Demography does not explain the migration crisis

My Times column on African demography and the
migration crisis:

Even the most compassionate of European liberals
must wonder at times whether this year’s migration crisis is just
the beginning of a 21st- century surge of poor people that will
overwhelm the rich countries of our continent. With African
populations growing fastest, are we glimpsing a future in which the
scenes we saw on the Macedonian border, or on Kos or in the seas
around Sicily last week will seem tame?

I don’t think so. The current migration crisis is being driven
by war and oppression, not demography. Almost two thirds of the
migrants reaching Europe by boat this year are from three small countries: Syria,
Afghanistan and Eritrea. These are not even densely populated
countries: their combined populations come to less than England’s,
let alone Britain’s, and none of them is in the top 20 for
population growth rates.

Well then, perhaps that is even more ominous. If these three
relatively small countries can cause such turmoil, imagine what
would happen if say the more populous countries in Africa fell into
similar chaos. Today Africa’s population (north and sub-Saharan) is about 50 per cent larger than Europe’s (East
and West). By 2050, when — according to United Nations estimates —
Africa’s population will have more than doubled from 1.1 billion to
about 2.4 billion people and Europe’s will have shrunk from 740
million to about 709 million, there will be more than three
Africans for every European.

Actually, demography is a poor predictor of migration. Nowhere
in the world are people leaving countries specifically because of
population growth or density. The population density of Germany is five times as high as that of Afghanistan
or Eritrea: unlike water, people often move up population
gradients. Tiny Eritrea, with only five million people, is a hell-hole for purely political reasons.
It has a totalitarian government that tries to make North Korea and
the old East Germany look tame: it conscripts every 17-year-old
into lifelong and total service of the state. No wonder 3 per cent
of its people have already left.

It is equally obvious why people are clamouring to leave Syria
and Afghanistan: violence is driving them out, not shortage of
food, space, or water, let alone climate change or anything else.
(Notoriously, in 2005 the UN Environment Programme forecast 50 million climate-change refugees by
2010.)

So it is simply not the case that migration of Africans (or
Asians) will be driven by their ever-increasing numbers. Ethiopia,
next-door to Eritrea, is the second most populous country in
Africa, with higher population density than Eritrea, and 90 million
people. But its government is only mildly authoritarian, its
economic growth rate is an astonishing 8-12 per cent over the past
five years and people are not clamouring to leave.

Geographically speaking, Africa is an enormous continent. You can fit China, India, the United States,
Mexico, Europe and Japan inside it, and still have space left over.
When it has a population of 2.4 billion in 2050, it will still have
fewer people than the 4 billion who live in those places today. Of
the 50 least densely populated countries in the world, 16 are in Africa. The continent is far from
overflowing.

As for feeding this multitude, much of Africa can grow fabulous
crops several times a year. Without access to synthetic fertilizer,
yields have lagged behind Asia, but they are starting to catch up
and when they do, Africa will easily be able to feed 2.4 billion
people and export a surplus. Already, despite fast-growing
populations, famine is gone from Africa, except where mad and bad
regimes cause it.

With the death tolls from HIV-Aids and malaria falling rapidly,
the continent is currently experiencing a plunge in child
mortality, which in turn is encouraging birth rates to fall: when
people expect their children to live, they have fewer of them. The
birth rate in Kenya has halved in the past 40 years. It is called
the demographic transition, and it happened here more than a
century ago.

Africa’s population growth will slow during this century. The
richer it gets the more that growth rate will slow. But there are
already easily enough Africans to overwhelm Europe’s capacity to
cope if they all come here, so there is nothing especially alarming
about the idea of a larger future population in Africa. The problem
isn’t demography.

No, what drives migration is violence, perpetrated these days
either by dictatorial regimes, or by religious extremists, rarely
by other causes.

In Syria, of course, both causes have combined to deadly effect.
The global Sunni-Shia civil war, the war of militant Islamists
against Christians, the kidnapping of women and children by Boko
Haram, Islamic State and the Lord’s Resistance Army — these are the
kind of things that will drive poor people into Europe from Africa
and Asia. The best way to make that flow less overwhelming is not
to reduce population but to extinguish wars, expel dictators and
calm religious extremisms: easier said than done.

The one demographic trend that gives cause for concern is the
birth rate among religious extremists. As Eric Kaufmann pointed out
in 2010 in his book Shall the Religious Inherit the
Earth?, there is a dramatic and growing difference between
the family size of moderate and fundamentalist believers in every
major religion. Fundamentalists are literally out-breeding
moderates within Islam, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Mormonism
and Judaism. Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews have an average of 7.5 children; secular ones
2.2. In cities in Muslim countries, women who are most in favour of
Sharia have twice as many children as women who most oppose it.

Combine this with the result derived from twin studies that,
while the particular religion you practise clearly does not run in
the genes, the degree of religious enthusiasm does to some extent.

Imagine then that by the middle of this century, people with a
tendency to become highly religious have become a much greater
proportion of the population than today. That could be a recipe for
more violence. (You may think I am equating all religion with
violence. No, but next time you hear about a violent atrocity on a
train or in a shopping mall, you don’t say to yourself — there go
those agnostics again.)

Fortunately, children often do the opposite of what their
parents tell them, and religious revivals have a tendency to fade.
So it is just as likely that the spasms of violence causing surges
of migration from poor countries will have died away by mid
century.