- La Presse notes that suburbanization proceeds in Montréal, as migration from the island of Montréal to off-island suburbs grows. This is of perhaps particular note in a Québec where demographics, particularly related to language dynamics, have long been a preoccupation, the island of Montréal being more multilingual than its suburbs.
- The blog Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta, a 2018 book by Kushanava Choudhury. One brief excerpt touches upon the diversity of Calcutta's migrant population.
- The South China Morning Post has posted some interesting articles about language dynamics. In one, the SCMP suggests that the Cantonese language is falling out of use among young people in Guangzhou, largest Cantonese-speaking city by population. Does this hint at decline in other Chinese languages? Another, noting how Muslim Huiare being pressured to shut down Arabic-medium schools, is more foreboding.
- Ukrainian demographics blogger pollotenchegg is back with a new map of Soviet census data from 1990, one that shows the very different population dynamics of some parts of the Soviet Union. The contrast between provincial European Russia and southern Central Asia is outstanding.
- In the area of the former Soviet Union, scholar Otto Pohl has recently examined how people from the different German communities of southeast Europe were, at the end of the Second World War, taken to the Soviet Union as forced labourers. The blog Window on Eurasia, meanwhile, has noted that the number of immigrants to Russia are falling, with Ukrainians diminishing particularly in number while Central Asian numbers remain more resistant to the trend.
- Finally, JSTOR Daily has observed the extent to which border walls represent, ultimately, a failure of politics.
Showing posts with label south asia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label south asia. Show all posts
Friday, March 01, 2019
Some news links: Montréal & Calcutta migration, Chinese languages, former Soviet Union, borders
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Some demography links
This afternoon--this afternoon in Toronto, at least--I thought I'd share with you five interesting demographics-related blog posts.
At Behind the Numbers, Mark Mather reports on the news that men in the United States are catching up to women in terms of life expectancy.
Dealing with my earlier post about biased sex ratios in the South Caucasus, fellow Livejournaler demographer has written--translated post here, original post here--on the subject, suggesting that the apparent deficit is a consequence of the underregistration of female births.
Geocurrents' Martin Lewis writes about the barrier along the Pakistani border built by the Iranians, dividing the historical region of Baluchistan. While built in an effort to control insurgents, the wall has a secondary use of limiting Pakistani migration into Iran.
The Global Sociology Blog links to an extended BBC series describing the effects of the male-biased sex ratio in India, describing things as varied as the grief of women forced to abort their daughters, the migration of women from more sex-balanced areas in southern India to the male-biased north, the shocking deterioration in the sex ratio in Kashmir, and Indian government efforts to encourage the birth of female children.
At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen summarizes a new book by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd and the subtitle is A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World. This book makes the point, made here several times, that Muslim societies around the world are also going through the demographic transition, albeit each in their own distinctive ways.
Friday, March 25, 2011
"Ripples from Bengal"
As an addendum to my previous post, I thought I'd share with our readers an essay from Himal South Asian, the December 2010 essay by Afsan Choudhary "Ripples from Bengal". Drawing from the history of his family, descended from mid-19th century migrants from what's now Bangladesh to what's now West Bengal, Choudary provides a potted history of migration in Bengal--at first within, then from--from the 19th century on. Migration patterns are intimately tied to the patterns set by colonialism.
Migration – be it within national borders or beyond, voluntary or forced – has long been part of Bengali life. Anil Seal, in his seminal book India and the Emergence of Indian Nationalism talks of how the British in Bengal created the new clerical ‘babu’ class to serve their own needs, which coincided with the aspirations of the emerging Bengali middle class. Schools and colleges sprang up in response to the demand for education, but soon there were more graduates than jobs. This is what set off the internal migration from Bengal to other parts of India, particularly modern-day Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where there was demand for an educated class. The Ganguly family of the well-known Indian film stars Kishore and Ashok Kumar was part of this Bengali migrant population.
While Bengali migrants to North India (and Burma) belonged largely to the middle classes, the journeys of the poorer migrants usually took them to the Indian Northeast. When Syed Ahmed Khan and the Nawab of Rampur (in present-day Uttar Pradesh), the former a Muslim and the latter a Hindu, came together to fight the immigrant Bengalis, they were responding to classic anti-immigrant sentiment. Their organisation, a splendid sign of interfaith political cooperation, was dedicated to fighting these new arrivals. Syed Ahmed’s virulent anti-Bengali feelings are rooted in the appearance of Bengali graduates taking jobs that locals thought were rightfully theirs. When many people in India today rail against Bangladeshi/Muslim ‘outsiders’, there are clear echoes of the rage at the arrival of Bengali Hindu migrants into the colonial United Provinces.
Migration, which is today seen as a security issue between New Delhi and Dhaka, began with little protest from local indigenous people when it came to the Northeast. There were no national borders to be crossed at that time – it was all British India, and the locals were not asked their opinion because they were poor and with little political organisation. It really did not matter whether anyone was going there, went the thinking, because no one else wanted to do so.
Between 1947 and 1971, large-scale migration was non-existent in East Pakistan save for the border areas, where national boundaries existed in the eyes of the states but not the border people. My grandfather travelled back and forth between Shillong, where he ran a restaurant, and Dhaka, where his family had moved after 1947, thus existing as a stranger in both lands. In 1965, while he was visiting Dhaka, war broke out between India and Pakistan. He was declared an enemy, his restaurant was seized by his business partner and he was rendered a pauper overnight. Till his death in the mid-1970s, Grandfather gradually retreated into his own mind, continuing to live in his Shillong home inside his head. He had experienced what many Hindus did in East Pakistan: living in two lands and then paying a price for doing so, despite the fact that the two lands look and feel – and are – so similar. Likewise, for my ‘refugee’ uncles, life in East Pakistan was brutal, as they had no networks and never managed to build or find any. They were lost in the labyrinths of failure into which most forced migrants disappear, marginalised and part of neither land, immigrants to nowhere.
[. . .]
Internal migration rem.ains a largely invisible phenomenon. Within Bangladesh, people move to harvesting work every season, creating a relatively unknown migrant culture with its alternative survival strategies and values. And as the landless population increases, so too does internal migration. Some move from the rural areas to Dhaka, choking an already dysfunctional city even as the new extreme poor populate the city in a desperate attempt to survive. Sometimes internal migration produces deadly results, as in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. From the mid-1970s, the Hill Tracts saw militant insurgency by the indigenous Chakma population and a brutal pacification attempt by the Bangladesh Army. One containment strategy was to bring in landless people from the tidal flats of the Bay of Bengal to the hills, and give them free land for cultivation. The clear idea was to create a pro-state local population to marginalise the highlanders and reduce them to a minority. The new migrants, already brutalised by poverty and natural disasters in their erstwhile homes, became vicious in protecting the land given to them. In this way, then, internal migration was successfully used as a military tool, while the indigenous highlanders lived in refugee camps in India. When they returned following an agreement in the mid-1990, few got their land back.
While emigration and migration to most areas require certain qualifications, connections and money, none of this is required when one moves to India. Duly, millions have gone across the border over the last century. This process, which was an ‘internal migration’ till 1947, thereafter became an illegal international border crossing, increasingly attached to security implications. In the Indian Northeast, clashes between migrants and local indigenous populations have resulted in regional instability, while elsewhere in India the Bengali of Bangladesh is often accused of being linked to ‘terrorist’ activities. Many of these migrants are reduced to mere shadows, living lives of wretched poverty and fear. Another destination for the very poor is Pakistan, where many work as domestic servants and in the fisheries sector, so badly off that they spark pity even among Pakistanis. Their lives as migrants are as poverty-stricken as the ones they left behind at home.
We now see three distinct trends in Bangladeshi migration: emigration for settlement to Europe, Australasia and North America; contract labour migration to the Gulf and a few Southeast Asian countries; and of course the movement of people across the border areas, mainly to India. Migration to West Asia has drawn attention due to its enormous impact on the home economy. Remittances have emerged as a key driver of economic growth and poverty reduction in Bangladesh, increasing at an average annual rate of 19 percent over the last three decades. The World Bank reports that remittances – the bulk of which come from West Asia – now exceed all other types of foreign-exchange inflow. The Bangladeshi migrants in West Asia do not constitute a monolithic block, of course. Professionals are comfortable, while labourers lead miserable lives. But when the latter return to Bangladesh, they constitute a newly rich group in impoverished rural areas, a new local elite impacting on power relations – and keeping the economy from collapsing.
Bangladesh entering the 2010s
The Economist's Asia blog Banyan has a post up exploring the mechanics of Bangladesh's upcoming census. The quality of information available to date, the reader learns, is poor and quite debatable.
A good place to start an overview of the Bangladeshi population might be to compare it with the Pakistani population. Until 1971, after all, Bangladesh was known as "East Pakistan", the eastern wing of the state that was supposed to include the Muslim-majority territories of the former Raj. The underrepresentation of East Pakistan in the country's affairs led to a regionalist movement that became a separatist movement that led to a Bangladeshi declaration of independence and eventually liberation by India. Of the two wings, East Pakistan was the most populous; estimates gave East Pakistan had 70 million versus 60 million in West Pakistan. In the early 1970s, after the half-million killed in the 1970 Dhola cyclone and the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of civilians killed by Pakistani soldiers in the 1971 war, Bangladesh was seen as having far worse development prospects than rump Pakistan, called a "basket case" by Henry Kissinger, the sort of "hopeless" land that Paul Ehrlich would have callously abandoned to famine and mass death.
Instead, things have reversed. Even the highest estimates for Bangladesh's population place it behind the population of Pakistan, and the difference will continue to grow as Bangladeshi fertility rates remain below the comparable Pakistani figures. Bangladesh is catching up on the Human Development Index, too; indeed, Bangladesh has seen some of the highest rates of HDI growth in the world. While still lagging behind Pakistan on metrics like literacy and life expectancy, Bangladesh is catching up quickly. The Bangladeshi economy, too, has done reasonably well since the 1990s, driven by a successful garment industry and famously the home country of microcredit institutions. Tahmina Anam is right to conclude that more things are going right in Bangladesh than wrong.
Regarding Bangladeshi demographics, Mohammad Shahidul Islam at Roubini.com suggests that Bangladesh is set to enjoy the economic dividends of its advanced demographic transition.
Of special note, Bangladeshi sex ratios are better than elsewhere in the region.
I've come across anecdotal press reports of Bangladeshi women being valued as potential marriage partners in Indian states like Punjab lacking in marriageable women. Interesting possibilities lie here.
This connects to the phenomenon of Bangladeshi emigration. It is large, in absolute numbers and relative to receiving areas, as Banyan notes. There is an overseas Bangladeshi diaspora numbering somewhere in the area of four million people, mostly concentrated in Middle Eastern migrant-receiving countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as to Malaysia, but including large communities in the United Kingdom and the United States, even the nucleus of a Bangladeshi-Canadian community here in Canadian Toronto. Much larger in absolute size is the scale of Bangladeshi immigration into India, most controversially into the northeastern state of Assam where the presence of Bangladeshis--Bengalis, generally--has become a political issue frequently erupting into violence, but also into culturally kin West Bengal and elsewhere in India.
This emigration, frankly, is inevitable. Before Bangladesh was East Pakistan it was East Bengal, a region with a Muslim majority separated from the region and British imperial province of Bengal certainly not because it was a self-contained unit with economically viable frontiers (as noted by Nafis Ahmad in a 1950 paper for Economic Geography) but because it had a Muslim majority population. Under British rule, East Pakistan was a producer of commodities, raw materials to be transferred to the Bengali industrial centre and port in Calcutta. The inter-state frontier led to East Pakistan being cut off from its natural hub, now in the Indian state of West Bengal. While Bangladesh has since developed its capital Dhaka as a new industrial centre and port in Chittagong, it still lags behind West Bengal economically. Critically, despite the state frontiers separating Bangladesh from neighbouring Indian states Bengal remains a functional human region in a way that--say--the Punjab divided between India and Pakistan does not, with a shared language and culture and a famously porous border and communal relations generally less fraught. In Partition, for instance, Bengal lacked the same scale of communal violence as in Punjab, while the dwindling of the Hindu proportion of the Bangladeshi population from 40% a century ago to a bit more than 9% now has as much to do with lower Bangladeshi Hindu birth rates as it does with the forced migration and/or massacre of Hindus. (A highly disproportionate share of the murdered and displaced civilians in 1971 were Hindus, targeted by Pakistanis--not their fellow Bengalis--for persecution by virtue of their religion.)
All things considered, it would be more surprising if Bangladeshis didn't Emigrate, to India and elsewhere. Whatever notable degree of economic development Bangladesh has achieved, it is ultimately still dependent on the wider world for its future, and Bangladeshi migrants are a critically important resource for their homeland, the mostly unskilled and semi-skilled labourers sending back huge volumes of remittances to their homeland despite their vulnerability--as now in Libya--to events in their adopted homelands.
According to the adjusted 2001 census figures, Bangladesh’s population stood at 129.3m (an initial count put it at 124.4m; an adjustment for the standard rate of undercounting then boosted the figure). Those familiar with the census mechanics tell of a muddle, marked by “multiple technical problems” starting with some official’s decision to procure inferior paper, which fouled up the optical-scanning process…which in turn undermined the quality of the data set. This time, donors are handling the pens and paper—the EU is chipping in over €10m ($14m), or more than a third of the total cost of the census.
The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ population clock claims that, at midnight today, that number had risen to 150,220,172. But many think the clock is running too slow. Bangladesh’s statisticians have almost certainly underestimated the natural population growth since the last census, according to the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. Researchers at the Dhaka-based international research institution—it has been monitoring the country’s population for 40 years and has the longest-running and most comprehensive demographic data in the developing world—put Bangladesh’s current population at 162m.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) agrees, almost to the letter: it put the population at 164.4m in 2010. It is the UN body’s estimate that has enraged Bangladesh’s politicians, some of whom care about these things. A.M.A. Muhith, the finance minister, has called the UN estimate—which suggests that the government may have 14m citizens it would appear to prefer not to have—“condemnable” and “unauthorised meddling”.
The difference reflects UNFPA’s pessimistic assumptions about the speed of fertility decline. Helped along by one of the world’s most expensive fertility-reduction programmes, Bangladesh has seen a dramatic fall in its total fertility rate. In the late 1970s, women had seven children on average; by the early 1990s just over three. The fertility decline settled at a plateau in 1993-2002, but has resumed sliding since. It has not, however, made up for that lost time. In 2010, the year Bangladesh’ s National Population Policy aimed to achieve the replacement level fertility of 2.2, it still hovered at 2.5.
[. . .]
Arithmetically speaking, it is a battle over the size of a denominator—many indicators of economic development are expressed as a proportion of the total population. Politically, a small population is a nice thing to have. This is because the smaller it is, the more impressive Bangladesh’s progress on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will look (and the warm feeling would be mutual). This refers to progress made towards the goal of halving the proportions of poor and hungry people. So the size of the population matters, either directly or indirectly, for it serves as a denominator in the vast majority of indicators by which progress on the goals in the MDG framework are measured.
A good place to start an overview of the Bangladeshi population might be to compare it with the Pakistani population. Until 1971, after all, Bangladesh was known as "East Pakistan", the eastern wing of the state that was supposed to include the Muslim-majority territories of the former Raj. The underrepresentation of East Pakistan in the country's affairs led to a regionalist movement that became a separatist movement that led to a Bangladeshi declaration of independence and eventually liberation by India. Of the two wings, East Pakistan was the most populous; estimates gave East Pakistan had 70 million versus 60 million in West Pakistan. In the early 1970s, after the half-million killed in the 1970 Dhola cyclone and the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of civilians killed by Pakistani soldiers in the 1971 war, Bangladesh was seen as having far worse development prospects than rump Pakistan, called a "basket case" by Henry Kissinger, the sort of "hopeless" land that Paul Ehrlich would have callously abandoned to famine and mass death.
Instead, things have reversed. Even the highest estimates for Bangladesh's population place it behind the population of Pakistan, and the difference will continue to grow as Bangladeshi fertility rates remain below the comparable Pakistani figures. Bangladesh is catching up on the Human Development Index, too; indeed, Bangladesh has seen some of the highest rates of HDI growth in the world. While still lagging behind Pakistan on metrics like literacy and life expectancy, Bangladesh is catching up quickly. The Bangladeshi economy, too, has done reasonably well since the 1990s, driven by a successful garment industry and famously the home country of microcredit institutions. Tahmina Anam is right to conclude that more things are going right in Bangladesh than wrong.
Regarding Bangladeshi demographics, Mohammad Shahidul Islam at Roubini.com suggests that Bangladesh is set to enjoy the economic dividends of its advanced demographic transition.
Based on the stylized facts of the demographic transition model, one can see the dynamics of Bangladesh’s population transition. According to the United Nation’s Population Prospects 2008 database, total fertility rates (TFR) in Bangladesh have declined, from 6.85 children per woman in 1971-75 to 2.36 in 2005-2010. The TFR is projected to approach a replacement level (2.1) in the period 2015-2020. The population growth rate declined from 2.67 per cent in 1970-75 to 1.42 per cent in 2005-2010. The crude birth rate and the crude death rates in the country are now 21.6 and 6.3 (per 1000 population) respectively.
Based on these statistics, Bangladesh is now at the beginning of Stage III of population transition. In other words, it has entered the stabilization era of population transition. Bangladesh’s population transition has been following nearly the same pattern that Europe and East Asia experienced.
[. . .]
Bangladesh’s dependency ratio has declined, from 92 in 1975 to 53 in 2010. A nation’s demographic window generally opens when the dependency ratio (non-working to working age population) goes below 50. In South Asia, Bangladesh and India are projected to enjoy a large demographic window (2015-2050) thanks to a sharp decline in their dependency ratios.
[. . .]
Until the 1980s, Bangladesh’s per capita income growth was very low owing to a high dependency ratio. With a high birth rate, low death rate and subsistence economy the country’s economic development till the 1980s resulted in poor per capita income growth. However, the scenario has changed since the late 1980s and early 1990s when Bangladesh witnessed a sharp decline in population growth and a steady increase in GDP growth with low volatility.
Of special note, Bangladeshi sex ratios are better than elsewhere in the region.
Moreover, Bangladesh has done much better than many of its neighbours, including India, in terms of gender-related demographic statistics. This development will provide additional impetus to Bangladesh’s demography. With an improved sex ratio, the females’ share is approaching half of the total working age population in Bangladesh. Studies show that the actual growth rates of South Asia and other lagging regions were at least one percentage point lower than their potential growth due to gender imbalances.
I've come across anecdotal press reports of Bangladeshi women being valued as potential marriage partners in Indian states like Punjab lacking in marriageable women. Interesting possibilities lie here.
This connects to the phenomenon of Bangladeshi emigration. It is large, in absolute numbers and relative to receiving areas, as Banyan notes. There is an overseas Bangladeshi diaspora numbering somewhere in the area of four million people, mostly concentrated in Middle Eastern migrant-receiving countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as to Malaysia, but including large communities in the United Kingdom and the United States, even the nucleus of a Bangladeshi-Canadian community here in Canadian Toronto. Much larger in absolute size is the scale of Bangladeshi immigration into India, most controversially into the northeastern state of Assam where the presence of Bangladeshis--Bengalis, generally--has become a political issue frequently erupting into violence, but also into culturally kin West Bengal and elsewhere in India.
This emigration, frankly, is inevitable. Before Bangladesh was East Pakistan it was East Bengal, a region with a Muslim majority separated from the region and British imperial province of Bengal certainly not because it was a self-contained unit with economically viable frontiers (as noted by Nafis Ahmad in a 1950 paper for Economic Geography) but because it had a Muslim majority population. Under British rule, East Pakistan was a producer of commodities, raw materials to be transferred to the Bengali industrial centre and port in Calcutta. The inter-state frontier led to East Pakistan being cut off from its natural hub, now in the Indian state of West Bengal. While Bangladesh has since developed its capital Dhaka as a new industrial centre and port in Chittagong, it still lags behind West Bengal economically. Critically, despite the state frontiers separating Bangladesh from neighbouring Indian states Bengal remains a functional human region in a way that--say--the Punjab divided between India and Pakistan does not, with a shared language and culture and a famously porous border and communal relations generally less fraught. In Partition, for instance, Bengal lacked the same scale of communal violence as in Punjab, while the dwindling of the Hindu proportion of the Bangladeshi population from 40% a century ago to a bit more than 9% now has as much to do with lower Bangladeshi Hindu birth rates as it does with the forced migration and/or massacre of Hindus. (A highly disproportionate share of the murdered and displaced civilians in 1971 were Hindus, targeted by Pakistanis--not their fellow Bengalis--for persecution by virtue of their religion.)
All things considered, it would be more surprising if Bangladeshis didn't Emigrate, to India and elsewhere. Whatever notable degree of economic development Bangladesh has achieved, it is ultimately still dependent on the wider world for its future, and Bangladeshi migrants are a critically important resource for their homeland, the mostly unskilled and semi-skilled labourers sending back huge volumes of remittances to their homeland despite their vulnerability--as now in Libya--to events in their adopted homelands.
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
On the Pew Forum's disproof of Eurabia
My latest post at my other group blog, History and Futility, was entitled "Why Eurabia?" Why, in the face of the abundant evidence that the prospect of a Muslim majority in any European country--indeed, of particularly large Muslim minorities anywhere--do large numbers of people (like Glenn Beck) predict an imminent caliphate in Europe?
Eurabia's fundamentally an ideology of revenge ("Ha, ha, you didn't support us, now you're going to get raped by Muslims!") as well as an ideology of envy. Muslims, imagined by Eurabianists as beings somehow completely resistant to the influences of modernization and post-modernization etc., are imagined as perfect conservatives, retaining the superfecundity of old and maintaining the traditional family. Why them? some ask. Why not us?
Eurabia's all the more ironic since many sources–the Economist, Douglas Todd’s blog The Search, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times–have reported on a recent report by the Pew Research Group observing that Muslim population growth is slowing, and certainly Muslims won’t become majority populations in any European country.
The report in question--"The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030"--makes for very interesting reading. Suffice it to say that although Muslim populations are growing more quickly, it is a consequence of relatively higher fertility--declining notably, however, for the same reasons as in Iran or Turkey or Tunisia or any other country where urbanization, the liberation of women, and economic pressures has pushed fertility down--and a relatively large proportion of young people of childbearing age. In the case of Europe, the projections suggest that a tenth of the populations of France, Belgium, and Sweden will be Muslim by 2030, that the proportion in western Europe as a whole will rise from 4.5% now to 7.1%, noting additionally that right now Muslim fertility is below replacement levels in Germany, Italy, and Spain, the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim populations continuing to close. Russia, notably, is and will be home to one-third of Europe's Muslims, but even there proportions won't change overmuch (~11% to ~15%). And in case you're worried about India, the projections suggest a rise in the Muslim proportion of the Indian population from 14.6% to 15.9%.
The study's methodology looks fine to me: conservative, well-grounded in facts, not making the sorts of sweeping predictions of radical transformation that always merit the most stringent skepticism. Notably, projections are made only two decades into the future, roughly one generation, beyond which point much happens. Are radical changes possible? Sure. Are they likely? No. One may as well predict a huge surge in non-Muslim fertility as not, or mass Christian immigration into Muslim lands. (The latter is possible, by the way; the huge disparities in income between North Africa and the Middle East to the north, and sub-Saharan Africa to the south, could drive interesting population movements.)
Alas, this fine report won't be considered by the prophets of Eurabia. Eurabia is a fantasy, product of an ideology that imagines the punishment of errant nations by a terrifyingly perfect, inhuman conservatism. Envy and revenge fantasies can't be defeated so easily as all that. Pity, not least since these fantasies can lead to any number of horrifying outcomes.
Eurabia's fundamentally an ideology of revenge ("Ha, ha, you didn't support us, now you're going to get raped by Muslims!") as well as an ideology of envy. Muslims, imagined by Eurabianists as beings somehow completely resistant to the influences of modernization and post-modernization etc., are imagined as perfect conservatives, retaining the superfecundity of old and maintaining the traditional family. Why them? some ask. Why not us?
Eurabia's all the more ironic since many sources–the Economist, Douglas Todd’s blog The Search, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times–have reported on a recent report by the Pew Research Group observing that Muslim population growth is slowing, and certainly Muslims won’t become majority populations in any European country.
At the heart of its analysis is the ongoing effect of a “youth bulge” which peaked in 2000. In 1990 Islam’s share of the world’s youth was 20%; in 2010, 26%. In 2030 it will be 29% (of 15-to-29-year-olds). But the Muslim world is slowly heading towards paunchiness: the median age in Muslim-majority countries was 19 in 1990. It is 24 now, and will be 30 by 2030. (For French, Germans and Japanese the figure is 40 or over.) This suggests Muslim numbers will ultimately stop climbing, but later than the rest of the world population.
The authors call their calculations demographic, not political. Drawing on earlier Pew research, they say conversion is not a big factor in the global contest between Islam, Christianity and other faiths; the converts balance out. Nor do they assess piety; via the imperfect data of the United Nations, the European Union and national statistics, they aim simply to measure how many people call themselves Muslim, at least culturally, if asked.
New numbers, they say, will change the world map. As Indonesia prospers, its birth rate is falling; South Asia’s remains very high. By 2030, 80m extra mouths in Pakistan will boost its Muslim numbers to 256m, ousting Indonesia (with 239m) as the most populous Islamic land. India’s Muslim minority will be nearly as large at 236m—though growth is slowing there too. And in 2030 India’s Muslims will still constitute only a modest 15.9% of that country’s swelling total, against 14.6% now.
The report asserts no causal link between Islamic teaching and high fertility rates, although it notes that poverty and poor education are a problem in many Muslim lands. In Muslim countries such as Bangladesh and Turkey, it observes, the lay and religious authorities encourage birth control. Better medical care and lower mortality boost poor-country population numbers too.
[. . .]
The total Muslim share of Europe’s population is predicted to grow from 6% now to 8% in 2030: hardly the stuff of nightmares. But amid that are some sharp rises. The report assumes Britain has 2.9m Muslims now (far higher than the usual estimates, which suggest 2.4m at most), rising to 5.6m by 2030. As poor migrants start families in Spain and Italy, numbers there will rocket; in France and Germany, where some Muslims are middle-class, rises will be more modest—though from a higher base. Russia’s Muslims will increase to 14.4% or 18.6m, up from 11.7% now (partly because non-Muslims are declining). The report takes a cautious baseline of 2.6m American Muslims in 2010, but predicts the number will surge by 2030 to 6.2m, or 1.7% of the population—about the same size as Jews or Episcopalians. In Canada the Muslim share will surge from 2.8% to 6.6%.
The report in question--"The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030"--makes for very interesting reading. Suffice it to say that although Muslim populations are growing more quickly, it is a consequence of relatively higher fertility--declining notably, however, for the same reasons as in Iran or Turkey or Tunisia or any other country where urbanization, the liberation of women, and economic pressures has pushed fertility down--and a relatively large proportion of young people of childbearing age. In the case of Europe, the projections suggest that a tenth of the populations of France, Belgium, and Sweden will be Muslim by 2030, that the proportion in western Europe as a whole will rise from 4.5% now to 7.1%, noting additionally that right now Muslim fertility is below replacement levels in Germany, Italy, and Spain, the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim populations continuing to close. Russia, notably, is and will be home to one-third of Europe's Muslims, but even there proportions won't change overmuch (~11% to ~15%). And in case you're worried about India, the projections suggest a rise in the Muslim proportion of the Indian population from 14.6% to 15.9%.
The study's methodology looks fine to me: conservative, well-grounded in facts, not making the sorts of sweeping predictions of radical transformation that always merit the most stringent skepticism. Notably, projections are made only two decades into the future, roughly one generation, beyond which point much happens. Are radical changes possible? Sure. Are they likely? No. One may as well predict a huge surge in non-Muslim fertility as not, or mass Christian immigration into Muslim lands. (The latter is possible, by the way; the huge disparities in income between North Africa and the Middle East to the north, and sub-Saharan Africa to the south, could drive interesting population movements.)
Alas, this fine report won't be considered by the prophets of Eurabia. Eurabia is a fantasy, product of an ideology that imagines the punishment of errant nations by a terrifyingly perfect, inhuman conservatism. Envy and revenge fantasies can't be defeated so easily as all that. Pity, not least since these fantasies can lead to any number of horrifying outcomes.
Friday, September 24, 2010
On climate change and migration
The American law blog The Volokh Conspiracy is an unusual place to find guest blogs about migration driven by environmental change, but Matthew Kahn, author of the book Climatopolis does have a guest post there. He argues--as he does here, for instance--that migrations triggered by climate change need not be catastrophic, and in fact can be quite manageable or even net economic pluses. A central point of his analysis is that all cities will not be effected equally.
Not all cities will suffer equally from climate change. There are over 300 major cities to choose from in the United States. A city such as Seattle may suffer much less. An implicit assumption throughout Climatopolis is that there will always be some safe area where our cities can thrive and we can migrate to. If the entire 7 billion people on the planet lived at Hong Kong’s density then we would need 1.1 million square kilometers of habitable land. This represents just .7% of the world’s land mass.
Suppose that California’s coastal cities suffer greatly from climate change due to the combined punch of sea level rise, hotter summers, drought and rising electricity prices. Self interested households will see that California cities are no longer great places to live and they will “vote with their feet” and migrate to other cities that have suffered less from climate change or perhaps even gained due to warmer winter temperatures.
[. . .]
Our ability to migrate means that urban places can suffer while urban people continue to prosper. Within the New York City metropolitan area, New Jersey employment centers may gain if Southern Manhattan and Wall Street are under siege from sea level rise. Land owners in Southern Manhattan will suffer but workers at downtown Goldman Sachs would not.
Kahn even suggests that these migrations, from areas heavily impacted by climate change to areas not-so-heavily impacted, could through the reallocation of labour into more vibrant and/or rejuvenated environs. If the proper human connections exist, of course.
Growth economists have long argued that human capital (attracting and retaining the footloose, skilled) is the key for a nation or a city to enjoy sustainable growth. If a city such as Los Angeles loses its quality of life edge, then the skilled will move elsewhere and firms will be less likely to move to Los Angeles. Similar to a neighborhood with high crime or bad schools, local real estate prices will fall. The owners of such assets will bear the incidence of this “new news”. While real estate values would decline in cities deemed to be increasingly at risk, there are other cities that could actually experience a windfall. Today, you can trade one home near UCLA for 100 Detroit homes. In 2070, will this exchange rate still hold or will there be parity?
[. . .]
Does this same optimism hold in the developing world? In the United States, there are a large number of cities scattered across various geographical regions. In other nations such as Bangladesh, there is unlikely to be the same menu to choose from. As “environmental refugees” seek out safer havens they may cross political boundaries into nations where they are not welcome. Developed countries could ease adaptation in the developing world if they loosen immigration restrictions. Migration also represents an upfront investment that requires resources. The poorest of the poor may be unable to move and not to have the information or social networks concerning potential beneficial destinations.
I agree with Kahn to a certain extent. Back in June 2009 I blogged about climate change-driven migration in West Africa, noting how there were already well-established traditions of migration to and from the Sahel to the West African coast, and these these migrations played a significant role in economic growth in littoral states like Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Could a substantial migration of skilled Californians rejuvenate a Detroit notable for a decent locatino and very low real estate prices? I don't doubt it. If climate change-driven migration isn't a sudden process, but rather takes place on time scales on the order of decades, it needn't be unmanageable.
But. Kahn's analysis assumes that there is little possibility catastrophic runaway change with effects as outlined by Sublime Oblivion's Anatoly Karlin at the link previous, or that if it does happen the consequences will be manageable. This strikes me as optimistic. Le monde diplomatique observed that in 1998 the expected influx of very large numbers of Kosovar refugees into Albania threatened to destabilize an already shaky economy, while in 1999 the consequences of the Kosovo catastrophe weighed heavily on the entire western Balkans region. If, say, the Netherlands is significantly flooded, what would happen? Where would the Dutch go? What would happen to the Eurozone economy? If California enters a long period of economic decline precipitated by a worsening climate, what will happen to the American economy? If Shanghai floods, or has to protect itself, what will happen to the Chinese? Et cetera. The loss in infrastructure investments alone, never mind symbolism/morale, would be serious indeed.
The political and social consequences of migration of this scale also need to be considered. In Côte d'Ivoire, the migrations from the Sahel were eventually used for political and economic reasons to trigger xenophobia among the Ivoiriens de souche, leading to more than a decade of civil war and division. The decades of net migration from the Sahel did benefit Côte d'Ivoire, but the country experienced a meltdown nonetheless. The factor of xenophobia is less of an issue in some countries and regions than in others--the American population may be mobile enough to cope--but it still has to be considered. In the example of Bangladesh, source of perhaps tens of millions of migrants in India who often act as cheap labour, fears of Bangladeshi immigrants' links to terrorism and flee Assam won't help things in the case of future mass migrations.
And then, there is the question of what people who need to migrate but don't have the connections necessary to successfully migrate--or even migrate at all--will do. What will be done?
Not all cities will suffer equally from climate change. There are over 300 major cities to choose from in the United States. A city such as Seattle may suffer much less. An implicit assumption throughout Climatopolis is that there will always be some safe area where our cities can thrive and we can migrate to. If the entire 7 billion people on the planet lived at Hong Kong’s density then we would need 1.1 million square kilometers of habitable land. This represents just .7% of the world’s land mass.
Suppose that California’s coastal cities suffer greatly from climate change due to the combined punch of sea level rise, hotter summers, drought and rising electricity prices. Self interested households will see that California cities are no longer great places to live and they will “vote with their feet” and migrate to other cities that have suffered less from climate change or perhaps even gained due to warmer winter temperatures.
[. . .]
Our ability to migrate means that urban places can suffer while urban people continue to prosper. Within the New York City metropolitan area, New Jersey employment centers may gain if Southern Manhattan and Wall Street are under siege from sea level rise. Land owners in Southern Manhattan will suffer but workers at downtown Goldman Sachs would not.
Kahn even suggests that these migrations, from areas heavily impacted by climate change to areas not-so-heavily impacted, could through the reallocation of labour into more vibrant and/or rejuvenated environs. If the proper human connections exist, of course.
Growth economists have long argued that human capital (attracting and retaining the footloose, skilled) is the key for a nation or a city to enjoy sustainable growth. If a city such as Los Angeles loses its quality of life edge, then the skilled will move elsewhere and firms will be less likely to move to Los Angeles. Similar to a neighborhood with high crime or bad schools, local real estate prices will fall. The owners of such assets will bear the incidence of this “new news”. While real estate values would decline in cities deemed to be increasingly at risk, there are other cities that could actually experience a windfall. Today, you can trade one home near UCLA for 100 Detroit homes. In 2070, will this exchange rate still hold or will there be parity?
[. . .]
Does this same optimism hold in the developing world? In the United States, there are a large number of cities scattered across various geographical regions. In other nations such as Bangladesh, there is unlikely to be the same menu to choose from. As “environmental refugees” seek out safer havens they may cross political boundaries into nations where they are not welcome. Developed countries could ease adaptation in the developing world if they loosen immigration restrictions. Migration also represents an upfront investment that requires resources. The poorest of the poor may be unable to move and not to have the information or social networks concerning potential beneficial destinations.
I agree with Kahn to a certain extent. Back in June 2009 I blogged about climate change-driven migration in West Africa, noting how there were already well-established traditions of migration to and from the Sahel to the West African coast, and these these migrations played a significant role in economic growth in littoral states like Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Could a substantial migration of skilled Californians rejuvenate a Detroit notable for a decent locatino and very low real estate prices? I don't doubt it. If climate change-driven migration isn't a sudden process, but rather takes place on time scales on the order of decades, it needn't be unmanageable.
But. Kahn's analysis assumes that there is little possibility catastrophic runaway change with effects as outlined by Sublime Oblivion's Anatoly Karlin at the link previous, or that if it does happen the consequences will be manageable. This strikes me as optimistic. Le monde diplomatique observed that in 1998 the expected influx of very large numbers of Kosovar refugees into Albania threatened to destabilize an already shaky economy, while in 1999 the consequences of the Kosovo catastrophe weighed heavily on the entire western Balkans region. If, say, the Netherlands is significantly flooded, what would happen? Where would the Dutch go? What would happen to the Eurozone economy? If California enters a long period of economic decline precipitated by a worsening climate, what will happen to the American economy? If Shanghai floods, or has to protect itself, what will happen to the Chinese? Et cetera. The loss in infrastructure investments alone, never mind symbolism/morale, would be serious indeed.
The political and social consequences of migration of this scale also need to be considered. In Côte d'Ivoire, the migrations from the Sahel were eventually used for political and economic reasons to trigger xenophobia among the Ivoiriens de souche, leading to more than a decade of civil war and division. The decades of net migration from the Sahel did benefit Côte d'Ivoire, but the country experienced a meltdown nonetheless. The factor of xenophobia is less of an issue in some countries and regions than in others--the American population may be mobile enough to cope--but it still has to be considered. In the example of Bangladesh, source of perhaps tens of millions of migrants in India who often act as cheap labour, fears of Bangladeshi immigrants' links to terrorism and flee Assam won't help things in the case of future mass migrations.
And then, there is the question of what people who need to migrate but don't have the connections necessary to successfully migrate--or even migrate at all--will do. What will be done?
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Some demographic news links
I've stored up a few, so please forgive me. I promise not to let the links accumulate quite so much.
- The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports debate on the extent to which Australia's rapidly growing population--possibly as high as 44 million by 2050!--will be driven by natural increase or immigration.
- At Inter Press Service, Vesna Peric Zimonjic reveals the new phenomenon of Ukrainian (and even Albanian!) women marrying bachelors in rural Serbia.
- Grace Puliyel has an article at allafrica.com examining the phenomenon of brain drain and remittances in the Kenyan context, particularly but not only examining South Asians.
- New changes in British immigration policy allowing Ghurka soldiers to settle in that country may precipitate a mass exodus from at least one Nepalese town.
- The Malta Independent announces that despite a rapidly falling total fertility rate, Malta's population grew not only because of continued natural increase but because of immigration, while the percentage of births outside marriage continues to grow.
- The American state of Utah's traditionally high TFR is slowly converging to the American norm, and there's some conflict as to whether this is a good thing or not.
- Finally, Reuters explores the growing number of Sudanese refugees and migrants in Egypt, and how crackdowns in Libya and Italy is encouraging many to try to flee to Israel.
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