What's Happening to Unaccompanied Minor Children Entering Europe?

From Europe today came yet another horrific story related to the refugee flow into the region. There may be 10,000 unaccompanied minor children who are missing. BBC News has the report:

More than 10,000 migrant children may have disappeared after arriving in Europe over the past two years, the EU's police intelligence unit says. Europol said thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities. It warned of children and young people being forced into sexual exploitation and slavery by criminal gangs.

Save the Children says some 26,000 child migrants arrived in Europe last year without any family. It is the first time Europol has given a Europe-wide estimate of how many might be missing.

The story notes that some of these missing kids may have been united with family members, but the fear is that many of them have fallen into the hands of human traffickers and other kinds of gangs. It seems that by law even child migrants are allowed out of the reception centers during the day and some use the opportunity to run away--and that probably doesn't end well for a lot of them.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) spokesman Leonard Doyle told the BBC the figure of 10,000 missing children was "shocking but not surprising". He said it was "to be expected" that many of these would be caught up in exploitation. "Let's hope now the EU puts the resources into finding these children, helping them and reuniting these children with their families."

Controlling the Zika Virus Means Controlling Mosquitos

The Zika virus has stunned the world over the past couple of weeks, as I have already noted. There are still a lot of questions about how it spread from Africa to Brazil and why it it taking off as it appears to be. The key to its spread, though, is that infected persons must be bitten by the type of mosquito that carries it (the Aedes aegypti), although there is some circumstantial evidence that it could also be transmitted through sexual intercourse. Assuming that the mosquito is the real issue, then controlling mosquitos is obviously the way to control the spread of the disease. This week the Economist reminds us that Brazil had done a pretty good job of getting rid of mosquitos back in the 1950s, but success led to complacency and the mosquito population has bounced back, with horrific consequences for at least some of the Zika virus victims.

Brazil was declared free of A. aegypti in 1958, after a campaign that included regular fumigation and visits to ensure households got rid of standing water, where mosquitoes like to breed. Since then, the insect has bounced back. Might the fear of Zika help finish the job properly this time?

As another article in the Economist points out, mosquito eradication, while expensive, is clearly a better solution to the problem than telling women not to get pregnant. At the same time, countries all over the world need to monitor visitors from Brazil, in the same way that visitors from West Africa were monitored for Ebola. The map below, published by the Economist, compiles data on visitors from Brazil to other parts of the hemisphere and to Europe. The numbers are very large, and bound to explode as we get nearer to the summer Olympics to be held in Brazil. 

European Backlash Against Refugees

Maybe everyone is getting cranky because it's the middle of winter. I don't know. But we do know that this week has seen several stories out of Europe suggesting a clear backlash against the onslaught of refugees from Syria. A couple of days ago, the Danish parliament passed a law allowing Danish officials to confiscate cash and other assets from refugees as sort of a down payment on how much they will cost the Danish taxpayers. 

Under the new Danish law, police will be allowed to search asylum seekers on arrival in the country and confiscate any non-essential items worth more than 10,000 kroner (£1,000) that have no sentimental value to their owner.

Then yesterday Sweden announced that it might be expelling as many as 80,000 asylum seekers, clearly trying to send a signal to would-be travelers that the reception in Sweden might be icier than they expected.

The interior ministry has called on police and migration authorities to prepare for a sharp increase in deportations, and to arrange charter flights to expel refused asylum seekers to their country of origin. Sweden is also approaching other EU countries, including Germany, to discuss cooperation to increase efficiency and make sure flights are filled to capacity, it said.

On Thursday Finland’s interior minister said Helsinki also intended to expel about 20,000 of the 32,000 asylum seekers it received in 2015. “In principle we speak of about two-thirds, meaning approximately 65 percent of the 32,000 will get a negative decision (to their asylum application),” Paivi Nerg, the ministry’s administrative director, told Agence France-Presse.

Sweden received more than 160,000 asylum applications last year – by far the biggest influx in the EU as a proportion of the population. Between 60,000 and 80,000 of them will be rejected, the interior minister, Anders Ygeman, told Swedish media on Thursday.

People wouldn't reach Scandinavia, of course, if their progress was halted farther south. So, Greece gets the blame for not doing that, since Greece has become the major entry point for people taking off from Turkey and heading in small boats to the Greek shoreline.

The European Union authorities on Wednesday raised pressure on Greece to step up its efforts to slow the flow of migrants and tighten control of the bloc’s external borders, the first step in a process that would allow some countries to its north to extend their border controls for up to two years.

Valdis Dombrovskis, a vice president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive body, said that Greece was “seriously neglecting its obligations” by failing to properly register and fingerprint migrants. That conclusion led the commission to file a report to member states detailing “persistent and serious deficiencies” by Greece at controlling its borders.

In the meantime, the talks aimed at finding a resolution to the Syrian conflict are themselves in conflict, so the refugee crisis is not going to end anytime soon. 

What's to Become of Today's Younger Generation?

This week's Economist has a special section on the problem of youth unemployment all over the globe. There are a lot of familiar people quoted in the story, and too much detail to cover in one blog session, but let me hit some highlights:

This report takes a global view, since 85% of young people live in developing countries, and focuses on practical matters, such as education and jobs. And it will argue that the young are an oppressed minority, held back by their elders. They are unlike other oppressed minorities, of course. Their “oppressors” do not set out to harm them. On the contrary, they often love and nurture them. Many would gladly swap places with them, too.

Every single generation of humans has likely been "oppressed" by the elders. This is the nature of social control, in which the older generation tries to keep society from changing too much. 

In some respects the young have never had it so good. They are richer and likely to live longer than any previous generation.

Yet much of their talent is being squandered. In most regions they are at least twice as likely as their elders to be unemployed. Over 25% of youngsters in middle-income nations and 15% in rich ones are NEETs: not in education, employment or training.

These are the kinds of generalizations that require more explanation. I don't have time to do this  research myself, but my guess is that the biggest issue is relative cohort size. In countries where the younger cohort is larger than the older cohort, the demands on the economy to keep growing in order to create ever more jobs may well be beyond societal resources. This is the problem of sustainability. Can we continue to have more people every year, and have them all be better off than before? The realistic answer is maybe not. We are in historically uncharted territory. 

The author of the special report, Robert Guest, is an economist promoting free market capitalism as a solution to problems and I don't have a problem with that in general. But, the ubiquity of income inequality--called out just before the last two Davos meetings by OxFam--is a barrier. Humans living in societies need to share resources if everyone is to thrive. The concentration of too much income and wealth anywhere--whether by the government or private firms--is deleterious to the human condition. I thought of this recently when Paul Ryan became Speaker of the US House of Representatives. His family's wealth as a private road construction firm came heavily from the government paying to have roads built. That is the type of resource sharing that most countries are currently not doing, and that is where the "oppression" lies. If we get back on that track, everyone--young and old--will be better off.

Zika Virus Hits El Salvador--Government Advises Women Not to Get Pregnant

The zika virus has emerged from the shadows to be really scary, mainly for pregnant women, as a I noted a couple of days ago. Brazil was the first to be noticed on this, but a story in today's NYTimes suggests that on a per person basis, El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America may actually be harder hit.

With at least 5,000 cases of Zika in a nation of six million, more than 1,500 in the last month alone, the government has been scrambling for solutions. It has dispatched teams of fumigators and treated water supplies to combat the Aedes mosquito, which also carries diseases like dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya.

But the government has also suggested to women that they delay pregnancy for two years!

But El Salvador’s advice to stop having children for two full years struck many experts as particularly sweeping, leaving them to wonder when else a nation has tried to halt its birthrate in the face of an epidemic. 

“I can tell you that I have never read, heard or encountered a public request like that,” said David Bloom, a professor of economics and demography at the Harvard School of Public Health. 

If El Salvador’s advice sounds like a cry for help, critics say, that’s because it is.

Despite the fact that the country is largely Roman Catholic, birth control is widespread. Data summarized by PRB show that an estimated 72% of married women are already using contraception, and the fertility rate has dropped to replacement level. Gang violence, economic uncertainty and a lot of out-migration have contributed to women already deciding to limit the number of children. It is, of course, unlikely that a large number of women will heed the government's advice, but time will tell...