Category Archives: Immigration

The owl and the pussycat.

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Bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Americans are obsessed by their “un-secured” Southern border, a land frontier. Other people perceive the oceans as pathways as much as obstacles. During 2014, 350,000 people took to the sea in an effort to migrate illegally.[1]

In 2014, more than 80,000 people from the “Horn of Africa” have crossed the Gulf of Aden. Often, their first land-fall is Yemen, hardly an improvement on Somalia or Ethiopia. Their more distant goals are the oil-states of the Gulf. The largest numbers of those who reached Southern Europe by sea came from Syria and—mind-bogglingly—Eritrea.

This year more than 50,000 have descended the Bay of Bengal from Bangladesh and Myanmar to Malaysia and the little chicken-leg of Thailand that runs down the Malaysian Peninsula.[2] Many of these migrants are Rohinyas (Muslims living in northwestern Myanmar). The Buddhist military government has long persecuted the Rohinyas. Over the years, many of the Rohinyas sought refuge by taking passage to Muslim Malaysia. Often, the migrants fell prey to gangs of traffickers who sold them into near-slavery. In the last few years the trafficking gangs have extended their reach into Bangladesh.

Gangs in Myanmar and, now Bangladesh, shanghai people and take them to Thailand and Malaysia. They are crammed into little fishing boats and lightered to larger ships in the Bay of Bengal. The ships bear them south to Thailand, where they are unloaded and moved to camps in the jungle. Then the gangs start to economically exploit their captives. First, the gangs extort a standard fee from the families of those they have kidnapped, just to let them go on living. If the family can pay the ransom, then the traffickers move the captives into Malaysia. Here they work for low wages on plantations, or construction jobs, or sweat-shops. News accounts don’t say what happens to those whose families cannot pay the ransom.

The human stories are both illuminating and heart-breaking.[3] Amadou Jallow was a 22 year-old Gambian college graduate with a teaching certificate and a job in a high-school. The pay was lousy compared to what rumor said he could make in Europe. One day in 2002, without telling his father, he borrowed part of the family savings from his mother as a grub-stake, mounted his bicycle, and set off for Senegal. From Senegal he hoped to catch a boat to the Canary Islands. Two years later he finally caught his boat, although it was from Guinea-Bissau.

The boat was over-loaded (131 people set out) and badly supplied with food and water (there were supplies for six days, but the voyage took eleven days). The bodies of those who died during the night were thrown over-board when dawn broke. The hell-ship finally reached the Canary Islands. The passengers spent six weeks in a detention center, then were flown to Spain. Jallow was delighted: “I thought I was going to be a millionaire.”

It hasn’t turned out the way he expected. He made about 600 euros a year as a teacher. Now he averages about 2,000 euros working in restaurants or in farm fields. This is a pittance given the much higher cost of living in Europe compared to Gambia. He sent about 4,000 euros home to his family, but stopped doing that when work became hard to get. Now he lives in a squalid camp in a forest with other African immigrants.

The Africans keep up the charade that first drew them to Europe. They feel humiliated by their own stupidity and embarrassed by having used the modest savings of their families to finance these fool’s errands. They send home photographs of themselves smiling and standing next to expensive cars as if they were the owners. They never tell anyone the truth when they call home. More and more Africans are drawn to make the difficult, often dangerous journey to Europe. Twenty-five thousand of them have reached the Italian island of Lampedusa in recent years.

[1] Somini Sengupta, “More Refugees Take to the Sea, U.N. Reports,” NYT, 11 December 2014.

[2] Syed Zain Al-Mahmood, “Traffickers Take Aim at Bangladeshis,” WSJ, 29 October 2014.

[3] Suzanne Daley, “Chasing Riches From Africa to Europe and Finding Only Squalor,” NYT, 26 May 2011.

The Struggle for More Workers.

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The world’s population currently is about 7.2 billion people. For many years apocalyptic visions inspired by Thomas Malthus haunted the sleep of demographers. Then, fertility rates in many high birth-rate countries began to decline. Current estimates now project that the world’s population will “peak” at about 9 billion people.[1]

However, that consensus has just come under attack. Many countries in South Asia and Africa continue to experience rapidly rising populations. The African fertility rate, in particular, has failed to follow the downward track projected from early statistics. Some population experts now believe that the population of the world may reach a population of 12.3 billion people by 2100.[2] Moreover, their populations are rising without the economic growth to be able to provide them with a decent standard of living. Back to Malthus on steroids.

Conversely, many other countries find themselves with a birthrate below the replacement level. The working age population of Japan began to decline about 1997. There is no sign that it will start to rise again anytime soon. That means a shrinking population of workers will have to support a growing population of retirees. Enhanced productivity can off-set this problem, but—at the moment—it isn’t. Japan’s trade balance has shift from running export surpluses to import surpluses. What’s true of Japan is or soon will be true of many other countries with low birthrates and high life expectancy. Chinese couples will have to juggle running or working in sweat-shops with caring for their aging parents as well as their own children. The Italians find themselves in an even worse boat than do the Chinese.

What’s the solution to this two-headed problem? If one approaches it from a strictly economic perspective, then one solution is to foster the migration of surplus population from Africa and South Asia to population deficient countries. Brilliant! The further triumph of the equilibrium model.[3] Why haven’t we done this already? There are two big stumbling blocks: the educational differences and the cultural differences.

The Educational problem is simply stated: poor countries have poor school systems, but the developed countries need educated workers. Some migrants will need more education.

The Cultural problem is simply stated: immigrant-receiving countries will want the newcomers to adapt swiftly to established culture, rather than to adapt themselves to a foreign culture. To avoid the sort of social problems that have overtaken Britain, France, and Germany, there would have to be some flexibility on both sides.

Is it worth thinking about “Aid to Potential Immigrants” stations abroad? ICE, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Education could maintain offices in places like India, Taiwan, Israel, the Philippines, and South Africa. They could both recruit and evaluate immigrants. Travel costs could be subsidized in whole or in part.

Is it worth thinking about the possible resistance from population-surplus countries? It’s not like someone is going to up-date Emma Lazarus: “Give us your aged, your stupid, your weak of will.” Advanced economies will be trying to cherry-pick the “best and the brightest” people from societies that are struggling to raise their own standard of living. What population-surplus countries prefer to do is to get rid of their problems. That doesn’t mean that things can’t work out. Look at Mariel. Look at Australia.

[1] Tyler Cowan, “Rebalancing the Population Scales,” NYT, 9 November 2014.

[2] I’ll be long dead by then, so you deal with it.

[3] It’s a constant in human thought, like symmetry in ideals of Beauty and Justice. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_types_of_equilibrium

What is globalization?

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“Globalization” has been going on for a very long time, but in the last quarter of a century the degree of globalization has increased dramatically.

The ancient “Silk Road” trade route connected East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Sailors, caravan drivers, missionaries, and the odd tourist carried word of one civilization to another. (Bits of Roman armor have been discovered in Vietnam.)

The “Voyages of Discovery” created European empires of Trade in Asia and of Settlement in the Americas. Europeans (willing) and Africans (unwilling) moved to the Americas; cotton, coffee, corn, tomatoes, tobacco, potatoes, and Aedes aegypti all crossed the oceans for the first time.

Industrialization in the 19th Century spread Western power, ideas, and patterns of economic development all over the globe in new ways and to a greater degree than before. European investment poured into American, Indian, and Chinese railroads, and into the Suez and Panama canals; the telegraph eliminated time in sending messages; millions of people migrated.

The rise of Communism between 1919 and 1989 sealed off much of the world from Western Capitalism. These places needed scientists, doctors, and engineers, so they built up an educated elite. Then the collapse of the Communist model led to the opening of Russia, Eastern Europe, and China to the world market. Countries like India, much of Africa, and Latin America had all copied parts of the Communist model. After 1989 they also opened up. Low-skill jobs flowed toward low-cost producers who had to employ and feed poor people as best they could. Making steel, sneakers, T-shirts; assembling computers; and processing chicken all migrated.

The collapse of Communism roughly coincided with the development of the Internet for commercial uses. This, too, wiped away barriers. Call centers in India sprang up, making my afternoons a living hell. At the same time, angry Russian techies who had lost their cushy jobs with NepoCom went in for cyber-crime against Western businesses.

The whole world suddenly became more like One World than ever before.

 

It always has been driven by economic forces, but it always has had huge effects in every other aspect of human life. Here are a few examples.

On the one hand, the world is organized into nation-states, but there aren’t any borders in the atmosphere. Green-house gases emitted by one country affect every country. On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people live in environmentally-fragile places, but they are driving for industry as the path to a better life. What happens when 1.3 billion Chinese decide that they all want a car, just like 300 million Americans? I suppose we could tell them to stick to bicycles, but that seems kind of racist. Maybe we should go back to bicycles to set a good example?

Millions of people in poverty-stricken “failed states” want to get to some place that is successful. Even if they don’t speak the language, can’t read or write beyond an elementary school level, belong to a traditional culture that devalues women, and have spent their working lives behind a water buffalo. It will get worse if their country is about to go under water.

You can get a kidney transplant done for $5,000 in India (plus airfare and hotel); you can get SRS done for $16,000 in Thailand (plus airfare and hotel).

Rihanna is from Barbados; Frankie Joe Rukundo is from Rwanda; “Narcocorrida” is popular on both sides of the Mexican-American border; some of the most interesting American students consider themselves “otaku”; three French brothers produced “Assassin’s Creed.”

Rivers of Blood I.

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Muslim immigration to Western Europe began by stages after the Second World War as labor-short economies and the end of empires combined to draw non-Europeans toward the “mother country.” A great deal of thoughtlessness went into these migrations. All host countries were ill-prepared to deal with the immigrants.

In January 2015 there are an estimated 20 million Muslims in Europe. About 5 million are in France, where they make up 8 percent of the population. (See: “The other land of liberty and opportunity.”) In Britain and Germany they make up 5 percent of the population. One of the things that eats at European countries is the feeling that immigrants have come to their countries to prey on the generous social welfare provision of enlightened countries. In the 1970s, two-thirds of the immigrants in Germany were in the labor force, while one-third were not. Thirty years later scarcely more than a quarter of immigrants were in the labor force.[1] Another problem, revealed by a poll in L’Express in January 2013 is that 74 percent of those polled said that Islam “is not compatible with French society.” Yet this feeling finds no expression in the “mainstream” or “respectable” French political parties. Why not?

Christopher Caldwell argues that the European left has made discussion of the problems raised by immigration almost impossible.[2] On the one hand, they have evoked European historical crimes—the Holocaust above all—to justify repressing unwelcome speech. He implies that they have undermined the foundations of democracy in the process. In France, he sees the “SOS Racisme” group created in the 1980s as a puppet of the Socialist Party intended to shout-down conservative voices and the 1990 Gayssot Law against Holocaust-denial as an entering wedge for people who want to stifle discussion of other historical events—many of them highly unpleasant and non-Western. Most recently, the anti-immigrant Front National Party got left out of the post-Charlie Hebdo parade on the grounds that it was not “republican” enough.

On the other hand, people on the left have failed to understand that, whatever was done to European Jews, it wasn’t done by Muslims. Just as Palestinians have felt free to reject the State of Israel as European expiation of European crimes at the expense of Arabs, so too have Euro-Muslims felt free to reject European progressive thought as an alien set of values intended to curb their own beliefs. If one adds these forces to the failure to integrate the immigrants and their French-born descendants into French society, one can begin to understand some of the impulses that set the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly on the path to terrorism. They are not alone in their alienation, hostility, and religious fervor.

Caldwell understands that Europe’s aging and declining non-Muslim population makes immigration essential. He is less quick to say that the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments expressed by parties like the Front National can have no practical expression in public policy. Yes, the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Is that what the Front National or other parties expect to repeat with Muslims? Some of the Front National voters undoubtedly do want that, but the program of the party calls for a halt to further immigration and a defense of “secular values.” France already has more police per capita than any other European country. Even so, security lapses allowed the Kouatchis and Coulibaly to escape detection of their plans to kill.

There is going to have to be a third way between “political correctness” and stupidity.

[1] Two million out of three million in the early 1970s versus two million out of seven-and-a-half million in th early 2000s.

[2] Christopher Caldwell, “Europe’s Crisis of Faith,” WSJ, 17-18 January 2015.

 

Thoughts for the New Year.

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I don’t know anything. So, here are my thoughts on a couple of issues.

Climate change is a grave reality. However, I doubt that people can entirely hold back (let alone turn back) global warming. Carbon-burning is central to the industrialization of developing-economies. There aren’t a lot of cheap and ready-to-use alternatives. Instead, there is going to be a long period of adaptation to worsened conditions. It is going to make environmentalists, intellectuals, and other “progressive” people very angry that there will turn out to be market-driven profit opportunities when statist restrictions might have provided more desirable outcomes.

In terms of foreign policy, Vladimir Putin is considerably more of an adult than are American leaders. Balance-of-power politics and spheres of influence are realities in world politics. Power and influence are not the single and permanent prerogative of the United States. For one thing, Ukraine is to Russia as Mexico is to the United States. (“Pity poor Mexico. So far from God, so near the United States.”) For another thing, Putin has tried to help the US out of a couple of ditches into which American leaders have driven it. Syrian chemical weapons and a possible solution to the Iranian nuclear problem are the key examples. All the while he has been vilified because he isn’t a democrat at home and he’s resisting the onward march of Western power around the borders of Russia.

In the Middle East we are witnessing a re-writing the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Iraq is fragmenting into Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurdish enclaves. This fragmentation is being papered-over during the current emergency. The Shi’ites will never be able to repair their behavior during the Maliki period. Syria is going to fragment into Alawite, Sunni, and Kurdish enclaves. A Kurdish state will emerge. This new country will have trouble with both Turkey and Iran. Will Jordan or Saudi Arabia absorb the unstable and impoverished new Sunni micro-state in western Iraq?

The “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t. Israel cannot afford to have a Palestinian state created. That state would be implacably revanchist, regardless of whatever professions its spokesmen might make in order to obtain sovereignty. Over the centuries, many people have felt that the problems of the world could be resolved if only the Jews would die and stop bothering people. Well, the Israelis aren’t buying this line.

The United States gets much less from the US-Israel alliance than does Israel.

ISIS isn’t a serious problem. The enthusiasm for “jihad” among many Muslims is a serious problem. It is likely to be around for a long time. I’m not sure that it can be de-legitimized by Western propaganda. I’m not sure that playing military whack-a-mole with every new outbreak will solve the problem.

Much as I agree with the objectives being pursued by President Obama on some key issues, I don’t believe that he has the authority for some of his actions. The Supreme Court is likely to overturn the authority-grab carried out by the EPA. The immigration problem wasn’t/isn’t a crisis. It’s just a stick with which to beat the Republicans and an effort to keep Hispanic-American voters on the side of the Democrats. American liberals are going to rue the day that they celebrated his unilateral actions on coal-burning energy generation and immigration. One day, a Republican president will invoke the Obama example.

The International Trade in Jobs and Workers

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It is an article of faith among most economists and businessmen that barriers to trade between nations create inefficiencies and lower standards of living.[1] What kinds of barriers to trade exist? Tariffs are taxes on imported goods that raise the sales price to a level that makes the import uncompetitive with a domestic product. Government subsidies (payments) to domestic producers of some goods allow them to hold down prices compared to imports. Government regulations and standards for goods which vary from one country to another can force adaptation costs onto foreign producers, thus raising the price of their goods to a point where it isn’t worth the trouble to sell in a foreign market. The effect of these barriers is to reduce competition, efficiency, and specialization, while raising the cost of living for consumers.

So, trade barriers are bad. In 1994 businessmen won passage of the international treaty called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This treaty abolished tariffs and other barriers to trade on 70 percent of the goods produced and consumed in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. What is the up-side of this agreement? Trade between Mexico and the US tripled during the decade and a half after passage of the treaty; Canadian exports also tripled. What is the down-side of the agreement? Wages haven’t gone up in either Mexico or the US.

In the United States the response to NAFTA is ambivalent. The normal line of development in an advanced economy is that low-wage foreign competitors in low-skill sectors take jobs from the advanced economy, while the advanced economy creates jobs in high-skill and high-wage sectors. That is one of the things that seem to be happening in the United States. By 2008, three million American manufacturing jobs had been lost since the passage of NAFTA. This doesn’t count the many more jobs lost during the “Great Recession.” On the other hand, more jobs were created in those years than in the fourteen years before passage of the treaty. Similarly, highly-mechanized North American farming is far more productive and cheaper than is much Mexican farming, so agricultural exports to Mexico have also greatly increased. However, neither American politicians nor American media have been very good about pointing out the realities of the situation. Job-loss and displacement normally gets a lot more media attention than does job creation. “If it bleeds, it leads.” Those three million manufacturing jobs that went up in smoke since 1994? Mostly they went to China and India, not to Mexico.

In Mexico the response has been profoundly hostile. Mexicans dislike NAFTA by about two-to-one. Why is that? About forty percent of Mexicans still live in poverty. Small and inefficient Mexican farms have been unable to compete with low-cost imports from North America, so many Mexican farmers have been driven to the wall. There was been a huge increase in illegal immigration to the United States, until the “Great Recession” hit. Eight million of the twelve million Mexican illegal immigrants in the United States have come since the passage of NAFTA. Is NAFTA solely or even principally to blame for the flood of illegal immigrants? Not necessarily. One Mexican observer argues that the upper classes have creamed off all the rewards of expanded trade. This has kept the benefits of increased trade from flowing downward in society through higher taxes on the well-off, better services for ordinary people, and higher wages for most workers.

This raises the possibility that the Mexican upper-class is intentionally exporting much of its population to the United States in order to defend an inequitable social order at home.

[1] “Coming to terms with NAFTA,” The Week, 30 May 2008, p. 13.

The Secret History of Columbus Day.

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The vast majority of the early settlers of British North America were Protestants. They brought with them a folk memory of how English Catholics had been seen—often correctly—as disloyal to the British government and in the service of foreign princes who wished to establish absolute monarchies that would force people to abandon their own faith to become Catholics. Protestantism and Catholicism regarded each other as defective faiths, rather than legitimate religions. From the late 18th Century on, the Catholic Church sided with autocratic governments and systematic ignorance. The Church opposed everything desired by progressive people of the day: representative governments, elections, freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, individual civil rights, and modern science. The Church had maintained an Inquisition to repress heresy (wrong belief) and an Index of Banned Books that no Catholic should read. Occasionally, the Church kidnapped Jewish children who had been secretly baptized by Christians, and raised them as Catholics.[1] Moreover, in theory, Catholics owed their first loyalty to the Pope, rather than to the government of whatever country they happened to live in. Protestants in all countries despised Catholics as a primitive people who were slaves to the orders of their priests.

Catholic immigrants—from Ireland, Italy, and Germany—got a hostile reception from Protestant America. To make matters worse, the Irish and Italians, were poor country people. Usually they were illiterate and generally had no technical skills. Hence, they took the lowest-paying and least-regarded jobs when they first arrived in America. Their desperation for work dragged down wages for the native-born population. During the 1830s and 1840s, anti-Catholic sentiment boiled over in brawls, riots, press campaigns, and “Nativist” political parties.

The problem for Catholics lay in how to make themselves acceptable in a hostile foreign society. One solution came through associating themselves with the history of America from its earliest times. Italian-Americans first celebrated Columbus Day in New York City’s “Little Italy” in 1866. In 1882 Catholic Americans led by an Irish-American priest founded the “Knights of Columbus” as a device to help impoverished immigrants and promote Catholic education. The organization grew like wild-fire among Irish and Italian immigrants and their descendants. It emphasized the union of Americanism and Catholicism.

In 1892 President Benjamin Harrison proposed that Americans celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. Various dignitaries and un-dignitaries used the occasion to laud such ideals as patriotism and social progress. School-children recited the “Pledge of Allegiance” for the first time as part of the celebration.

Angelo Noce, an Italian immigrant who had become a citizen and who lived in Denver, Colorado took it into his head to press to make Columbus Day a Colorado state holiday. In 1905 the governor of Colorado decreed 12 October to be a state holiday.

In 1934, the Knights of Columbus and an Italian-American leader in New York City named Generoso Pope (the founder of the National Enquirer), got newly-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proclaim Columbus Day as a national holiday. Roosevelt needed the Italian vote, so he agreed.

Now “progressive” people want to use the date to validate the long-neglected Native Americans. Why not? Catholics now are fully-integrated into American society. They don’t need it. And it isn’t as much fun as Saint Patrick’s Day. Still, that leaves Asian-Americans.

[1] See David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Random House, 1997) for one example that attracted much attention.

Pop. 2050.

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People from Thomas Malthus to Paul Ehrlich used to fear that population growth would outrun resources. These fears proved groundless by the end of the 20th century. Projecting from current trends, the United Nations foresees a world population of 9.3 billion by 2050, with growth slowing to stability at 11 billion by 2200. Other reliable estimates set the “carrying capacity” of the earth (its resource base) at something better than ten billion people. Many estimates hold that the earth could support 11 to 14 billion people. In short, a huge crush on resources seems unlikely to imperil human survival.

Instead, by the start of the 21st Century it was being predicted that “the most important changes in world population over the next fifty years are less likely to be in the total number of people than in their age and geographic distribution.”

For example, the anticipated overall slowing of population growth means that populations will age. In 2002 the median age of the world’s population was 26.5 years; by 2050 it will be something like 36.5 years. In the more-developed regions, long life-spans combined with a previous drop in the number of children below replacement level (2.2 children/family) will create very distinctly aged population patterns. The absolute and relative size of the working populations will shrink. Fewer working people will have to support more elderly dependent people, but fewer children. Unless there is substantial immigration from non-European areas, Europe’s 2050 population will be smaller than its 2000 population and only 57 percent will be of working age (15-65). Italy may be regarded as an extreme case: by 2050 the Italian population will shrink by 25 percent and only 3 Italians will be working for every two over 65 years. In both Russia and the former Soviet-bloc territories population is plunging as people have fewer children, many die younger than one would expect, and others emigrate.

Other areas of the world still face surging population growth: in China the birth rate is double the death rate, in India and Nigeria the birth rate is almost triple the death rate, in Pakistan the birth rate is more than triple the death rate. In general, almost all of Africa, the Arab world, and South Asia can anticipate population growth by 2050 that ranges from at least 50 to over 100 percent. Eight of ten of the fastest growing countries are Islamic-majority countries. Afghan women bear on average 6.8 children, while the population of the Gaza Strips is projected to quadruple by 2050. But it is not just Islam that reports rapid population growth: sixteen million more Indians were born than died in 2002 (20 percent of the world’s population growth); and the population of Africa is projected to increase by 150 percent between 2000 and 2050. This is in spite of the AIDS epidemic, which reduced life expectancy in Africa from 60 years (early 1990s) to 36 years (2002).

In contrast to developed Western countries (including Japan), in less-developed regions, the continuing comparatively high number of children will create distinctly youthful population patterns. The absolute and relative size of the working populations will grow. More working people will have to support more children, but not as many aged people.   (Retirement homes and elementary schools may become the key institutions in two different societies.)

More importantly, it is difficult to see how “developed” societies are going to do without a large influx of workers from “developing” countries. What school-teachers call “cultural competencies” are going to start to count more and more. “Controlling the border” will take on a different meaning.

 

Don Peck, “The World in Numbers: Population 2050,” Atlantic, October 2002, pp. 40-41.

Climate of Fear III

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People tend to fixate on oil as a key natural resource. How much oil is there in the world? Have we passed “peak oil” or is there a lot still to be discovered? (See: “The Blood of Victory.”) They should also give some thought to water. Water was a key natural resource long before oil and it will be a key resource long after oil has ceased to be the chief fuel source. We need it for drinking and for crop irrigation at a minimum.

Of all the water on the earth, 97.5 percent is salt water. Unless one goes through a very costly desalinization process ($2.50-$16/gallon, compared to $0.50-$2.00.gallon for conventional fresh water), this water is not available for use. This leaves 2.5 percent of the world’s water as usable fresh water.

This sounds scary. In theory, there is about 1.5 billion gallons for each person currently living on earth. However, only a small portion of that water is readily available for human use.   The polar ice caps and the glaciers hold about 68 percent of this fresh water. Another 31 percent of it is not readily accessible because it is buried deep underground. Thus, 99 percent of the 2.5 percent is not available for human use (at this time).

Even so, there is a huge amount of fresh water on the earth. Readily available fresh water surface run-off averages 524,151 gallons per person. That sounds reassuring.

The 6.3 billion people now living on earth use about 54 percent of that readily available water. So, it looks like we have a comfortable margin. That is reassuring. It is estimated that world population will rise to 7.8 billion people by 2025 and that use of readily available water will increase to 70 percent of the total. That sounds scary.

 

That small amount is unevenly distributed, just like most other resources. The UN (God bless its pointy little head) has worked out a scale of measurement for water supply per capita.

“Water abundance”:    >19,000 cubic meters/person. Canada, Russia, the Congo basin, almost all of South America.

“Water surplus”:          3,400-18,999 cubic meters/person. United States, Mexico, France, Ireland, the Balkans, Turkey, Southeast Asia, Kazakhstan.

“Water sufficiency”:   1,700-3,399 cubic meters/person. Most of Europe, Iraq, northern Iran, Afghanistan, most of India, southern and western China, Japan.

“Water stress”:            1,000-1,699 cubic meters/person. Northern Pakistan, South Africa and Zimbabwe, Syria, Czech Republic, Poland.

“Water scarcity”:         < 1,000 cubic meters/person. North Africa, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, southern Iran, southern Pakistan, northern China, southern India.

See: Jen Joynt and Marshall Poe, “The World in Numbers: Waterworld,” Atlantic, July/August 2003, pp. 42-43.

It seems likely that water shortages will start to weigh on both domestic and international politics. The pressure will come from the bottom, from those countries already facing “water stress” and “water scarcity.” One issue will be a campaign for international sharing.   Here the experience of the American West is likely to be useful. Western states have been sharing water resources for decades. It hasn’t always been easy or painless. It’s better than starting from zero.

A second issue will be migration—first internal, then international–by “water refugees.” People will try to ignore this problem for as long as possible. They will describe it as a domestic problem in water-deficient countries. It will not stay contained, any more than climate change.

Save the Pagan Babies!

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Poor countries cannot run what contemporary Americans would regard as “adequate” orphanages. They don’t have the surplus economic resources to provide robust social welfare institutions. Furthermore, as political scientists say, the state institutions lack capacity to achieve their goals. At best, they’re something out of Dickens. At worst, they’re warehouses in Hell. This is probably going to have some kind of long term psychological impact.

Long wars, especially civil wars, fought under barbarous conditions produce lots of orphans. The process of getting orphaned may involve something like watching your father have his arms chopped off with a machete. This, too, may have a lasting impact.

One report states that in Azerbaijan, “Many children are abandoned due to extreme poverty and harsh living conditions. Family members or neighbors may raise some of these children but the majority live in crowded orphanages until the age of fifteen when they are sent into the community to make a living for themselves.”

Finally, as in America not all that long ago, people use mental institutions and orphanages as receptacles for family members who are permanently disabled in some way. (One problem with tenement living was that you lacked an attic in which to confine Great-Aunt Grace who spent all her time talking about Kate Chopin’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Putting her in the storage locker in the basement just got the neighbors talking.)

Promoting international adoption can be one way of reducing the burden on taxpayers.

Still, there can be problems.

“Child laundering.” No, really, that’s what it’s called. Basically, “gringos” and “farangs” spend so much time with their cell phones that the radiation fries their little swimmers. So, no kids. So, they come to some developing country to buy a kid from an orphanage or some helpful soul who knows a starving child and would like to set him/her up in an American suburban home with a swing set in the backyard and 999 television channels. They’re rich, so there’s money to be made if you have a spare kid to sell. What if you do not have such a kid? Well, that’s what shopping malls are for in the United States. In developing countries you probably have to snatch them in a market-place or on their way home from school. Then, sell to “gringo” or “farang.” It helps if you know a “poor, corrupt policeman” who can help you with fake identity papers. (The US government has been prosecuting an American woman for her part in the fraudulent adoption of 800 Cambodian children.)

UNICEF estimates that there are 700,000 orphans in Russia. The number increases by over 100,000 a year. The striking thing is that these are “social orphans.” They have at least one living parent. The parent feels unable to care for the child, so they abandon the child to the care of someone else. Most go to other relatives or to foster homes. About a third are in the care of the state. Same thing is true in Haiti, where poor parents “hoped to increase their children’s opportunities by sending them to orphanages.” After the Haitian earthquake, the number of orphans sky-rocketed (although so did the number of suddenly-childless adults). American aid agencies descended on Haiti. One impulse was to promote the adoption of children from the orphanages to American homes. The obvious problem was that the Americans completely misunderstood the nature of Haitian orphanages. (On the other hand, they perfectly understood the motives of Haitian government officials who objected to the adoptions: they hadn’t got their cut.)

Little of this kind of “news” makes the headlines.