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

Another links post!

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

On francophone immigration to Toronto and Ontario

Back in July 2008, as part of a long post on the gradual assimilation of most Francophone minorities in Canada outside of Québec ("Demography and culture: French Canada's fall and Québec's isolation"), I mentioned in passing the possible role on Francophone immigration in bolstering Francophone numbers. The numbers involved would of necessity have to be substantial, especially given the strong pressure for Francophone minorities in the rest of Canada to shift to English. Even so, Francophone immigration to Canada is a real and growing phenomenon, and while Québec is the obvious focus of this migration--around a hundred thousand French immigrants are in Montréal alone--it is also a reality elsewhere. Here in Toronto, as Selena Ross' article in The Globe and Mail mirrored at 24news.ca noted, this has had a significant impact on the number of French-medium schools in Toronto. As Francophones continues to immigrate to Ontario and older-established Francophones start to make use of these facilities, the numbers of students keep rising.

Despite guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, French-only schools in Toronto have historically been few and far between. For decades, a real fear for many francophones settling in Hogtown has been that they would fail to pass on their language and culture to their offspring.

A once-in-a-generation opportunity is starting to change that, and it promises a bigger cultural shift in Toronto. As enrolment in English-language schools declines, a crop of school properties is being put up for sale and the region’s two French school boards have jumped to buy. What no one predicted is the snowball effect that has followed each new school opening, drawing “invisible francophones” out of a reluctant assimilation and making new connections between them.

Lianne Doucet, a mother of three in Toronto’s Leslieville neighbourhood, laughs and lowers her voice to a spooky register. “We always say, ‘We’re all around you.’”

The cultural isolation of Toronto-area francophones – whether by mother tongue or schooling – can be so extreme that many don’t know that Section 23 of the Charter promises French-language K-12 education for their children. The Toronto area’s first French-language school board was created in 1988, and there are now two serving the region, one public and one Catholic. Still, nearly 30 years later, the secular board, the Conseil Scolaire Viamonde, must diligently advertise its schools to get the word out, superintendent Sylvie Longo said.

It has had a lot of ads to put out lately: 12 new schools in the past eight years, with four more under construction. The board’s Catholic counterpart, the Conseil Scolaire de District Catholique Centre-Sud, has opened 10 in the same time span. The two boards’ enrolment rose respectively by 33 and 16 per cent from 2008 to 2014.

That’s in sharp contrast with the shrinking English system. The Toronto District School Board’s enrolment dropped by nearly 5 per cent in the same period.

And still, French schools consistently fill up faster than predicted. École Élémentaire La Mosaïque opened in Toronto’s Danforth area in 2008 and has already had to rezone, unable to fit in all the eligible children. École Ronald-Marion in Pickering opened in 2013 and now needs portable classrooms to meet demand, while a French Catholic school in Stouffville is at full capacity and hasn’t even opened yet.

“When we build schools, they come,” Ms. Longo said.

Toronto may be one of the world’s most diverse cities, but within Canada, it’s also a bastion of English – and Quebec, a more obvious destination for francophone immigrants, is just a few hours away. Who are the tens of thousands of Toronto-area residents itching for all-French education?

Ryerson Centre for Immigration and Settlement's January 2014 report "Ontario Francophone Immigrant Profile: Immigration Trends & Labour Outcomes" (PDF format) took a look at the basic dynamics of Francophone immigration to Ontario.

From 2001 to 2012, francophone immigration nationally accounted for on average 9.9% of all immigration to Canada. Excluding Quebec, francophone immigration, on average, accounted for 4.1% of all immigrants. Francophone immigration to Canada remained stable with no average decrease or increase per year. When Quebec was removed, there was a slight decline.

[. . .]

[. . .] The average percent of francophones to Ontario (as a proportion of all immigrants) was 2.5%. This percentage ranged from a low of 1.9% in 2002/2003 to a high of 3.4% in 2010. Over the past two years, the percent francophone immigration has hovered around an average of 3.2%. There was an average growth of 0.1% per year, which is above both the national average growth (0%) and the national average growth without Quebec (-0.1%).

The provincial government has stated an interest in boosting Francophone immigrant numbers to 5% of the total. The promotion of immigration into Francophone minority communities actually has been a goal of the federal government and many provincial governments, a way to try to slow down or even reverse the language shift I described back in 2008. One factor of note in this goal, as the Ryerson report observes, is that the communities chosen by Francophone international migrants in Ontario do not necessarily correspond to the communities where Francophones currently live.

In order to gain an understanding of how francophone immigrants are contributing to existing francophone communities, a profile of francophone immigration to traditional francophone centres was constructed based on the 2011 National Household Survey. Traditional francophone centres are defined as places in Ontario with large French speaking populations relative to the total population. The CMAs [of Greater Sudbury, Hawkesbury, Ottawa-Hull, and Timmins] were chosen because they have high populations of francophones relative to the total population, ranging from 15.8% to 64.3%. In comparison, non-traditional francophone centres such as Toronto and Hamilton, which have received higher absolute numbers of francophone immigrants, only had francophone populations that accounted for 1.3 to 1.6% of the total population.

Amongst the traditional francophone centres, only Ottawa-Hull attracts a considerable proportion of francophone immigrants. Indeed, Ottawa-Hull was the second largest CMA destination for francophone migrants in Ontario. Outside of Ottawa-Hull, francophone immigrants are not settling in traditional francophone centres in Ontario but rather in traditionally-considered Anglophone cities like Toronto, Hamilton, and Windsor. Could this be part of some larger francophone movement towards non-traditional francophone centres? The latest results from the 2011 National Household Survey indicate that the answer is no. A comparison of the geographic distribution of francophones immigrants versus all francophones finds different patterns in their settlement. Shown as a per cent of the total of each group, a larger proportion (on average, 2.3%) of non-immigrant francophones reside in traditional francophone centres (such as Ottawa, Timmins, Sudbury, and Hawkesbury). Indeed, by this measure Timmins is the fourth largest francophone centre in all of Ontario.

According to this cursory NHS analysis, francophone immigrants show a spatial distribution that is consistent with the findings of this report. The largest proportion of francophone immigrants reside in Toronto followed by Ottawa and Hamilton. It is also interesting to note that a slightly larger proportion (3.5%) of francophone immigrants live in Ottawa as opposed to non-immigrant francophones.

Ottawa, it should be noted, not only is the second-largest city of Ontario by population with a Francophone population of its own both proportionately and absolutely large, but it is part of the National Capital Region, including strongly Francophone Gatineau on the Québec side of the Ottawa River. The other communities named--Timmins, Sudbury, Hawkesbury--are relatively smaller centres in the north and east of Ontario. If international migrants are not moving to these communities and are instead opting for Ottawa and the cities of southern Ontario, this might well note their sensitivity to poor economic conditions.

Is this working? In the specific case of Ontario, possibly. Statistics Canada's profile of Canadian Francophones noted that not only did Ontario's Francophone population grow between 2006 and 2011, but it nearly maintained its proportion of the total population. Selena Ross' article, quoted above, does suggest that international Francophone migration might well galvanize Francophone consciousness generally. Then again, as noted above, it's not clear that this international migration can do much for the older Francophone communities in the province. The November 2002 report "Official Languages and Immigration: Obstacles and Opportunities for Immigrants and Communities" notes that there are any number of ways in which Francophone international migrants can just not have a successful experience, with a lack of common ground between migrants and natives spoiling the project.

How demographics shaped the 2011 Canadian federal election

My previous post here touched upon the remarkable consequences of the Canadian federal election held last Monday. The New Democratic Party made massive breakthroughs, especially in Québec, to become the official opposition, while the separatist Bloc Québécois was devastated (from 47 to 4 seats) and the Liberal Party was more than halved. Maps do a good job of illustrating this transformation. Copied from here, this map shows the distribution of seats following the 2008 federal election in Canada. Blue is for the Conservatives, red for the Liberals, orange for the New Democratic Party, and teal for the Bloc Québécois.



Here is a map showing the results of the 2011 election.



Population changes played a major role in this outcome. Take voter turnout, which rose 2.3% from 59.1% in 2008 to 61.4% this time. The low voter turnout is a major concern for Canadians, but so far no one has come up with a solution. Disenchantment with politics is pervasive.

The NDP made massive gains, going from 36 to 108 seats (by comparison, the previous peak was 43 seats in 1988). Many established parties were displaced. My own downtown Toronto riding of Davenport, represented by Liberal parliamentarians since 1962, switched massively over to the New Democratic Party, the NDP candidate outpolling the Liberal incumbent by 2:1. Davenport, with a large Portuguese-Canadian community, has traditionally voted Liberal. Why the change?

The Davenport riding is in transition. As Portuguese-Canadians become prosperous and move to the suburbs, the gentrification that has taken over The Annex neighbourhood is spreading west into Davenport. Since I've moved here, a townhouse complex has been built on the other side of the street, while an artists' community centre is by the laundry and any number of old storefronts about being converted into residential units.



It may not be that whereas Liberal Mario Silva made his name partly through his aid to immigrants, the NDP's Andrew Cash first came to attention as a punk rocker, then as a journalist for the alternative press. And yes, you probably won't be surprised to hear that I voted NDP myself. I was frustrated with the Liberal Party and wanted a change. Clearly, I was not alone.

One very notable instance of demographics on the election--here, the tendency of Québec to vote as a bloc and to swing massively from one party to another was the massive success enjoyed by the NDP, which crushed the Bloc Québécois and won 58 of the province's 75 seats. By way of comparison, before the election the NDP had only one seat in Québec, in Montréal. Québécois seem to have tired of the Bloc, and voted for the only other party in massive numbers. The NDP didn't have to try: one candidate, a unilingual Anglophone who spent a good part of the campaign in Las Vegas on vacation and hasn't even visited her rising beat a 13 years' incumbent.

What's very interesting about this is that the NDP is now the dominant party of French Canada, not just Québec. I wrote earlier here about the substantial assimilation facing most Francophone populations outside of Québec, but for the time being there are close to a million Francophones in adjacent Ontario and New Brunswick. These populations also voted substantially for the NDP. Taken from Wikimedia here, the below is an edited map showing electoral outcomes in central and eastern Canada, with maps of outcomes in the three Canadian cities with the largest Francophone populations (in descending order, Montréal, Québec City, and Ottawa-Gatineau) added.



Even Francophone neighbourhoods in Ottawa voted for the NDP.

What this means, given the weakness of the governing Conservatives in the province, is that the NDP is the only political party to have large numbers of members in both French Canada and English Canada. If the party can assimilate its new huge cohort, this straddling the language frontier could well make it an inevitable party of government.

Finally, here in Toronto the Conservatives pierced what was once a Liberal stronghold and split the city with the NDP. The first map below shows the situation before the election; the second shows the situation after the election.





This division corresponds substantially to the geographical divisions manifested in Toronto's recent mayoral election, where the left-wing George Smitherman held the downtown but the right-wing Rob Ford carried the day with the outer peripheries of the city: as described by the "Three Torontos" paradigm, poorer, more multiethnic, and with more problems about a left-leaning city government that didn't seem to do much for them. These areas traditionally voted Liberal federally--for instance, the Portuguese Canadians--because the Liberal Party is the one responsible for the lifting of discriminatory immigration legislation and the introduction of multicultural policies in the 1970s. As immigrant communities have become larger and more stable, and the Conservative Party has made efforts to appeal through social and economic conservatism, many of their members have switched allegiances to the Conservative Party. While a good marker of assimilation, this is not good for the Liberals.

What does all this mean? Considering the Conservative Party's gains in Ontario, and the NDP's massive success in Québec and substantial improvement in the rest of Canada, the future of the Liberal Party as a potential party of government is in doubt. Without any particularly coherent geographic or communal base and no longer the party of central Canada's cities (and patches elsewhere), how can it succeed? As for Québec, the effective destruction of the Bloc Québécois and the defection of Québécois voters en masse to the federalist NDP may signal significant reverses for the local separatist movement.

It is exciting times for Canadian politics. Demographics both established and changing can be thanked for a good chunk of it.

Tuberculosis, Canadian first nations, and pandemics

Over at my blog, I linked to a startling news item pointing to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science paper "Dispersal of Mycobacterium tuberculosis via the Canadian fur trade". The abstract?

Patterns of gene flow can have marked effects on the evolution of populations. To better understand the migration dynamics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, we studied genetic data from European M. tuberculosis lineages currently circulating in Aboriginal and French Canadian communities. A single M. tuberculosis lineage, characterized by the DS6Quebec genomic deletion, is at highest frequency among Aboriginal populations in Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Alberta; this bacterial lineage is also dominant among tuberculosis (TB) cases in French Canadians resident in Quebec. Substantial contact between these human populations is limited to a specific historical era (1710–1870), during which individuals from these populations met to barter furs. Statistical analyses of extant M. tuberculosis minisatellite data are consistent with Quebec as a source population for M. tuberculosis gene flow into Aboriginal populations during the fur trade era. Historical and genetic analyses suggest that tiny M. tuberculosis populations persisted for ∼100 y among indigenous populations and subsequently expanded in the late 19th century after environmental changes favoring the pathogen. Our study suggests that spread of TB can occur by two asynchronous processes: (i) dispersal of M. tuberculosis by minimal numbers of human migrants, during which small pathogen populations are sustained by ongoing migration and slow disease dynamics, and (ii) expansion of the M. tuberculosis population facilitated by shifts in host ecology. If generalizable, these migration dynamics can help explain the low DNA sequence diversity observed among isolates of M. tuberculosis and the difficulties in global elimination of tuberculosis, as small, widely dispersed pathogen populations are difficult both to detect and to eradicate.

This finding documents any number of things, such as the underlying and continuing vulnerability of Canada's indigenous peoples to epidemic disease, the long-standing ties between French Canadians--then, as commenters at CBC point out, simply Canadiens--and First Nations, the highly contingent nature of the transmission of pandemic diseases, and the extent to which these pandemics can remain below public attention for decades or even centuries. Parallels with the the evolution and spread of HIV, reconstructed from fossil viruses and genetic data, are entirely merited.

The data point to 1908 as the year that HIV group M (which now infects more than 31 million people worldwide) began its assault — somewhat earlier than the previous best estimate of 1931. Though 1908 is an approximation, the evidence suggests that the true date almost certainly falls sometime between 1884 and 1924.

When such evolutionary studies are overlaid with the history of human societies in Africa, a detailed picture of the origins of HIV group M comes into focus. Historically, chimpanzees in west-central Africa have been hunted for food. Many of them are also infected with the virus that HIV evolved from, Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV). Butchering chimps probably repeatedly exposed local hunters to SIV. The virus may have made the leap to infect people many times — but only at the turn of the century did this viral invasion gain a foothold in the population. Around that time, a hunter seems to have picked up the virus from a chimp in the southeast corner of Cameroon and carried the pathogen along the main route out of the forest at the time, the Sangha river, to Leopoldville (modern-day Kinshasa). Mirroring the growth of the cities in Africa, the virus spread slowly in Leopoldville until around 1950, when it began to proliferate rapidly. Still undetected, the virus continued to evolve and to diversify, leapfrogging through burgeoning cities. With the increasing ease of global travel, HIV was carried out of Africa and around the world — and the rest, as they say, is history.

This reconstruction of HIV's origins certainly satisfies our curiosity — but it also serves as a practical reminder of the conditions that foster the emergence of new diseases. We cannot stop evolution. Pathogens regularly make the leap to infect new hosts, and we increase our chances of being victimized by one of these host switches, when we take on lifestyles that put us in close contact with other species — especially ones closely related to us — like chimpanzees. The early history of HIV also illustrates that the virus is not invincible. For more than 50 years, HIV infected human populations but had such a small impact that it wasn't noticed against the backdrop of other diseases. In comparison to pathogens like malaria (which is carried by mosquitoes) and the common cold (which can travel through the air), HIV is pretty terrible at getting from one person to the next, relying on the direct transfer of body fluids. The virus only got its start in humans through a confluence of opportunity and history — the practice of hunting chimpanzees, the rise of densely populated cities in Africa, and a correlated increase in high-risk behaviors involving the exchange of body fluids (e.g., injection drug use, prostitution). The fact that changes in human societies were so critical in the rise of the virus suggests that changes in human societies could snuff it as well.

The lead author notes that in the case of tuberculosis, isolated early cases produced an epidemic only when living conditions deteriorated sharply from the late 19th century on, as traditional lands were confiscated, children sent to residential schools, and living conditions on reserve became--and remained--Third World. If these conditions didn't occur, then presumably tuberculosis would be much less of a problem on Canada's reserves.

Institutional Adaptations to Migrants and Transnationalism

I'd like to point our readers towards David Fitzgerald's recent Migration Information article "Uncovering the Emigration Policies of the Catholic Church in Mexico". As the article's title suggests, Fitzgerald reviews how the Catholic Church in Mexico tried first to prevent emigration, then to help emigrants preserve their culture in ways consistent with Catholic mores.

The first mass wave of emigration from Mexico took place during the 1910s and 1920s as Mexicans fled political and economic turmoil at home for work in US agriculture and railroads. By 1929, an estimated 738,500 people of Mexican birth lived in the United States. Many of them migrated seasonally.

Within Mexico, most elites opposed the mass migration of its people, the country's largest asset, to the United States.

The strongest sentiment against emigration during this period came from the Catholic Church, an influential voice in a country where more than 98 percent of the population identified as Catholic even as the Church continued to lose its long and bloody struggles with the government. The Church feared that migration caused the breakup of families, religious conversions, and the introduction of dangerous foreign ideas.

However, the Church's various attempts to prevent migration northward largely failed. By the 1960s, its migration policy shifted to preparing migrants for the journey, establishing closer ties with the Church in the United States, and becoming a voice for migrants' rights while encouraging both their US integration and homeland ties.

With 88 percent of Mexicans older than age 4 being Catholic in 2000 according to INEGI, Mexico's official statistical agency, the Church continues to play an important role in the migration experience even as the number of evangelical Christians grows.

What strikes me most about the Mexican experience is how closely it resembles the Franco-American experience, as I blogged last July

[M]ass language shift from French to English is not unique in the history of North American Francophones. Starting in the late 19th century, relative economic underdevelopment propelled a tremendous migration of Francophones out from their traditional settlement areas along the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of St. Lawrence to adjacent parts of the continent. Large and thriving communities of Franco-Americans (concentrated in New England, particularly in that region's industrial cities) and Franco-Ontarians (concentrated in northern and eastern areas adjacent to Québec) formed at this time, encouraging some to believe in the idea of a greater Québec encompassing those communities. That vision failed, as the Franco-American community was whittled away through immigration restrictions and acculturation to the Anglophone culture surrounding them. Franco-Ontarians, who with few exceptions like in Anglophone-majority communities relatively isolated from Québec, may be about to follow. And no, the Francophones who are tourists in Maine or long-term residents in Florida don't make up the same sorts of communities.

As I noted in a June 2008 post at my blog, all the blandishments of nationalists and Franco-Americans in the Catholic Church urging French Canadians to stay in Canada, if not on their own land, failed miserably. In one case recorded at the above blog link, the arrival of so many relatively prosperous Franco-Americans helped encourage migration! Towards the end of the immigration in the 1900-1920 period, just as the Mexican Catholic Church tried to prepare and help preserve their culture, so did French Canadians and Franco-Americans inside the American Catholic Church tried to create a self-sustaining conservative culture in the Little Canada urban enclaves. They failed, in the end. Jack Kerouac did write in English, after all.

What impresses me most about the past experience of French Canadians and the current experience of Mexicans is the way in which originally national institutions became transnational, representing the nation at home and abroad. There's signs that this sort of institutional adaptation to transnationalism is present in other instances, as in Morocco's refusal to let emigrants abandon their citizenship on the grounds that they remain part of the nation. Can our readers think of other circumstances?