A Tunnel of Trouble--Migrants Trying to Get to the UK

The United Kingdom is separated from Europe by water and it is not part of the Schengen agreement that allows people to move across European borders without showing identity cards. But, there is the Chunnel that connects England to France allowing people and goods to cross under the channel. Since European countries have not come to any conclusion about how to deal with undocumented migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the migrants have had to improvise.

The French police said there were about 2,100 attempts by migrants to gain access to the tunnel on Monday, and Eurotunnel, the company that operates the 31-mile English Channel crossing, put the number for Tuesday night at about 1,500.

Calais is certainly feeling the strain. Eurotunnel said in a statement on Wednesday that it had intercepted more than 37,000 migrants since January.

The English Channel is a focus of the broader European crisis because many migrants are trying to travel to Britain, where they believe they will find it easier to secure work. The country also appears more attractive because Britain does not operate an identity card system and because many migrants speak some English.

“What we are seeing is the result of the European Union not being able to handle the migration crisis in the way that they should,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, a research fellow at the Center for European Reform, a research institute.
“Everyone is blaming each other for not handling the crisis properly,” she said. “The Italians and Greeks are blaming everyone else for not helping them. France is blaming Italy for giving documents to asylum seekers, without checking them properly, so they can move on.”

A story yesterday on MarketPlace from American Public Media quoted one young man as saying that he wanted to get to the UK to make "fast money." This may well illustrate the kinds of claims that human traffickers make to people to get them to spend money to be transported to Europe in the hope of a better life.

New Population Projections from the UN Population Division

The United Nations Population Division yesterday released its latest set of population estimates and projections for all of the countries of the world. The biggest headline from this was the projection that India would probably overtake China as the world's most populous country sooner than previously thought--in 2022 rather than 2028.  I think that the bigger story is the demographic ascendency of Africa. As you can see below (the first table in the UN report), Asia is ascending demographically right now (despite the slowdown in China's growth), but Africa is growing more quickly than any other part of the world. 

Population increase in Asia and Africa is also associated with still young populations. Despite widespread declines in fertility, mortality is also declining and that keeps the population younger than it might otherwise seem. Furthermore, as John Wilmoth, Director of the Population Division notes in his press release, we cannot just sit back idly and assume that fertility will continue to drop.

Our medium-variant projection assumes that fertility will continue to decline in countries where fertility is above the replacement level, and to increase slightly in countries where it is very low. However, such changes will not happen automatically. In effect, we are assuming that countries will continue to respond to the challenges presented by relatively high or low levels of fertility by adopting policies that help to enable couples, both men and women, to control the number, the timing and the spacing of their children.

There is a lot of change taking place and a lot of work to do, and the obsession in rich countries with the long-term impact of low birth rates is not helping us to generate good global policy. 

Is More Child Care the Key to Raising the Birth Rate?

This week's Economist has a lead story on how governments in low fertility countries can effectively raise the birth rate. Their answer is child-care to encourage women to have babies and a career at the same time. They draw explicitly from a new study from the OECD of pronatalist government policies in the richer countries. 

Yet not all state baby bribes are equal. “The kind of spending matters more than the amount,” says Olivier Thévenon, who tracks natalist policies at the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Longer maternity and paternity leave are nice but seem not to encourage childbearing. Cash payments and gifts encourage couples to have babies more quickly but not to have more than they otherwise would.

The clear winner, according to Mr Thévenon’s research, is subsidised child care. Decent, affordable nurseries make it easier for women to combine work and motherhood. They seem to be the main reason France and Sweden have robust fertility rates—though mass immigration from more fecund countries has helped them a little, too.

This is well known among demographers but is only part of the larger issue of gender equality. If you give women freedom to become educated and have a career, but society does not treat them as equal to men, the result tends to be very low fertility. Cultural shifts that create gender equality are almost certainly the best path to fertility levels that are close to the replacement level.

I do have to object, however, to a comment that the Economist makes about the need for public policy that tries to influence the birth rate.

Many liberals argue that the state should keep its nose out of family matters, but in practice this is hard. Simply by creating pension systems paid for out of general taxation, governments have drastically reduced the private incentive to have children—who were once the best security parents had in their dotage. A more useful question is which baby-boosting policies work.

This is simply wrong. The history of Social Security is that it arose because children were not supporting their parents as death rates declined and the elderly lived longer. The idea of children as a source of social security is largely a myth based on ignorance of the fact that for most of human history until the 20th century, parents were very unlikely to retire and be forced to live on welfare from their children--who might or might not provide it in any case. The change in death rates over the last two centuries--but especially the last century--has altered generational relations in ways that make the modern world largely unrecognizable to earlier humans.

Will China Abandon the One Child Policy?

Although India is set to overtake China as the world's most populous nation 15 or so years from now, China's size will always mean that what happens in China will not stay in China. People cannot resist speculating about China's demographic future, as evidenced by the widely circulated non-news that the Chinese government "might" loosen even further the restrictions on childbearing. The Guardian has a lengthy story.

Thirty-five years after enacting draconian birth control rules blamed for millions of forced abortions and the creation of a demographic “timebomb”, China could be on the verge of introducing a two-child policy. The new regulation, under which all Chinese couples would be allowed to have two children, could be implemented “as soon as the end of the year if everything goes well”, a government source was quoted as saying by the China Business News.

But the article also notes that:

Beijing quickly played down claims that the two-child policy would be in place by the end of the year. “No timetable has been set to allow all couples in the country to have a second child,” the national health and family planning commission insisted, according to the state-run China Daily.

In all events, there is no evidence that couples are likely to respond with higher fertility, as I have noted before and as the article itself points out.

Liang Zhongtang, a demographer from the Shanghai Academy of Social Science, said the policy should have been abolished long ago..Liang said Beijing’s apparent decision to scrap the one-child policy was a positive and long overdue step. But even a full shift to a nationwide two-child policy would do little to reverse the demographic trends already set in place. “At the moment, many people are not willing to have more children, even if they are encouraged to do so. So in reality the government introducing the two-child policy still won’t have much of an impact,” he said.

Of course, this won't be the last word. If the government really does abandon the one child policy next year, there will be widespread speculation about an impending baby boom in China.

An Overview of the Mess in Yemen

The Humanitarian Information Unit of the US State Department has just released a fantastic set of maps showing the scope of demographic displacement and related issues in Yemen:

The humanitarian crisis in Yemen continues to deteriorate with an estimated 21.1 million people, 80% of the population, in need of assistance. The UN revised its funding appeal in June 2015 upwards to $1.6 billion to target 11.7 million people. Regardless of funding, there is limited capacity to handle the collapsing food and health sectors and deteriorating water and sanitation systems.

As they note, the thousands fleeing Yemen have been largely absorbed by neighbors, especially Djibouti and Somalia. Neither country is necessarily in a position to afford this for long, but international help has been slow in coming, particularly in light of all the other problems in the region. While correlation is not necessarily causation, the US invasion of Iraq, followed by the Arab Spring--both in the context of rapidly growing youthful populations--probably lit the fuse that has led us to this state of affairs.