixon show in their 2004 Migration Information article, migration has radically changed this island nation.

The results of three decades of migration were apparent in the last Tongan census. Of Tonga's population of 97,784, almost seven of 10 Tongans now reside on the main island of Tongatapu, and practically one-quarter of the entire population lives in the capital, Nuku'alofa. Outer island areas are depopulating rapidly, leading to new government policies aimed at stemming the tide of internal population movement. Although recent population estimates suggest that migration overseas may be slowing, today half of the estimated 216,000 Tongans in the world are abroad, and almost every household has a relative resident in another country. About two in 10 of Tonga's expatriates are residents of Australia, while four out of every 10 overseas Tongans live in the US, and another four out of 10 live in New Zealand. The connections between migrants and their homeland have created a new global village of Tongans, with profound implications for their homeland.

[. . .]

Like many other Pacific island nations, Tonga has become a so-called MIRAB economy, that is, an economy dependent on migration, remittances, foreign aid, and government bureaucracy as its major sources of revenue. Despite efforts to diversify, Tonga has a limited export sector, consisting of agricultural exports including squash, fish, root crops, vanilla, and kava, and a fledging tourist industry. Since the 1960s, imports have exceeded exports, resulting in a consistent pattern of negative trade balances. In 2002, total imports to Tonga were more than six times its exports. Building materials, agricultural chemicals, fuel, and imported food (despite the fact that 65 percent of the work force is in agriculture) make up the bulk of imported items.

It is migration, along with the remittances of cash and goods from migrants who live and work overseas, that keeps the Tongan economy afloat. At the national level, remittances are the major source of foreign exchange and accounted in FY2002 for about 50 percent of GDP. At the village and household levels, remittances are an integral part of income and consumption. In addition to receiving shipping containers filled with appliances, clothing, toys, and building materials, villagers are regularly sent cash remittances from their relatives overseas. Seventy-five percent of all Tongan households report receiving remittances from overseas, making remittances the single most widespread source of income in Tonga. Remittances also comprise a sizable proportion of total household income, second only nationally to "wages and salaries" as the largest income source. At a national level, reported remittances—and there is ample evidence that much more is received than formally reported—comprise 22 percent of income derived from all cash sources, including wages, salaries, and sales of produce. In some villages, remittances account for as much as 50 percent of all household income.

As they go on to note, as doors for Tonga emigrants close and their remittances dry up, challenges to the Tonga monarchy and its monopoly on political power have grown. Where it will end up, nobody can say for certain. What can be said is that globalization in the form of migration has certain hit this supposedly idyllic South Pacific monarchy.