Posts Tagged ‘demography matters’
[DM] “A brief note on the blog and on COVID-19”
I’ve a post up at Demography Matters noting the all-encompassing impact of COVID-19 on the world and its demographics, and promising that Demography Matters will persist in some form to address the different changes this virus has imposed on us all.
[DM] Some links: immigration, cities, small towns, French Canada, Eurasia, China, Brexit, music
Another links post is up over at Demography Matters!
- Skepticism about immigration in many traditional receiving countries appeared. Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative took issue with the argument of Andray Domise after an EKOS poll, that Canadians would not know much about the nature of migration flows. The Conversation observed how the rise of Vox in Spain means that country’s language on immigration is set to change towards greater skepticism. Elsewhere, the SCMP called on South Korea, facing pronounced population aging and workforce shrinkages, to become more open to immigrants and minorities.
- Cities facing challenges were a recurring theme. This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland’s second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential. Also on Ireland, the NYR Daily looked at how Brexit and a hardened border will hit the Northern Ireland city of Derry, with its Catholic majority and its location neighbouring the Republic. CityLab reported on black migration patterns in different American cities, noting gains in the South, is fascinating. As for the threat of Donald Trump to send undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities in the United States has widely noted., at least one observer noted that sending undocumented immigrants to cities where they could connect with fellow diasporids and build secure lives might actually be a good solution.
- Declining rural settlements featured, too. The Guardian reported from the Castilian town of Sayatón, a disappearing town that has become a symbol of depopulating rural Spain. Global News, similarly, noted that the loss by the small Nova Scotia community of Blacks Harbour of its only grocery store presaged perhaps a future of decline. VICE, meanwhile, reported on the very relevant story about how resettled refugees helped revive the Italian town of Sutera, on the island of Sicily. (The Guardian, to its credit, mentioned how immigration played a role in keeping up numbers in Sayatón, though the second generation did not stay.)
- The position of Francophone minorities in Canada, meanwhile, also popped up at me.
- This TVO article about the forces facing the École secondaire Confédération in the southern Ontario city of Welland is a fascinating study of minority dynamics. A brief article touches on efforts in the Franco-Manitoban community of Winnipeg to provide temporary shelter for new Francophone immigrants. CBC reported, meanwhile, that Francophones in New Brunswick continue to face pressure, with their numbers despite overall population growth and with Francophones being much more likely to be bilingual than Anglophones. This last fact is a particularly notable issue inasmuch as New Brunswick’s Francophones constitute the second-largest Francophone community outside of Québec, and have traditionally been more resistant to language shift and assimilation than the more numerous Franco-Ontarians.
- The Eurasia-focused links blog Window on Eurasia pointed to some issues. It considered if the new Russian policy of handing out passports to residents of the Donbas republics is related to a policy of trying to bolster the population of Russia, whether fictively or actually. (I’m skeptical there will be much change, myself: There has already been quite a lot of emigration from the Donbas republics to various destinations, and I suspect that more would see the sort of wholesale migration of entire families, even communities, that would add to Russian numbers but not necessarily alter population pyramids.) Migration within Russia was also touched upon, whether on in an attempt to explain the sharp drop in the ethnic Russian population of Tuva in the 1990s or in the argument of one Muslim community leader in the northern boomtown of Norilsk that a quarter of that city’s population is of Muslim background.
- Eurasian concerns also featured. The Russian Demographics Blog observed, correctly, that one reason why Ukrainians are more prone to emigration to Europe and points beyond than Russians is that Ukraine has long been included, in whole or in part, in various European states. As well, Marginal Revolution linked to a paper that examines the positions of Jews in the economies of eastern Europe as a “rural service minority”, and observed the substantial demographic shifts occurring in Kazakhstan since independence, with Kazakh majorities appearing throughout the country.
- JSTOR Daily considered if, between the drop in fertility that developing China was likely to undergo anyway and the continuing resentments of the Chinese, the one-child policy was worth it. I’m inclined to say no, based not least on the evidence of the rapid fall in East Asian fertility outside of China.
- What will Britons living in the EU-27 do, faced with Brexit? Bloomberg noted the challenge of British immigrant workers in Luxembourg faced with Brexit, as Politico Europe did their counterparts living in Brussels.
- Finally, at the Inter Press Service, A.D. Mackenzie wrote about an interesting exhibit at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris on the contributions made by immigrants to popular music in Britain and France from the 1960s to the 1980s.
[DM] “Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016”
Over at Demography Matters, I note how the blog Information is Beautiful has just now shared the results of the 2018 iteration of the Information is Beautiful Awards, a celebration of “the world’s world’s best data-visualisations and infographics.” Many of these data-visualizations and infographics deal with demographics, in one way or another. The winner, the video “Simulated Dendrochronology of U.S. Immigration 1790-2016” assembled by Pedro M. Cruz and team together with Northeastern University and National Geographic, does a remarkable job of showing trends in American immigration over nearly two centuries.
The project’s website explains what the video shows and how it shows it.
Nature has its own ways of [organizing] information: organisms grow and register information from the environment. This is particularly notable in trees, which, through their rings, tell the story of their growth. Drawing on this phenomenon as a visual metaphor, the United States can be envisioned as a tree, with shapes and growing patterns influenced by immigration. The nation, the tree, is hundreds of years old, and its cells are made out of immigrants. As time passes, the cells are deposited in decennial rings that capture waves of immigration.
Cells grow more in specific directions depending on the geographic origin of the immigrants. Rings that are more skewed toward the country’s East, for example, show more immigration from Europe, while rings skewed South show more immigration from Latin America.
A cell represents a specific number of immigrants who arrived in a given decade. A computational algorithm deposits those cells in such a way that simulates the appearance of tree rings. This physics-based system generates a data visualization that is based on millions of data points. The data was queried from IPUMS-USA and consists of millions of samples of questionnaires from U.S. Censuses.
The historical formation process of this tree can be observed in an animated way. Here, the granularity of the dataset is unveiled as hundreds of points of origin are laid out.
The U.S. and its population growth can also be envisioned as a forest of trees. Tree sections, one for each state in the U.S., show the growth profile due to incoming immigration, but also due to newborns (here referred to as natural-borns).
Each state has grown at different rates, with varying immigration profiles. Some are larger, some are smaller, and some have complex shapes that portray their immigration profile. Tree rings that are nearly circular indicate that population growth due to immigration was much less significant than that due to natural-born persons.
[DM] “On the unreality of imagining chain migration to be a bad thing”
I’ve a post up at Demography Matters taking issue with the idea that chain migration is supposed to be a bad thing. What are these people talking about?