The Real Scoop on Undocumented Immigrants in America

Donald Trump has made undocumented immigrants, and the need to build a wall to stop them, a huge part of his presidential campaign. The reality is vastly different than his description of them as criminals and rapists who are coming across the border to take jobs from Americans. Thanks to my son John for pointing to me an a truly excellent interview that WNYC had a couple of days ago with Professor Douglas Massey, Professor of Sociology at Princeton and past president of the Population Association of America. Massey is the genuinely the world's foremost authority on migration issues and you will hear nothing but the truth in the 12 minutes that he is interviewed.

A less detailed, but also very good, editorial on this topic appeared in today's NYTimes, with an appropriate reference to Professor Rubén Rumbaut's work demonstrating that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than are citizens of the U.S.

Is Increasing Tallness a Sign of Societal Well-Being?

As I discuss in Chapter 11 of my text, the health and mortality transition in the world is associated with larger people. This means that as the population grows, our improved health is associated partly with a better diet and, in turn, the demand for food grows faster than the population is growing. Majid Ezzati at Imperial College London, along a large group of collaboraters, has just published an analysis of global trends in human height over the 100 year span from the beginning of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century. The abstract sums up the main points:

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5–22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3–19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8–144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries.

The Economist Espresso pulled together a graph from the data that provides a nice picture of a century of growth in height among the tallest people in the world, who are Europeans:

Now, in the interest of full-disclosure, I am 6' 2" so I may pay more attention to the tallness issue than might otherwise be the case, but the societal correlation between changes in average tallness and changes in average well-being is compelling.

Birth Defect Associated With Zika Virus is Spatially Concentrated in Brazil

The huge concern about the Zika virus is of course that it can cause birth defects (microcephaly) in babies whose mothers have contracted the disease. But Nature News today reported on new analyses showing that birth defects are spatially concentrated in only one state in Brazil, leading researchers to consider what else it is about that state that might interact with Zika to cause microcephaly. 

Zika virus has spread throughout Brazil, but extremely high rates of microcephaly have been reported only in the country's northeast. Although evidence suggests that Zika can cause microcephaly, the clustering pattern hints that other environmental, socio-economic or biological factors could be at play. 

“We suspect that something more than Zika virus is causing the high intensity and severity of cases,” says Fatima Marinho, director of information and health analysis at Brazil’s ministry of health. If that turns out to be true, it could change researchers' assessment of the risk that Zika poses to pregnant women and their children.

There are many hypotheses about what might be going on. Marinho says that her team's data, submitted for publication, hint that socio-economic factors might be involved. For example, the majority of women who have had babies with microcephaly have been young, single, black, poor and tend to live in small cities or on the outskirts of big ones, she says. Another idea is that co-infections of Zika and other viruses, such as dengue and chikungunya, might be interacting to cause the high intensity of birth defects in the area. A third possibility was put forward in a paper published last month1, in which researchers from Brazilian labs noted a correlation between low vaccination rates for yellow fever and the microcephaly clusters.

Brazil has called in spatial epidemiology experts Oliver Brady from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Simon Hay, director of geospatial science at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington, to help sort out the issues. Not mentioned among the possibilities is the debunked theory put out early on that this was all due to experimental research on larvicides being conducted in the region by Sumitomo, which has a relationship to Monsanto.

Continued Worries About Israel's Growing Population

Israel's demography has not traditionally been part of the demographic mess in the Middle East. Indeed, the country's biggest concern for a long time was that it needed enough people to make the economy work and defend itself against hostile neighbors. Yet, more than three years ago I blogged about the emerging issue of the much more rapid growth of the ultra-orthodox population in Israel than of the rest of the population, and of the possibility that this might alter the political landscape of the country. Last month I discussed a new report out by Alon Tal of Ben-Gurion University in Israel who is decrying the overall rapid rate of population growth there. Professor Tal's concerns today reached the ears of the New York Times in the form of an Op-Ed piece.

For a quarter-century, I have worked hard to protect Israel’s environment: organizing demonstrations, writing legislation, even suing polluters. Eventually, it dawned on me that while local environmentalists might enjoy isolated victories, our efforts may be futile in the long run — because we’re addressing only symptoms, not causes.

Israel’s environmental problems are largely a function of a rapid increase in population. The country will never be able to control greenhouse gases, maintain even minimal levels in our rivers and streams or protect our fragile habitats if this demographic growth continues at such an astonishing rate. With urban development taking over about five square miles of open space every five years, Israel’s wildlife is in steep decline. Species from gazelles and hedgehogs to bats and hyenas are endangered.

Professor Tal is sensitive to the politics of the country and does not specifically address the high fertility of the ultra-orthodox population, although he does refer to studies that suggest the long-term cost of large families:

More than a quarter of Israeli children live below the poverty line; a majority of those live in families with five or more children. Israeli children growing up in families with two siblings or fewer, regardless of ethnic identity or religious affiliation, generally enjoy better opportunities.

Nor does he get into the clearly related problem of settlements in the West Bank, which are driven both by politics and demography. He may be indirectly referencing these things, however, in his final comment that "[T]here was a time when expanding Israel’s population was a paramount national priority. Today, the focus must change from quantity to quality of life." John Stuart Mill made that same assessment back in the 19th century and it is still true today and true today everywhere in the world, not just in Israel.

The History of the Population Association of America Has a New Website

For several decades now there has been an ongoing effort to keep up with and write the history of the Population Association of America. The effort was first started by Anders Lunde, who received his doctorate in sociology at Columbia University under Kingsley Davis. Most of his professional career was spent at the National Center for Health Statistics in Washington, D.C. (which is now part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control). When he became PAA secretary-treasurer in 1965, he was dismayed by the dearth of usable PAA files he inherited. So, Lunde subsequently decided to create an archive of data, including oral histories of past PAA presidents. In 1973, he became the first Historian of the PAA and assembled core records of meetings, membership numbers and officers and Board members since PAA's founding in 1931. With these data available to him, he started interviewing past presidents who were still alive at that time, beginning with Frank Notestein at the Population Council. He interviewed 12 others between 1973 and 1979 when he retired from the NCHS. In 1982, Lunde asked Jean van der Tak of the Population Reference Bureau to assume the role of PAA Historian. She subsequently brought the oral histories up-to-date as of 1994, calling them "Demographic Destinies". She retired in that year, and the PAA Board asked me to take over the role of PAA Historian. With the help of a great set of committee members--Dennis Hodgson of Fairfield University, Karen Hardee of the Population Council, Deborah McFarlane of the University of New Mexico, and Emily Merchant of Dartmouth University--we have been trying our best to interview all past PAA Presidents, as well as provide brief histories of the PAA and a timeline of PAA events. 

For many years these historical archives were hosted by San Diego State University, but this week Danielle Staudt and Bobbi Westmoreland of the PAA were able to finalize their integration into the website of the Population Association of America. Take a look, and enjoy!