On the upcoming ethnic cleansing of supposed Haitians from the Dominican Republic

Haiti has been mentioned here at Demography Matters a few times. In January 2010 after the devastating earthquake, for instance, I described the evolution and prospects of the substantial Haitian diaspora and also explained why a quixotic offer by the Senegalese president to resettle Haitians in Africa was not likely to lead anywhere, June 2010 mentioning that French-using Haiti was major source of immigrants to Québec and then in December 2011 noting how a migration of Haitian professionals to post-colonial Congo in the 1960s seems to have been the key movement that introduced HIV/AIDS to the Atlantic world. The Dominican Republic has come up more rarely, in 2006 and in 2009 being mentioned as a Caribbean Hispanophone society that has consistently seen more rapid population growth than once-dominant Cuba. As far as I can tell, the long and entangled history that has led, via migration from low-income Haiti to the middle-income Dominican Republic, to a population of Haitian origin in the latter country amounting well over a million people has never come up here.

It's coming up now. As The Guardian's Sibylla Brodzinsky reports, a new citizenship law is set to strip hundreds of thousands of these people of their citizenship in Dominican Republic, rendering them liable to deportation from the land of their birth and statelessness.

[Yesenia Originé] was born in the Dominican city of San Pedro de Macorís to Haitian parents. But because she has no papers to prove it, she, like thousands of other people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, risks being rounded up and deported to the neighboring country.

Many people in Originé’s situation are fearing the worst ahead of the Wednesday deadline for an estimated 500,000 undocumented persons living in the Dominican Republic to register with government authorities. The country’s authorities have reportedly lined up a fleet of buses and established processing centers on the border with Haiti, prompting widespread fears of mass roundups of Dominicans of Haitian descent.

“If they send me there, I don’t know what I’ll do,” says 22-year-old Originé who lives in a batey – a company town for sugarcane workers – in the south-west of the Dominican Republic.

A 2013 court ruling stripped children of Haitian migrants their citizenship retroactively to 1930, leaving tens of thousands of Dominican-born people of Haitian descent stateless. International outrage over the ruling led the Dominican government to pass a law last year that allows people born to undocumented foreign parents, whose birth was never registered in the Dominican Republic, to request residency permits as foreigners. After two years they can apply for naturalisation.

However many have actively resisted registering as foreigners because they say they are Dominican by birth and deserve all the rights that come with it – for example a naturalised citizen cannot run for high office.

Abby Philipp at the Washington Post went into more detail about the racism motivating this denationalization. Following the once Spanish Dominican Republic's separation from formerly French Haiti, the young republic set out to define its national identity in direct contrast to that of its neighbour. This meant, among other things, strong anti-black and anti-Haitian racism that culminated at least in the 20th century in an act of genocide.

There was a time when that split between the two countries was drawn with blood; the 1937 Parsley Massacre is widely regarded as a turning point in Haitian-Dominican relations. The slaughter, carried out by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, targeted Haitians along with Dominicans who looked dark enough to be Haitian -- or whose inability to roll the "r" in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, gave them away.

The Dajabón River, which serves as the northernmost part of the international border between the two countries, had "risen to new heights on blood alone," wrote Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat.

"The massacre cemented Haitians into a long-term subversive outsider incompatible with what it means to be Dominicans," according to Border of Lights, an organization that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the massacre in 2012.
[. . .]
Cassandre Theano, a legal officer at the New York-based Open Society Foundations, said the comparisons between the Dominican government's actions and the denationalization of Jews in Nazi Germany are justified.

"We've called it as such because there are definitely linkages," she told The Washington Post this week. "You don't want to look a few years back and say, 'This is what was happening and I didn't call it.' "

Julia Harrington Ready, also of the Open Society Foundations, is right to call this ethnic cleansing.

The potential consequences of this for the two nations of Hispaniola, and for the wider region, cannot be understated. Even if this population at risk of mass deportation actually was Haitian, even five years after the earthquake Haiti is in no position to handle hundreds of thousands of deportees. For the Dominican Republic, meanwhile, I would be willing to bet that whatever nationalists might think they would gain in terms of a homeland rid of these people will be outweighed by the actual losses experienced. (Getting rid of large chunks of your workforce generally does not do good things for the economy.) Meanwhile, this ethnic cleansing will be certain to produce substantial numbers of people who will likely need resettlement outside of these region, just like other ethnic cleansings in the recent past.

This is not good. This is really not good at all. Be alarmed, readers. Maybe we can do something to prevent this catastrophe.

On Jollibee, the Philippines, and diaspora economics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[. . .]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 how the Irish find jobs in Toronto

The Irish diaspora is continuing to expand, as tens of thousands of Irish leave the Republic in the wake of the ongoing economic troubles. (I'm unaware of any specific trends regarding Northern Ireland; leave links here if you'd like.)

Canada is taking on greater importance. An Irish Times blog post claims that three-quarters of Irish emigrants in 2011 went to the United Kingdom, Australia, and the remainder of the European Union, each destination accounting for roughly a quarter of the emigrants, with Canada and the United States each accounting for roughly a tenth. A more recent article suggests that Canada is starting to catch up to Australia, with news items like the February Irish Examiner article claiming that 6350 Canadian work visas were snapped up at a job fair over just four days and ention being made of the labour-hungry economy of Alberta.

Ontario, and the Toronto where I live, are also destinations. Back in November, I blogged about a Toronto Life article detailing how Gaelic football and real Irish pubs played critical roles in connecting Irish migrants to jobs. Two recent articles in the Toronto press highlight these interesting contingent mechanisms. The Torontoist post "An Irish Sport Gains Popularity in Toronto", by Sarah-Joyce Battersby, highlights Gaelic football.

[W]ith a new wave of Irish immigrants coming to find work in Canada, the sport has taken on a special role.

“The Toronto GAA has taken it on to make our best efforts to take care of people coming over,” spokesperson John Creery told us. “When you come over, the most important thing is to find work and a home. The Irish community in general is good, and they’re realy helpful, but the GAA community in particular is great for that.”

That’s how Creery got settled when he moved to Canada in 2001 from Lugan, a small town in County Armagh. Creery had been playing Gaelic football all his life. Soon after moving to Toronto, he met a team coach. “When he heard my accent he wanted me to come play for him,” said Creery.

Most of Creery’s friends are people he met through the Gaelic football community. And he said people involved in the sport look out for one another, helping new recruits find out about job prospects, apartments, and the Canadian way of life.

The support is helpful not only to the players, but also to their families in Ireland. “This way,” Creery said, “families back home know their loved one is being welcomed and taken care of, and has someone here to look in on them.”

St. Patrick's Day was Sunday. On that day, Toronto Star writer Antonia Zerbisias described how the parade provided a venue for meet-up groups, if not immediately a job.

Damien Lenihan could use some of that mythical luck of the Irish.

The 33 year old Dublin native, who came to Toronto last September, is looking for work — and a future in Canada.

“Every time I ring home, everyone says ‘Don’t come back, things are really bad, you’re not missing anything,’ ” he says. “Everyone seems really depressed.”

On Sunday, he shivered in a light leather jacket and hoodie as Toronto’s 26th St. Patrick’s Day passed on Queen St. W. Lenihan recognized Mayor Rob Ford, and seemed to approve of the floats and bands. But he spent most of the parade asking questions about jobs and life in Canada.

[. . .]

Still, as cold as it was on Sunday, Lenihan was basking in the warmth of a new group of friends, thanks to a meet-up organized online by the Irish Association of Toronto.

“It’s like they’re strangers in a strange land, and they’re coming in the hundreds and thousands because the economy is so awful there,” explains Leah Morrigan, a proud holder of dual citizenship and the association’s vice-president. “This is good fun because a lot of the Irish don’t have anybody to latch on to. We like to be a bit of a welcoming committee for them.”

I'm fascinated by these contingencies that help determine the direction and eventual success (or failure) of individuals' efforts at making a success of migration. These individual stories determine are hardly unique to Irish migrants to Toronto; they undergird every migration story.

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.

Some population-related links

Over the past couple of months, I've collected links to blog posts on population-related issues. I present them here to you.

• In an extended essay at Geocurrents, Martin Lewis describes "The Many Armenian Diasporas, Then and Now". The most recent diasporas, first a mass migration from Anatolia after the Armenian genocide then economic migration from post-Soviet Armenia in the 1990s, were products of war. Earlier Armenian diasporas, however, were triggered by positive incentives to migrate, establishing mercantile networks stretching from central Europe to South Asia.


• After a half-century or so, Brazil is starting to become a noteworthy destination for immigrants, rather than a source. Jim Russell at Burgh Diaspora concentrates on one element of this, in the growing attractiveness of São Paulo to New Yorkers looking for the next global city.


• Patrick Metzger at the Toronto-centered blog Torontoist reacts to findings from the 2011 Canadian census revealing that Alberta's population has been growing significantly faster than Ontario, and that for the first time, more Canadians outside of Ontario live west of the province than east (in Québec and Atlantic Canada). To what extent is this shift product of Albertan growth as opposed to Ontarian decline? The debate's ongoing.


• Another post at Geocurrents notes the recent acceleration in population growth in Saskatchewan, perhaps connected with new energy developments. Will rapid population growth shift that Canadian province's traditionally left-wing political culture?


• At Crooked Timber, Maria Farrell's thoughtful personal essay "Things I have learnt from and about IVF" describes her own experiences with assisted reproduction.


• Two posts at Eastern approaches, the Economist's central and eastern Europe blog, deal with ethnic tensions in the Baltic States complicated by transnational ties. The first, on the recent referendum in Latvia on giving Russian official status, describes the polarization in Latvian society on ethnolinguistic lines that acts as a significant complication. The second, on growing Polish-Lithuanian tensions over Lithuania's Polish minority, makes the point that despite the two countries' shared history ion Poland-Lithuania they perceive this history in different ways. Rapid population aging and shrinkage in Lithuania, too, may--as commenters point out--encourage more of a siege mentality.


• A Victor Mair post at Language Log explores tensions in Hong Kong between Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese, often recent migrants to the autonomous city-state, with the two different populations being marked by the literal shibboleth of dialect: Cantonese-speaking Hong Kongers versus Putongua-speaking Chinese. Interesting and worrying stuff.

On arrival cities

Tonight, I was lucky enough to see Canadian journalist Doug Saunders present his new book Arrival City here in Toronto. This book, examining the global phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration--in low-, middle-, and high-income countries, within countries and between countries--makes the case, as summarized by Mark Kingwell in his recent review, that rural-to-urban migration is a very good thing for human beings.

In the terms of economics, cities are full of externalities – spillovers to market transactions. I might hate the noise created by the cafés and bars on the busy street near my house, but I welcome the romantic opportunities created by the very same nightspots.

Both positive and negative externalities are everywhere in urban life, and that’s one clear reason humans have been, for centuries now, progressively abandoning other ways of life and migrating to large, sometimes very large, conurbations.

Another reason, as Doug Saunders argues in this timely contribution to the discourse on global cities, is the simple desire of parents to offer their children a better time than they had.

Indeed, Saunders argues the cultivation of what he calls arrival cities--places where immigrants can find niches, residential, occupational, and otherwise, with as few restraints on all kinds of mobility as possible--is key. What is the arrival city?

The arrival city can be distinguished readily from other urban neighbourhoods, not only by its rural-immigrant population, improvised appearance and ever-changing nature, but also by the constant linkages it makes, in two directions, from every street, house and workplace.

It is linked in a lasting, intensive way to its far-off, originating villages, constantly sending people, money and knowledge back and forth. It finances improvements in the village, the care of older generations and the education of younger ones, while also making possible the next wave of migrations.

It is also deeply engaged with the nearby, established city. Its political institutions, business relationships, social networks and transactions are all footholds intended to give new village arrivals a purchase, however fragile, on the larger society.

The arrival city gives them a place to push themselves and their children further into the centre, into acceptability and connectedness.

The ex-villager enclave located on the periphery of our vision and beyond the tourist maps has become the setting of the world's next chapter – driven by exertion and promise, battered by violence and death, strangled by neglect and misunderstanding.

The first chapter is excerpted here; you'll have to buy the book for more. The concept of the arrival city does strike me as a very strong one. My own biography has connections of a sort to the concept of the arrival city: my parents left easternmost Prince Edward Island for the provincial capital of Charlottetown, where they enjoyed far more educational and occupational and other opportunities that their would have in their home district, settling in a suburb on the fringes of the city. That was an example of a well-regulated arrival city in a high-income countries; a century ago in Toronto, up to one-third of the housing stock was built pell-mell, shantytowns mostly on the fringes of the city. And in the metropoli of the world--Paris, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Mumbai--the same phenomenon that hit Toronto a century ago is being repeated now.

Saunders' key element for successful arrival cities lies in their openness, in their ability to let immigrants join the labour market, find homes and neighbourhoods where they can build useful social networks, assimilate however they do into the host culture, and do so with as little hindrances as possible. China's hukou system, which limits the possibility of rural migrants' settling in cities, is an example of what not to do (although the forced savings of isolated workers plays the useful role of providing the Chinese government with the money necessary to prop up state-own ed enterprises); Turkey and Brazil, which have regularized slums and are now actively trying to support the creation of civil society there, are doing much better. Even in the developed world, there are huge contrasts between a Germany that has let its Turkish population remain culturally and socially isolated, a France that has absorbed its immigrants culturally but left them on the edges of the economy and society, a Spain that had the luxury of planning the integration of its immigrants, and a Canada that was very very lucky.

I'm going on at length, I know. Suffice it to say that Arrival City is easily one of the more important books on migration recently published, and that this blog's readers would do well to pick up a copy for themselves.

A few links

Hi, everyone! My apologies for taking this much time off. While I generate some actual content, here's a few links for you to peruse!

The Toronto Star reports that many displaced people from Port-au-Prince have found refuge in Haiti's smaller towns and cities.

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin reproduces economist Paul Romer's argument that Haitians should be helped by letting them immigrate to countries where they will able to prosper, instead of forcing them to stay in their impoverished country while hoping for massive political and economic improvements that may well not come.

Elliott Abrams makes a similar argument in the Washington Post, arguing that a much larger Haitian diaspora would be able to send more remittances back to Haiti, thus helping the Haitian economy.

The Inter Press Service reports that high rates of poverty have made most of Nicaragua's young want to emigrate, joing a diaspora amounting to 13% of Nicaragua's 5.5 million.

Yabiladi.com reports that a tenth of Italy's foreigners are Moroccan.

The New Straits Times's Chi Mei Ling writes about the vast improvements in opportunities that migrants to richer countries could enjoy, and argues that some countries--Malaysia is specifically raised--could do a better job of enabling this improvement.

The New York Times takes a look at the controversial nature of daycare and the all-day school system in Germany, steps towards more equal labour-sharing within the household and greater opportunities for women, part of an effort towards boosting cohort fertility. Interestingly enough, East German women raised with the GDR's tradition of female daycare and high rates of female participation in the labour force are wondering why it took West German women so long.

Radio Australia describes a major problem facing foreign immigrants in Japan when it notes that out of one thousand nursing applicants from Indonesia and the Philippines, "30 were able to qualify for training in Japan, and of those, just five passed the national exam, giving them the right to work as nurses." Mastering the Japanese language, especially all three of its scripts, was a major problem; without the language, they couldn't get in.

In Canada's, the population of the province of Saskatchewan--recently a net exporter of immigrants--has grown as economic opportunities have improved.

The Latin American Herald Tribune notes that Chile's birth rate has fallen by more than half since 1950, from "an average of five children each in 1950 to fewer than two apiece in 2007" to a current TFR of 1.8.

The Inter Press Service's Chen Siwu and Li Yahong describe the provinces of China's "ant tribe," the well-educated young Chinese who have difficulties finding a job.

People in Mali are organizing to help and protect the sizable Malien labour diaspora in Europe, especially in France, lobbying for the regularization of this diaspora's members and helping Maliens deported back to their country.

Taiwan News notes the correspondence between Taiwanese women's low participation in Taiwan's labour force and the island nation's low cohort fertility.

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

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

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

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

Two South Korea links

I've come across two New York Times articles which explores interesting elements of Korean identity as it relates to migration.

First, Ron Nixon examines the identity issues surrounding adopted South Koreans in the United States as part of a wider phenomenon of transracial adoption and its issues: a half-million children have been adopted in the United States from outside that country. South Korea was one of the more important senders of these migrants.

[O]of the largest studies of transracial adoptions, which is to be released on Monday, [. . .] which focuses on the first generation of children adopted from South Korea, found that 78 percent of those who responded had considered themselves to be white or had wanted to be white when they were children. Sixty percent indicated their racial identity had become important by the time they were in middle school, and, as adults, nearly 61 percent said they had traveled to Korea both to learn more about the culture and to find their birth parents.

Like Ms. Young, most Korean adoptees were raised in predominantly white neighborhoods and saw few, if any, people who looked like them. The report also found that the children were teased and experienced racial discrimination, often from teachers. And only a minority of the respondents said they felt welcomed by members of their own ethnic group.

As a result, many of them have had trouble coming to terms with their racial and ethnic identities.

The report was issued by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit adoption research and policy group based in New York. Since 1953, parents in the United States have adopted more than a half-million children from other countries, the vast majority of them from orphanages in Asia, South America and, most recently, Africa. Yet the impact of such adoptions on identity has been only sporadically studied. The authors of the Donaldson Adoption Institute study said they hoped their work would guide policymakers, parents and adoption agencies in helping the current generation of children adopted from Asian countries to form healthy identities.

“So much of the research on transracial adoption has been done from the perspective of adoptive parents or adolescent children,” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the institute. “We wanted to be able to draw on the knowledge and life experience of a group of individuals who can provide insight into what we need to do better.”

The study recommends several changes in adoption practices that the institute said are important, including better support for adoptive parents and recognition that adoption grows in significance for their children from young adulthood on, and throughout adulthood.

South Korea was the first country from which Americans adopted in significant numbers. From 1953 to 2007, an estimated 160,000 South Korean children were adopted by people from other countries, most of them in the United States. They make up the largest group of transracial adoptees in the United States and, by some estimates, are 10 percent of the nation’s Korean population.

The report says that significant changes have occurred since the first generation of adopted children were brought to the United States, a time when parents were told to assimilate the children into their families without regard for their native culture.

Yet even adoptees who are exposed to their culture and have parents who discuss issues of race and discrimination say they found it difficult growing up.

Heidi Weitzman, who was adopted from Korea when she was 7 months old and who grew up in ethnically mixed neighborhoods in St. Paul, said her parents were in touch with other parents with Korean children and even offered to send her to a “culture camp” where she could learn about her heritage.

But I hated it,” said Ms. Weitzman, a mental health therapist in St. Paul. “I didn’t want to do anything that made me stand out as being Korean. Being surrounded by people who were blonds and brunets, I just thought that I was white.” It was not until she moved to New York after college that she began to become comfortable with being Korean.

“I was 21 before I could look in the mirror and not be surprised by what I saw staring back at me,” she said. “The process of discovering who I am has been a long process, and I’m still on it.”

In South Korea proper, in the meantime, Choe Sang-Hun reports on the difficulties surrounding South Korea's transition to a multicultural and multiracial environment.

On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them.

What was different this time, however, was that, once it was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

“Things got worse for me this time, because I was with a Korean woman,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview. “Whenever I’ve walked with Ms. Hahn or other Korean women, most of the time I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”

South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to take pride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skin color” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a new reality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residents has doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7 million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of its low birth rate.

Many of the foreigners come here to toil at sea or on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned by South Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannot find South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries find jobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the language from native speakers.

For most South Koreans, globalization has largely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now that it is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42 percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spoken with a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust — often uncomfortably.

Go, read.

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?