Can Europe's Migrant Mess Get Messier? You Bet!

The surge of migrants into Europe has been constantly in the news, as well it should be. European countries, along with the US, have played a huge hand in creating the stresses generating the flow out of the Middle East and Africa. The NYTimes has a detailed summary of recent events:

Thousands of migrants continue to flow through the Balkans toward Hungary every day, rapidly approaching its southern border with Serbia, government officials said. Two Greek ferries carrying more than 4,000 migrants were scheduled to land Sunday in Athens, a first stop on the migrant trail through the Balkans.

On Sunday, Pope Francis called upon Catholic parishes and religious communities to take in refugees. And Germany has called for a quota system to distribute the migrant population evenly throughout Europe. 

But the European Union remains deeply divided over what should be done, a debate that has strained relations and threatened the 28-nation bloc’s proud policy of open borders.

In the midst of all this, it turns out that not all migrants heading out of Serbia towards Germany are fleeing the Middle East or Africa. Today the Economist reported that Serbians are themselves part of the migrant flow.

Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s prime minister, trumpets his country’s kindness to those in transit; he can afford to be generous, because none want to stay in hard-up Serbia. A bigger problem is that 42% of those applying for asylum in Germany are from the southern ex-Yugoslav states and Albania. Almost all of them are economic migrants, fleeing poverty, not the persecution their countries’ temporary guests have escaped.

As you can see in the map below, the flow of refugee migrants is north from Greece, through Macedonia, and then through Serbia towards Hungary, then Austria and Germany. In Serbia a lot of people are joining the growing group, and this is getting messier by the day.

Working Mothers--the Key to Japan's Demographic Future

I've noted before that Japan is the land of the rising sun, but only the son rises. Japanese women are well educated and are active in the labor force, but they are much less likely to rise occupationally than are men, and they are very likely to be discriminated against at work if they become pregnant. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised at the beginning of this year that he would work on these issues, and this week's Economist has what might be called a report card on his progress.

“ABENOMICS is womenomics,” Japan’s prime minister declared, marrying two atrocious words in a single phrase, at a glamorous shindig called WAW!, or the “World Assembly for Women in Tokyo”, on August 28th-29th. Before an international audience of high-powered female leaders and businesswomen, Shinzo Abe promised to help women “shine” at work as a way to boost Japan’s talent pool and economy. As the conference opened, the Diet (parliament) passed a long-awaited law calling on companies to find ways to promote more women.

Yet such grand visions are beside the point for most working women. Sayaka Osakabe, founder of a new non-profit outfit called Matahara Net, which campaigns for the rights of pregnant women at work, says that before “shining” women just need to be allowed to work without being harassed. Matahara, (a contraction of “maternity” and “harassment”), is illegal but rife.

The problem is that there is a lot of opposition within society to these reforms. They won't come easily. In the meantime, Japan's birth rate remains very low and this lack of gender equality in the workplace (and at home) is almost certainly the primary reason, as it is in Taiwan.

Lots of People in the South Knocking on Northern Doors

The migrant mess continues almost unabated in Europe, as people south of the Mediterranean stream north. In the meantime, violence and economic uncertainty south of Mexico is fueling a continued stream of people heading north. A key change in that dynamic, however, is that Mexico has been stepping up its program of apprehension and deportation of Central American migrants as they come north across Mexico's southern border. This is detailed in a new report by the Migration Policy Institute titled "Migrants Deported from the United States and Mexico to the Northern Triangle: A Statistical and Socioeconomic Profile."

Amid increasingly muscular enforcement by Mexico, U.S. apprehensions of Central Americans for fiscal 2015 to date have fallen by more than half compared to the prior year. Many of those who previously would have made it to the U.S. border and been apprehended by the Border Patrol now are being intercepted by Mexican authorities.

The report also offers a profile of deportees to the Northern Triangle, finding that the majority are young males with low educational attainment levels, most having experience in low-skilled jobs but with nearly 40 percent reporting they were unemployed in the 30 days before setting off on their journey.

And contrary to the stereotype that many young Central American migrants are gang members, the MPI researchers report that the majority of deportees do not have a criminal background. Ninety-five percent of child deportees and 61 percent of adult deportees had never been convicted of a crime. For those with a criminal record, 63 percent had been convicted of immigration or traffic offenses or other non-violent crimes. Twenty-nine percent of those with criminal convictions had committed violent offenses and 9 percent drug offenses.

The report also discusses the myriad policy issues embedded in these statistics. People in Central America have a strong local incentive to get out of there. Gang violence in El Salvador means that it is about to pass Honduras as the country with the highest murder rate in the world, and Guatemala's president was just forced to resign (although at least he did do that). 

Are We Running Out of Room on the Planet?

It is not a good visual. No one who has ever traveled can readily absorb the idea that there are more humans than the planet can handle. There just seems to be so much space out there, right? The problem, of course, is that most of the planet is not fit for human habitation, and we are, indeed, using almost all of the useful land to sustain ourselves. This is the idea behind the ecological footprint and it is the subject of two different stories in today's news.

From BBCNews comes the story with the exact title of "Is the World Running Out of Space?" This is a good overview of population growth with quotes from a lot of familiar people.

“Virtually all population growth between now and the end of the century will be in cities,” says Joel Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University and Columbia University, and author of a book called How many people can the Earth support? “It boils down to more than one million additional people living in cities every five to six days from now until 2100.”

“People can live at much higher population densities – it is possible,” says John Wilmoth, director of the Population Division of the United Nations. “As someone who lives in Manhattan, I have to say that it’s not awful.”

“The Africa projections are really scary,” says John Bongaarts, vice president and distinguished scholar at the Population Council, a non-profit research organisation based in New York City. “A large proportion will end up in urban slums, which is not a recipe for happy living.”

“I’d say there’s no threat of the world’s rainforests all being taken over by cities,” says Karen Seto, a professor of geography and urbanisation at Yale University. “The bigger threat is the indirect impact of urbanisation on those landscapes.” Indeed, cities require wood for creating buildings and furniture, agricultural land for growing food, space to dispose of tonnes of rubbish produced on a daily basis – and much more.

Karen Seto's concern is echoed by a new report from Negative Population Growth on the replacement of good agricultural land in the US by the spread of cities out into the countryside.

Part of the reason that growth is unsustainable is because it is devouring the land it needs to feed itself, sawing off the limb it stands on. Eventually that limb will snap. But we’re smarter than that – one hopes.

Even if you don't feel very crowded where you are, rest assured that the increasing number of us--all clamoring for a higher standard of living--is crowding the planet.

Migrant Journeys Last a Lifetime

For many years, Rubén Rumbaut and his colleagues have been studying the processes by which immigrants adapt to and, eventually, assimilate into their new home country. This is a slow and cross-generational process, with a thousand possible bumps in the road. I was thinking of this today as two pieces of news came across my screen. The first is the latest iteration of the European migrant crisis, as Hungary loaded a bunch of people onto a train and sent them on to Germany--which is where they want to go because it is a big country with a big economy. The New York Times, among many others, has noted that this crisis has really put Europe's open border policy to the test. It wasn't designed to deal with a bunch of people arriving without documentation, but hoping to be granted refugee status so that they can stay in Europe for a better life than they would have had wherever they came from.

It seems very likely that, once settled, their lives will in fact, be better than before. It could certainly take a while to get to that point, however. The people who may wind up suffering most from the new place will be the children. A report out just today from the Migration Policy Institute reviews the evidence about discrimination against immigrant children in the United States, but it is reasonable to expect that this could happen in Europe as well:

Report author Christia Spears Brown, an associate professor of developmental psychology at the University of Kentucky, examines the literature on discrimination in school settings. Studies show that by elementary school, children of immigrants report being treated unfairly by teachers, receiving verbal insults, being excluded from activities or being threatened with physical harm by peers. By their teen years, immigrants’ children report that they have been graded unfairly, discouraged from joining advanced-level classes and disciplined excessively for the same behaviors as other children.

So, the point is that the trauma for immigrants doesn't end when they are finally settled in a place. The cultural problem of dealing with differences, as I've noted before, is going to be an issue for some time to come. It may not be until the third generation--some 50 years from now--that the descendants of these immigrants will finally be part of the "mainstream." In the meantime, there will need to be many kinds of adjustments on the part of immigrants and the host society. With luck, immigrants and the host society collectively will be better off as a result, but it won't be easy.