Europe to Turkey: If We Pay You, Will You Keep the Refugees?

The European Union yesterday concluded a deal with Turkey aimed at stemming the flow of refugees out of Turkey and into Europe. The Economist is not sanguine about its likely effectiveness.

At a summit in Brussels on November 29th, the European Union finalised an agreement with Turkey to try to reduce the flow. But the deal looks nearly as patchy as the dinghies migrants are crossing in. The Europeans set aside their worries about the growing authoritarianism of Turkey’s government and promised €3 billion ($3.2 billion) in aid for refugees along with a package of political goodies. These included restarting Turkey’s stalled EU accession process and visa-free travel for its citizens as early as October 2016. In exchange the EU expects Turkey to keep the migrants away.

Perhaps the biggest problem refugees face in Turkey is not lack of benefits, but the inability to integrate. Syrians enjoy “temporary protection” in Turkey, but not full refugee status, meaning they cannot get work permits. “Lack of status is the main push factor” driving migrants to leave, says Metin Corabatir of the Research Centre on Asylum and Migration, a Turkish think-tank.

Most Syrians do not speak Turkish, so they have trouble communicating and their children are not going to school, by and large. In essence, Turkey does not want a huge refugee population any more than do European countries, and so it is likely that the refugees will keep trying to get out of Turkey and head to Europe. Smugglers will quickly adapt to whatever changes are put into place. We get back to the fact that the only way to stem the flow of refugees is to put an end to the fighting in Syria, but no one seems to know how to do that. 

What if the Indigenous Population in New England Had Been Resistant to Disease?

During Thanksgiving week last week, PBS aired an American Experience program on The Pilgrims.  Since we were out of town, we recorded it and just watched it. As with most things in history, reality is a bit more grim than the modern-day celebrations would seem to suggest. As a demographer, I was especially struck by something which I mention in Chapter 5 of my text, but do not discuss in great detail: the colonization of the Americas was everywhere aided by the decimation of the indigenous population from diseases brought by the Europeans. Central and South America get the most attention, including in my book, because of the size of their indigenous populations at the time, but it seems unlikely that the Pilgrims would have survived their first winter back in 1620 were it not for the fact that the local native American Indian population had been wiped out by disease contracted from earlier contact with Europeans during the 1619-1619 period. 

The American Experience program ascribes the deaths among the local indigenous groups to "the plague." That term is really just a placeholder for one or more diseases to which the local population had no immunity and therefore suffered badly. One of the references on the program's website is to a paper published in Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2010 by John May and John Cathey. 

In the years before English settlers established the Plymouth colony (1616–1619), most Native Americans living on the southeastern coast of present-day Massachusetts died from a mysterious disease. Classic explanations have included yellow fever, smallpox, and plague. Chickenpox and trichinosis are among more recent proposals. We suggest an additional candidate: leptospirosis complicated by Weil syndrome. Rodent reservoirs from European ships infected indigenous reservoirs and contaminated land and fresh water. Local ecology and high-risk quotidian practices of the native population favored exposure and were not shared by Europeans. Reduction of the population may have been incremental, episodic, and continuous; local customs continuously exposed this population to hyperendemic leptospiral infection over months or years, and only a fraction survived. Previous proposals do not adequately account for signature signs (epistaxis, jaundice) and do not consider customs that may have been instrumental to the near annihilation of Native Americans, which facilitated successful colonization of the Massachusetts Bay area.

We will probably never know for sure exactly what wiped them out, but it is interesting to contemplate how different the world of today might be if the indigenous population had been resistant to these diseases. The ability to have casinos seems small compensation, albeit more than has been offered to American blacks, as Larry Wilmore points out in the title of his new book.

Did Papa Francis Really Say This?

Pope Francis is in Africa this week, and the NYTimes reports on his speech in a Nairobi slum yesterday:

He lashed out against what he called “new forms of colonialism, which would make African countries parts of a machine, cogs on a gigantic wheel.”

Francis said that “countries are frequently pressured to adopt policies typical of the culture of waste, like those aimed at lowering the birthrate.”

He called the slums “wounds” inflicted by the elite. “How can I not denounce the injustices which you suffer?” he said.

There are few places more apt for Francis, who has cast himself as a champion of the world’s poor, to deliver such remarks. The slum he visited, Kangemi, on the outskirts of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, is a seemingly endless rusted-roof settlement where thousands of families cram into iron shacks with ripped mattresses on the floor and cockroaches scuttling in the unlit corners. Many here survive on a few dollars a day.

I've been in slums in Africa and they are, without question, places where lives need to be made better as soon as possible. But lowering the birth rate is a long-term solution to the problem, not an injustice. Indeed, most people would agree that denying women (and men) access to birth control is an injustice, not the other way around.

Thinking About Population Growth on Black Friday

It's still Black Friday in my time zone, and even though shoppers are undoubtedly home and exhausted, it is never too late to comment on the frenzy to spend money consuming the earth's resources, whether we need stuff or note. Andrew Revkin, writing for the NYTimes, had some similar thoughts as he contemplated a book that speaks to the whole issue: Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot.

“Over,” formally titled “Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot,” explores themes at the heart of this blog — the harms from persistent high fertility rates, consumption for consumption’s sake, disregard for the environmental and social impacts of resource extraction.

But even as I embrace some of the themes and marvel at the imagery, I can’t help recoiling simply because the book’s dimensions and mass clash so primally with its call to stop overloading the planet with too many people consuming too much stuff — stuff like books that weigh almost as much as a Thanksgiving turkey.

Now, I confess to being one of those people possessing a hard copy of the book and it is on the coffee table to remind people of how importantly interwoven population growth is with the sustainability issues we face on the planet. But, as I pointed out when the book was published this past spring, you can view it for free on the internet. I encourage you to do that right now. 

People Are Leaving Ireland--Again!

It was almost exactly five years ago that I commented on the turnaround in Irish migration patterns. Since the mid-19th century Ireland had been a source of out-migration. This was initiated by the potato famine, but high fertility also maintained a supply of people leaving the country and a generally weak economy encouraged them to do so. Here's what I wrote in 2010:

Ever since the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-19th century, Ireland had been a nation of emigrants, until the government decided to lower the corporate tax rate in the mid-1990s, drawing in a flood of foreign investment and foreigners themselves searching for new work opportunities. A key to this was that, as a member of the EU, money and people from other parts of Europe could flow into Ireland pretty freely. The economic boom gave Ireland the nick-name of the "Celtic Tiger" and life was good. Or so it seemed. The boom boosted property values and developers borrowed heavily to cash in on the new prosperity. But the worldwide recession has brought all of that to a halt, and the debt--much of which was hidden by the state-owned Anglo Irish Bank--is now a national catastrophe. The predictable result is that people are once again leaving Ireland, although to be fair, most of the evidence thus far is anecdotal, not official.

It took some time, but now it is official. The Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC, has a new report confirming these trends. This time is a little different than in the past, however, because some of the emigration is just people from elsewhere in Europe returning home or heading somewhere else. And, at the same time, the evidence suggests that the Irish citizens who are leaving are not the down-and-outers of yore, but are likely to be college graduates. 

The tax laws in Ireland continue to be favorable to businesses, however, no matter the demographic trends. That was on display yesterday when American-based Pfizer and Ireland-based Allergan merged into a new Ireland-based company that will now pay billions of dollars per year less into the U.S. treasury. Keep in mind, by the way, that Allergen itself was originally a U.S. firm, "born" in Los Angeles in the late 1940s.