Does France Have Too Many Immigrants?

President Sarkozy of France seems to think that his country has too many immigrants. Since he is currently trailing in the Presidential polls for the upcoming election, this sounds a lot like conservatives in the US who have resorted to bashing immigrants to keep their name in the news. BBC News has the story:

In a TV debate, Mr Sarkozy defended his plan to cut the number of new arrivals in half if he is re-elected next month.
Mr Sarkozy is trailing in the opinion polls behind the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande.
He is also competing for conservative voters with the far-right National Front party led by Marine le Pen.
The president said while immigration could be a boon for France, it needed to be controlled more tightly through tougher qualification rules for residency.

The story points out that this is actually not his first negative set of comments about immigrants, despite the fact that his own father was an immigrant from Hungary. As I pointed out here a few months ago, in 2010 President Sarkozy ordered the expulsion of Romas (Romanian Gypsies) from France.


Of some interest is the fact that the foreign-born population in France is now just under 12 percent of the total--one percentage point lower than the US. You might think that this would be some kind of tipping point, except for the fact that in Canada, for example, the figure is 20 percent, while it is 15 percent in Austria, and 14 percent in Sweden, according to numbers from the OECD, compiled by the Migration Information Source.

Demographics of Super Tuesday in the US

Super Tuesday refers, of course, to the large number of Presidential primary elections that will be held on Tuesday, March 6th. The Republican Party currently seems to be composed disproportionately of non-Hispanic whites who really hate the demographic changes taking place in the US, including the increase in the foreign-born population and the regular use of contraceptives by women. Ultimately these changes will have a big impact on the demographics of voters, but even people who don't vote may influence attitudes of those who do. The Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, has been tracking the demographics of several states as their primaries arrive, and the most recent in the installment gives us the Top 10 Things You Should Know About Georgia's Demographics and Immigration Politics. For example:

1. Georgia is at a demographic tipping point. It is 1 of 13 states where people of color make up more than 40 percent of the population. The state has 44.1 percent nonwhite residents, and the nonwhite share of the state has increased by 6.7 percent in the past decade. From 2000 to 2009 Georgia’s Hispanic population accounted for 23.2 percent of the state’s population growth.
2. People of color make up a substantial portion of Georgia’s population.African Americans make up 31.5 percent of the population, while 8.8 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino, and 3.8 percent is Asian American.

Those links in the quotes, by the way, take you to tables with the data, so you can see things for yourself. You don't have to take their word for it. The data allow you to see that whereas 8.8 of the population in Georgia is Latino, only 1.8 percent of registered voters were Latino, as of 2010. On the other hand, the increasing presence of Latino's has created a backlash.

6. Georgia copied Arizona’s deeply unpopular anti-immigrant bill by passing its own law, H.B. 87, in 2011. Among other things, H.B. 87 makes it a crime to harbor or transport undocumented immigrants and empowers law enforcement to ask for “papers please” from anyone they suspect to be in the country without status. While polling on H.B. 87 is unavailable, 74 percent of Latino voters nationwide oppose the bill that inspired it, Arizona’s S.B. 1070.
7. The state is currently feeling the effects of this anti-immigrant measure.Early estimates argue that the state could lose between $300 million and $1 billion in the 2011 growing season alone.

This is, of course, yet another example of the policy of "We need you, but we don't want you." 

Dealing with the "Double-Burden" in Developing Nations

The research that I and my colleagues have been doing in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, in West Africa, has clearly demonstrated there the existence of the “double burden” facing many developing nations, which are continuing to experience high (but generally declining) death rates among children from communicable disease even while seeing a rise in death rates among adults from degenerative diseases such as hypertension and other aspects of cardiovascular disease. This is illustrated most poignantly by the nutritional paradox, in which households include children who are underweight while the adults are obese. The Economist has picked up on this theme as it applies in particular to Arab societies.

TYRE is a small province on Lebanon’s border with Israel, a place of poor tobacco farmers and tin-roofed shacks. Only about half the population has enough to eat. Many say that, in the past six months, somebody in the household has spent a day without food or gone hungry to bed. But there is something odd about the burden of malnutrition. While in hungry households just over a quarter of children under five are too short for their age—a classic symptom of malnutrition—a third are overweight, malnourished in the opposite sense. Tyre is suffering malnutrition and obesity simultaneously.
This “dual burden” is growing everywhere, but nowhere as quickly as in the Arab world. Between 15% and 25% of Arab children under five are too short for their age and between 5% and 15% are underweight. Almost half of pregnant Egyptian women are anaemic, reflecting an iron deficiency often caused by poor diets. Yet a survey in 2006 reckoned that 30% of Egyptian adults were obese. Obesity estimates for Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were even higher: between 35% and 45%.

This is all part of the nutrition transition, first identified many years ago by Barry Popkin and his colleagues at UNC, Chapel Hill, and now unfolding throughout the world.

In Egypt, Peru and Mexico, about half the women with anaemia are overweight or obese. They are simultaneously over- and underfed: too many calories, not enough micronutrients.

Irresistible Forces Meeting Immovable Objects

I owe the subject line to Professor Rubén Rumbaut of UC, Irvine, who pointed out the new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center describing the impact of Alabama's HB 56 on the Hispanic population in that state. The Irresistible force refers, of course, to the fact that we need immigrants to fill in the labor force in this country because of the low birth rate. The immovable object is, at root, racism--xenophobia--sending the the message that "we need you here, but we don't want you here."

Latinos in Alabama have experienced harassment, hardship and discrimination, regardless of their immigration status, as a result of the state’s anti-immigrant law, HB 56, and the xenophobic climate it has created, according to a report released today by the SPLC.
The report – Alabama’s Shame: HB 56 and the War on Immigrants – features stories told by Latinos from across Alabama. They describe being cheated out of wages, being denied medical treatment and facing a growing hostility since the passage of HB 56. The report calls for the law’s repeal, citing evidence that it attacks the basic human dignity of all Latinos.
The report includes the following stories:

• A health clinic refused to treat a young girl due to her immigration status. Days later, she had to undergo emergency surgery.

A family with young children lived in a home without running water for 40 days because their “papers” were not in order.

After asking to be paid for her work, a day laborer had a gun pointed at her by a boss who declared he didn’t have to pay her because she didn’t have “papers.”

Latinos who are U.S. citizens have reported enduring taunts of “Go back to Mexico” and being treated with suspicion. One citizen described having to provide “American” identification to complete a routine purchase at a store – simply because he is Latino.

You might argue that these stories are--perhaps--only the exception, not the rule. Even if that were true (and I don't think it is), it still makes me heartsick that this sort of thing can be going on in this country.

Will China's Urban Transition Produce a Large Middle Class?

China is now an urban majority country, as I noted recently. The general assumption is that this puts China squarely on the path to an ever more affluent urban middle class. Maybe not, cautions geographer and University of Washington professor Kam Wing Chan in a recently published paper, as reported this week in the Atlantic Cities--Place Matters website.

Professor Chan argues that all of the country’s urban growth and prosperity is not actually filtering down to the majority of the rising urban population. The reason is that the majority of the urban population is prevented from fully participating in the booming urban economy because of a Mao-era rule that draws a harsh line between those from urban areas and those from rural ones.
Established in 1958, hukou establishes a two-tiered population structure of rural and urban citizens. Urban citizens are given access to social services and welfare programs, including public education and affordable housing. Rural residents are not. Status is hereditary, meaning that once a family is in one tier it will always remain in that tier. This has been a problem for many rural residents who want to leave their agricultural lifestyles to earn the higher wages in cities working in factories or construction, but who are faced with slum-like living conditions and an effective low ceiling over their social and economic mobility.
Chan says it is this system of official discrimination that has enabled China to experience such economic growth – and what makes it unlikely that the second-class citizens will be able to become the sort of consumerist middle class outsiders are predicting.
“I would argue that this is one of the most powerful forces creating the modern global economy that we see,” says Chan. “There’s 150 million super-exploitable, very young migrant workers in China. And this is all very much created by the hukou system.”

This is a classic case of the dual labor market--a theory which is usually assumed to apply to the way in which rich countries incorporate immigrants. But China seems to have established an internal dual labor market that benefits the "officially" urban population at the expense of migrants from rural areas who lack the legal right to establish permanent residency in the city and thus cash in (literally) on the labor that they are contributing.