How population characteristics shape our world, and how we can influence them

Jennifer D. Sciubba, currently President and CEO of Population Reference Bureau, is a political demographer. She is a leading expert in how population trends and composition affect politics and social relations -- and vice versa. This is what makes her analysis more interesting than your run-of-the-mill books on demography. My own background was originally in population geography, so the fundamentals that Sciubba explains in the book are very familiar to me.

Beyond those fundamentals, there is a lot of interesting and insightful in the book. For example, Sciubba points out that neither rapid population growth nor aging are per se not inherently problematic. Instead, their impact depends on the governance, political and economic circumstances. While fertility has dropped to below replacement levles, resulting in population shrinkage without immigration in most parts of the world (including Europe, North America, Japan, China, even Brazil), it remains very high in most of Africa where the societies' ability to accommodate the large cohorts of new entrants into labor force are generally weak. Sub-Saharan Africa contines to be the place with the largest growth in population. Almost 90% of world's population growth until mid-century will take place in lower-middle and low-income countries. This will pose challenges in terms of political stability and pressures to migrate. Sciubba also points out that it is not to poorest people from the poorest countries who migrate, because migration requires a certain amount of financial resources as well as skills to navigate the complex challenges of international migration. This fact casts doubt on the oft-heard justification for foreign aid to help people where they are, so that they will be discouraged to move.

A feature that makes Sciubba's book a lively read is her ample use of historical and current examples to demonstrate the more technical or theoretical points. They range from the impacts of China's one-child policy to the Rwandan genocide; from the relationship between aging societies and peace, to implications of Nigeria's youthful population. (I have to point out an odd slip: At one point, Sciubba places the southern African country of Botswana in the Sahel.)

Although Sciubba mentions climate change in several places, as acting as a stressor and as a driver of migration, it features fairly little in the book. That of course could be the focus of a separate book in itself.

A worthwhile and entertaining read, I'd recommend this book to anyone interesting in how population trends, fertility, mortality and migration shape society all over the world.

People on the Move - Climate Refugees

 

Environmental degradation and climate change add to migration pressures, which need to be addressed internationally for a more sustainable future.

Migration of people, driven by multifaceted crises, continues to surge, affecting millions globally. By mid-2022, 281 million people lived outside their birth country, some 40% of them forcibly displaced by the year's end due to conflict, persecution, or environmental degradation. Migration is not a singular event but a fluid process involving ongoing adaptation, often encompassing return or circular movements.

Most of displacement takes place within and between conflict-impacted countries in the global South, although most of the attention is given to those attempting to come to Europe and North America. According to the International Organization for Migration, there were 117 million displaced people at the end of 2022. Of these, 71.2 million were internally displaced.

The simple reason for this is that when people escape their own country, they usually end up in the neighboring one. Consequently, the biggest host country over the past seven years has been Türkiye (Turkey), because of the civil war in Syria (now that the situation there has calmed down, at least temporarily, many of the Syrian refugees are returning). For the same reason, Afghanistan’s neighbors—Pakistan and Iran—are also at the top of the list. The only Western country that makes it to the top-5 host countries is Germany. (If we don’t only count refugees, the busiest country-to-country migration corridor is between Mexico and the United States.) [These data come from the 2024 World Migration Report by the International Organization for Migration.]

Conflict remains a primary driver for people seeking refuge, with armed violence displacing millions, as seen in Ukraine and Gaza. Civilians disproportionately bear the brunt of modern warfare, with limited protections despite international conventions. Environmental factors, including floods, droughts, and rising sea levels, exacerbate migration pressures, with projections estimating over 100 million annual climate migrants by 2050. Climatic hazards should be divided into two categories: sudden-onset and slow-onset. The former refer to disastrous events, such as the 2022 floods in Pakistan, which forced a large number of people to flee, but many of whom returned afterwards. The slow-onset hazards consist of gradual but more or less permanent changes, like the drying up of Guatemala’s agricultural lands.

Closely associated with climate change as a driver of migration is increasing food insecurity. As we show in our book Migrant Health and Resilience published some months ago, health vulnerabilities, including exposure to disease and inadequate care, compound the challenges migrants face. Women, children, and displaced populations are particularly at risk, underscoring the need for targeted social and healthcare interventions.

Environmental refugees (or climate refugees) is a relatively new term used for people who move because of environmental pressures or because climate change has rendered their livelihoods untenable. In fact, international law does not yet recognize this category. The only legally binding treaties pertaining to refugees are the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. The Convention defines refugees as people fleeing their country of origin due to a credible fear of persecution based on race, religion, national origin, or membership in a particular political or social group. That does not cover climate refugees for the obvious reason that at the time when this treaty was created, few people had any notion of climate change. Legal scholars, like Caitlan Sussman, argue that there should be an expanded international framework for protecting climate refugees, and that the strongest solution would be to amend the 1951 Convention.

Should these people be classified as climate refugees if their decision to migrate has been triggered by worsened environmental conditions making it hard for them to eke out a living in their places of origin? This determination is a tough one and there probably isn’t a one-size-fits-all definition.

It is notoriously difficult to parse together the motivations of people to move away from their home areas. Most people move to improve their opportunities to a decent living, some even for mere survival. The vast majority of people move within the borders of their own country. The great urbanization that the world has experienced over the past several decades has been driven by this process. More than half of us now live in cities. People from the countryside moved to the cities in search for employment opportunities, giving rise to vast shanties often on the outskirts of the largest urban areas in the country. In many cases, people still kept their homesteads in the countryside and often left their wives and families to tend to them.

The biggest shanty towns can be found around Karachi (Pakistan), Mexico City, Mumbai (India), Nairobi (Kenya) and Cape Town (South Africa). These five settlements have a combined population of some 5.7 million people. Their hazardous geographical locations often render them particularly vulnerable to natural hazards from storms and floods to landslides.

Others move across national borders, many, as we know, seeking refuge in Europe or in North America, creating the politically explosive situation in which we currently live. The rapid increase in the number of migrants from the South has led to calls for border closings and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in the global West.

The 16^th Conference of Parties (COP16) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) finished earlier this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Conference President, the Saudi Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture, Abderrahman Al-Fadhli, emphasized how drought, land degradation, and resource loss are causing migration and fueling conflict. According to UNCCD, up to 40% of the world’s agricultural lands are already degraded and this trend continues unabated. Of course, not all of this degradation is due to climate change. Much of it is simple overuse or utilization of poor agricultural practices, but often climate change is at least part of the picture. In the past, it was possible for farmers and herders to move when one area became depleted, but today places are too densely populated to allow for opening up new land when old becomes exhausted.

One of the worst affected areas is the Sahel, the arid belt between the Sahara desert and wetter and more fertile areas further south in Africa. The transboundary Lake Chad, straddling the Central and West African countries of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, has lost nine-tenths of its area in just a few decades starting in the early 1970s, leading to food shortages, population displacement and conflict. At the COP16, Nigeria’s Minister of Environment, Balarabe Abbas Lawal, placed this ecological fact at the center of the rise of Boko Haram, the violent fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization. Again, it’s hard to tell exactly how much of this dramatic shrinkage has been due to human-induced climate change. Paleoclimate research shows that the lake has experienced wet and dry periods for thousands of years. Human factors, such as extraction of water for irrigation have also contributed. Recent research published in Nature suggests that climatic fluctuations are indeed the main reason for Lake Chad’s loss of water but that the lake is not disappearing; in fact the southern pool has been rather stable and even slightly increasing in recent years following local rainfall and river discharge. The fact remains, that the availability of water and the interannual variability of rainfall, combined with growing human population, continues to cause increasing pressure on natural resources and conflict.

While COP16 was meeting in Riyadh in early-December 2024, the Syrian opposition forces led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani overran the country’s capital, Damascus, sending the dictator Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Moscow (birds of a feather flock together). Syria is a large country at a strategic crossroads in the Middle East. It has a complex ethnic and religious makeup, and many actors in the region and beyond (from Turkey and Iran to Russia and Israel) meddling in its affairs. Its geography matters. Rising temperatures, decreased rainfall and water scarcity, combined with environmental pollution has made farming difficult. It drove large numbers of people from the countryside into cities causing conflicts, acting as an accelerator to the bloody 13-year civil war.

On the Western hemisphere, climate change and environmental degradation play a role in the immigration crisis on the US southern border. Missing rains and subsequent land degradation in Central America, especially Guatemala and Honduras, has rendered farming increasingly precarious decimating rural livelihoods. Jobs in the cities of these countries are hard to come by, the political situation is oppressive, and violent criminal gangs prey on people making life dangerous. Consequently, many people make the decision to try their luck and make the hazardous trek to reach the rich North.

All these cases demonstrate how climate interacts with human and political factors in creating fragility, conflict and violence—and consequent pressures to migrate.

In other parts of the world the issue is too much water. This is particularly true for low-lying coastal regions subject to sea-level rise and coastal storms. How countries and cities cope with these calamities depends very much on the resources available to them and how stable their decision-making structures are. Much of the Netherlands is below sea level but the country has been able to thrive under these conditions for centuries, while poorer countries from Bangladesh to Nigeria are hard pressed to deal with the increasing coastal hazards.

Island nations and especially small island developing states (SIDS) are an extreme case where climate-related environmental changes may pose an existential threat. Many of us have seen pictures of the foreign minister of Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific Island nation, delivering a message to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change COP26 in 2023 standing knee-deep in water. Tuvalu has also launched plans to become the world’s first entirely digital nation, so that it can preserve key aspects of its culture and national identity even if the islands will be covered by waves.

Migration reshapes social and economic landscapes both in the countries of origin and in receiving countries, straining resources and labor markets while fostering cultural and demographic shifts. Sustainable responses demand addressing migration drivers as well as improved resettlement systems. Irrespective of legal recognition, addressing climate-induced migration requires proactive strategies and recognition of shared global responsibilities. Ultimately, promoting harmonious integration and wellbeing for both migrants and host communities remains a critical challenge in an era of unprecedented human displacement.

[Originally published at: https://juhauitto.substack.com/p/people-on-the-move-climate-refugees]

People on the move - Coping with immigration

 Immigration was the central issue for one in seven of (likely) voters in the US presidential election of 2024, second only to inflation and high prices, and played a decisive role for many people in deciding whom to vote for.

Likewise in Europe, immigration has dominated much of the public discourse over the past years. Immigration from outside to the European Union (EU) and the United States has increased significantly over the past several decades. In the US, there are now 46.2 million foreign-born persons (yours truly included) or about 13.9% of the total population. In the EU, 42.4 million people, or 9% of the population, were born outside of the Union’s borders. Whether the share of immigrants in Western countries is high or low is open for debate—and it has indeed dominated public discourse almost everywhere.

A 2022 Eurobarometer survey found that almost seven out of ten Europeans overestimate the share of immigrants in their countries. Furthermore, the largest source countries for immigrants tend to be elsewhere in Europe and what we broadly call the West, the list topped by Switzerland, Australia, Iceland, Israel, Norway, the US, and Turkey (Türkiye).

Japan is still an exception among the rich and ageing countries of the Global West. While it maintains its more restrictive immigration policy, the number of foreigners there, too, has grown significantly. According to the Ministry of Justice, there were 2.76 million foreigners living in Japan in 2022 (excluding those there illegally and long-staying tourists) constituting about 2.3% of the total population.

The largest groups of immigrants to Japan come from other Asian countries—China, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines—as well as Brazil, which has a significant population of ethnic Japanese (with about half a million Japanese residing in and around São Paulo). These same are among the top source countries in the US as well. Following Mexico, the largest groups of immigrants to the States come from India, China, Philippines and Vietnam.

Attitudes towards foreigners vary significantly depending on the kind of migrant and how they arrived in the destination countries. To put it bluntly, few EU citizens are upset about the Swiss or the Norwegians living amongst them (some are more critical of the Americans, although those who want to live in Europe tend to be less provincial in outlook than their average compatriots).

Most of the debate on immigration is concerned with immigrants from poor and conflict-affected countries, and is driven by fears that the importation of cheap unskilled labor from the Global South will undercut salaries and take away jobs in general. There is some truth to this argument: the availability of ample labor for low-paying jobs can reduce the pressure on employers to increase pay in step with rising prices.

However, immigrants often do jobs that natives in rich countries would not take, including in agriculture and the numerous restaurant kitchens everywhere around us.  Without immigrants from Mexico, elsewhere in Central America, and China, consumer prices in the US would certainly go up and many fields would suffer from labor shortages.

Another complaint pertains to social and cultural issues. Some immigrants are seen as holding on to their old ways and often not integrating into their new host countries. In this respect, the US has a better track record than Europe, which has suffered several (and increasing) terrorist attacks by foreigners, several of whom have arrived among legitimate refugees.

Issues such as women’s rights, domestic violence (even honor killings), female genital mutilation, and other persistent features appall the Western hosts. Incoming President Trump has famously fanned the flames of fear of immigrants, claiming i.a. that Mexican immigrants to the US are rapists and murderers, and that immigrants from Haiti eat the pets of Americans. There is no evidence of this and, in fact, native-born Americans are more likely to commit crimes than immigrants.

The issue of illegal immigration is obviously a complicated one. The “crisis on the southern border” was a major theme in the 2024 US election, which concerned Americans of all races and walks of life. Even people who feel positively towards immigration (after all, the country was built upon immigration) tend to think that the situation is out of control and that it would be important to have an orderly process.

Many immigrants who have come to the country through a legal route also see it as unfair that you can enter the country just by showing up at a border post, declaring yourself a refugee facing persecution at home; then get in to wait for their case to pass through the legal process (which takes years) and in the meantime disappear into the country and find illegal work.

The economics of immigration are clear. Immigration overall is correlated with increased productivity and long-term economic development. Multiculturalism also tends to be associated with a richer tapestry of life. No-one can seriously argue that the cuisine of the USA, UK, Germany or Finland has not improved thanks to foreigners coming to live in our countries. However, it is equally clear that extremely rapid movement of people can be disruptive and irrevocably change the nature of communities.

There are also great differences between different groups of immigrants. At one end you have the highly educated professionals, including those who arrived for higher education, who tend to integrate and quickly enrich their new home countries. In the US, where according to the Census Bureau the current median household income is about $80,000 per year, this figure is over $112,000 for Asians, as compared with $85,000 for whites, $65,000 for Hispanics, $61,000 for Native Americans (including Alaskans), and $57,000 for Blacks. The Indian, Persian, Chinese, Japanese and other Asian doctors, engineers and other professionals clearly are doing well in America. It’s also worth noting that immigrants from Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa are on the average earning more than Americans, including whites.

Which brings us to the differing policies between countries. Canada is well known for its system where higher education and wealth bring points to potential immigrants to move up the queue. Japan has also opened its doors to highly educated foreigners who can help the country stay at the forefront of advanced research: When you enter the campus of any top research university in the country you can’t avoid seeing many un-Japanese faces, mostly from India and elsewhere in South Asia.

In the USA, there are currently more than 1.5 million foreign students (the top countries being India, China and South Korea) and they tend towards STEM majors, such as computer and information sciences and engineering, as well as management. They also dominate graduate studies in STEM subjects. Without them, science and technological development in the US would be far less innovative.

People have always been on the move and, on the whole, this has enriched our lives. What some people these days lament as cultural appropriation has always been the norm. That’s how societies learn and develop. There is no country in the world that has not taken bits and pieces of other nations’ cultures and made them their own.

We now live in a world where, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN body, more than 280 million people—or 3.6% of the world's population—are on the move.

People move for a variety of reasons. Many move in search of a better life and economic opportunities. These two are not necessarily the same, as for many migrant workers better economic opportunities may bring current hardships and dangers. For instance, South Asian and Filippino workers in the Gulf have little recourse against abuses by employers. Still, this does not deter migrant workers: there were 169 million of them in 2019 according to IOM. These migrants and diaspora communities sent $647 billion back to their home countries in 2022, far outpacing any official development assistance these countries receive.

Many people do not move voluntarily. The UN’s refugee organization tells that there were 82.4 million forcibly displaced persons in 2020, including 26.4 million officially recognized refugees. These are people who have fled persecution, armed conflict, or human rights violations in their home areas. Most of them are internally displaced or in neighboring countries, but many of them are also spread around the world. A new category, not yet fully recognized in international law, are the environmental or climate refugees whose livelihoods have been affected by environmental degradation, droughts and other environmental hazards (more on that in a later blog).

People from both categories—economic migrants and refugees—frequently try their luck to get into the more peaceful countries of Europe, North America and Australia. Legally or illegally.

Complicating the problem is that it is rarely the poorest people who migrate. The increase in migration during the past decades has coincided with increased incomes and standards of living in the emigrants’ home countries. Despite this, the wealth differences between countries drive people to seek their luck in richer countries of the world—and who can blame them for that? It does, nevertheless, contradict the often-heard claim that increased development assistance in the departure countries would reduce pressure to emigrate.

Our views of how we should deal with our fellow humans on the move vary considerably. At one end are those who long for a borderless world, like it was hundreds of years ago when you could just walk or ride a camel or sail to a new land and settle there (sometimes replacing or subordinating those already living there). One of them is Gaia Vince, who in her well researched but partial book, Nomad Century, argues for the abolishment of national borders for both moral and economic reasons.

Vince doesn’t seem to see any downsides to accepting an unlimited number of new entrants to any country. She goes as far as to suggest that Swedish policy-makers fear nothing more than the departure of immigrants from the country. Such Pollyannish views would hardly fly with the people of Sweden where foreign gangs (many hailing from North Africa or former Yugoslavia) have turned the peaceful “people’s home” (folkhemmet) into a killing field (unlike in America, it is the foreigners who are driving violent crime in Scandinavia).

At the other end are those who want to keep all foreigners out. We find them everywhere: in Japan where some right-wing nationalists see gaijin corrupting the country; in Finland where violent events involving immigrants have hardened the public attitudes; and in the USA where president-elect Trump has promised to round up and deport 11 million undocumented people living illegally in the country. An analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics suggests that this effort would drive up inflation and shrink the US economy, targeting workers in areas where they will be hard to replace. (Not to mention the logistical challenge and cost of actually rounding up and deporting millions of people.)

Understandably, immigration brings out strong emotions and divides people and communities. Although its impacts can be net-positive, there are many factors that influence the balance. One of them is the speed of the process, which can overwhelm communities. The other is the facility of integration of immigrants into their new environments, which requires effort from both sides.

While multiculturalism can be a richness, the long-term inhabitants in a place have a right to maintain their social norms. We need an immigration policy that is both humane towards the people who need refuge, as well as orderly and fair; one that also takes into account what different types of immigrants can contribute to their new country.

[Published originally at: https://juhauitto.substack.com/p/people-on-the-move-coping-with-immigration] 

Ghosts of Honolulu -- an unsual perspective on the Pacific War

Quite interesting, an unusual perspective to the Pacific War. Well researched and balanced. I also very much appreciated the description of the suspicion towards and internment of Japanese Americans, and how unfair and irrational it was. There are some lessons there for today's world.

Geopolitics, moral ambiguity, and murder

A very interesting and highly original plot involving the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The main characters are all very well drawn up, interesting and human. McDermid writes beautifully, with genuine sounding dialogue. She manages to insert (black) humor into the rather grim tale, making it at times laugh-out-loud funny. The moral ambiguities at the heart of the story make you think.

As a personal bonus, one of the protagonists is an Oxford geography professor who, as a fellow geographer, shares my interest in geopolitics.

My only regret is that it has taken me this long to discover Val McDermid. On the other hand, it means that I will have many of her books to look forward to.