Where the Hungry Are

There was a considerable amount of attention given to issues like poverty and hunger in the run-up to the recent United Nations summit on progress toward the MDGs. As usual, the talk dies down after the big meeting is over. However, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC, has kept the issue on the table with a new report detailing where the hungry nations are. The list is predictable, because it is the same group of countries with high mortality and high fertility. Nonetheless, it is instructive to be reminded:

The 10 countries with the worst levels of hunger -- all "extremely alarming" or "alarming" -- starting with the worst off, were Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Eritrea, Chad, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Comoros, Madagascar, and the Central African Republic.

In South Asia, the low nutritional, educational and social status of women leads to a higher number of underweight children, the report states.

In sub-Saharan Africa, war and instability and high rates of HIV and AIDS are cited as leading to high child mortality.

The IFPRI website has excellent map visualization resources to allow you see where the hungry nations are, based on their global hunger index (GHI).

How Important is Religion?

Religion is nearly an ascribed characteristic, since relatively few of us change the religious affiliation into which we were born, except when one group (e.g., Europeans) takes over an area (e.g., Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa) and pushes a new religion onto the population. Most of the changing mix of people by religion is due to the differential rates of population growth by group. The importance of religious differences is a common theme in the news and in the social sciences. However, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center shows that most people in the United States are not all that familiar with the beliefs of their own religion:

Previous surveys by the Pew Research Center have shown that America is among the most religious of the world's developed nations. Nearly six-in-ten U.S. adults say that religion is "very important" in their lives, and roughly four-in-ten say they attend worship services at least once a week.

But the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey shows that large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions -- including their own. Many people also think the constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools are stricter than they really are.

You can test yourself on the questions asked in the Pew Survey, and also try the special quiz on religion put together by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff. As you look at these results and see your own scores, contemplate the fact that religious knowledge probably tells us more about culture than it does about religion per se.

A Bad Economy is a Good Deterrent to Migration

The global recession has had the global effect of slowing down the pace of South to North migration, and migrant workers in their adopted home appear to be among the hardest hit by the recession. These are among the findings of a report recently completed for BBC News by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC.

"Overall immigration to developed countries has slowed sharply as a result of the economic crisis, bringing to a virtual halt the rapid growth in foreign-born populations over the past three decades," the report says.

This has caused a notable decline in illegal immigration. The number of foreign workers caught trying to enter the EU illegally by sea fell by more than 40% from 2008 to 2009 and is still falling.

At the same time, the number of illegal migrants from Mexico stopped at the US border went down by roughly the same amount.

However, legal migration has also been hard hit. Immigration to the Irish Republic from new EU member states in Eastern and Central Europe fell by 60% from 2008 to 2009.

Over the same period, the US saw a 50% drop in the number of visas issued to low-skilled seasonal workers, such as fruit and vegetable pickers.

But those migrants who are already established in developed countries are having a tough time.

One aspect of the tough times has been the tougher tone that the Obama administration has taken toward the deportation of undocumented immigrants compared to policies under the Bush administration. This may have the unintended effect of dampening Hispanic support for candidates from the Democratic party in the upcoming election.

More on the Postponement of Marriage in the US

A few days ago I commented on new data from the 2009 American Community Survey (ACS) showing that Americans were postponing marriage, almost certainly in response to bad economic times. Today the Pew Research Center released a report based on data from the 2008 ACS, and earlier decennial census data, that provide a twist on the postponement story--people without a college degree have been delaying marriage more than the college-educated. The upshot of this is that among 30-year-olds in 2008, the percentage of college-educated people who were married or had been married was slightly higher (62 percent) than among those without a college degree (60 percent). This is a brand new phenomenon. Note, however, that this does not mean that the people without a degree are not forming families, but they are more likely to be doing it through informal means. It used to be that cohabitation was derisively called the "poor man's marriage." Over the past few decades the rapid rise in cohabitation at nearly all adult ages seemed to put the lie to that idea, but this new Pew analysis might resurrect that notion.

Will Hispanics Swing the Vote in November in the US?

The Pew Hispanic Center has just released results from a nationwide telephone survey of Hispanics 18 and older conducted during August and September of this year. According to these data, Hispanic registered voters are solidly (65 percent) supportive of candidates from the Democratic party--that's the good news for Democrats. The not-so-good news for Democrats is that scarcely half (51 percent) of those registered Hispanic voters expect to vote, which is considerably lower than the 70 percent among all registered voters.

Midterm elections typically have lower voter turnout than Presidential year elections, but if only 51 percent of Hispanics show up to vote, it will represent a very significant decline from the 2008 election. Data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) show that 84 percent of registered Hispanic voters went to the polls in 2008, although that was lower than 90 percent among whites and 92 percent among blacks. At the same time, only 59 percent of Hispanic US citizens aged 18 and older are registered to vote, according to the CPS, well below the 74 percent among non-Hispanic whites and 69 percent among non-Hispanic blacks. Asians, however, have an even lower percent of citizens (55) registered to vote.