The Times | 7 September 2006 | Foreign Editor’s Briefing by Bronwen Maddox
THIS year’s United Nations report on the State of World Population is astonishing — and refreshing — for its upbeat tone on migration.
All right, it has chosen as its special theme the particular problems of women migrants, including sex trafficking and disease, and it is bleak about those. But overall it points out that people move around the planet a lot, and argues that this is a good thing.
International migration “can play a key role in development and poverty reduction”, it says. “It has clear benefits that could be enhanced and disadvantages that could be minimised.”
The survey offers a cheerful contrast to European fears and to some of the darker prophecies of development agencies.
Some of the shock of the report lies in the headline figures. The number of people living outside their country of birth has almost doubled during the past 50 years, to a record 191 million. The report dubs the 21st century “a world on the move” as transport, communications and the fall of the Soviet Union put distant countries within reach.
Women make up almost half the total of migrants; young people aged between 10 and 24 make up about a third.
But the rate of migration has slowed. The number of new migrations fell to 36 million between 1990 and 2005, compared with 41 million between 1975 and 1990, partly because there were fewer refugees.
One out of every four migrants lives in the US (whose population is projected to grow to 395 million by 2050, from its current level of 301 million — and this is at the lower end of recent UN projections). One in three migrants lives in Europe, the report notes, a tally that may only fuel the rising anxiety in Western Europe.
In a clear-headed summary of the great pensions row, the report points out that migration can be only a small part of the answer to the ageing populations of Europe. Migrants may be young when they arrive, but they age, too. Yet no developed country would tolerate the strain of immigration on the vast, sustained scale needed to preserve the age balance.
The authors’ most optimistic conclusions lie in the analysis of remittances home by migrants. These are larger than official development aid and comprise the second largest source of external income for developing countries after foreign direct investment, they say. But this assertion will be inflammatory to many in development groups, who often regard remittances as a sop to the problem of the brain drain from the poorest countries.
The report is not blithe on this point; some Caribbean countries have lost more than 70 per cent of their most educated. But it does argue, citing World Bank studies, that attempts to “plug the drain” may cost poor countries more than they save, and will probably fail.
There are plenty of other flashes of hope in the rest of the report: bald figures that represent decades of painful transformation, particularly in India, China and Iran. But it is still a shock to see that life expectancy in Zimbabwe is now only 38 years for men and 36 for women, one of the five lowest in the world and down from about 65 years before the onslaught of Aids.
Report online: unfpa.org/swp
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