SOCIAL TRENDS

[kmaherali]

The Communist Party’s solution to the country’s demographic crisis and a slowing economy is to push women back into traditional roles.


Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and the state, including Xi Jinping, attending the 13th National Women’s Congress in Beijing last month.Credit...Yao Dawei/Xinhua, via Getty Images

At China’s top political gathering for women, it was mostly a man who was seen and heard.

Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, sat center stage at the opening of the National Women’s Congress. A close-up of him at the Congress was splashed on the front page of the Chinese Communist Party’s newspaper the next day. From the head of a large round table, Mr. Xi lectured female delegates at the closing meeting on Monday.

“We should actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” he said in a speech, adding that it was the role of party officials to influence young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family.”

The Women’s Congress, held every five years, has long been a forum for the ruling Communist Party to demonstrate its commitment to women. The gesture, while mostly symbolic, has taken on more significance than ever this year, the first time in two decades that there are no women in the party’s executive policymaking body.

What was notable was how officials downplayed gender equality. They focused instead on using the gathering to press Mr. Xi’s goal for Chinese women: get married and have babies. In the past, officials had touched on the role women play at home as well as in the work force. But in this year’s address, Mr. Xi made no mention of women at work.

The party desperately needs women to have more babies. China has been thrust into a demographic crisis as its birthrate has plummeted, causing its population to shrink for the first time since the 1960s. The authorities are scrambling to undo what experts have said is an irreversible trend, trying one initiative after another, such as cash handouts and tax benefits to encourage more births.

Faced with a demographic crisis, a slowing economy and what it views as a stubborn rise of feminism, the party has chosen to push women back into the home, calling on them to rear the young and care for the old. The work, in the words of Mr. Xi, is essential for “China’s path to modernization.”

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Xi Jinping stands before rows women who are applauding.

Mr. Xi’s speech indicated that women returning to traditional roles in the home was essential to “China’s path to modernization."Credit...Xie Huanchi/Xinhua, via Getty Images

But to some, his vision sounds more like a worrying regression.

“Women in China have been alarmed by the trend and have been fighting back over the years,” said Yaqiu Wang, the research director for Hong Kong, China and Taiwan at Freedom House, a nonprofit based in Washington. “Many women in China are empowered and united in their fight against the twin repressions in China: the authoritarian government and the patriarchal society.”

The party has failed to address many concerns, viewing some issues raised by women as a direct challenge to its leadership. Bursts of discussion over sexual harassment, gender violence and discrimination are silenced on social media. Support for victims is often extinguished. Feminists and outspoken advocates have been jailed, and a #MeToo movement that briefly flourished in 2018 has been pushed underground.

The language used by senior officials at the Women’s Congress in Beijing was another glimpse of how the party sees the role of women. Mr. Xi has pushed a hard-line agenda to advance his vision of a stronger China that includes a revival of what he considers traditional values. At the congress, he encouraged female leaders to “tell good stories about family traditions and guide women to play their unique role in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation.”

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In a departure from a two-decade tradition, Mr. Xi’s deputy, Ding Xuexiang, failed to mention in an opening address at the congress a standard phrase: that gender equality is a basic national policy.

And even as Mr. Xi did nod to gender equality, he spent most of his speech elaborating on family, parenting and fertility.

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A man and a woman in wedding attire hold hands in the doorway of a brick chapel as a line of people streams by on a sidewalk.

A couple taking wedding pictures in Shanghai in July. Young adults in China have expressed ambivalence about marriage.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

This stands in stark contrast to a decade ago, when top officials stressed the importance of both equality and women’s self-realization, said Hanzhang Liu, a political studies professor at Pitzer College who has examined speeches by senior officials at several congresses over the past two decades.

“Women’s work was once about women for themselves, women for women’s sake,” said Ms. Liu, referring to the party’s jargon for gender issues. “Now what they are saying is that women’s rightful place in society — where they can do the most meaningful work — is at home with the family.”

But the Women’s Congress is not where the battle for their rights is being fought. Organized by the All-China Women’s Federation, a group that works to promote party policies and is funded by the party, it tends to represent the political status quo.

As a result, much of the discussion this year was focused on encouraging party leaders to promote traditional family values. The language reveals the calculus that officials have made: that extolling the virtues of China’s past will inspire women to focus on family. This, they hope, will help with demographics.

Sending women back to the home and out of the work force is also convenient at a time when China faces its biggest economic challenge in four decades and the government is under pressure to improve a social welfare system that is severely underdeveloped and unable to support a rapidly aging population.

“Women have always been viewed as an instrument of the state in one way or another,” said Minglu Chen, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney who studies gender and politics in China. “But now we have to think about China’s political economy. It benefits the party to emphasize women returning to the home, where they can care for children and for the elderly.”

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A man in a black puffer jacket and a medical mask looks over laminated listings of people looking to be romantically matched with others.

People perused matrimonial posters at a wedding market in Wuhan, China, in 2021. Parents meet weekly at the market to search for partners for their children.Credit...Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

The trend of fewer marriages and births has been years in the making, however, and Mr. Xi is goading women into a role they have long rejected. Many young and educated women in China’s biggest cities have relished their financial independence and are wary of marriage because of the pressure on them to have children and give it all up.

Young adults have expressed ambivalence about marrying and settling down, and they worry about the future as the economy slumps and unemployment soars. China is also among the most expensive countries in the world to raise a child.

For all of Mr. Xi’s calls on women to take up the cause of having babies, the party’s efforts are unlikely to bolster the birthrate enough to reverse the country’s population decline. That is, unless it is willing to resort to more punitive measures to disadvantage or marginalize women who choose not to have children.

While unlikely, it is something that Fubing Su, a political science professor at Vassar College, said was not completely out of the question. During the “one-child” policy, the party resorted to fines, forced abortions and sterilizations in an attempt to slow population growth for decades until it ended the restrictions in 2015.

“If the party could sacrifice women’s body and birth rights for its one-child policy,” said Mr. Su, “they could impose their will on women again.”

Zixu Wang contributed research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/worl ... women.html

[kmaherali]

Young Chinese Women Are Defying the Communist Party



The pressure to marry began when Amiee was in her early 20s.

By 25, her Chinese parents were accusing her of causing them a public loss of face because she still had no plans to wed. Her father warned her that women are worth less to a man as they near the age of 30, when — according to Chinese government propaganda — their peak childbearing time has passed. When Amiee was 29, her mother threatened to jump off a building if she didn’t find a husband.

At family gatherings like Chinese New Year, relatives badgered her to help her “entire clan find peace,” she told me, and at work she was pressured into company-organized blind dates, chaperoned by several colleagues. These were “terrifying,” she said.

Amiee — whose full name is being withheld to avoid potential repercussions for questioning government policy — wasn’t against marriage, per se. She simply hadn’t found her soul mate at that age and didn’t want to rush into marriage to please her parents or a government eager to push up the birthrate. Today, still single and with a successful career in public relations, she is finally enjoying some peace; she’s 34, past what China’s government says is a woman’s reproductive prime, and her family has stopped pressuring her.

I hear similar stories from single women across China, where sexist state propaganda labels single professional women older than 27 as sheng nu, or leftover women. While conducting fieldwork in China for my Ph.D. in sociology from 2011 to 2013, I spoke with many who endured relationships they didn’t want, often making great personal, financial and career compromises. I wanted to tell them to just walk away.

Now many young Chinese women are doing exactly that, delaying or shunning marriage and childbirth altogether, mirroring the journey of women in other, wealthier patriarchal East Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. As individuals, these Chinese women are generally unwilling to challenge official policy. But through their reproductive choices, they collectively pose a radical and complicated problem for the Chinese Communist Party.

Facing a shrinking population and a long-term economic slowdown, the party wants China’s women to be docile, baby-breeding guarantors of social, economic and demographic stability. Instead, many Chinese women, who now have greater personal freedom and control over their lives than during the early Communist era, are quietly resisting.

In the late 1970s, the government imposed its one-child policy to rein in population growth. But this led to plummeting birthrates, an aging population and a gender imbalance as millions of female fetuses were aborted because of a traditional preference for male heirs. (As of 2020, China still had about 17.5 million more men than women between the ages of 20 and 40, which government media has warned could pose a threat to social stability.) Worried, the government abandoned the one-child policy beginning in 2016, allowing all married couples to have two children and raising that to three in 2021.

But a hoped-for baby boom has not materialized. Marriage registrations have fallen for nine consecutive years leading up to 2022, when they sank to the lowest level since the government began releasing figures in 1986. New births have also continued to fall, with only 9.56 million babies being born last year, the fewest since records began with the founding of Communist China in 1949. The nation’s population shrank in 2022 for the first time in six decades, allowing India to overtake China as the world’s most populous country.

Many young Chinese men are also avoiding marriage. But this seismic demographic shift appears to be driven largely by an increasing unwillingness of women to make the requisite career and lifestyle sacrifices or bear the rising cost of educating children. Recent surveys have shown that young Chinese women have a significantly more negative view of marriage than men. A Communist Youth League survey released in 2021 found that 30.5 percent of urban youths ages 18 to 26 said they “don’t believe in marriage”; 73.4 percent of those respondents were women.

That’s the last thing the party wants to hear. While Mao Zedong famously said that “women hold up half the sky,” President Xi Jinping has made clear that subjugating women is essential to his plans for Chinese modernization. This year, the government began a drive to encourage women to marry and have children, and at a top political gathering of women in October, Mr. Xi called for a “a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” in which the party seeks to influence younger Chinese people to have babies. Last year, for the first time since 1997, not a single woman was among the 24 members appointed to the party’s new Politburo.

But Mr. Xi’s regressive policies are up against the stark reality of what a traditional role means for women in China. Besides having to surrender personal and career freedoms, marriage can be downright dangerous for Chinese women. Many face domestic violence and an uphill battle in pursuing a divorce in court. In 2021 the government made it even harder for women to seek divorce, imposing a mandatory cooling-off period for feuding couples.

Mr. Xi’s government has waged a broad crackdown on civil society organizations, making overt feminism dangerous. Huang Xueqin, a leading feminist activist and journalist who helped start China’s #MeToo movement by creating a social media platform for reporting sexual harassment in 2018, was put on trial in September on vague charges of subversion, after two years in detention. No verdict has been announced.

A clash over control of reproduction now looms, one with great implications for women’s rights and the country’s demographic future. The Communist Party has dug in, identifying Western feminism as an unpatriotic threat to its population-planning objectives and an example of hostile foreign ideological infiltration. Censorship of feminist topics online has intensified, as has misogynistic state propaganda.

But as record-high numbers of Chinese women attend college, interest in feminist issues and asserting one’s reproductive rights has intensified. Women continue to go online to challenge sexism and unequal treatment and exchange ideas. With China’s publishing industry heavily censored, the translated works of feminists like the Japanese scholar Chizuko Ueno have become best-sellers in China.

As this struggle over who controls reproduction escalates, the government may expand financial or other incentives to encourage childbirth. But given Mr. Xi’s mentality, the government is just as likely to ratchet up pressure on feminism and women’s rights in general. It is already becoming more difficult to get vasectomies.

But the Communist Party’s options are limited. It can’t force women to marry or get pregnant and is unlikely to relax its tight immigration policies to make up for a shrinking work force. Placing even more pressure on women or drastic actions like imposing nationwide bans on abortion or contraception could harden women’s attitudes or even trigger an uprising. Young, educated women were conspicuously on the front lines of protests in several cities in late 2022 against the government’s oppressive pandemic-control policies.

The Communist Party has faced many opponents and dissenters in its decades of rule, quickly silencing and consigning them to oblivion. In the nation’s young women, the party’s male leaders may now be facing their most implacable challengers yet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/26/opin ... ights.html

[kmaherali]

After Watching 10 Migrants Die at Sea, He Now Pleads: ‘Stay’

Witness to a tragedy on a boat to Spain, Moustapha Diouf has made it his mission to persuade young people not to emigrate from Senegal, but even he concedes that it’s getting harder to make his case.


Moustapha Diouf, who survived a disastrous voyage at sea while trying to migrate to Spain, speaking to students about the dangers of emigration at an elementary school in Senegal.

Crowded together with 90 other migrants on a rickety fishing vessel bound for Spain, Moustapha Diouf watched 10 of them die, one by one, from heat and exhaustion.

Worried about health risks posed by the corpses, Mr. Diouf had to throw the bodies overboard. Five were friends.

It was in that macabre moment 17 years ago, Mr. Diouf said, that he vowed to do everything in his power to stop others from making the choice he had and enduring the same fate: He would make it his mission to dissuade his fellow Senegalese from trying to reach Europe and drowning or dying in myriad other ways on the perilous journey.

“If we don’t do anything, we become accomplices in their deaths,” said Mr. Diouf, 54, sitting in a dusty office of the nonprofit he co-founded, empty but for one desk and a couple of chairs. “I will fight every day to stop young people from leaving.”

In 2006, the boat Mr. Diouf boarded with his friends was one of the first of many pirogues, as the craft are known, that departed that year from the coastal villages of Senegal in the direction of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago 60 miles off the Moroccan coast.

With their traditional way of fishing no match for the industrial trawlers from China, Europe and Russia that had begun combing the sea around them, Mr. Diouf and his fellow villagers could no longer support their families. Migrating, they believed, was their best choice.

Over the course of just one year, almost 32,000 migrants, most of them West Africans, reached the Canary Islands through this irregular route.

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A wooden boat with a red flag on the bow lies nearly submerged just offshore.

At least 16 people died in July when this wooden boat bound for Spain sank just off the beach in Dakar, Senegal. Thousands undertake a similar voyage every year.

Thousands of others died or disappeared. The route was so treacherous that the motto of those who braved it was “Barsa wala Barsakh,” or “Barcelona or die” in Wolof, one of Senegal’s national languages. Yet, it was so popular that locals started referring to places like Thiaroye-sur-Mer, Mr. Diouf’s village in the suburbs of Dakar, as “international airports.”

Mr. Diouf was among the lucky ones: He made it to the Canary Islands alive. But the whole experience was dreadful, he said. He was imprisoned and deported to Senegal. Upon his return, together with two other repatriates, he set up his nonprofit, known as AJRAP, or the Association of Young Repatriates, whose mission is persuading Senegal’s youth to stay.

In his quest, Mr. Diouf has sought the help of some high-profile allies: He wrote a letter to the country’s president, Macky Sall, but never got an answer. He met with the mayor of Dakar, the capital. He even tried to go to Brussels to speak with the authorities of the European Union but was denied a visa.

But that has not held him back.

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Four white sheep wander through sandy streets in a coastal town.

The Dakar suburb of Thiaroye-sur-Mer. The area’s traditional fishing economy has been hurt by large factory trawlers from China, Europe and Russia.

When it has the funds, AJRAP organizes vocational training in baking, poultry breeding, electricity and entrepreneurship, to provide alternatives to embarking on a pirogue. Mr. Diouf also speaks to young people in local schools to rectify the overly rosy picture of Europe often painted by those who made it there.

But he is painfully aware of his limitations. He does not have the capacity to offer anyone a job, and most choose to migrate anyway.

“We know that the European Union sent funds to Senegal to create jobs,” he said with quiet resignation in his voice. “But we have not seen any of this money.”

After the initial peak of 2006-2007, the number of people trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean decreased in the following years. But recently, the route has seen a resurgence in popularity, especially among young people struggling to find jobs, and fishermen affected by their ever-shrinking catch.

So far this year, over 35,000 migrants have arrived in the Canary Islands, the Spanish authorities said, exceeding the 2006 peak. Most of them were from West Africa.

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Four young men sit in a circle and play games on their cellphones.

Fishermen gather and play games on the phone on the beach of Thiaroye-sur-Mer. Jobs of all kinds are scarce in the area.

Communities like Thiaroye-sur-Mer, where fishing is the traditional source of livelihood, have been among the most depleted by emigration and the most harmed by its dangers. According to numbers gathered by Mr. Diouf’s nonprofit, since 2006, 358 village residents died at sea trying to reach Europe. There were years when local football tournaments had to be canceled, because there were not enough players.

Last month, Mr. Sall, the president, announced “emergency measures” to “neutralize the departure of migrants.”

Mr. Diouf said that the government did not offer any support for young people in his village and that the measures promised by Mr. Sall had yet to materialize.

Aly Deme, 47, a fellow fisherman who traveled to Spain on that same ill-fated boat in 2006, said that Mr. Diouf “was doing the job of the government.”

“He doesn’t have the resources," he said. “But he has the courage.”

Standing on the Thiaroye-sur-Mer beachfront, surrounded by abandoned pirogues and nets whose owners had left for Europe, Mr. Diouf pointed to low-rise buildings, mostly unfinished because of a lack of funds.

“In all these houses, at least one person left,” he said. “And in most families, someone died.”

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A man wearing a cap has a strand of rope in his hand. In front of him is a calm ocean, with a number of boats visible.

A fisherman repairing his net on the beach in Thiaroye-sur-mer.

He took out his phone and played a video posted on TikTok showing a group of ecstatic young people in a wooden boat reaching a rocky shore.

These were people he knew from his work with his nonprofit, and while the video was a sign that they had reached Europe alive, for Mr. Diouf the news was bittersweet.

“I trained her in making pastries,” he said, pointing out a smiling young woman in a colorful head scarf. “And the two guys next to her, in electricity.”

But in Senegal, they were unable to find jobs.

A tall man of commanding presence and almost brusque demeanor, Mr. Diouf has endured much loss in his life, but he typically holds back expressing emotions.

His older brother was killed when his pirogue was sunk by a big fishing trawler, Mr. Diouf said in a matter-of-fact manner, and his first wife left him and their three children because she was unhappy with the attention he was devoting to his mission.

But when he spoke about a shipwreck last month in which the ocean swallowed the lives of 15 people from the same local family in his village, his voice broke down.

“Psychologically, I just can’t support it,” he said, his eyes wet with tears. But then he gathered himself. “If I stop at least one person from dying in the sea, it’s worth it.”

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Mustapha Diouf, wearing a green cap and a white striped long shirt, sits on a bench.

“If I stop at least one person from dying in the sea, it’s worth it,” said Mr. Diouf, who admits he is fighting an uphill battle against emigration.

The task is daunting: 75 percent of Senegalese are under 35, and young adults face immense social pressure to earn money and support their families. But doing so is becoming harder: Inflation reached almost 10 percent last year, driven mostly by a surge in food prices.

Atou Samb, a 29-year-old fisherman, has tried to get to Europe three times, and said that as soon as he gathered enough money, he was going to try again.

“We respect Moustapha a lot in the village,” said Mr. Samb, repairing a fishing net in the scorching sun. “He never stops talking about the dangers of migration. But words alone will not feed my family. There is nothing left for us here.”

On a recent morning in a local school, Mr. Diouf was speaking to a classroom of 13-year-olds. Almost all said someone from their family had left for Spain.

“If your boat gets lost, you will all die,” Mr. Diouf said in his blunt manner. “I know you all want to help your parents. But the best way to help them is to stay alive.”

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Children wearing light blue shirts raise their hands in a classroom.

Children in a classroom in Thiaroye-sur-Mer on a recent day raising their hands after Mr. Diouf asked them if any of them wanted to leave the country.

The class dutifully nodded. But when asked who wanted to stay in Senegal after they were done with school, only six out of 101 raised their hands.

Lately, even Mr. Diouf is finding it increasingly difficult to believe in his own words.

“How can I keep on telling them that they should stay, if there are no jobs?” he said. “How can I keep on telling them not to take the pirogue and to apply for a visa, when my own visa application has been rejected?”

Perhaps the most challenging task of all is persuading his own children to stay.

Ousseynou, Mr. Diouf’s oldest, is 18 and trying to make a living from fishing.

“I went out to the sea today and I haven’t found anything,” he said, standing at the doorstep of their house, where he lives with 14 family members. “The whole week has been like that.”

“I am going to leave soon,” he said.

Babacar Fall and Mady Camara contributed reporting from Dakar and Thiaroye-sur-Mer, Senegal.

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A young man wearing a soccer jersey and shorts sits on a bed.

Mr. Diouf’s 18-year-old son, Ousseynou, is trying to make a living as a fisherman but says he expects to leave Senegal soon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

For some time now, South Korea has been a striking case study in the depopulation problem that hangs over the developed world. Almost all rich countries have seen their birthrates settle below replacement level, but usually that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 children per woman. For instance, in 2021 the United States stood at 1.7, France at 1.8, Italy at 1.3 and Canada at 1.4.

But South Korea is distinctive in that it slipped into below-replacement territory in the 1980s but lately has been falling even more — dropping below one child per woman in 2018 to 0.8 after the pandemic and now, in provisional data for the second and third quarters of 2023, to just 0.7 births per woman.

It’s worth unpacking what that means. A country that sustained a birthrate at that level would have, for every 200 people in one generation, 70 people in the next one, a depopulation exceeding what the Black Death delivered to Europe in the 14th century. Run the experiment through a second generational turnover, and your original 200-person population falls below 25. Run it again, and you’re nearing the kind of population crash caused by the fictional superflu in Stephen King’s “The Stand.”

By the standards of newspaper columnists, I am a low-birthrate alarmist, but in some ways I consider myself an optimist. Just as the overpopulation panic of the 1960s and 1970s mistakenly assumed that trends would simply continue upward without adaptation, I suspect a deep pessimism about the downward trajectory of birthrates — the kind that imagines a 22nd-century America dominated by the Amish, say — underrates human adaptability, the extent to which populations that flourish amid population decline will model a higher-fertility future and attract converts over time.

In that spirit of optimism, I don’t actually think the South Korean birthrate will stay this low for decades, or that its population will drop from today’s roughly 51 million to the single-digit millions that my thought experiment suggests.

But I do believe the estimates that project a plunge to fewer than 35 million people by the late 2060s — and that decline alone may be enough to thrust Korean society into crisis.

There will be a choice between accepting steep economic decline as the age pyramid rapidly inverts and trying to welcome immigrants on a scale far beyond the numbers that are already destabilizing Western Europe. There will be inevitable abandonment of the elderly, vast ghost towns and ruined high rises and emigration by young people who see no future as custodians of a retirement community. And at some point there will quite possibly be an invasion from North Korea (current fertility rate: 1., if its southern neighbor struggles to keep a capable army in the field.

For the rest of the world, meanwhile, the South Korean example demonstrates that the birth dearth can get much worse much faster than the general trend in rich countries so far.

This is not to say that it will, since there are a number of patterns that set South Korea apart. For instance, one oft-cited driver of the Korean birth dearth is a uniquely brutal culture of academic competition, piling “cram schools” on top of normal education, driving parental anxiety and student misery, and making family life potentially hellish in ways that discourage people from even making the attempt.

Another is the distinctive interaction between the country’s cultural conservatism and social and economic modernization. For a long time the sexual revolution in South Korea was partly blunted by traditional social mores — the nation has very low rates of out-of-wedlock births, for instance. But eventually this produced intertwining rebellions, a feminist revolt against conservative social expectations and a male anti-feminist reaction, driving a stark polarization between the sexes that’s reshaped the country’s politics even as it’s knocked the marriage rate to record lows.

It also doesn’t help that South Korea’s conservatism is historically more Confucian and familial than religious in the Western sense; my sense is that strong religious belief is a better spur to family formation than traditionalist custom. Or that the country has long been out on the bleeding edge of internet gaming culture, drawing young men especially deeper into virtual existence and further from the opposite sex.

But now that I’ve written these descriptions, they read not as simple contrasts with American culture so much as exaggerations of the trends we’re experiencing as well.

We too have an exhausting meritocracy. We too have a growing ideological division between men and women in Generation Z. We too are secularizing and forging a cultural conservatism that’s anti-liberal but not necessarily pious, a spiritual but not religious right. We too are struggling to master the temptations and pathologies of virtual existence.

So the current trend in South Korea is more than just a grim surprise. It’s a warning about what’s possible for us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Thousands of people from African nations are flying to Central America and then traveling over land to Mexico and on to the southern border.

Lukeville, a border city in Arizona, is among the crossings where migrants from Africa, like these men from Mauritania, have been entering the United States, along with many thousands of other migrants.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

The young men from Guinea had decided it was time to leave their impoverished homeland in West Africa. But instead of seeking a new life in Europe, where so many African migrants have settled, they set out for what has become a far safer bet of late: the United States.

“Getting into the United States is certain compared to European countries, and so I came,” said Sekuba Keita, 30, who was at a migrant center in San Diego on a recent afternoon after an odyssey that took him by plane to Turkey, Colombia, El Salvador and Nicaragua, then by land to the Mexico-U.S. border.

Mr. Keita, who spoke in French, was at a cellphone charging station at the center among dozens more Africans, from Angola, Mauritania, Senegal and elsewhere, who had made the same calculus.

While migrants from African nations still represent a small share of the people crossing the southern border, their numbers have been surging, as smuggling networks in the Americas open new markets and capitalize on intensifying anti-immigrant sentiment in some corners of Europe.

Historically, the number of migrants from Africa’s 54 countries has been so low that U.S. authorities classified them as “other,” a category that has grown exponentially, driven recently, officials say, by fast-rising numbers from the continent.

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Three people bend over in prayer as they stand on dirt. In the background is a large group of people sitting against a wall.

As they wait in Lukeville to be transported from the southern border, migrants from Senegal pray at sunset.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

According to government data obtained by The Times, the number of Africans apprehended at the southern border jumped to 58,462 in the fiscal year 2023 from 13,406 in 2022. The top African countries in 2023 were Mauritania, at 15,263; Senegal, at 13,526; and Angola and Guinea, which each had more than 4,000.

Nonprofits that work on the border said that the trend has continued, with the absolute number and share of migrants from Africa climbing in recent months as potential destinations in Europe narrow.

“You have countries that are less and less welcoming,” said Camille Le Coz, a senior policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute Europe. “When new routes open up, people are going to migrate because economic opportunities at home are insufficient.”

A record number of people are on the move worldwide, according to the United Nations, fleeing climate change, authoritarian states and economic instability.

The swelling number of migrants from Africa has exacerbated the crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border, as they join legions of migrants from Central and South America, as well as from China, India and other nations in making their way north.

Nearly 2.5 million migrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2023 fiscal year, and about 300,000 migrants were processed by the U.S. Border Patrol in December, the most of any month, stretching resources to the limit. Most people will apply for asylum, which allows them to remain in the United States until the outcome of their cases, issued years down the road.

President Biden is facing pressure from Republicans in Washington and from some mayors and governors to stanch the flow of migrants into the country and into cities and towns struggling to absorb the new arrivals.

For decades, Congress has failed to reach a consensus on comprehensive changes to the immigration system, and that has compounded the challenges of responding to the surge.

Now, Republicans in Congress have demanded the Biden administration accelerate deportations and restrict asylum in exchange for support for wartime aid to Ukraine and Israel, and talks on that are expected to resume next week when lawmakers return to Washington.

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Several people, including one person carrying a small child, stand in line outside near a fence.

It is extremely difficult to deport people to countries in Asia and Africa, because of the long distance and lack of consent from many nations.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

The surge of migrants from African nations can be noticeable even before they arrive in the Americas. After a flight from Senegal landed in Morocco on a recent morning, an airport employee called for anyone headed to the Nicaraguan capital Managua. A few dozen Senegalese travelers followed her.

The Nicaraguan government, led by longtime president Daniel Ortega, does not restrict entry of Africans, and by starting their overland journey there, migrants are spared the perilous trek through the Darien Gap, a dense jungle between Colombia and Panama.

The African migrants continue through Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico until they arrive at the southern U.S. border. Between January and September, nearly 28,000 Africans passed through Honduras, a sixfold increase over the corresponding period in 2022, according to the Honduran government. Guinea, Senegal and Mauritania are among the top 10 countries of those migrants; only a couple dozen people from each of those countries traveled through Honduras in 2020.

While the United States has ramped up deportation flights, it has had to keep releasing many more people into the country because immigration detention centers are full and families cannot be locked up for extended periods. It is also extremely difficult to deport people to countries in Asia and Africa, because of the long distance and lack of consent from many nations.

Across the Atlantic, immigration has stirred concern in many countries. Right-leaning candidates with anti-immigration platforms prevailed in a few national elections last year, most recently in the Netherlands. France, Germany and Spain have struck deals with Tunisia and Morocco to intercept migrants who transit through them. And on Dec. 20, the European Union signed a pact to facilitate the deportation of asylum seekers and limit migration to the bloc.

Image
Several tents sit on dirt near a large fence.

Encampments like this one in Jacumba Hot Springs, Calif., serve as way stations for migrant families waiting to be transported by the Border Patrol to processing facilities.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Migrants heading to the United States share tips and success stories on social media, and smugglers masquerading as travel guides tout their services. Friends and relatives relay that they obtain U.S. work authorization after filing asylum claims. And while the migrants are unlikely to win their cases, it typically takes years for a decision because of a massive backlog in immigration court.

“In the past, migrating across the U.S. border was very mysterious to people,” said John Modlin, the chief of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which has been seeing large numbers of Africans crossing in remote areas.

“The greatest danger right now is the global reach of the smuggling organizations,” aided by social media, he said in a recent interview.

The route from West Africa and through Central America emerged a few years ago, according to Aly Tandian, a professor specializing in migration studies at the University Gaston Berger in Senegal. But departures soared in 2023 as more migrants began flying through Morocco and Turkey en route to Nicaragua.

“I saw people had made it to the United States,” Ousman Camara, 27, a college student from Mauritania now in the United States, said in an interview. “Morocco controls the seas, making it harder to reach Europe.”

Mr. Camara said that he no longer felt safe in Mauritania, where human rights groups have documented widespread abuses against Black minorities, and that he planned to apply for asylum in the United States.

He borrowed about $8,000 from a friend to make the journey, which Mr. Camara said he would repay once he has steady work in the United States.

Image
A person wearing a face mask and a jacket stands outside near a large group of people who have lined up against a large wall.

A surge in migrants last month stretched resources, leaving many people, like this man from Guinea, stranded at the border waiting to be picked up by U.S. authorities.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

Unlike many of the migrants from countries in the Americas, many migrants from Africa and Asia had families or friends who could help pay for the air travel to Nicaragua.

Mr. Keita, from Guinea, said that he had sold his small laundry-detergent factory in Kankanto afford the trip. “Working here, I will be able to better myself and provide for us,” he said.

Mohammed Aram, 33, of Sudan, where civil war broke out in April, said that the United States was the best place to start a new life. “Entry to Europe is difficult,” said Mr. Aram, who planned to go to Chicago.

More than a dozen migrants interviewed for this article said that they had surrendered at the border to U.S. agents, who bused them to a processing facility. There, the migrants spent two or three nights waiting their turn to provide personal information to authorities. They were released with documents that indicated they were in deportation proceedings and must go to court on a specific date in the city where they reported they will live.

Finally, the migrants were released to the San Diego center, where they received meals and assistance contacting friends or relatives around the country who typically paid for airline tickets to their U.S. destination.

Having made it to the United States, many expressed optimism about making fresh starts in cities across the country. But some who traveled to the United States said that social media posts had omitted mention of the danger they might encounter on their journeys, especially through Central America and Mexico.

Image
Several hands extend over a small fire.

While the United States has ramped up deportation flights, it has had to keep releasing many more people into the country because immigration detention centers are full and families cannot be locked up for extended periods. Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

Paulo Kando, 20, and M’bome Joao, 22, from Angola, an oil-rich nation on the West African coast, said that bandits had robbed their cellphones and all their money at the Guatemala-Mexico border. They got jobs piling charcoal into carts to earn some pesos in Mexico. By the time they reached California, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Now they were stranded in San Diego. An Angolan friend in Portland, Ore., had promised to receive them but was not answering his phone, and they could not afford the bus fare to get there. They knew no one else in the United States, they said. Still, they did not regret coming.

Mr. Kando, speaking in his native Portuguese, said his goal had not changed. “We’re trusting in God that a miracle will happen,” he said, “and we will reach Portland.”

Elian Peltier contributed reporting from Casablanca, Morocco.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/us/a ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

China Told Women to Have Babies, but Its Population Shrank Again

Faced with falling births, China’s efforts to stabilize a shrinking population and maintain economic growth are failing.


The frozen Liangma River in Beijing. The number of babies born in China declined for the seventh straight year in 2023. Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

China’s ruling Communist Party is facing a national emergency. To fix it, the party wants more women to have more babies.

It has offered them sweeteners, like cheaper housing, tax benefits and cash. It has also invoked patriotism, calling on them to be “good wives and mothers.”

The efforts aren’t working. Chinese women have been shunning marriage and babies at such a rapid pace that China’s population in 2023 shrank for the second straight year, accelerating the government’s sense of crisis over the country’s rapidly aging population and its economic future.

China said on Wednesday that 9.02 million babies were born in 2023, down from 9.56 million in 2022 and the seventh year in a row that the number has fallen. Taken together with the number of people who died during the year — 11.1 million — China has more older people than anywhere else in the world, an amount that is rising rapidly. China’s total population was 1,409,670,000 at the end of 2023, a decline of two million people, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The shrinking and aging population worries Beijing because it is draining China of the working-age people it needs to power the economy. The demographic crisis, which arrived sooner than nearly anyone expected, is already straining weak and underfunded health care and pension systems.

China hastened the problem with its one-child policy, which helped to push the birthrate down over several decades. The rule also created generations of young only-child girls who were given an education and employment opportunities — a cohort that turned into empowered women who now view Beijing’s efforts as pushing them back into the home.

China’s population continues to shrink as deaths outnumber births

Note: In 2015, China announced that all married couples would be allowed to have two children. In 2021, China said it would allow couples to have three children.Source: National Bureau of StatisticsBy The New York Times

Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has long talked about the need for women to return to more traditional roles in the home. He recently urged government officials to promote a “marriage and childbearing culture,” and to influence what young people think about “love and marriage, fertility and family.”

But experts said the efforts lacked any attempt to address one reality that shaped women’s views about parenting: deep-seated gender inequality. The laws that are meant to protect women and their property, and to ensure they are treated equally, have failed them.

“Women still don’t feel sure enough to have children in our country,” said Rashelle Chen, a social media professional from the southern province of Guangdong. Ms. Chen, 33, has been married for five years and said she didn’t intend to have a baby.

“It seems that the government’s birth policy is only aimed at making babies but doesn’t protect the person who gives birth,” she said. “It does not protect the rights and interests of women.”

Image
A city street crowded with pedestrians.

Despite government efforts to silence China’s feminist movement, its ideas about equality remain widespread. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

Propaganda campaigns and state-sponsored dating events goad young people to get married and have babies. In China, it is uncommon for unmarried couples or a single person to have children. State media is filled with calls for China’s youths to play a role in “rejuvenating the nation.”

The message has been received by parents, many of whom already share traditional views about marriage. Ms. Chen’s parents sometimes get so upset at her decision not to have children that they cry on the phone. “We are no longer your parents,” they tell her.

Women in China today have a better awareness of their rights because of the rise in advocacy against sexual harassment and workplace discrimination. The authorities have tried to silence China’s feminist movement, but its ideas about equality remain widespread.

“During these past 10 years, there is a huge community of feminists that have been built up through the internet,” said Zheng Churan, a Chinese women’s rights activist, who was detained with four other activists on the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015. “Women are more empowered today,” Ms. Zheng said.

Censorship has silenced much of the debate around women’s issues, sometimes tamping down on public discussion of sexual discrimination, harassment or gender violence. Yet women have been able to share their experiences online and provide support to the victims, Ms. Zheng said.

Image
People with a child in a stroller inside a shopping mall.

China’s one-child policy pushed the birthrate down for three decades.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

On paper, China has laws to promote gender equality. Employment discrimination based on gender, race or ethnicity is illegal, for example. In practice, companies advertise for male candidates and discriminate against female employees, said Guo Jing, an activist who has helped to provide legal support to women facing discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace.

“In some ways, women are more aware of gender inequality in every area of life,” Ms. Guo said. “It’s still difficult for women to get justice, even in court.” In 2014, she sued a state-owned company, Dongfang Cooking Training School, after she was told not to apply for a job because she was a woman. She prevailed, but was awarded only about $300 in compensation.

A recent uptick in shocking social media postings and news articles about acts of violence against women have grabbed the attention of the nation, like the savage beating of several women in Tangshan at a restaurant and the story of a mother of eight who was found chained to the wall of a shack.

Women often cite such violent acts when discussing why they don’t want to get married. Changes to policies and regulations, like a new rule requiring a 30-day cooling-off period before civil divorces can be made final, are another. Marriage rates have been falling for nine years. That trend, once limited mostly to cities, has spread to rural areas as well, according to government statistics.

Another reason women say they don’t want to get married is that it has gotten harder to win a divorce in court if it is contested.

An analysis of nearly 150,000 court rulings on divorce cases by Ethan Michelson, a professor at Indiana University, found that around 80 percent of the petitions filed by women were denied by a judge on the first try, often when there was evidence of domestic violence. (The rate of denial for a second try is around 70 percent.)

Image
A bride and a groom hold hands while being photographed outside the tall arched entrances of a large brick building.

It is uncommon for children to be born to unwed mothers in China, where marriage rates have been falling for nine years. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

“There have been so many strong signals from the very top, from Xi’s own mouth, about family being the bedrock of Chinese society and family stability being the foundation of social stability and national development,” Mr. Michelson said. “There is no doubt that these signals have reinforced judges’ tendencies,” he said.

Popular sayings online — such as “a marriage license has become a license to beat,” or worse — are reinforced by news reports. In just one of many similar cases last summer, a woman in the northwestern province of Gansu was denied a divorce petition despite evidence of domestic abuse; a judge said the couple needed to stay together for their children. Another woman in the southern city of Guangzhou was murdered by her husband during a 30-day divorce cooling-off period.

In 2011, a Supreme People’s Court ruled that family homes would no longer be divided in divorce, but instead given to the person whose name was on the deed — a finding that favored men.

“That decision really frightened a lot of women in China,” said Leta Hong Fincher, the author of “Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China.”

That sense of panic has not gone away.

“Instead of having more care and protection, mothers become more vulnerable to abuse and isolation,” said Elgar Yang, 24, a journalist in Shanghai.

Policies by the government that are meant to entice women to marry, she added, “even make me feel that it is a trap.”

Image
A person holding a child's hand as they walk away from the camera along a city sidewalk lined with bare trees.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, recently urged government officials to promote a “marriage and childbearing culture.”Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

A correction was made on Jan. 17, 2024: An earlier version of this article misstated the findings of an analysis of nearly 150,000 court rulings on divorce cases. Around 80 percent of the petitions filed by women were denied by a judge, not 40 percent, and that figure applies to the first try, not to all legal efforts. (The rate of denial for a second try is around 70 percent.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/busi ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

TOKYO, Feb 27 (Reuters) - The number of babies born in Japan fell for an eighth straight year to a fresh record low in 2023, preliminary government data showed on Tuesday, underscoring the daunting task the country faces in trying to stem depopulation.

The number of births fell 5.1% from a year earlier to 758,631, while the number of marriages slid 5.9% to 489,281 -- the first time in 90 years the number fell below 500,000 -- foreboding a further decline in the population as out-of-wedlock births are rare in Japan.

Asked about the latest data, Japan's top government spokesperson said the government will take "unprecedented steps" to cope with the declining birthrate, such as expanding childcare and promoting wage hikes for younger workers.

A seven-month-old baby and her mother look at early flowering Kanzakura cherry blossoms in full bloom at the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo

A seven-month-old baby and her mother look at early flowering Kanzakura cherry blossoms in full bloom at the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo, Japan March 14, 2018. REUTERS/Issei Kato Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

"The declining birthrate is in a critical situation," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters. "The next six years or so until 2030, when the number of young people will rapidly decline, will be the last chance to reverse the trend."

Mindful of the potential social and economic impact, and the strains on public finances, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called the trend the "gravest crisis our country faces", and unveiled a range of steps to support child-bearing households late last year.

Japan's population will likely decline by about 30% to 87 million by 2070, with four out of every 10 people aged 65 or older, according to estimates by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-paci ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

South Korea Needs Foreign Workers, but Often Fails to Protect Them

Though a shrinking population makes imported labor vital, migrant workers routinely face predatory employers, inhumane conditions and other abuse.


Migrant workers harvesting and packaging vegetables in a greenhouse in Gasan-myeon, South Korea, in December.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

Samsung phones. Hyundai cars. LG TVs. South Korean exports are available in virtually every corner of the world. But the nation is more dependent than ever before on an import to keep its factories and farms humming: foreign labor.

This shift is part of the fallout from a demographic crisis that has left South Korea with a shrinking and aging population. Data released this week showed that last year the country broke its own record — again — for the world’s lowest total fertility rate.

President Yoon Suk Yeol’s government has responded by more than doubling the quota for low-skilled workers from less-developed nations including Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, the Philippines and Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands of them now toil in South Korea, typically in small factories, or on remote farms or fishing boats — jobs that locals consider too dirty, dangerous or low-paying. With little say in choosing or changing employers, many foreign workers endure predatory bosses, inhumane housing, discrimination and other abuses.

One of these is Chandra Das Hari Narayan, a native of Bangladesh. Last July, working in a wooded park north of Seoul, he was ordered to cut down a tall tree. Though the law requires a safety helmet when doing such work, he was not given one. A falling branch hit his head, knocking him out and sending blood spilling from his nose and mouth.

Image
Three men stand in a dark, otherwise deserted street facing the camera.

Bangladeshi migrant workers Badhan Muhammad Sabur Kazi, Asis Kumar and Chandra Das Hari in Haksa Village, a small complex of cheap and rundown apartments in Pocheon, a town northeast of Seoul. Once inhabited by Korean students, the village is now occupied by migrant workers and international students.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

After his bosses refused to call an ambulance, ​a fellow ​migrant worker ​rushed him to a hospital, where​ doctors found internal bleeding in his head and his skull fractured in three places. His employer reported only minor bruises to the authorities, according to a document it filed for workers’ compensation for Mr. Chandra without his approval.

“They would not have treated me like this if I were South Korean,” said Mr. Chandra, 38. “They treat migrant workers ​like disposable items.”

The work can be deadly — foreign workers were nearly three times more likely to die in work-related accidents compared with the national average, according to a recent study. Such findings have alarmed rights groups and foreign governments; in January the Philippines prohibited its citizens from taking seasonal jobs in South Korea.

Image
A view of a field with long rows of greenhouses in the background and in the foreground plastic cylinders of something, possibly hay.

Greenhouses in Gasan-myeon. Many migrant workers end up in agricultural jobs.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

But South Korea remains an attractive destination, with more than 300,000 low-skilled workers here on temporary work visas. (Those figures do not include the tens of thousands of ethnic Korean migrants from China and former Soviet republics, who typically face less discrimination.) About 430,000 additional people have overstayed their visas and are working illegally, according to government data.

Migrant workers often land in places like Pocheon, a town northeast of Seoul where factories and greenhouses rely heavily on overseas labor. Sammer Chhetri, 30, got here in 2022 and sends $1,500 of his $1,750 monthly paycheck to his family in Nepal.

“You can’t make this kind of money ​in Nepal,” said Mr. Chhetri, who works from sunrise to dark in long, tunnel-shaped plastic greenhouses.

Image
Inside a greenhouse covered in translucent plastic, a worker pulls a large sheet of plastic over something.

A migrant worker covering vegetables with a sheet of plastic inside a greenhouse to protect it from the cold.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

Another Nepalese worker, Hari Shrestha, 33, said his earnings from a South Korean furniture factory have helped his family build a house in Nepal.

Then there is the allure of South Korean pop culture, its globally popular TV dramas and music.

“Whenever I call my teenage daughter back home, she always asks, ‘Daddy, have you met BTS yet?’” ​said Asis Kumar Das, 48, who is from Bangladesh.

For nearly three years, Mr. Asis worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week, in a small textile factory for a monthly salary of about $2,350 — which he did not regularly receive.

“They have never paid me on time or in full,” ​he said​, showing an agreement his former employer signed with him promising to pay part of his overdue wages by the end of this month.

Image
A man in a surgical mask stands in a dark field. Greenhouses, lights of a town, and mountains are visible in the distance behind him.

Nepali factory worker Hari Shrestha says earnings he makes in South Korea helped his family build a house back in Nepal.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

Mr. Asis is far from alone. Migrant workers ​annually report $91 million in ​unpaid wages, according to government data.

The Labor Ministry said it is “making all-out efforts” to improve working and living conditions for these workers. It is sending inspectors to more workplaces, hiring more translators and enforcing penalties for employers who mistreat workers, it said. Some towns are building public dormitories after local farmers complained that the government was importing foreign workers without adequate housing plans.

The government has also offered “exemplary” workers visas that allow them to bring over their families. Officials have said that South Korea intends to “bring in only those foreigners essential to our society​” and “strengthening the crackdown on those illegally staying here.”

But the authorities — who plan to issue a record 165,000 temporary work visas this year — have also scaled back some services, for instance cutting off funding for nine migrant support centers.

Image
Interior of a structure made of metal framing with plastic draped over it. Clothes hang on a line and there is a small trailer-like container with a door but no windows.

A migrant worker dormitory in Gasan-myeon. Some Korean farm owners provide housing in the form of a container box inside a greenhouse for their workers, though this is illegal.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

In the decades after the Korean War, South Korea exported construction workers to the Middle East and nurses and miners to Germany. By the early 1990s, as it emerged as an economic powerhouse churning out electronics and cars, it began importing foreign workers to fill jobs shunned by its increasingly rich local work force. But these migrants, classified as “industrial trainees,” were not protected by labor laws despite their harsh working conditions.

The government introduced the Employment Permit System, or E.P.S., in 2004, eliminating middlemen and becoming the sole job broker for low-skilled migrant workers. It recruits workers on three-year visas from 16 nations, and in 2015 also started offering seasonal employment to foreigners.

But severe issues persist.

“The biggest problem with E.P.S. is that it has created a master-servant relationship between employers and foreign workers,” said Kim Dal-sung, a Methodist pastor who runs the Pocheon Migrant Worker Center.

Image
A man stands in front of a structure made of metal framing covered with plastic, open at the end. A metal wall and door is visible under the plastic, and there is debris like bottles and an old motorbike.

Pastor Kim Dal-sung, head of the Pocheon Migrant Workers Center, in front of an illegal greenhouse dormitory in Gasan-myeon.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

That can mean inhumane conditions. The “housing” promised to Mr. Chhetri, the agriculture worker, turned out to be ​a used shipping container hidden inside a tattered greenhouse-like structure covered with black plastic shading.

During a bitter cold snap in December 2020, Nuon Sokkheng, a Cambodian migrant, died in a heatless shack. The government instituted new safety regulations, but in Pocheon many workers continue to live in substandard facilities.

If E.P.S. workers have abusive employers, they often have only two choices: endure the ordeal, hoping that their boss will help them extend or renew their visa, or work illegally for someone else and live in constant fear of immigration raids, the Rev. Kim said.

Image
A small tin-roofed structure with blankets for walls stands in a field next to metal-framed structures covered with plastic.

A makeshift latrine next to to an illegal greenhouse dormitory.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

In December 2022, Ray Sree Pallab Kumar, 32, lost most of the vision in his right eye after a metal piece thrown by his manager bounced off a steel-cutting machine and hit him. But his employers, in southern Seoul, sought to blame him for the accident, according to a Korean-language statement they tried to make him sign even though he didn’t understand it.

Migrants also say they face racist or xenophobic attitudes in South Korea.

“They treat people differently according to skin colors,” said Mr. Asis, the textile worker. “In the crowded bus, they would rather stand than take an empty seat next to me. I ask myself, ‘Do I smell?’”

Image
A man in a baseball cap and glasses sits on a bed inside a windowless room.

Ray Sree Pallab Kumar, a Bangladeshi migrant worker, in his makeshift room on top of the metal factory where he suffered an eye injury in an industrial accident. His right eye is permanently damaged.Credit...Jun Michael Park for The New York Times

Biswas Sree Shonkor, 34, a plastics factory worker, said his pay remained flat while his employer gave raises to and promoted South Korean workers he helped train.

Mr. Chandra said that even worse than workplace injuries like the one he suffered in the arboretum​ was how managers insulted foreign workers, but not locals, for similar mistakes.

“​We don’t mind doing hard work​,” he said. “It’s not ​our body but our mind that tires.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

A sculpture in Wuhan, a city in central China, depicted a joyful family of three. Recently, two more children were added.


An official newspaper said the change was aimed at promoting the government's three-child policy.

One Three Is Best: How China’s Family Planning Propaganda Has Changed

For decades, China harshly restricted the number of children couples could have, arguing that everyone would be better off with fewer mouths to feed. The government’s one-child policy was woven into the fabric of everyday life, through slogans on street banners and in popular culture and public art.

Now, faced with a shrinking and aging population, China is using many of the same propaganda channels to send the opposite message: Have more babies.

The government has also been offering financial incentives for couples to have two or three children. But the efforts have not been successful. The birthrate in China has fallen steeply, and last year was the lowest since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

China’s annual population growth

One-child

policy started

Three-child

policy

3%

Two-child

policy

2%

1%

0

Great Chinese

Famine

Population has been declining since 2022

-1%

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020


Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China
Instead of enforcing birth limits, the government has shifted gears to promote a “pro-birth culture,” organizing beauty pageants for pregnant women and producing rap videos about the advantages of having children.

In recent years, the state broadcaster’s annual spring festival gala, one of the country’s most-watched TV events, has prominently featured public service ads promoting families with two or three children.

In one ad that aired last year, a visibly pregnant woman was shown resting her hand on her belly while her husband and son peacefully slept in bed. The caption read: “It’s getting livelier around here.”


2022

2023

“The old and the young are together”“It’s getting livelier around here”
2024

2024

“A house full of children”
Source: China Central Television

The propaganda effort has been met with widespread ridicule. Critics have regarded the campaign as only the latest sign that policymakers are blind to the increasing costs and other challenges people face in raising multiple children.

They have also mocked the recent messaging for the obvious regulatory whiplash after decades of limiting births with forced abortions and hefty fines. Between 1980 and 2015, the year the one-child policy officially ended, the Chinese government used extensive propaganda to warn that having more babies would hinder China’s modernization.

Today the official rhetoric depicts larger families as the cornerstone of attaining a prosperous society, known in Chinese as “xiaokang.”


THEN

NOW

To achieve “xiaokang,” three children is better than two.Strictly limit second births, totally eradicate third births.
Sources: “Then” photo by Marie Mathelin/Roger Viollet via Getty Images; “Now” photo by local government of Bengbu, Anhui province
For officials, imposing the one-child policy also meant they had to challenge the deep-rooted traditional belief that children, and sons in particular, provided a form of security in old age. To change this mind-set, family planning offices plastered towns and villages with slogans saying that the state would take care of older Chinese.

But China’s population is aging rapidly. By 2040, nearly a third of its people will be over 60. The state will be hard pressed to support seniors, particularly those in rural areas, who get a fraction of the pension received by urban salaried workers under the current program.

Now the official messaging has shifted dramatically, highlighting the importance of self-reliance and family support.


THEN

NOW
One child is best, the government aids in elder care.


Three children are best, no need for state-supported elder care.
Under the one-child policy, local governments levied steep “social upbringing fees” on those who had more children than allowed. For some families, these penalties brought financial devastation and fractured marriages.

As recently as early 2021, people were still being fined heavily for having a third child, only to find out a few months later, in June, that the government passed a law allowing all married couples to have three children. It had also not only abolished these fees nationwide but also encouraged localities to provide extra welfare benefits and longer parental leave for families with three children.

The pivot has prompted local officials to remove visible remnants of the one-child policy. Last year, local governments across various provinces systematically erased outdated slogans on birth restrictions from public streets and walls.

In a village in Shanxi Province in northern China, government employees took down a mural with a slogan that promoted the one-child policy.


BEFORE


AFTER


Fewer children, focused

guidance, shaping

society's pillars.

More children, greater

strain, challenging

lifelong journeys.


Source: Local government of Xilingjing Xiang, Shanxi Province
But the slogans that the government would like to treat as relics of a bygone era are finding new resonance with young Chinese.

On social media, many Chinese users have shared photos of one-child policy slogans as witty retorts to what they described as growing societal pressure to have larger families. Some of the posts have garnered thousands of likes and hundreds of comments.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Vaughan Gething of Wales Is Europe’s First Black Head of Government

Video speech: https://nyti.ms/3TJFNRd

The Zambian-born lawyer was elected as the country’s first minister by the Welsh Parliament on Wednesday making him the first Black person to lead a nation in Europe.CreditCredit...Ben Birchall/Press Association, via Associated Press

Vaughan Gething on Thursday became the first Black person to lead a national government in Europe, a day after he was elected the first minister of Wales.

In a speech to the Welsh Senedd, or Parliament, Mr. Gething, who was born in Zambia, noted the historic nature of his election in a place where nearly 94 percent of the population of about three million is white, according to government data.

“It is a matter of pride, I believe, for a modern Wales, but also a daunting responsibility for me and one that I do not take lightly,” he said. “But today, we can also expect a depressingly familiar pattern to emerge with abuse on social media, racist tropes disguised with polite language, people questioning my motives. And yes, they will still question or deny my nationality, whilst others will question why I am playing the race card.”

To those critics, Mr. Gething said: “It is very easy not to care about identity when your own has never once been questioned or held you back. I believe the Wales of today and the future will be owned by all those decent people who recognize that our Parliament and our government should look like our country.”

Mr. Gething, 50, was narrowly elected leader of Wales’s governing Labour Party this week, and then was elected first minister by the Senedd. He also received approval from King Charles III, a ceremonial administrative step.

Mr. Gething’s elevation as first minister of Wales means that, for the first time, none of the four governments in the United Kingdom will be led by a white man. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain is of Indian descent, and Humza Yousaf, the first minister of Scotland, is of Pakistani descent. Michelle O’Neill became first minister of Northern Ireland last month, the first Catholic to hold that position.

Mr. Sunak’s government oversees the operation of the civil service and government agencies and makes decisions for England, but some responsibilities are left to elected officials in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — the result of a decades-long process called devolution.

Mr. Gething has spent much of his life in politics. He became active in the Welsh Labour Party at 17, campaigning unsuccessfully in the 1992 general election. He become a trade union lawyer and eventually a partner at the trade union firm Thompsons. He was also the first Black person — and the youngest — to serve as president of the Wales Trades Union Congress, a consortium of dozens of unions.

In 2011, he became the first Black minister to serve in any of the devolved United Kingdom countries and has since served in several roles in the Welsh Parliament, including as minister of economy and as health minister during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.


Mr. Gething faced criticism for accepting 200,000 pounds (about $253,000) in donations to his leadership campaign from a recycling company run by a man who had been found guilty of illegally dumping waste on protected land in South Wales. Asked about the donations in a BBC debate, he said that they had been “checked and filed properly with the Electoral Commission and declared to the Senedd,” The Guardian reported.

In his speech on Thursday, Mr. Gething said he wanted Wales “to thrive in the sunshine that hope and social justice can offer all of us, no matter what our background, what we look like or who we love.”

He added, “We can embrace fresh optimism and new ambition for a fairer Wales built by all of us.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

A French-Malian Singer Is Caught in an Olympic Storm


Aya Nakamura is France’s most popular singer at home and abroad, with 25 top 10 singles in France and over 20 million followers on social media.Credit...Charlotte Hadden for The New York Times

Aya Nakamura’s music is one of France’s top cultural exports. But reports that she might perform at the Paris Games have prompted fierce debates over identity and language.

In four months, France will host the Paris Olympics, but which France will show up? Torn between tradition and modernity, the country is in the midst of an identity crisis.

The possible choice for the opening ceremony of Aya Nakamura, a superstar French-Malian singer whose slang-spiced lyrics stand at some distance from academic French, has ignited a furor tinged with issues of race and linguistic propriety and the politics of immigration. Right-wing critics say Ms. Nakamura’s music does not represent France, and the prospect of her performing has led to a barrage of racist insults online against her. The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation.

The outcry has compounded a fight over an official poster unveiled this month: a pastel rendering of the city’s landmarks thronging with people in a busy style reminiscent of the “Where’s Waldo?” children’s books.

Right-wing critics have attacked the image as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history in a sea of sugary, irreproachable blandness most evident in the removal of the cross atop the golden dome of the Invalides, the former military hospital where Napoleon is buried. An opinion essay in the right-wing Journal du Dimanche said “the malaise of a nation in the throes of deconstruction” was in full view.

The rapid immersion of the Olympics in France’s culture wars has its roots in a meeting on Feb. 19 at the Élysée Palace between President Emmanuel Macron and Ms. Nakamura, 28. Mr. Macron, doubling as the artistic director of the Olympics, asked if she would perform.

ImageA man stands in front of an illuminated poster for the Paris Olympics.

The official poster of the Olympic Games in Paris has been attacked by right-wing critics as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history.Credit...Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images

Ms. Nakamura is by some distance France’s most popular singer at home and abroad, with 25 top 10 singles in France and over 20 million followers on social media. Born Aya Danioko in Bamako, Mali, she took her stage name from a character in “Heroes,” a science fiction series on NBC. Raised in a suburb of Paris, she mixes French lyrics with Arabic, English and West African languages like Bambara, the Malian language of her parents, in songs that interweave R&B, zouk and the rhythms of Afropop.

“This isn’t a beautiful symbol, it’s a new provocation by Emmanuel Macron, who must wake up every morning wondering how he can humiliate the French people,” Marine Le Pen, a leader of the far-right National Rally party, told France Inter radio, alluding to the possible choice of Ms. Nakamura. She insisted that Ms. Nakamura sang “who knows what” language — certainly not French — and was unfit to represent the country.

Ms. Nakamura, who declined a request for an interview, has not publicly addressed the furor beyond a few social media posts. On X, she responded to attacks by saying “you can be racist, but not deaf.” Naturalized in 2021, the singer has dual French and Malian citizenship. But in a country often ill at ease with its changing population — more diverse, less white, more questioning of the French model of identity-effacing assimilation in supposedly undifferentiated citizenship — she stands on a fault line.

“There is an identity panic,” said Rokhaya Diallo, a French author, filmmaker and activist. “I think France does not want to see itself the way it really is.” Citing the soccer star Kylian Mbappé and Ms. Nakamura, Ms. Diallo suggested that “a white France feels threatened in a way it did not 30 years ago.”

Ms. Nakamura is held to an unfair standard because of her background, Ms. Diallo added. “Her linguistic creativity is going to be seen as incompetence instead of artistic talent,” she said, because focusing solely on the artist’s lyrics ignored the inventive musicality of her songs.

The eldest of five siblings, Ms. Nakamura, who is a single mother of two children, was born into a family of griots, or traditional West African musicians and storytellers. “Everyone sings in my family,” she told Le Monde in 2017. “But I’m the only one who dared to sing ‘for real.’”

Her music has little overt political messaging. She told The New York Times in 2019, “I’m happy if my songs speak for themselves.” But she has also said she recognizes her place as a feminist role model. Her lyrics are often an ode to emancipated women who are firmly in control of their lives and unabashed about their sexuality.

“At the start of my career, I was rather skeptical of this idea of a model,” Ms. Nakamura told CB News, a marketing and public relations trade publication, in December. “But it’s a reality: I have influence. If, through my work and my undertakings, I enable certain women to assert themselves, then that’s something to be proud of.”

Image
Ms. Nakamura performing onstage in a white crop top and black shorts.

Ms. Nakamura performing in Nyon, Switzerland, in July. She mixes French lyrics with Arabic, English and West African dialects.Credit...Martial Trezzini/EPA, via Shutterstock

The furor over her possible performance reflects a fractured France. Some see a reactionary nation intent on ignoring how large-scale immigration, particularly from North Africa, has enriched the country hosting the 33rd Summer Olympics of modern times. Celebrities, left-wing politicians and government officials support the idea of Ms. Nakamura taking a prominent role in the ceremony.

Others, especially on the right, see a multicultural France intent on concealing its Christian roots, even the nation itself, especially with the erasure of the cross from the Invalides dome and the absence of a single French flag in the official poster. Mild pink, purple and green are favored over the bold blue, white and red of France.

“Every time the world is watching us, we give the impression we don’t embrace who we are,” Marion Maréchal, Ms. Le Pen’s niece and a leader of the extreme-right Reconquête party, told French television last week.

Then there is the question of language in this land of the Académie Française, which was founded in 1634 to promote and protect the French language. It takes upon itself the task of shielding the country from “brainless Globish,” as one of the 40 members once put it, and it does so with ardor, if with diminishing success as France succumbs to a world of “les startuppers.”

“There is a sort of religion of language in France,” said Julien Barret, a linguist and writer who has written an online glossary of the language prevalent in the banlieues where Ms. Nakamura grew up. “French identity is conflated with the French language” he added, in what amounts to “a cult of purity.”

That so-called purity has long since ceased to exist. France’s former African colonies increasingly infuse the language with their own expressions. Singers and rappers, often raised in immigrant families, have coined new terms. “You can’t write a song like you write a school assignment,” Mr. Barret said.

Ms. Nakamura’s dance-floor hits use an eclectic mix of French argot like verlan, which reverses the order of syllables; West African dialect like Nouchi in the Ivory Coast; and innovative turns of phrase that are sometimes nonsensical but quickly catch on.

In “Djadja,” her breakout song from 2018 that has become an anthem of female empowerment, she calls out a man who lies about sleeping with her by singing “I’m not your catin,” using a centuries-old French term for prostitute. It has been streamed about one billion times.

Another widely popular song is “Pookie” — a diminutive for poucave, slang that originates from Romani for a traitor or a rat.

During the meeting with Mr. Macron, first revealed by the magazine L’Express, the president asked Ms. Nakamura which French singer she liked. Her response was Édith Piaf, the legendary artist who died in 1963 and famously regretted nothing.

So, Mr. Macron suggested to Ms. Nakamura — in an account that the presidency has not disputed — why not sing Piaf to open the Olympics?

The idea is still under review.

For some, Ms. Nakamura channeling Piaf might be the perfect tribute to “La Vie en Rose,” Piaf’s immortal anthem of Parisian romantic love. Bruno Le Maire, the economy minister — and occasional author of erotic novels — said it would show “panache” and “audacity.” Supporters have noted that the two singers grew up in poverty and came from immigrant backgrounds.

But a recent poll found that 63 percent of French people did not approve of Mr. Macron’s idea, even though about half the respondents said they knew of Ms. Nakamura only by name.

Ms. Nakamura has encountered criticism of her music before in France, where expectations of assimilation are high. Some on the right complain she has become French but shown more interest in her African roots or her American role models.

She responded to her critics on French television in 2019, saying of her music, “In the end, it speaks to everyone.”

“You don’t understand,” she added. “But you sing.”

The Olympics furor appears unlikely to subside soon. As a commentator on France Inter radio put it: “France has no oil, but we do have debates. In fact, we almost deserve a gold medal for that.”

Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, coveri

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[swamidada]

‘Dead Nazi’ to ‘Sons of Amalek’: How Israel is weaponising music to dehumanise Palestinians
Songs like 'Harbu Darbu' and 'Zeh Aleinu' are not 'soundtracks of resistance' — they're celebrations of death.
Asfa Sultan
Updated 02 Apr, 2024

Beating chests, pounding on war drums, blaring horns and shouting provocative chants all make up scenes from pre-historic war times — when music was used as a tool to instil fear into the hearts of adversaries.

In ancient Greece, martial hymns known as the “Paean” were sung to invoke the favour of gods in battle. During the mediaeval period, battle songs would glorify war crimes and demonise groups of people, fuelling aggression and animosity among others. The Norse Vikings used ‘kvad’ (also spelled ‘kvæði’) — composed and performed by poets and musicians — to romanticise war, death, and “heroic” exploits.

As societies evolved, so did music and its associations, allowing it to be used as a propaganda tool to further fundamentalism, political ideologies and nationalistic narratives — its recall value lending it an upper hand over other art forms. Not everyone remembers a book, a film, a play or a poem the way they do a song. Even if it’s in a language they don’t speak and especially if it’s catchy — think the South Korean hit ‘Gangnam Style’.

The digital battlegrounds of today understand the power of music all too well — and advertisers, businesses, influencers, even your next-door neighbour have benefitted from it. So has Israel and its military, especially since October 7.

Music coming out of Israel over the past five months has surpassed propaganda and is in many cases outright hate speech. It is reflective of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intentions. The marriage between Israel’s right-wing rhetoric and its militainment has become a testament to Netanyahu’s fascist policies.

Couple that with Israel’s demonstrated history of cultural appropriation, its music is now not only unoriginal but also racist.

Giving hip-hop a bad name
Gestures of guns being fired, fists and middle fingers raised, intense trap music and calls for the death of Palestinians set to a drill beat all make up scenes from hit Israeli war anthem ‘Harbu Darbu’ by rap duo Ness Ve Stilla. The track features derogatory terms like “rats” and “sons of Amalek” for Palestinians — a biblical reference to the “enemy nation” repeatedly used especially by Netanyahu to justify the mass killing of Palestinians by denying the existence of “innocent civilians” in Gaza.

The term “Harbu Darbu” itself originates from Syrian Arabic words meaning “swords and strike,” and is a call to “rain hell” on Israel’s “enemies”, as per Diana Abbany in her feature for the Untold Mag. The track names Hamas leaders in the same breath as “enemy” celebrities Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa and Mia Khalifa, all of whom have expressed solidarity for Palestine in the past.

Khalifa dragged the song through the mud for its influences that give hip-hop — a genre that has historically served as an outlet for the disenfranchised and marginalised — a bad name. “Y’all that song calling for the IDF to kill me, Bella, and Dua is over a DRILL beat, they can’t even call for genocide in their own culture, they had to colonise something to get it to #1,” she tweeted.

Drill, a subgenre of hip hop created by Black artists from Chicago, features heavily in Palestinian rap as well.

No problem here
Despite the hate speech and violent sentiments evoked by the track, YouTube has not removed ‘Harbu Darbu’s’ music video since its release four months ago. In fact, it has racked up 21 million views on the video streaming platform till date. Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming giants have not taken any action against the song either.

As per a 2022 Washington Post report, Spotify maintains a strict policy against violent content uploaded to its platform. Yet, Mohammed Assaf’s 2015 track ‘Ana Dammi Falastini’ (My Blood is Palestinian) was temporarily removed from the platform, as well as from Apple Music and Deezer in May last year while ‘Harbu Darbu’ and other propaganda songs remain untouched.

Assaf and Spotify gave contrasting statements in response to the controversy. While Assaf said he had received an email from Spotify telling him his song had been taken down for “inciting against Israel,” Spotify stated that the decision to remove the song came at the behest of distributors. “We are not against publishing the song,” a Spotify representative told Al Jazeera at the time.

Regardless, a simple Google search will reveal that ‘Ana Dammi Falastini’ is a celebration of the Palestinian identity rather than a mockery of, or threat to, Israel. The song surged in popularity during the 2021 global demonstrations against Israeli crackdowns in Sheikh Jarrah but rather than delving into anti-Semitic rhetoric, it celebrates Palestinian heritage.

Music as a weapon
Being one of the most popular and offensive of Israel’s many “genocide anthems”, ‘Harbu Darbu’s is just one of many anti-Palestine songs released since October 7, and represents only a fragment of Israel’s history of militainment.

When it’s not villainising Palestinians, the Israeli hip-hop and pop propaganda machine paints Israelis as victims of a war-torn state, citing religious stories to reinstate their “right” over a land they continue to rob, depicting them as an “eternal nation”.

Israel’s not just employing blood-pumping anthems to spread its message — sad songs accompanied by videos of dancing Israeli soldiers have been plastered across social media to garner sympathy.

‘Rage and resilience’ — over what?
This isn’t a new tool for Israel — rewind to the last decade when songs like ‘Ahmad Loves Israel’ by Amir Benayoun were popular. The 2014 track sparked controversy for its provocative lyrics demonising Arabs and added to Israel’s repertoire of music weaponised with calls for violence against a community.

As per the Los Angeles Times, ‘Ahmad Loves Israel’ featured a fictional Arab narrator who spoke about wanting to stab Jews, fuelling Islamophobic tropes. The song’s aggressive tone and inflammatory rhetoric fuelled accusations of racism and incitement to violence. In response to the backlash, Benayoun said the track may have been inspired by violence but “wasn’t meant to celebrate it”.

Several songs released since Oct 7 have followed a similar tune. A Times of Israel report on songs of “rage and resilience” becoming soundtracks for Israelis since the Hamas attack boasts many such numbers. One of them is Subliminal’s song, ‘Zeh Aleinu’ (It’s On Us), described by the outlet as “an angry anthem about a country seeking victory in a war of survival while simultaneously looking to the future.”

The report proudly declares the song’s “clear militarism and emotionality” being inspired by hip-hop hits like ‘Harbu Darbu’ and ‘Horef ‘23’ (Winter of ‘23) by Odiah and Izi. The beginning verses of the song translate to: “Good evening, Gaza, another day, another dead Nazi/ Nova People are on the beach, Golani Brigade is in the parliament/ They’re saying to Yahya Sinwar/ Yeah… we’ve seen war/ Boom bye bye b**** your time is over!“

Klein Halevi, a writer and contributor to the outlet states that the “world-class anger” expressed by the Israeli hop-hop community is just one facet of Israel’s current musical environment.

A video surfaced in November of Israeli singer Lior Narkis serenading a group of Israeli soldiers in Gaza adds a another shocking layer to Israel’s war. “Gaza, you b****,” Narkis shouts to resounding applause. “Gaza, you daughter of a huge w****, like your mother, Gaza. Gaza, you w****. Gaza you black woman, you trash.”

Israel’s ‘resistance anthems’ are unlike any other — rather than resounding calls for unity or pride, there is hatred spewed against Palestinians.

Songs being released by Israeli artists “in response” to October 7 have done more than just convey hatred — they are facilitating shaping extreme nationalist identities and dehumanising an entire people. The best example of this is a track that came out last year, sung by Israeli children about “annihilating everyone” in Gaza. Called the ‘Friendship song 2023’, the song has been co-written by Shulamit Stolero and Ofer Rosenbaum, chairperson of the Civil Front — a ‘non-political’ Israeli group formed to mobilise the Israeli society in support of the war on Gaza.

Its music video was removed from YouTube for violating the platform’s terms of services. As per Yahoo! News, it was also shared, then quickly removed by Kan, the Israeli state-owned news channel, after receiving angry responses from around the globe.

The ‘Friendship song 2023’ is an adaptation of a renowned 1949 poem commemorating Jews killed during the Nakba. The original track’s title was replaced by “We Are the Children of the Victory Generation”.

The altered lyrics state: “On the Gaza beach the autumn night is descending / Planes are bombing, ruin follows ruin. See the IDF crossing the borderline / To annihilate the Swastika carriers. In one more year / There won’t be anything left there / And we’ll return safely to our home. In one more year / We’ll eliminate them all and go back to plowing our fields.”

This track also refers to Israel as the “the eternal nation” — a religious sentiment that is rehashed in much of Israeli propaganda music. Israel’s premier male singer Eyal Golan’s song ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ (The Israeli Nation Lives) echoes a similar sentiment. Released a week and a half after October 7, it claims, “Because the eternal people never fear/even when it’s hard to see.”

As if stealing land wasn’t enough
Speaking of warping reality, there are now several Israeli tracks misrepresenting Palestinian culture as Israeli, such as Banaia Barabi’s ‘Bein Hanahar Layam’ (From the River to the Sea).

Adapting the popular Palestinian chant that demonstrators from across the Western world have been prohibited from using for its ‘anti-Semitic’ implications — the slogan has been largely misrepresented in an attempt to silence Palestinian voices — the track released in February is described by Israeli journalist Klein Halevi as a “beautiful love song to the land and people of Israel.”

In his song, Barabi says, “We won’t stop even if the world asks for a chance/We won’t stay silent, be ready/If any of you are still alive, save these words/From the River to the Sea, Israel will be free.”

Halevi defends the track as an “updated, Eastern-influenced example of an older Zionist Hebrew genre of songs and poems that praise the land of Israel, and demonstrates ‘a seamless continuity of the genre’, and shows how it can adapt to new musical tastes.”

Of course the anti-Semitic outrage does not apply to this “adaptation”.

Assaf’s ‘Ana Dammi Falastini’, the very song that was removed temporarily by music streaming platforms, was also co-opted by singer Elkana Marziano, a former winner of The Voice Israel. Over the original beat, Marziano sings: “My blood is Jewish”. According to TRT, the appropriation is meant to “strip Palestinians of their identity.”

Examining the role of resistance music
While propaganda music has often been used as a tool to fuel violence, music of resistance has served as a potent force in fighting oppression and advocating for change. Bands like Pink Floyd and Rage Against the Machine have set the blueprint for socially conscious lyrics and activism and can be looked up when writing songs in protest.

Pink Floyd’s iconic album The Wall not only critiques authoritarianism and conformity but also serves as a rallying cry against oppression. Similarly, Rage Against the Machine’s politically charged lyrics and aggressive sound have made them synonymous with resistance movements around the world.

In the context of South Asia, ‘Hum Dekhenge’ by Faiz Ahmed Faiz stands tall against all forms of oppression with its implications changing under varying circumstances. From Iqbal Bano singing it to a charged crowd in Lahore in 1986, to students in India reciting its verses in protest, ‘Hum Dekhenge’ continues to inspire artists and people from all walks of life — an eternal protest anthem.

But it is essential to distinguish between art in resistance and art in propaganda, as even the co-opting of something good can change its meaning completely. The appropriation of the Swastika by Hitler, for example, has changed the world’s perception of the “symbol of wellness” altogether.

Similarly, The Kashmir Files’ use of ‘Hum Dekhenge’ back in 2022 flipped the song on its head and garnered heavy criticism online.

The weaponisation of resistance music is a tool in the arsenal of those seeking to further propaganda and false narratives. It is therefore imperative that digital platforms take proactive measures to penalise the dissemination of propaganda thinly veiled as ‘resistance’.

Music may have had its place throughout the history of wars, but not all anthems should be celebrated. Anthems dehumanising groups of people and celebrating murder have no place on music platforms for all the world to listen to. All is not fair in love and war — and there’s definitely nothing fair about Israel’s war on Gaza.

https://images.dawn.com/news/1192364/de ... lestinians?

[kmaherali]

The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care

Hilary Cass is the kind of hero the world needs today. She has entered one of the most toxic debates in our culture: how the medical community should respond to the growing numbers of young people who seek gender transition through medical treatments, including puberty blockers and hormone therapies. This month, after more than three years of research, Cass, a pediatrician, produced a report https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-c ... _Final.pdf, commissioned by the National Health Service in England, that is remarkable for its empathy for people on all sides of this issue, for its humility in the face of complex social trends we don’t understand and for its intellectual integrity as we try to figure out which treatments actually work to serve those patients who are in distress. With incredible courage, she shows that careful scholarship can cut through debates that have been marked by vituperation and intimidation and possibly reset them on more rational grounds.

Cass, a past president of Britain’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, is clear about the mission of her report: “This review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves or rolling back on people’s rights to health care. It is about what the health care approach should be, and how best to help the growing number of children and young people who are looking for support from the N.H.S. in relation to their gender identity.”

This issue begins with a mystery. For reasons that are not clear, the number of adolescents who have sought to medically change their sex has been skyrocketing in recent years, though the overall number remains very small. For reasons that are also not clear, adolescents who were assigned female at birth are driving this trend, whereas before the late 2000s, it was mostly adolescents who were assigned male at birth who sought these treatments.

Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria. In her report, Cass is skeptical of broad generalizations in the absence of clear evidence; these are individual children and adolescents who take their own routes to who they are.

Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities. Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being. But a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.

Unfortunately, some researchers who questioned the Dutch approach were viciously attacked. This year, Sallie Baxendale, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College London, published a review of studies looking at the impact of puberty blockers on brain development and concluded that “critical questions” about the therapy remain unanswered. She was immediately attacked. She recently told The Guardian, “I’ve been accused of being an anti-trans activist, and that now comes up on Google and is never going to go away.”

As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”

Cass focused on Britain, but her description of the intellectual and political climate is just as applicable to the U.S., where brutality on the left has been matched by brutality on the right, with crude legislation that doesn’t acknowledge the well-being of the young people in question. In 24 states Republicans have passed laws banning these therapies, sometimes threatening doctors with prison time if they prescribe the treatment they think is best for their patients.

The battle lines on this issue are an extreme case, but they are not unfamiliar. On issue after issue, zealous minorities bully and intimidate the reasonable majority. Often, those who see nuance decide it’s best to just keep their heads down. The rage-filled minority rules.

Cass showed enormous courage in walking into this maelstrom. She did it in the face of practitioners who refused to cooperate and thus denied her information that could have helped inform her report. As an editorial in The BMJ puts it, “Despite encouragement from N.H.S. England,” the “necessary cooperation” was not forthcoming. “Professionals withholding data from a national inquiry seems hard to imagine, but it is what happened.”

Cass’s report does not contain even a hint of rancor, just a generous open-mindedness and empathy for all involved. Time and again in her report, she returns to the young people and the parents directly involved, on all sides of the issue. She clearly spent a lot of time meeting with them. She writes, “One of the great pleasures of the review has been getting to meet and talk to so many interesting people.”

The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.

She notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”

She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.” She does not issue a blanket, one-size-fits-all recommendation, but her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.

You can agree or disagree with this or that part of the report, and maybe the evidence will look different in 10 years, but I ask you to examine the integrity with which Cass did her work in such a treacherous environment.

In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief. https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf ” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence. Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.

Recently it’s been encouraging to see cases in which the evidence has won out. Many universities have acknowledged that the SAT is a better predictor of college success than high school grades and have reinstated it. Some corporations have come to understand that while diversity, equity and inclusion are essential goals, the current programs often empirically fail to serve those goals and need to be reformed. I’m hoping that Hilary Cass is modeling a kind of behavior that will be replicated across academia, in the other professions and across the body politic more generally and thus save us from spiraling into an epistemological doom loop.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Less Marriage, Less Sex, Less Agreement

I wrote a column recently lamenting the decline in marriage rates, noting that a record half of American adults are now unmarried. As a long-married romantic myself, steeped in statistics suggesting that marriage correlates with happiness, I found that sad.

My readers, not so much.

Many women readers in particular dismissed heterosexual marriage as an outdated institution that pampers men while turning women into unpaid servants.

“Marriage is generally GREAT for men,” declared a woman reader from North Carolina whose comment on the column was the single most liked, with more than 2,000 people recommending it. Wives get stuck with the caregiving, she added, and “the sex that receives the care is gonna be happier than the sex that doesn’t receive the care.”

The second most recommended reader comment came from a woman who said that when she and her women friends get together, “We all say, ‘Never again.’ Men require a lot of care. They can be such babies.”

I think these skeptics make some valid points — we men do need to up our game! — even as I remain a staunch believer in marriage for both straight and gay couples. But put aside for a moment questions about marriage. The deluge of annoyance among some women readers intrigued me because while it’s anecdotal, it aligns with considerable survey evidence of a growing political, cultural and social divide between men and women throughout the industrialized world.

A poll across 20 countries by the Glocalities research group found “a growing divide between young men and young women” in political and social outlook, while The Economist examined polling across rich countries and likewise found that young women are becoming significantly more liberal as young men are becoming somewhat more conservative.

A study by Pew found that compared with never-married women, never-married men in the United States are 50 percent more likely to align with Republicans.

One gauge of the rightward drift of young men: In 2014 men ages 55 to 65 were the most conservative group, according to the Glocalities data, while now young men are more conservative than older ones.

The backdrop is that boys and men are lagging in education and much less likely than women to get college degrees. Many of these less educated men struggle in the job market, and increasingly some of them seem to blame their problems on feminism. Young men are more likely than older men to tell pollsters that “advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far”; women of all ages disagree.

A remarkable 45 percent of young men ages 18 to 29 say that in America today, men face discrimination. Older men are less likely to feel that way.

The upshot, polling suggests, is that men are becoming grumpier and more resentful of women’s success, and more drawn to conservative authoritarian populists, from Donald Trump to misogynist internet personalities like Andrew Tate.

The Glocalities survey concluded that around the world the “radical right increasingly finds fertile ground among young men, which is already impacting elections.” Representative Matt Gaetz suggested that it doesn’t matter if Republicans antagonize female voters because they can be replaced by male voters.

The gender gap is easiest to measure in politics, but the Brookings Institution warned last week that it “also appears in measures other than politics and points to some deeper and potentially even more concerning issues among young people.”

“The social bonds of previous generations appear to be eroding among young people, and this has serious consequences for coupling, future birthrates and social cohesion,” Brookings said.

One of the most discussed chasms between the sexes is in South Korea, where nearly 80 percent of young men say that men are discriminated against, and where (male) President Yoon Suk Yeol was elected in 2022 in part on an antifeminist platform. Women have their own complaints, including how unhelpful their husbands are in the house. Some Korean feminists have created the 4B movement, which promotes no marriage, no babies, no dating and no sex. South Korea’s total fertility rate has plummeted to one of the lowest in the world, with the average woman now having just 0.7 children.

Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, suggests in a recent book on marriage that the gender divide in South Korea and other Asian countries may offer a glimpse of what is coming to the United States. He estimates that perhaps one-third of today’s young Americans will never marry, with couples living together not replacing marriages. More people, he says, are simply detached and on their own.

Some women in America have publicly proclaimed that they are distancing themselves from men, abstaining from sex or going “boy sober.” Nearly 70 percent of breakups of heterosexual marriages in the United States are initiated by the wife.

One window into gender tensions is a viral meme on TikTok in which women discuss whether they would rather encounter a bear in the woods or a man. Many go with the bear.

Young people are not only marrying less and partnering less; they’re also having less sex. Traditionally, older folks worried that young people were too promiscuous; now perhaps we geezers should fret about youthful celibacy.

Perhaps this gender divide will reverse and fix itself. Or perhaps, as some of those women commenters suggested, it’s not a problem, or else it’s a problem for men alone. But polling finds that both young men and young women across the Western world are deeply unhappy at a time when they seem to be drifting apart and increasingly report that they are “unpartnered.” I’ve written enough about the epidemic of loneliness to be troubled by these divides; social isolation is estimated to be as lethal as smoking.

To me, the fundamental problem is the struggle of men to adapt to a world in which brawn matters less than brains, education and emotional intelligence. That’s an important topic that we haven’t addressed enough, despite alarm bells like Richard Reeves’s 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men.”

Reeves and others have proposed many ideas, including recruiting more male teachers, adding more recess and holding boys back so they start school later than girls. Vocational training programs like career academies and Per Scholas help, too.

I worry that gender frictions may grow and add tension to modern life, leaving more people facing the world alone with no one to snuggle up to and provide long-term comfort. I fear that I’m a romantic in a world that is becoming less romantic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

MIGRATION: The force shaping Western politics


Migrants arriving in the Canary Islands. Carlos De Saa/EPA, via Shutterstock

A dominant issue

The recent elections for the European Parliament are the latest sign of the political potency of immigration. ​The elections’ biggest winners were right-wing parties that promised to reduce the flow of migration.

​In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain why​ this subject is shaping Western politics and what may happen next.

Rapid change

The first thing to understand is how unusual the modern migration boom has been. In nearly every large Western country, the foreign-born share of the population has risen sharply since 1990:


Source: Migration Policy Institute | Figures are rounded. | by The New York Times

It’s not clear whether immigration has ever previously risen so quickly in so many different countries. (​I​f anything, the chart here understates the trend because it ends in 2020, the last year with available data.)

This migration boom has had big advantages. It has allowed millions of people to escape poverty and violence. It has diversified Western culture. It has brought workers into Europe and the U.S. who have held ​down the cost of labor-intensive businesses.

But the boom has also had downsides. More labor competition can obviously hurt the workers who already live in a country. Governments have strained to provide social services to the arrivals. And the rise in immigration has been so rapid that many citizens feel uncomfortable with the associated societal changes. Historically, major immigration increases tend to spark political backlashes.

The pattern has held in recent years. The shockingly successful Brexit campaign in 2016 emphasized immigration. So have Europe’s fast-growing, far-right political parties. In the U.S., polls show that immigration threatens President Biden’s re-election.

For years, mainstream Western politicians, from the center-right to the center-left to the left, have dismissed voters’ concerns about immigration. Some politicians describe it as a free lunch, with only economic benefits and no costs. They portray worries about immigration — worries shared by millions of people of different races, especially those with lower incomes — as inherently ignorant or xenophobic. Some politicians claim that governments are helpless to control their borders.

Many voters responded by drifting to the only parties that promised to reduce immigration — parties on the extreme right. To be clear, these parties do traffic in racism, as well as conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric and authoritarianism. To many voters, though, the parties were also the one part of the political system willing to listen to public opinion about rising immigration.

Andrew Sullivan, the political journalist (and an immigrant to the U.S.), points out that the disconnect has been particularly stark over the past few years. “As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa and Washington chose to massively accelerate it,” Sullivan wrote on Substack. “It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: Well now, how can we really get it to take off?”

In the elections for the European Parliament this week, the National Rally, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, won more votes than any other in France. In Germany, the AfD, an ultranationalist party, finished second, ahead of the left-leaning party that governs the country. In Italy, the right-wing party that already runs the country finished first.

A new tack?

Migrants walk along the Rio Grande, mountains are visible in the background.

Migrants walk along the Rio Grande. Paul Ratje for The New York Times

It wasn’t so long ago that the political left and center took a different approach to immigration.

They treated it as a complex issue that required moderation. President Barack Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders both fell into this category. They were part of a progressive tradition dating to labor and civil rights leaders who celebrated immigrants — but also supported tough border security, believing that unchecked immigration could destabilize society and increase inequality.

There are some signs that the center-left and center-right are returning to this approach and becoming more respectful of public opinion:

- Biden, after loosening border rules early in his presidency and watching migration soar, has reversed himself.

- In Britain, the Labour Party has criticized the Conservative Party as lax on immigration. During a debate last week, Keir Starmer, the Labour candidate for prime minister, described Rishi Sunak, the Conservative incumbent, as “the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration.”

- In the E.U. elections, center-right parties finished first partly by adopting a more restrictive stance on immigration, my colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff notes. (I recommend her succinct summary of the results.)

- The clearest example may be in Greece. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, an establishment conservative, has taken a hard line, refusing to allow some migrants to land there after years of surging migration. Even as other center-right parties struggled in the E.U. elections, Mitsotakis’s party finished first in Greece.

- Japan and South Korea are moving toward a moderate position, albeit from the opposite direction. After decades of highly restrictive policies, they have begun to admit more immigrants, largely for economic reasons.
The moves by Japan and South Korea are a recognition of immigration’s unavoidable complexity. Very high levels of immigration can cause political and economic problems. So can very low levels.

What’s next? Britain and France will hold domestic elections in the next month. Those elections will be more telling than this week’s, Matina says, because voters typically care more about their own government than about the E.U.

NYTIMES NEWSLETTER 12/6/2024

[kmaherali]

What My Cancer Surgery Taught Me About Immigration



Wheeled into the operating room last January, staring up at the massive arms of the robot with which a surgeon would remove my cancerous gland, I was hit with an unusual realization: I owe a debt of gratitude to President Lyndon Johnson and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Why? Without that legislation, the surgeon who operated on me probably wouldn’t be here. Nor might the doctor who pioneered the procedure. Nor the philanthropist who financed the research. Nor many workers at the company that makes these robots or those at a different company that designed the chips that enable the robot.

As my ordeal with cancer shows, immigration has become critical to our health. Immigrants account for more than a quarter of physicians, surgeons and personal care aides and about a fifth of nursing assistants.

I’m not sure we realize that immigrants help keep us alive: Just look at West Virginia, a state hostile to immigration where aging residents have died before getting off the wait list for home health aides.

While many Americans — including politicians this election year — dwell on stories like the Venezuelan migrant accused of killing a Georgia nursing student, they often forget the critical ways immigration has historically benefited us. A century ago this spring, the United States slammed the door on large sections of the world, and we could be on the verge of doing so again.

That I am so cognizant of the importance of immigrants is the result of two coincidences. The first is that I teach a class on practical writing at Stanford Business School. Frustrated by the cynicism that has pervaded my 3,000 students, many of whom were only teenagers when Donald Trump was elected and are skeptical of the government, I began showing a slide documenting the benefits they enjoy from legislation that originated in the 1960s. For one, many Stanford Business School students — I would guess roughly a quarter — come from families that would not be in this country if not for Mr. Johnson’s Immigration and Nationality Act.

Before that act, America’s immigration policy explicitly favored white immigrants from Canada and Northern and Western Europe while keeping those from South Asia, East Asia, Africa and Eastern and Southern Europe at bay. The goal, in the words of the State Department in the 1920s and echoed many times afterward: “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.”

Over time, many Americans grew ashamed of a system that was explicitly based more on prejudice than fairness. So in 1965 Mr. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act. It didn’t throw the doors wide open, but it gave priority to immigrants with family in this country and to refugees. It also favored skilled workers. Since then, the number of immigrants in the United States has more than quadrupled. Immigrants account for 15 percent of the population, the largest share in history.

The second coincidence: For two years I’ve worked on a book about Intuitive, the Sunnyvale, Calif., maker of the robot that would be used for my procedure. In doing so, I came to know immigrants with remarkable skills, like Dr. Mani Menon, who pioneered the robotic removal of the prostate that is now used in hundreds of thousands of surgeries worldwide annually. He emigrated from southern India in 1972 in part because his wife was Muslim and he was Hindu “and it was uncomfortable for us socially, so we decided to go somewhere where we could be comfortable,” he told me.

Dr. Menon could not have pioneered the robotic prostatectomy without someone to finance his research: another Indian immigrant, Raj Vattikuti. A decade after the 1965 act, Mr. Vattikuti went to Detroit as a computer engineering student. After building a successful business, he, with his wife, Padma, donated $40 million for research on prostate cancer and breast cancer. The Vattikuti Urology Institute at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit is where Dr. Menon pioneered the use of robots in urologic procedures.

And the urologist who performed my surgery, Dr. Vipul Patel, told me he is the grandson of Indians, was raised in Britain and moved to Los Angeles in 1984 for high school and college.

Many workers I interviewed from Silicon Valley told stories of ancestors fleeing persecution, much like many of today’s immigrants. One is the son of refugees from the Khmer Rouge internment camps in Cambodia; another escaped Vietnam as a child in an exodus known as the boat people. One’s family fled Cuba after Fidel Castro seized their property. A top executive is the grandson of Eastern European immigrants, including a maternal grandmother who escaped with one sister but lost the rest of her family to ethnic cleansing in Ukraine early in World War II.

As at most Silicon Valley companies, many thousands of Intuitive’s 13,000 employees — the company doesn’t track exactly how many — are immigrants or children of immigrants from places that were out of bounds for more than half the 20th century.

Now immigrants are 19 percent of the American civilian work force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Silicon Valley, it’s almost half, estimated the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant advocacy group.

Yet coinciding with the arrival of these immigrants in recent decades has been a growing hostility. In April Mr. Trump wished for more immigrants from “nice countries,” citing Denmark, Switzerland and Norway. After his conviction on May 30 for falsifying business records, he railed against “millions” who were “pouring in” unchallenged, mentioning China and Congo.

During his presidency Mr. Trump supported the Raise Act, an unsuccessful bill to halve legal immigration through a merit-based system that awarded points for age, education, salary and ability to speak English. But Akhila Satish, a scientist and an entrepreneur in Palo Alto, Calif., found a problem in the reasoning of the bill’s supporters: From 2000 to 2017, when the Raise Act was introduced, about 40 percent of American Nobel Prize recipients were immigrants. “And under the Raise Act the majority of these laureates would have been prevented from staying in the U.S.,” Ms. Satish wrote in a 2017 opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal.

I understand that many Americans call illegal immigration their top concern. And they think that businesses sometimes hire immigrants — in the country legally or illegally — instead of American workers because they can pay them less. I recognize the need to rationalize our immigration process. But in an election year when immigration is a partisan issue, we should also remember the profound difference immigrants have made in our lives.

At the “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibition at the National Museum of American History in Washington, you can see a lab coat that belonged to Dr. Menon and an early surgical robot. The exhibition pays tribute not just to him but also to two of his Indian American colleagues, Mr. Vattikuti and Dr. Mahendra Bhandari. The three established the Vattikuti Urology Institute. In doing so, they helped ensure that robotic surgery would continue to evolve. And that I and many other people would thrive — and recognize the importance of immigrants.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/opin ... ology.html

[kmaherali]

In Japan, These Women Want to Opt Out of Motherhood More Easily

A lawsuit challenges the onerous requirements for getting sterilized, calling the regulations paternalistic and a violation of women’s constitutional rights.


Kazane Kajiya, left, and Hisui Tatsuta, right, are suing the Japanese government over a law that makes sterilization all but impossible for single, childless women.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

When Hisui Tatsuta was in middle school, her mother used to joke that she couldn’t wait to see the faces of her future grandchildren. Ms. Tatsuta, now a 24-year-old model in Tokyo, recoiled at the assumption that she would someday give birth.

As her body began to develop feminine traits, Ms. Tatsuta took to extreme diet and exercise to forestall the changes. She started to regard herself as genderless. “To be seen as a uterus that can give birth before being seen as a person, I did not like this,” she said. Ultimately, she wants to be sterilized to eliminate any chance of becoming pregnant.

Yet in Japan, women who seek sterilization procedures like tubal ligation or hysterectomies must meet conditions that are among the most onerous in the world. They must already have children and prove that pregnancy would endanger their health, and they are required to obtain the consent of their spouses. That makes such surgeries difficult to obtain for many women, and all but impossible for single, childless women like Ms. Tatsuta.

Now, she and four other women are suing the Japanese government, arguing that a decades-old law known as the Maternal Protection Act violates their constitutional right to equality and self-determination and should be overturned.

During a hearing at Tokyo District Court last week, Michiko Kameishi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, described the law as “excessive paternalism” and said it “assumed that we think of a woman’s body as a body that is destined to become a mother.”

Ms. Kameishi told a three-judge panel of two men and one woman that the conditions for voluntary sterilization were relics of a different era and that the plaintiffs wanted to take “an essential step in living the life they have chosen.”

Image
Five women walk side-by-side down a street in Japan. Other people are walking behind them.

Plaintiffs who are suing the Japanese government over the Maternal Protection Act heading to court in Tokyo with their lawyers.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Japan lags other developed countries on reproductive rights beyond sterilization. Neither the birth control pill nor intrauterine devices are covered by national health insurance, and women who seek abortions are required to gain the consent of their partners. The most common form of birth control in Japan is the condom, according to a survey by the Japan Family Planning Association. Fewer than 5 percent of women use birth control pills as a primary method for preventing pregnancy.

Experts say that the plaintiffs in the sterilization case, who are also seeking damages of 1 million yen (about $6,400) per person with interest, face considerable hurdles. They are pushing for the right to be sterilized at the same time that the government is trying to increase Japan’s birthrate, which has fallen to record lows.

“For women who can give birth to stop having children, it is seen as a step backward in society,” said Yoko Matsubara, a professor of bioethics at Ritsumeikan University. “So it may be difficult to get support” for the suit.

Last week, as the five female plaintiffs sat across a courtroom from four male representatives of the government, Miri Sakai, 24, a graduate student in sociology, testified that she had no interest in either sexual or romantic relationships or in having children.

Although women have made some progress in the workplace in Japan, cultural expectations for their family duties are much as they have always been. “The lifestyle of not getting married or having children is still rejected in society,” Ms. Sakai said.

“Is it natural to have children for the sake of the country?” she asked. “Are women who do not give birth to children themselves unnecessary for society?”

Image
A woman in black pants and a white shirt sits on a rock under a tree.

“The lifestyle of not getting married or having children is still rejected in society,” said Miri Sakai, one of the plaintiffs.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

The legal fight in Japan is opening as reproductive rights have come under assault in the United States. Two years ago, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a constitutional right to abortion that had been in place for decades. The question of female sterilization is not yet contested in the United States, however, and it remains the most common form of birth control there, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Japan, sterilization is a particularly sensitive issue because of the government’s history of forcing the procedures on people with psychiatric conditions or intellectual and physical disabilities.

Sterilizations were performed for decades under a 1948 measure known as the Eugenics Protection Law. It was revised and renamed as the Maternal Protection Act in 1996 to remove the eugenics clause, but lawmakers retained stringent requirements for women who wanted abortions or sterilizations. Despite pressure from advocacy groups and women’s rights activists, the law has remained unchanged since the 1996 revision.

In principle, the law also affects men who seek vasectomies. They must have their spouses’ consent, as well as prove that they are already fathers and that their partners would be medically jeopardized by pregnancy.

In practice, however, experts say that far more clinics in Japan offer vasectomies than sterilization procedures for women.

According to government data, doctors performed 5,130 sterilizations on both men and women in 2021, the last year for which statistics are available. No breakdowns between the sexes are available.

In a statement, the Children and Families Agency, which carries out regulations under the Maternal Protection Act, said it could not comment on the litigation.

Kazane Kajiya, 27, testified last week that her desire not to have children was “a part of my innate values.”

“It is precisely because these feelings cannot be changed that I just want to live, easing as much of the discomfort and psychological distress I feel about my body as possible,” she said.

Image
Two women talk to each other on a train. One of them is holding onto a strap.

Ms. Tatsuta and Ms. Kajiya on the train after their hearing.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

In an interview before the hearing, Ms. Kajiya, an interpreter, said her aversion to having children was connected to a broader feminist outlook. From a very young age, she said, “I witnessed male dominance all over the country and across the society.”

At one point, Ms. Kajiya, who is married, considered whether she was actually a transgender man. But she decided that she was “totally fine with being a woman, and I love it. I just don’t like having the fertility that enables me to have babies with men.”

The entrenched rule of Japan’s right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party, along with the country’s deep-rooted traditional family values, has prevented progress in reproductive rights, said Yukako Ohashi, a writer and member of the Women’s Network for Reproductive Freedom.

The name of the Maternal Protection Act is revealing, Ms. Ohashi said in a video interview. “Women who will become mothers shall be protected,” she said. “But women who will not become mothers will not be respected. That is Japanese society.”

Even in the United States, where any woman 21 or older is legally able to seek sterilization, some obstetricians and gynecologists counsel their patients against the procedures, particularly when the women have not yet had children.

Similarly, in Japan, the medical profession “is still very patriarchal in its thinking,” said Lisa C. Ikemoto, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis. Doctors “operate as a cartel to maintain certain social norms.”

Women themselves are often hesitant to buck societal expectations because of heavy pressure to conform.

“Many people feel that trying to change the status quo is selfish,” Ms. Tatsuta, the model and plaintiff, said shortly before the hearing last week. But when it comes to fighting for the right to make choices about one’s own body, she said, “I want everyone to be angry.”


Motoko Rich is a reporter in Tokyo, leading coverage of Japan for The Times. More about Motoko Rich

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/worl ... ation.html

[kmaherali]

Kids? A Growing Number of Americans Say, ‘No, Thanks.’

A new study breaks down the reasons more U.S. adults say they are unlikely to have children.

When Jurnee McKay, 25, imagines having children, a series of scary scenarios pop into her mind: the “horrors” of childbirth, risks associated with pregnancy, a flighty potential partner, exorbitant child care costs.

Abortion care restrictions are also on her list of fears. So Ms. McKay, a nursing student in Orlando, decided to eliminate the possibility of an accidental pregnancy. But the first doctor she consulted refused to remove her fallopian tubes, she said, insisting that she might change her mind after meeting her “soul mate.”

“For some reason,” she said, “society looks at women who choose not to make life harder for themselves as crazy.”

Next week, she will speak with another doctor about sterilization.

Like Ms. McKay, a growing number of U.S. adults say they are unlikely to raise children, according to a study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center. When the survey was conducted in 2023, 47 percent of those younger than 50 without children said they were unlikely ever to have children, an increase of 10 percentage points since 2018.

When asked why kids were not in their future, 57 percent said they simply didn’t want to have them. Women were more likely to respond this way than men (64 percent vs. 50 percent). Further reasons included the desire to focus on other things, like their career or interests; concerns about the state of the world; worries about the costs involved in raising a child; concerns about the environment, including climate change; and not having found the right partner.

The results echo a 2023 Pew study that found that only 26 percent of adults said having children was extremely or very important to live a fulfilling life. The U.S. fertility rate has been falling over the last decade, dipping to about 1.6 births per woman in 2023. This is the lowest number on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it is less than what would be required for the population to replace itself from one generation to the next.

The decision to raise kids is shifting from “something that’s just an essential part of human life to one more choice, among others,” said Anastasia Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine.

She and Rachel Wiseman, a magazine editor, surveyed nearly 400 people for their new book, “What Are Children For?,” and found that many younger people without children were cautiously weighing the pros and cons, worried about how a child would affect their identity and their choices. Many were “averse to embracing the kinds of risks that having children implies,” said Dr. Berg, who is a millennial and a mother of two.

America’s waning desire for children should not come as a surprise, said Jennifer Glass, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research, published in 2021, showed that about 70 percent of American mothers would be their household’s primary earner at some point during their first 18 years of motherhood. At the same time, they also devote more time to caregiving than men.

“It’s really an impossible burden,” Dr. Glass said. For some, she added, it can feel as though “there is no way out except a birth strike.”

In addition, research has shown that in the United States, people who aren’t parents are generally happier than those who are. Dr. Glass’s 2016 study, which examined the happiness gap in 22 countries, found that the disparity was larger in the United States than in any other industrialized country.

In the Pew study, most of those surveyed said that not having kids had made it easier for them to afford the things they wanted, make time for their interests and save for the future.

For some, having children is simply not an option: 13 percent of those surveyed by Pew who were under age 50 said they didn’t plan to have children because of infertility, and 11 percent said that it was their partner or spouse who did not want kids.

The study also included responses from adults 50 and older without kids. For them, the top reason they hadn’t had children was because it just hadn’t happened.

“I never actively made a choice to not have children,” said Therese Shechter, a 62-year-old filmmaker in Toronto who spoke to child-free women in the United States and Canada about reproductive freedom and the pressure to have children in her recent documentary “My So-Called Selfish Life.”

In her case, she had a list of things she wanted to accomplish, but being a mother wasn’t on it. Even so, she assumed that one day it would happen.

“I just always felt like that was the thing hanging over my head,” she said. By the time she entered her late 30s, “I realized that, no, I actually didn’t have to do that.”

Trey Simmons, 54, said being child-free in his hometown, Augusta, Ga., made him a rarity.

“Most people think I’m off my rocker,” he said. After he and his wife divorced — she also did not want children — he had difficulty finding someone else to date who did not already have kids. Finally, he met someone online who lives in Detroit, and he plans to move there.

“I’ve just never been fond of children at all,” he added.

On average, research has shown that men appear to have fewer qualms about parenthood. Earlier this year, another Pew study found that among young adults without children, it was the men — not the women — who were more likely to want to be parents someday.

Corinne Datchi, a professor of psychology at William Paterson University and a couples therapist, said that in her private practice, she was seeing a growing number of women in their 30s who were starting to question whether they should ever have children, while their male partners seemed more open to the idea.

There is a “level of mistrust,” she said, where the women are skeptical that their male partners would be willing to sacrifice as much as they would to help raise their families. But there is also apprehension about losing their sense of self and worries about what pregnancy and childbirth would do to their bodies.

As for Ms. McKay, who has already made up her mind to remove her fallopian tubes, she said she would feel relieved when she no longer had to think about the implications of becoming pregnant or raising children.

Getting the procedure “will be a weight off my shoulders,” she said. “I think I’ll feel at peace.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/25/well ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Why Are So Many Americans Choosing to Not Have Children?

It’s probably not selfishness, experts say. Even young adults who want children see an increasing number of obstacles.


Researchers say that societal factors — like rising child care costs, unaffordable housing and slipping optimism about the future — have made it harder to raise children in the United States.Credit...Alisha Jucevic for The New York Time

For years, some conservatives have framed the declining fertility rate of the United States as an example of eroding family values, a moral catastrophe in slow motion.

JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, recently came under fire for saying in 2021 that the nation was run by “childless cat ladies” who “hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games.”

Last year, Ashley St. Clair, a Fox News commentator, described childless Americans this way: “They just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace of fulfillment and having a family.”

Researchers who study trends in reproductive health see a more nuanced picture. The decision to forgo having children is most likely not a sign that Americans are becoming more hedonistic, they say. For one thing, fertility rates are declining throughout the developed world.

Rather, it indicates that larger societal factors — such as rising child care costs, increasingly expensive housing and slipping optimism about the future — have made it feel more untenable to raise children in the United States.

“I don’t see it as a lack of a commitment to family,” said Mary Brinton, a sociologist who studies low fertility rates at Harvard. “I think the issues are very much on the societal level and the policy level.”

To some extent, experts like Dr. Brinton share the concern that Americans are having less children.

Fertility rates have been generally falling in the United States since the end of the baby boom in the mid-1960s. That decline accelerated after 2008, a trend that has been widely attributed to the Great Recession, said Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

“Everybody thought, maybe they’ll just delay having their babies for a few years, and then they’ll make up for it when the economy and the country gets back on its feet,” he said. “It never happened.”

Last year, the total fertility rate dipped to 1,616.5 births per 1,000 women, a historic low that is far less than the rate needed to maintain the population size, 2,100 births per 1,000 women.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that a growing number of adults said they were unlikely to ever have children. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly half of U.S. counties reported more deaths than births.

In addition, the average age at which Americans are marrying and starting to have children has increased, most likely contributing to the fertility decline. In 2023, the median age of women who were marrying for the first time was 28 — about six years older than in the 1980s.

The average age when women give birth to their first child has also risen substantially, from age 20 during the baby boom to 27 in 2022.

Immigration to the United States helps offset population loss. Yet experts fear that shrinking generations could cause schools to close, economic development to stall and social programs like Social Security to run an even larger deficit.

Image
JD Vance, in a navy blue suit and a blue tie, on a rally stage with Usha Vance, who wears a bright red dress.

JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has proposed tax breaks and more voting power for parents. But experts say there is little evidence to suggest that policies rewarding people for having children are successful on their own.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Notably, studies of the reasons behind the fertility decline don’t reveal a dramatic shift in the desire to have children.

Many Americans in their teens and 20s still report that they want two children, said Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. The fact that many of those adults don’t realize those goals probably means that external factors are making it more difficult to be a parent, she said.

Survey data suggests that many young adults want to hit certain economic milestones before having children — they might want to buy a house, pay off student debt or comfortably afford child care, said Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a family demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reaching those milestones has become increasingly difficult, she said, as mortgage rates have risen sharply and child care costs have soared.

As fewer women opt to stay home to raise children, the absence of policies that support working families — like paid maternity leave and stable child care — may also be leading couples to believe they’re not prepared to be parents, Dr. Guzzo added.

The decision to have children, which she views as the “ultimate vote of confidence” in the future, may also be affected by how optimistic people are about the state of the world, she said.

A study by sociologists in the Netherlands found that people who said they thought the future generation’s prospects were “much worse than today” were less likely to become parents.

Right now, there are plenty of reasons young Americans might be pessimistic, Dr. Guzzo said, including climate change, frequent gun violence and the recent pandemic.

This might explain why fertility rates have been declining in most developed countries — not just in the United States — despite differences in their economic systems and social welfare policies.

“It’s not about being selfish and saying, ‘I’m not having kids because I want to sleep in all the time,’” Dr. Guzzo said. “When fertility rates are down, to me, that’s because people don’t feel like they have a future that they feel confident in.”

If there has been any shift in attitudes toward parenthood, Dr. Hayford of Ohio State said she believed that younger Americans were now more focused on whether they could offer a child “the best experience possible.”

In interviews she conducted with teenagers and adults in their early 20s, Dr. Hayford said, they often stressed the importance of improving their own patience and anger management to ensure they would be able to one day support their children’s emotional needs.

And some research suggests that younger generations have a higher bar for the amount of money required to raise a child.

“Having children is something that people feel like they can make a choice about,” Dr. Hayford said. “They are really reluctant to enter into parenthood if they can’t provide what they think children need.”

Exactly how to change the trajectory of a so-called baby bust is still a mystery. Last year, former President Donald J. Trump floated the idea of offering a “baby bonus” to incentivize more families to have children.

“I want a baby boom!” he told a crowd of supporters. “You men are so lucky out there.”

Mr. Vance, his running mate, has advocated tax breaks for households with children and even an altered election system in which parents would have more voting power than people without children.

There is little evidence to suggest that policies designed to reward people for having children are successful on their own, Dr. Guzzo said. Governments in some countries have tried to increase fertility rates with cash incentives, tax breaks and generous parental leave, yielding modest or no success.

Since declining fertility is the result of a range of societal problems, Dr. Guzzo said, legislation that addresses broader issues — like student loans, unaffordable housing and parental leave — is more likely to spur change.

“In our view, every policy is a family policy,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/heal ... vance.html

[kmaherali]

Japan Needs Foreign Workers. It’s Just Not Sure It Wants Them to Stay.

Foreign employees have become much more visible in Japan. But policies designed only for short-term stays may hurt the country in the global competition for labor.


Winda Zahra, a worker from Indonesia, with a resident at a care home in Maebashi, the capital of Gunma Prefecture in central Japan.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Ngu Thazin wanted to leave her war-torn country for a better future. She set her sights on Japan.

In Myanmar, she studied Japanese and graduated with a chemistry degree from one of her country’s most prestigious universities. Yet she gladly took a job in Japan changing diapers and bathing residents at a nursing home in a midsize city.

“To be honest, I want to live in Japan because it is safe,” said Ms. Thazin, who hopes eventually to pass an exam that will allow her to work as a licensed caregiver. “And I want to send my family money.”

Japan desperately needs people like Ms. Thazin to fill jobs left open by a declining and aging population. The number of foreign workers has quadrupled since 2007, to more than two million, in a country of 125 million people. Many of these workers escaped low wages, political repression or armed conflict in their home countries.

But even as foreign employees become much more visible in Japan, working as convenience store cashiers, hotel clerks and restaurant servers, they are treated with ambivalence. Politicians remain reluctant to create pathways for foreign workers, especially those in low-skill jobs, to stay indefinitely. That may eventually cost Japan in its competition with neighbors like South Korea and Taiwan, or even places farther afield like Australia and Europe, that are also scrambling to find labor.

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Two women stand in a kitchen that is somewhat institutional looking, with metal countertops and open shelving with labels and bins.

Ngu Thazin at the shared house where she lives with other foreign workers in Maebashi.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

The political resistance to immigration in long-insular Japan, as well as a public that is sometimes wary of integrating newcomers, has led to a nebulous legal and support system that makes it difficult for foreigners to put down roots. Foreign-born workers are paid on average about 30 percent less than their Japanese counterparts, according to government data. Fearful of losing their right to stay in Japan, workers often have precarious relationships with their employers, and career advancement can be elusive.

Japan’s policies are designed for “people to work in Japan for preferably a short period of time,” said Yang Liu, a fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo. “If the system continues as it is, the probability that foreign workers will stop coming has become very high.”

In 2018, the government passed a law authorizing a sharp increase in the number of low-skilled “guest laborers” allowed into the country. Earlier this year, the government committed to more than doubling the number of such workers over the next five years, to 820,000. It also revised a technical internship program that employers had used as a source of cheap labor and that workers and labor activists had criticized as fostering abuses.

Still, politicians are far from flinging open the country’s borders. Japan has yet to experience the kind of significant migration that has convulsed Europe or the United States. The total number of foreign-born residents in Japan — including nonworking spouses and children — is 3.4 million, less than 3 percent of the population. The percentage in Germany and the United States, for instance, is close to five times that.

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Two men holding a large futon between them bend over to put it on the floor.

Gurung Nissan, right, from Nepal, laying out futon mattresses at Ginshotei Awashima, a traditional Japanese hot springs inn in Oigami Onsen.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Japan has tightened some rules even as it has loosened others. This spring, the governing Liberal Democratic Party pushed through a revision to Japan’s immigration law that would allow permanent residency to be revoked if a person fails to pay taxes. Critics warned that the policy could make it easier to withdraw residency status for more minor infractions, such as failing to show a police officer an identification card upon request.

Such a threat “robs permanent residents of their sense of security” and “will undoubtedly encourage discrimination and prejudice,” Michihiro Ishibashi, a member of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, said during a parliamentary discussion.

In a separate parliamentary committee, Ryuji Koizumi, the justice minister, said the revision was intended to “realize a society where we can coexist with foreigners,” by making sure they “abide by the minimum rules necessary for living in Japan.”

Long before foreigners can obtain permanent residency, they must navigate labyrinthine visa requirements, including language and skills tests. Unlike in Germany, where the government offers new foreign residents up to 400 hours of language courses at a subsidized rate of just over $2 per lesson, Japan has no organized language training for foreign workers.

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Three women in surgical masks and servers’ uniforms stand in a large dining room.

Ngun Nei Par, right, the general manager at Ginshotei Awashima, talks with service staff from Myanmar and Nepal.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

While politicians say the country should do a better job of teaching Japanese, “they are not yet ready to go as far as pouring money into this from taxes,” said Toshinori Kawaguchi, director of the foreign workers affairs division at the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.

That leaves individual municipalities and employers to decide whether and how often to provide language training. The nursing home operator that employs Ms. Thazin in Maebashi, the capital of Gunma Prefecture in central Japan, offers some of its caregivers one day of group Japanese lessons, as well as one more 45-minute lesson, each month. Workers who prepare meals receive just one 45-minute lesson a month.

Akira Higuchi, the president of the company, Hotaka Kai, said he gives workers an incentive to study Japanese on their own. Those who pass the second-highest level of a government Japanese language proficiency test, he said, “will be treated the same as Japanese people, with the same salary and bonuses.”

Particularly outside the largest cities, foreigners who don’t speak Japanese can struggle to communicate with local governments or schools. In health emergencies, few hospital workers will speak languages other than Japanese.

Hotaka Kai has taken other measures to support its staff, including housing newcomers in subsidized corporate apartments and offering skills training.

A dormitory kitchen shared by 33 women ranging in age from 18 to 31 offers a glimpse of the heritages that mingle together. Peeking out from plastic bins labeled with the residents’ names were sachets of Ladaku merica bubuk (an Indonesian white pepper powder) and packets of thit kho seasoning for making Vietnamese braised pork with eggs.

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A woman wearing a vest and name tag stands outside a wooden building.

Ms. Par, the general manager at Ginshotei Awashima in Oigami Onsen, graduated from a university in Myanmar with a degree in geography. Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Across Gunma Prefecture, the reliance on foreign workers is unmistakable. In Oigami Onsen, a rundown mountainside village where many restaurants, shops and hotels are shuttered, half of the 20 full-time workers at Ginshotei Awashima, a traditional Japanese hot springs inn, are originally from Myanmar, Nepal or Vietnam.

With the inn’s deeply rural location, “there are no more Japanese people who want to work here,” said Wataru Tsutani, the owner.

Several of its foreign workers have educational backgrounds that would seem to qualify them for more than menial work. A 32-year-old with a degree in physics from a university in Myanmar serves food in the inn’s dining rooms. A 27-year-old who studied Japanese culture at a university in Vietnam is stationed at the reception desk. A 27-year-old Nepali who was studying agricultural history at a university in Ukraine before the Russian invasion now washes dishes and lays out futon, Japanese-style bedding, in guest rooms.

Most of the customers at Ginshotei Awashima are Japanese. Sakae Yoshizawa, 58, who had come for an overnight stay with her husband and was enjoying a cup of tea in the lobby before checking out, said she was impressed by the service. “Their Japanese is very good, and I have a good feeling about them,” she said. Ms. Yoshizawa said she works with foreign-born colleagues at a newspaper delivery service.

Ngun Nei Par, the inn’s general manager, graduated from a university in Myanmar with a degree in geography. She hopes that the Japanese government will smooth a path toward citizenship that would allow her to bring the rest of her family to Japan someday.

Mr. Tsutani, the owner, said that a public that had not caught up with reality might object if too many foreigners obtained citizenship.

“I hear a lot that Japan is a ‘unique country,’” Mr. Tsutani said. Ultimately, “there is no need to make it that difficult” for foreigners to stay in Japan, he said. “We want workers.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

After Anti-Immigrant Riots, Thousands of Counterprotesters Gather in U.K.

Extra police officers were mobilized across the country, but by Wednesday evening, there were no signs of large far-right protests.


People gathered in Liverpool, England, on Wednesday to demonstrate against racism.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Thousands of police officers fanned out across Britain on Wednesday amid fears that protests planned by far-right groups would descend into fresh violence after days of anti-immigrant riots shocked the country. But by late evening, large anti-immigration protests had not materialized and only a handful of arrests had been made.

Instead, thousands of antiracism protesters gathered in cities across the country, including Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool and London. Some of those demonstrations were close to places that had been identified as potential targets for rioters. And as the summer evening that many had feared could turn violent made way for the night, many expressed relief that the worries of wide-scale violence had not been realized.

More than a dozen towns and cities across Britain experienced violent unrest over the past week, fueled in part by far-right agitators and an online disinformation campaign intent on creating disorder after a deadly knife attack on a children’s dance class in northwestern England. Much of the misinformation after the attack in Southport claimed that the teenage suspect — who was born in Britain — was an asylum seeker.

The BBC has reported that the suspect’s parents were from Rwanda. The police have not disclosed a motive for the stabbing attack. Britain has very tight restrictions on what can be reported once a case is underway.

Last week, and over the weekend, rioters clashed with the police, set cars on fire and targeted mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. Far-right groups had called for further protests on Wednesday night, with the BBC reporting that the police were monitoring at least 30 locations, including London.

With tensions running high, some 6,000 specialist public-order police officers were mobilized nationwide to respond to any disorder. The authorities in several cities and towns stepped up patrols and gave the police extended powers to arrest those they believed were intent on causing unrest, even before any riots started.

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Several police officers, most of them on horseback. Two officers are talking to a man on a scooter.

Police officers on horseback in Liverpool. Officers were mobilized nationwide as Britain braced for potential unrest.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Among a small number of arrests reported on Wednesday night was one in Southampton where Hampshire police said they had detained a 40-year-old man from nearby Eastleigh, suspected of violent or threatening behavior. That incident took place after a small group of anti-immigration protesters gathered but were outnumbered by counterprotesters, and the police kept the two groups apart.

In Bristol, police said there was one arrest after a brick was thrown at a police vehicle and a bottle was thrown, but that demonstrations there had remained largely peaceful. In the southern city of Portsmouth, police officers dispersed a small group of anti-immigration protesters who had blocked a roadway in the city. And in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where there have been at least four nights of unrest, disorder continued and the police service said on Wednesday it would bring in additional officers.

A list circulating on messaging apps and social media showed more than 30 spots that might be targeted by anti-immigration protests. Many were businesses or charities that support asylum seekers and refugees; a number of them closed after the list circulated.

That list included Liverpool, where by late evening, the antiracism demonstration that crowded a street in the east of the city had taken on an almost joyous tone. Hundreds of people gathered on the street outside a charity that supports asylum seekers, which had been on the list. The charity, Asylum Link Merseyside, has been closed for days in anticipation of violence, and on Wednesday evening, the windows at the center were boarded up.

Many businesses in the area had also closed early, with parents describing being asked to pick up their children from a nearby child care center.

On Wednesday evening, people banged drums, chanted “Fascists out!” and held signs that read “Love Not Hate” as a helicopter circled overhead. There was a large police presence, but the anti-immigration crowd failed to materialize. Instead, the gathering was diverse, made up of locals who were surprised that their street had become the center of a demonstration, union groups and others who voiced condemnation of the recent violence in Britain.

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A helicopter in the sky.

A helicopter circled above the crowd in Liverpool.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

“It’s a quiet place normally, this neighborhood, and I am not happy with the far right trying to come here,” said Terry O’Brien, 52, who has lived in Liverpool all his life. “We have never had a problem with immigrants here, and people are trying to come here and bring violence.”

In Walthamstow, an ethnically diverse neighborhood in northeast London, word of potential far-right demonstrations had ricocheted around neighborhood WhatsApp and Facebook discussion groups. Residents quickly organized plans for a counterprotest, and by late afternoon, many shops and cafes on the main street had shut early, with some real estate agencies having boarded up their windows and doors with plywood.

By late evening, there was no sign of anti-immigration demonstrations, but thousands of counterprotesters filled the main streets, carrying signs that read “Refugees welcome” and “smash the far right.”

Experts who monitor the far right said that the threats of violence had already caused trauma for many, even before any action began, with communities on edge for possible violence.

“Understandably, the wide circulation of this list has caused a great deal of distress, unease and fear,” said Joe Mulhall, the director of research for Hope Not Hate, an advocacy group in Britain that researches extremist organizations. “Indeed, this list has been compiled precisely to spread these emotions within Muslim and immigrant communities.”

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A crowd of people on a street.

Hundreds of antiracism protesters gathered outside a Liverpool charity that supports asylum seekers.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

A snap poll published on Wednesday by YouGov found that after the week of disorder, nearly half of Britons view right-wing extremists as a “big threat,” a 15 percentage point increase in six months.

But people who said they voted last month for Reform UK, the populist anti-immigration party led by Nigel Farage, were less likely than others to see right-wing extremists as a major threat: Just 18 percent said they did.

While a vast majority of people polled opposed the riots, 21 percent of Reform UK voters expressed support.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned late on Tuesday that anyone involved in the violence would face “the full force of the law,” noting that more than 400 people had been arrested since the violence began, including people who had taken part in the riots and committed crimes online, and around 100 charged.

“That should send a very powerful message,” he said, “to anybody involved, either directly or online, that you are likely to be dealt with within a week, and that nobody, nobody, should be involving themselves in this disorder.”

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A couple dozen people standing on a sidewalk.

There was a large police presence in Liverpool, but no anti-immigration crowd materialized. Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Much of the unrest over the last week was driven by disinformation on social media and by calls to action by far-right groups on messaging apps like Telegram.

On Wednesday, Telegram said its moderators were removing channels and posts containing calls to violence, which it says are forbidden under its terms of service. It said that not only were moderators monitoring public parts of the platform, but it was using A.I. tools and user reports “to ensure content that breaches Telegram’s terms is removed.”

Michael J. de la Merced, and Adam Satariano contributed reporting from London, and Amelia Nierenberg contributed reporting from Rotherham, England.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[swamidada]

Iraq prepares bill lowering marriage age for girls from 18 to 9 years
The first of three readings of the bill has taken place, with protests slated to be held today.
AFP
Updated 08 Aug, 2024

Rights advocates are alarmed by a bill introduced to Iraq’s parliament that, they fear, would roll back women’s rights and increase underage marriage in the deeply patriarchal society.

The bill would allow citizens to choose from religious authorities or the civil judiciary to decide on family affairs. Critics fear this would lead to a slashing of rights in matters of inheritance, divorce and child custody.

In particular, they are worried it would effectively scrap the minimum age for Muslim girls to marry, which is set in the 1959 Personal Status Law at 18 — charges lawmakers supporting the changes have denied.

According to the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, 28 per cent of girls in Iraq are already married before the age of 18. “Passing this law would show a country moving backwards, not forward,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Sarah Sanbar said.

Amal Kabashi, from the Iraq Women’s Network advocacy group, said the amendment “provides huge leeway for male dominance over family issues” in an already conservative society. Activists have demonstrated against the proposed changes and were planning to protest again later Thursday in Baghdad.

The 1959 legislation passed shortly after the fall of the Iraqi monarchy and transferred the right to decide on family affairs from religious authorities to the state and its judiciary.

This looks set to be weakened under the amendment, backed by conservative Shia Muslim deputies, that would allow the enforcement of religious rules, particularly Shia and Sunni Muslim.

There is no mention of other religions or sects which belong to Iraq’s diverse population.

In late July, parliament withdrew the proposed changes when many lawmakers objected. They resurfaced in an August 4 session after receiving the support of powerful Shia blocs which dominate the chamber. It is still unclear if this bid to change the law will succeed when several earlier attempts have failed.

For a bill to become binding it must have three readings, be debated thoroughly and then a vote will be held unanimously.

“We have fought them before and we will continue to do so,” Kabashi said. Amnesty International’s Iraq researcher Razaw Salihy said the proposed changes should be “stopped in their tracks.”

“No matter how it is dressed up, in passing these amendments, Iraq would be closing a ring of fire around women and children,” she said.

According to the proposed changes, “Muslims of age” who want to marry must choose whether the 1959 Personal Status Law or Sharia Islamic rules apply to them on family matters. They also allow already-married couples to convert from civil law to religious regulations.

Constitutional expert Zaid Al-Ali said the 1959 law “borrowed the most progressive rules of each sect, causing a huge source of irritation for Islamic authorities.”

Several attempts to abrogate the law and revert to traditional Islamic rules have been made since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein. This time, lawmakers are maintaining the 1959 law by giving people a chance to choose it over religious authorities.

“They are giving men the option to shop in their favour,” Ali said. The bill would hand them “more power over women and more opportunities to maintain wealth, control over children, and so on.” By giving people a choice, “I think they’re trying to increase the chances of the law being adopted,” Ali said.

The new bill gives Shiite and Sunni institutions six months to present a set of rules based on each sect to parliament for approval.

By giving power over marriage to religious authorities, the amendment would “undermine the principle of equality under Iraqi law,” Sanbar of HRW said. It also “could legalise the marriage of girls as young as nine years old, stealing the futures and well-being of countless girls.”

“Girls belong on the playground and in school, not in a wedding dress,” she said. HRW warned earlier this year that religious leaders in Iraq conduct thousands of unregistered marriages each year, including child marriages, in violation of the current law.

The rights groups say child marriages violate human rights, deprive girls of education and employment, and expose them to violence. Lawmaker Raed Al-Maliki, who brought the amendment forward and earlier this year successfully backed an anti-LGBTQ bill in parliament, denied that the new revisions allow the marriage of minors.

“Objections to the law come from a malicious agenda that seeks to deny a significant portion of the Iraqi population” the right to have “their status determined by their beliefs,” he said in a television interview.

But Amnesty’s Salihy said that enshrining religious freedom in law with “vague and undefined language” could “strip women and girls of rights and safety.”

https://images.dawn.com/news/1192632/ir ... ls-to-nine

[kmaherali]

Iraq prepares bill lowering marriage age for girls from 18 to 9 years
The first of three readings of the bill has taken place, with protests slated to be held today.

More on Child Marriages at: viewtopic.php?p=77814#p77814

[kmaherali]

A Deadly Fire Exposes the Plight of Low-Paid Migrants in Wealthy Kuwait

After the blaze killed 49 migrant workers, a government crackdown focused on building violations — bypassing deeper problems that leave migrants with low wages and unsafe housing across the oil-rich Gulf.


Relatives mourning next to the coffins of Indian workers killed in a fire in June in Kuwait after they arrived in Kochi, India.Credit...Arun Chandrabose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On a recent summer day in Kuwait, as the temperature soared above 110 degrees, four Indian migrant workers stood by the side of a road with their belongings stuffed into bags.

Suresh Kumar, 52, and his roommates had just been evicted as the authorities swept their neighborhood for building code violations after a fatal fire in June that killed 49 migrant workers, the vast majority of whom were Indian. The four men said they had shared a 172-square-foot room on the ground floor of an apartment building, but inhabiting the ground floor is prohibited, so the owner was demolishing the room.

Now they were homeless, and unsure of where to go.

Kuwait, perched on the Persian Gulf, is one of the richest countries in the world, with a $980 billion sovereign fund built on oil revenue. But little of that wealth is enjoyed by migrant workers like Mr. Kumar and his roommates, who often struggle with inadequate housing and low wages, and who have limited power to seek recourse.

Mr. Kumar and his roommates were all construction workers subcontracted on projects for Kuwait’s state oil firm and refining company, and they said they could afford to pay only about $325 in rent between the four of them. Because a whole apartment would cost more than twice that amount, they were resigned to finding themselves another room to share, with no guarantee that it would be any safer or more comfortable than their old home.

The high death toll from the fire in June — which engulfed a seven-story building where nearly 200 migrant workers lived — shocked people across Kuwait. In the weeks after the tragedy, it spurred an unusually public reckoning over unsafe housing for migrant workers, as inspectors fanned out to issue building code violations.

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A building showing signs of a fire. People are walking and standing in the foreground.

The building that was engulfed by fire in June in Kuwait City.Credit...Yasser Al-Zayyat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But that response stopped short of addressing the structural issues that afflict migrant workers in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, human rights activists say. In some cases, the government’s reaction punished the migrants themselves — evicting them from their homes and leaving them in fear of deportation. After the fire, Kuwait’s Interior Ministry said an unspecified number of visa violators in workers’ housing had been arrested.

“It’s a perfect tragic example of how migrant workers are noticed only when there is some kind of catastrophe,” said James Lynch, a director of FairSquare, a London-based research group that investigates rights abuses. “Nobody was thinking about worker housing in Kuwait until this happened — until it made the government look really bad.”

The insecurity that migrant workers face, combined with limited political freedoms and labor organizing rights, means that it is rare for them to publicly complain or push for change.

Kuwait’s Public Authority for Manpower, which oversees labor affairs, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Kuwait Oil Company or Kuwait National Petroleum Company — the companies that Mr. Kumar and his roommates said they worked for, via third-party contractors.

After the fire, The New York Times interviewed 18 migrant workers in Kuwait about their living conditions; many spoke on the condition of partial anonymity because they feared retribution.

Several of them described Kuwaiti authorities cracking down on building code violations, ordering people to leave their homes with minimal notice.

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A rainbow can be seen over the skyline of a city.

Kuwait City. Kuwait is one of the richest countries in the world, with a $980 billion sovereign fund built on oil revenue.Credit...Yasser Al-Zayyat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Employers in Kuwait are obligated to provide accommodations, but many of the workers said they had been left to find their own. Rashid and Rahmat, Pakistani workers who declined to give their last names, described going from building to building on foot to ask about vacancies. The biggest struggle, they said, is finding a space they can afford.

At the heart of the problem, according to migrant rights activists and scholars, is a system governing foreign labor in the Gulf called “kafala” — which binds workers to their employers — as well as the power imbalances faced by migrants who flock to the Gulf from poorer nations across Asia and Africa to earn higher wages than they could back home.

“These workers are disposable in nature,” said Manishankar Prasad, an independent labor researcher in Malaysia, describing the kafala system.

Mr. Prasad, an Indian national who grew up in the Gulf, said he was “infuriated” as he followed the news of the fire, watching the names of the dead trickle out on social media.

Foreign residents make up more than two-thirds of Kuwait’s population of four million; that ratio is even higher in nearby Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Many work in office jobs, but across the Gulf, lower-income migrants perform essential work as street cleaners, truck drivers, construction workers, child-care providers, cashiers and more.

“There is no incentive for anybody to change the system,” Mr. Prasad said. “Because for each worker who is killed, there are 10 other people who’ll replace them within a day.”

The fire began in the early morning of June 12 in Mangaf, an area near Kuwait City where many migrants live. Survivors interviewed by The Times said they awoke to screams and found thick black smoke filling the building’s corridors. Building codes in Gulf countries are often laxly enforced, and smoke detectors and fire escapes are not common in residential properties. In addition to the 49 people killed, more than 50 people were injured.

Kuwait’s firefighting force said that the blaze had been caused by an electrical short circuit, and that it had started in a guard’s room on the ground floor.

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A woman mourning over the body of a person lying under a glass covering.

Family members of Sreehari Pradeep, one of the victims of the fire that broke out in a building housing foreign workers in Kuwait, mourning next to his body in the village of Ithithanam, India, in June.Credit...Sivaram V./Reuters

Visiting the scene of the fire, Sheikh Fahad Yusuf Al Sabah — Kuwait’s deputy prime minister — blamed “the greed of property owners” and said the owner of the company employing the workers would be detained. Soon after, Noura Al Mashaan, Kuwait’s public works minister, said the authorities would start tackling building code violations.

Kuwaiti regulations specify that no more than four workers be housed in a room and set minimum space requirements per person. Rooms must be well ventilated and employers must provide air conditioning as well as at least one toilet for every eight workers.

Depak Pasma, 24, from Nepal, said that his housing in Mangaf was provided by his company, with four people sharing an air-conditioned room that he described as large.

But many other workers said their reality was very different. Some described cramming six people into tiny rooms inside illegally subdivided apartments. Several said they lived in buildings with ground-floor apartments that were now being torn down.

“We have been living in this building for years and nobody said anything,” said Sayed Abu Khalid, a 58-year-old supermarket worker from Egypt. “After what happened in Mangaf they want us to move out of the ground floor.”

Mr. Abu Khalid said he lives in a two-bedroom apartment that houses eight people.

The building owner plans to demolish their apartment, and the tenants hope to move into a vacant apartment upstairs.

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Sheikh Fahad Yusuf Al Sabah, in sunglasses and traditional dress, speaking to police officers outside the burned building.

Kuwait’s deputy prime minister, Sheikh Fahad Yusuf Al Sabah, visiting the scene of the fire on June 12.Credit...Reuters

Combined, the eight roommates pay nearly $1,000 in monthly rent to a sublessor, who then pays about $800 to the apartment’s owner and pockets the difference, Mr. Abu Khalid said.

Profit-making middlemen are built into the perilous system that migrant workers must navigate. Their troubles sometimes begin in their home countries, with predatory recruiters and loan sharks who leave them in debt before they start working. After they arrive in the Gulf, they are often employed by third-party contractors, who sponsor their visas and house them while they perform jobs for other companies.

The workers who died in the fire were employed by a third-party contractor called NBTC Group. In a statement, the company said it was “greatly shocked and saddened” by the tragedy, and promised to pay nearly $10,000 to the families of workers killed, saying it was ready to “render the fullest assistance.”

Similar third-party arrangements are common in Gulf countries, allowing the workers’ ultimate employers to outsource the tasks of hiring and housing migrant workers.

“It’s a convenient dumping of risk and responsibility onto the private sector,” said Mr. Lynch of FairSquare.

NBTC Group works across the Gulf in construction and engineering, logistics and other fields. In Kuwait, according to its website, it has been subcontracted by firms including the Kuwait Oil Company, the Kuwait National Petroleum Company and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a statement to The Times that it was “committed to the well-being” of workers and that it had “tools in place to ensure companies we contract with are complying with federal requirements, such as routine site inspections and interviews with contractor personnel.”

Gulf countries’ economic models rely on cheap foreign labor, and inadequate housing is often the result of cost-cutting, Mr. Lynch said. But, he added, blaming the private sector “is missing a key part of what is going on here — which is the failure of the state to live up to its own obligation.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

‘Twilight Love’: Shanghai’s Lonely and Retired Are Looking for Love

China has the world’s largest population of people 65 or older, and more and more of them are unattached.


People’s Park, known for its matchmaking corner, in Shanghai in March.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

For Shanghai’s lonely and retired, love is elusive. Divorced or widowed residents gather in a dating corner in People’s Park every weekend looking for a chat. They mill about an Ikea canteen on Tuesdays in search of some fun.

They arrive dressed a little nicer than usual, ready to talk about their virtues, their past lives and the future.

“I’m simple. I don’t smoke cigarettes or play mahjong,” said Xu Xiaoduo, 70, a twice-divorced former primary-school teacher who volunteers details about his pension (around $1,250 a month) and his dancing abilities (very good).

“But,” he added with a sigh, “I can’t find true love.” Others share his frustrations, but downplay any yearning to find love. More than a few say they have lost hope.

It should not be this hard. There are more people in China who are 65 or older than there are in any other country. And Shanghai has more older adults than any other Chinese city. Most of these residents stopped working long ago because China has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world, and many are either widowed or divorced. Everyone seems to be lonely, the children and grandchildren too busy with their own lives to visit.

The pool of older singles in China is only becoming bigger. Within the next three decades, the population of people who are 65 or older is expected to reach 400 million, according to the International Monetary Fund.

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People sitting on park benches socializing.

People’s Park, known for attracting parents seeking matches for their unwed children on weekends, also now thrives as a social hub for seniors.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

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People walking around a park and socializing.

The People’s Park “marriage market,” for parents seeking partners for their unattached adult children, inspired the idea that the park could also be a gathering place for seniors. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

As people in China live longer and as ideas about love and marriage change, more people are looking for a second, or third, chance at love. To help fill the void, dating shows have popped up with titles like “Not Too Late for Fate.” Online, there are chat rooms, livestreaming matchmakers and dating apps for the old and single.

But there is no substitute for getting together.

Every week in Shanghai, hundreds of older adults return to the same designated corners of public parks and, for some reason that no one was able to explain, one dining area at an Ikea in the upscale district of Xuhui, hopeful of meeting a future spouse.

The gatherings are social events — people bring karaoke machines and speakers to the park to dance and sing. They bring thermoses to Ikea to fill with free coffee, and sit around birch and plastic white tables swapping stories about their childhoods.

There are regulars, like Ma Guoying, 64, who has a warm smile and likes to wear bright colors and large, round glasses. She has spent a lot of time at Ikea and People’s Park over the past several months. Her friend Zhang Xiaolan, 66, has been coming for a decade.

Neither of them has had much luck finding a man. The older ones always seem to want younger women.

But it’s an activity that fills up a few hours of the day.

“If we stay at home 24 hours a day, our brains would deteriorate,” Ms. Ma said. Divorced and retired many years ago, she said it was lonely at home. Her daughter calls only occasionally, mostly just to check on her.

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A row of sheets of white paper on the ground.

Parents bring résumés showing off the qualifications of their unmarried adult children to People’s Park. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

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People seated on a park bench mingling with trees all around them.

For Shanghai’s seniors, gathering in parks is irreplaceable. Every week, hundreds return to the same corners, hoping to meet a future spouse.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

A leafy plot of land at the center of Shanghai, People’s Park has a long history of serving as a meeting place, first for gamblers, then for student protesters and those hoping to practice their English. Today, it is better known for its “marriage market,” a place where parents return weekend after weekend with relentless optimism about finding a match for their unmarried and childless offspring. They bring résumés with personal details like the height and weight of their children, and they boast of attributes like I.Q. level, university degrees and test scores.

It seemed only natural that the park could also become a meeting point for another kind of romantic hopeful: the retired and bored.

“Gradually, someone thought if the children could find a partner, so can the parents,” said Liu Qiyu, who was dressed in a blue velvet corduroy sweatsuit and accessorized with a gold watch, chains and a silk scarf. As older men and women began to crowd around in groups nearby, Mr. Liu explained that he wasn’t looking for someone himself.

“I came here once or twice, looking for the other half, but I couldn’t find one,” he said.

Like the weekend park meet-ups, Tuesdays at Ikea tend to attract people between the ages of 60 and 80 looking for what has become known in China as “twilight love.”

For a few hours in the afternoon, the Swedish furniture retailer has the feel of a social club. The second floor of the store has some of the usual weekday traffic — shoppers who amble through the cafeteria’s metal stanchions picking out the famous meatballs, almond cakes and lingonberry juice. But many more have come for something other than Swedish fare, some bringing their own food and loitering from table to table, pulling chairs up to where friends and acquaintances are seated.

In the brightly lit bathroom, off to the side of the shop floor, women gather to gossip. One is putting on lipstick.

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People sitting at a table inside a cafe having a conversation.

Every Tuesday afternoon, this canteen at Ikea becomes a place for dozens of senior residents to meet up at.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

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A man wearing a red sweater and a cap, with a satchel bag over his shoulder inside the Ikea store.

“I’m simple. I don’t smoke cigarettes or play mahjong,” said Xu Xiaoduo, 70, a twice-divorced former primary schoolteacher.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

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A person wearing glasses and a black jacket with fur around the neck.

Li Zhiming, 69, likes to shop for products online. “I don’t think online dating is reliable,” he said.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

Online dating isn’t really a thing for the men and women here. They have smartphones, or at least they have the means to buy one, but most say they don’t want to search for a partner online.

“When it comes to buying things, I go online,” said Li Zhiming, 69, who had styled his black hair with gel and was wearing eyeliner and bell bottoms. “I don’t think online dating is reliable.”

Mr. Li said his wife had left him and their young son to go abroad in 1996, the early years of China’s reform and economic opening. He has been alone ever since. After retiring from a job as an engineer nine years ago, he started to plan his days with activities. He plays cards, dances to Latin music and can sing.

“I have my own apartment, a pension and a healthy body,” Mr. Li said.

He said he wanted to find a woman who was “young and beautiful.” In exchange, he promised to cook and take care of her. “I am lonely at home,” he said.

Zheng Yue, 70, chose to sit alone and wait for someone to come to her. Like many other women here, she did not want to give her full identity, instead providing the name she used on her public social media account.

Ms. Zheng, whose husband was a former police officer and died from an injury he had suffered years earlier, is looking for a man who is “knowledgeable, sensible, mature, stable, amiable and kind.” Someone, she added, whom she could “hold hands with for a lifetime.”

It takes a lot for women to come to these gatherings, she said. They tend to be more shy about finding a new partner.

“We are brave enough to come by ourselves and take the first step.”

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People gathered around a table inside an Ikea store.

Friends Zhang Xiaolan and Ma Guoying, wearing pink, huddling at Ikea, where they gathered with other seniors for afternoon tea.Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

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Two people standing holding mobile phones speaking to one another.

The gatherings of Shanghai’s single seniors are not just opportunities for people to find companionship. They are also social events. Credit...Qilai Shen for The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/busi ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

China Stops Foreign Adoptions, Ending a Complicated Chapter

Beijing said the move was in line with international trends, as more countries have limited such adoptions. Many would-be adoptive families were left in limbo.


A child at a foster home on the outskirts of Beijing in 2017.Credit...Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

For three decades, China sent tens of thousands of young children overseas for adoption as it enforced a strict one-child policy that forced many families to abandon their babies. Now the government will no longer allow most foreign adoptions, a move that it said was in line with global trends.

The ban raises questions for many of the hundreds of families in the United States who were in the process of adopting children from China and had heard earlier this week from adoption agencies that China was moving to bar international adoptions. The official confirmation came in the form of a brief comment by China’s foreign ministry on Thursday.

“We are grateful for the desire and love of the governments and adoption families of relevant countries to adopt Chinese children,” said Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for the ministry. She offered few details about the new policy, except to say that exceptions would be made only for foreigners adopting stepchildren and children of blood relatives in China.

Before the Covid pandemic, China was a top country of origin for international adoption, having sent more than 160,000 children overseas since 1992. But its program had been tainted by past allegations of corruption and by its association with China’s harshly enforced birth restrictions. Many families left their babies in alleyways or at the doors of police stations or social welfare institutions, to avoid severe penalties for violating the one-child policy.

Unable to pay for the care of these children, orphanages turned to international adoption to help fund their services.

“This is, in a way, the end of an era and the closing of one of the most shameful chapters of the three and a half decades of social engineering known as one-child policy,” said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in China’s demographics. “The Chinese government created the problem and then they couldn’t deal with the financial constraints and that is why they allowed foreign adoption as a last resort.”

Today, China’s population is shrinking as the country grapples with one of the lowest birthrates in the world. It maintains a nominal policy of limiting families to three children, and it has been trying to encourage births.

Nearly all foreign adoptions involve children with disabilities, according to the Chinese government. Adoptees from China have largely been girls, because of a cultural preference for boys, along with some boys with physical and developmental disabilities, said Zhou Yun, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.

Being adopted by families in countries far from their place of birth, with vastly different cultures, has left many adoptees wondering about their identity, Ms. Zhou said. “It touches on some of the most emotionally fraught and politically charged questions of citizenship, belonging, nationalistic sentiments, and gender and racial politics,” she said.

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A group of people, many pushing strollers with babies in them, walk through Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Spanish couples with their newly adopted Chinese children, in Beijing in 2007.Credit...Greg Baker/Associated Press

In recent years, Chinese officials have sought to promote domestic adoptions. International adoptions peaked and began to slow in the mid-2000s, as China’s economy boomed and the government allocated more money to support orphans.

Fewer children have been put up for adoption, too, a reflection of slowing birthrates and more support for children with disabilities. By 2018, the number of children registered for adoption had fallen to around 15,000, from about 44,000 in 2009, official statistics show. There were 343,000 orphans in China in 2019, according to Chinese officials.

Some Chinese may have regarded the international adoption program as a form of national humiliation, said Guo Wu, an associate professor of Chinese studies at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.

The new ban “might reflect the popular feelings of rising national pride and a kind of resentment of America,” Mr. Wu said. “This policy might fulfill that feeling that ‘we don’t need to send our kids to America.’”

Activists like Peter Moller, a Korean adoptee raised in Denmark who is a co-founder of the Danish Korean Rights Group, welcomed the halt in international adoptions, which in general reflects concerns about abuse and neglect of adopted children, he said.

“International adoption has been proven very problematic in both donor and recipient countries, and international adoption takes a toll on both adoptees and the adoptees’ biological families,” he said.

Other countries have started to wind down or stop foreign adoptions in recent years, including Ethiopia, Russia and Kazakhstan. Some European overseas adoption agencies have also stopped their operations amid national concerns about abuse, falsified documents and accountability.

At the same time, China’s decision came with little advance warning for many American families that were already in the process of adopting children. More than 82,000 children from China have been adopted by families in the United States, according to the State Department.

The State Department said that China’s civil affairs ministry told the United States that it had completed processing of cases with previously issued travel authorizations, but it would not continue to process cases other than exceptions for those with relatives.

“We understand there are hundreds of families still pending completion of their adoptions, and we sympathize with their situation,” the State Department said in response to questions about the issue. The civil affairs ministry in China did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

At least six of these families told The New York Times they were in a panic, devastated by the news that they would no longer be able to bring home the girls and boys that they had been matched with in China.

They said they had already received approval by both China and the United States to adopt children in 2019 and early 2020, before China closed its borders, and had been preparing to welcome them. They had bought clothes and modified their homes to accommodate the disabilities that some of the children had. Several described spending months communicating with the children they hoped to bring home through video calls, letters and photos exchanges.

Courtney Moore and her husband, who live just outside Houston, said they had sent packages every year for Christmas and the Lunar New Year to the southern Chinese city of Guiyang, where the young boy they had been matched with was living in an orphanage. Then they stopped hearing back from the orphanage at the end of 2022.

“It’s really hard that there are hundreds of families that are waiting, that have a place prepared and we sit here hopeless, with our hands tied,” said Ms. Moore, who met her husband when they were students studying Chinese in the city of Nanjing.

“We loved the country, we love the people and part of my grief is for the connection with China.”

Edward Wong contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

China’s ‘Silver Economy’ Is Thriving as Birthrate Plunges

The shrinking population poses threats to growth but has opened opportunities for businesses that serve seniors.


Schools for children have been turned into education centers offering activities for seniors like singing, dancing and art classes.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

For more than a decade, Li Dongmei operated a series of kindergartens and schools for young children, withstanding the realities of China’s declining birthrate. She finally faced the music in 2020.

The shrinking number of children meant ever smaller enrollments of babies and toddlers at her schools. The social and economic ruptures of the Covid-19 pandemic were the breaking point, and she shifted her focus to a different and more abundant set of pupils: the elderly.

At her education center in Jinan, a city in eastern China, she now offers singing, dancing, music and art classes for seniors. She organizes activities and educational trips for her students. Unlike schoolchildren who have summer and winter holidays, Ms. Li said, older people take classes all year round. And the classes are full.

“The biggest economy is the silver economy,” said Ms. Li, 36. “It is bigger than the children’s market.”

China’s aging society is expected to deplete the vigor and vitality of the world’s second-largest economy in the coming decades. But the adverse effects of demographic change are already apparent for Chinese businesses that cater to children. Many are scaling back operations or changing course.

ImageLi Dongmei, wearing a white suit, stands near several elderly women dressed in red costumes.

Li Dongmei, right, once operated a series of kindergartens and schools for young children.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

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Women on a stage inside a shopping mall wearing red and black.

“The biggest economy is the silver economy,” said Ms. Li, 36. “It is bigger than the children’s market.”Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Dairy companies that produced formula for China’s infants are now developing powdered milks for seniors. Proprietors of preschools and kindergartens are closing those facilities to start senior care centers. A technology firm that made devices for parents to track their young children is now designing products allowing grown children to keep tabs on their aging mothers and fathers.

In 2022, China’s population shrank for the first time since 1961. Deaths outnumbered births again last year, and the number of 60-year-olds topped 290 million, or one in every five Chinese people. China’s National Health Commission estimates that the country’s elderly population will grow to more than 400 million by around 2035.

To address its aging population, China announced on Friday that it had approved a plan to raise the country’s statutory retirement age for the first time since the 1950s.

China has tried for years to stave off its demographic crisis. It fully lifted its one-child policy in 2016 and offered a range of incentives to encourage people to have more children. But the country’s recent economic troubles have given young people more reason to question whether they can afford bigger families.

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In one activity, seniors are taught how to walk like fashion models.

One concern is that fewer babies will lead to a smaller labor force that will whittle away at tax revenue and add stress to health care and pensions.

In a 2021 directive, China’s State Council, or cabinet, called for “actively fostering the silver economy” and developing “elderly-friendly industries.”

Ms. Li, the education executive who has shut her schools for children, now offers a variety of classes for seniors, including one on how to strut like fashion models on the catwalk. Ms. Li said she teaches her students how to become online influencers with lessons on creating short videos.

Also eyeing older customers, Xinjiang Tianrun Dairy, a state-owned company, acquired a smaller rival last year to focus on creating powdered milk for middle-aged and elderly consumers.

Nestlé, the Swiss food and beverage maker, cited the sharp decline in births in China last year when it announced plans to close its infant formula factory in Ireland. It and Chinese dairy firms have introduced special powdered milk products with health benefits for seniors including preventing muscle atrophy, improving sleep and helping digestion.

A leading Chinese dairy company, Yili Group, is promoting its products for seniors through television commercials. In one, a young couple buys specialized powdered milk — without cane sugar — as a gift for relatives at Chinese New Year.

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Seniors seated around two rectangular tables, hold up their hands in an activity led by a young woman.

Zhang Youlan, a former kindergarten teacher, leads a singing class at a nursing home.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

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Elderly people inside a nursing home singing.

The number of elderly care facilities in China has doubled since 2018.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

It’s not just milk. The Chinese cybersecurity firm 360 Security Technology since 2013 has been making smartwatches for kids that allow parents to contact their children and monitor their whereabouts and internet use.

In 2019, citing “the advent of an aging society,” the company introduced smartwatches for seniors with features such as blood pressure and heart rate monitors, location tracking for concerned family members and one-click emergency calling.

The size of the growing seniors market is forcing the hand of Chinese companies that once targeted children and their parents, said He-Ling Shi, an associate economics professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

“They have no choice,” he said.

Births in China fell to nine million in 2023, down about 6 percent from the previous year. And the number of preschool children plummeted nearly 12 percent, according to China’s Ministry of Education.

Last year Zhang Youlan responded to a job posting for a kindergarten teacher in Xi’an, a city in central China. When she showed up for an interview, the facility was not a kindergarten. It was a nursing home.

Ms. Zhang, a former kindergarten teacher, said she was told that the position had been advertised that way because many of the responsibilities are the same. She said her new job is similar to her old one: She leads a class in singing and dancing and teaches arts and crafts. She sends pictures of her students eating lunch to their guardians, usually their grown children.

Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/09/16/123 ... g_720p.mp4

The size of the growing seniors market is forcing the hand of Chinese companies that once targeted children and their parents.CreditCredit...Video and Photo Production by Gilles Sabrié

Ms. Zhang said she had noticed that kindergartens were shutting down. More than 20,000 closed in China in 2022 and 2023, according to China’s Ministry of Education, with the ranks of kindergarten teachers declining 5 percent last year.

By contrast, the senior care sector is booming. The number of elderly care facilities in China has doubled since 2018.

“It has a better future than kindergarten,” Ms. Zhang said. “There are more and more elderly people and fewer and fewer children.”

Cai Hao opened a maternity and baby goods store in 2018 in Shijiazhuang, a city in China’s northern Hebei Province. His store initially carried clothes and footwear, for infants and toddlers.

A surge of newborns in the years after China adopted a two-child policy soon fizzled out, and the pandemic hurt foot traffic into the store.

“There were no customers,” Mr. Cai said. “Without children, customers had no reason to shop here.”

Then a few years ago, customers started to ask whether his store carried powdered milk for older people. Figuring he didn’t have much to lose, Mr. Cai began to stock it. Sales grew so he added different varieties including one for diabetics and another for people with hypertension.

Mr. Cai said that he never made a strategic decision to start targeting older customers, but that about 10 percent of his sales now come from dairy products for seniors.

He added, “Who wouldn’t be willing to sell more if they could?”

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People looking at shoe products speak to a customer service person.

Businesses are focusing on senior consumers with the country’s elderly population expected to grow to more than 400 million by around 2035.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

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A woman walking past a shelf of vitamins and health products.
Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/busi ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

In Japan’s Countryside, Century-Old Firms Learn to Embrace Foreign Workers

Japan’s regional economies are facing severe labor shortages. Their survival depends on their ability to persuade foreign workers to stay.


Vietnamese workers packaging rice crackers at a Hizatsuki Confectionery factory in Tochigi Prefecture. Foreign workers make up about two dozen of the company’s 210 employees.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Four years ago, Hizatsuki Confectionery hired its first foreign workers.

The company, in a mountainous region north of Tokyo, has been baking and frying glutinous dough into rice crackers since 1923. Then it was known as Teikoku Senbei, or Imperial Rice Crackers.

Today, the company’s third-generation president, Takeo Hizatsuki, has encountered an existential challenge that his father and grandfather never did. Hizatsuki Confectionery can’t find enough Japanese employees.

A shrinking and rapidly aging population has forced Japan, which for centuries was mostly closed off to immigrants, to allow foreign workers to enter the country and potentially stay for good. Most come from other parts of Asia, including China, Vietnam and the Philippines.

That transition to employing more foreign workers has proceeded gradually at big companies in major cities over the past decade. But in parts of the countryside, where labor shortages are particularly acute, some of Japan’s storied businesses like Hizatsuki Confectionery are just now figuring out how to accommodate foreign workers for the first time.

These are areas of the country where few speak languages other than Japanese, and communities tend to be more wary of integrating newcomers. Whether companies can persuade foreigners to stay may dictate their survival.

For small and medium-size businesses, the backbone of Japan’s regional economies, “foreign workers are indispensable,” said Yuki Hashimoto, a senior fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry, or RIETI, in Tokyo. “Without them, they will collapse.”

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Yuta and Takeo Hizatsuki standing inside a store for a portrait.

Takeo Hizatsuki, the president of Hizatsuki Confectionery, right, plans to pass the business on to his son, Yuta Hizatsuki, left, in two years.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Japan lacks a national system for helping foreign workers with essentials like language assistance. Local businesses and municipalities are quickly fashioning their own methods of long-term support.

For Hizatsuki Confectionery, the company’s experience with foreign workers began in 2020, when Mr. Hizatsuki, the president for the past two decades, decided to hire 10 workers from Vietnam.

He recalled in an interview that his Japanese employees were deeply unsettled by the change. “I told them: ‘To be able to feed the Japanese people, we need to be able to survive. And to be able to survive, we need to accept foreign workers.’”

Over the past four years, Mr. Hizatsuki said, he established various policies aimed at retaining the workers from Vietnam, as well as others from Indonesia, who now make up two dozen of the company’s 210 employees.

Mr. Hizatsuki has started using a translator at the company’s factory so he can check in with his foreign employees directly. He also raises the base wages for his foreign and Japanese workers by the same amount each year, which some other companies in Japan decline to do.

Mr. Hizatsuki plans to promote a non-Japanese worker to deputy line manager and then line manager within three to five years, moves that he hopes will show other foreign employees that they have opportunities for career advancement in Japan.

Japanese employees at the company have become comfortable working with their foreign colleagues, Mr. Hizatsuki said.

The need for his policies to work is real: In two years, he plans to pass the business on to his son. Mr. Hizatsuki estimates that in the next generation, about half the snack maker’s employees will need to be foreign workers.

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A person wearing a white uniform working on the production line of a rice cracker facility with yellow bins stacked behind them.

In the past few years, the company’s president has established various policies aimed at retaining foreign workers.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Last year, Japan approved policies that made it possible for a wide range of foreign workers to stay in the country long-term.

That was a big shift for a country that had sought to keep immigration at a slow drip because of fears that any surge in foreign populations could set off social unrest. The changes underscore how severe the decline in Japan’s working-age population has become.

Shigeru Ishiba, who became Japan’s new prime minister on Tuesday, has advocated employing more foreigners to help fill labor shortages.

Under previous policies, limited numbers of foreign workers were allowed in for just a few years and paid significantly less than their Japanese counterparts. Many chose to leave jobs after confronting nebulous support systems and hierarchical company structures that left them few chances for career advancement.

Now, as Japan begins to create more pathways for foreigners to stay indefinitely, the problem is that companies have no experience to build on, Ms. Hashimoto, the fellow at RIETI, said.

“Japan has long been closed off,” she said. And until recently, she added, “it was work for three to five years, and that’s it.”

Across the country, some businesses are beginning to create policies — like wage increases and visa and language assistance — that are necessary to retain foreign workers over longer periods, Ms. Hashimoto said. But at other companies, she added, “the long-held view of foreign workers as just temporary aid will remain.”

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Tran Vinh Trung eating breakfast with his wife and two children. They are sitting on the floor at a low table.

Tran Vinh Trung, a worker at Daiwa Steel Tube Industries, with his family in their apartment. His wife and two children moved from Vietnam to join him in Japan last year.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

On a weekday morning in July, Tran Vinh Trung fried eggs and slid them onto plates next to chunks of baguette, tomato slices and sausages. Mr. Trung’s wife poured Vietnamese-style coffee through aluminum filters, while their two children set the table in the living room.

Two years ago, Mr. Trung, 47, moved from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to work at Daiwa Steel Tube Industries, a manufacturer in Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo, that makes steel tubes used in scaffolding and other applications. Mr. Trung is one of six foreign employees at the 92-year-old company.

Mr. Trung’s wife, 20-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son joined him last year in Japan, setting up in a small apartment in Utsunomiya, Tochigi’s capital city.

Daiwa Steel encourages foreign employees to bring their families to Japan, partly because Shinichiro Nakamura, its president, hopes that will motivate them to stay in the country longer.

Since taking over the business from his father two decades ago, Mr. Nakamura has put into effect a number of policies aimed at supporting its much-needed foreign workers. They range from small gestures — such as picking them up from the airport — to larger benefits, like helping them find housing.

Mr. Nakamura also rotates foreign workers through different positions within the company so that they acquire new skills and experience in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Mr. Trung, who had previously worked in the company’s human resources division, recently joined its product-sales division as a deputy manager.

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Shinichiro Nakamura standing inside a factory wearing a blue uniform and a white hard hat.

The company encourages foreign employees to bring their families to Japan, partly because Shinichiro Nakamura, its president, hopes that will motivate them to stay in the country longer.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Still, Mr. Nakamura says that even with the systems he has created, foreign workers often say they want to stay in Japan for no more than three to five years.

Their families are often overseas, and some struggle to find a sense of belonging in long-insular Japanese communities. Mr. Nakamura acknowledges there are limits to what a business can provide.

“It’s tough being overseas,” he said. “Maybe that is just human nature — to want to be in the environment you were born in. We are happy to support family visas because if they want to put down roots here, it’s always a good sign.”

Over the past year, Mr. Trung’s family has begun to settle in. His visa can be renewed indefinitely, and he and his family say they have no immediate plans to return to Vietnam.

Still, they are unsure how long they will stay.

Mr. Trung’s son is in high school and has made friends on his soccer team. His daughter is studying Japanese and has a part-time job at a potsticker restaurant that she found through a connection at the Catholic church the family attends.

Mr. Trung’s wife found a job at a local baked-goods factory, where she works alongside several Filipino and Vietnamese employees. But she said she missed home. She prefers Vietnam’s open-air markets to Japan’s frigid grocery stores, and she wishes she could be closer to her elderly mother.

The family took a trip to Vietnam over the summer, and days before departure, suitcases were laid out in the living room, ready to go.

Also in the room was a paper pinned to the wall by Mr. Trung’s son, who wants to study medicine after he graduates from high school. In Japanese characters, the paper spelled out “University of Tokyo.”

Image
Three people inside a factory wearing navy uniforms and a yellow hard hat.

Mr. Trung, center, who previously worked in the company’s human resources division, recently joined its product-sales division as a deputy manager.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/03/busi ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Does anyone still want kids? Families are shrinking as people have fewer children — or none at all


Canada's fertility rate has been steadily declining for more than 15 years, reaching a record low in 2023, as more families choose to not have children. (Nicolas Guyonnet/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images)

Demographers, sociologists and your mother-in-law want to know: why aren't people having as many kids?

Canada recorded its lowest-ever fertility rate for the second year in a row in 2023, according to Statistics Canada, at 1.26 children born per woman. It now joins the ranks of "lowest-low" fertility countries, including South Korea, Spain, Italy and Japan.

Statistics Canada said the drop between 2022 and 2023 specifically reflects an increase in the number of women of childbearing age, but also noted the fertility rate has been steadily declining for more than 15 years.

Canada records its lowest fertility rate for 2nd year: StatsCan https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british- ... -1.7338374

Experts have linked a range of factors with reproductive decision-making, including the rising cost of living and eco-anxiety.

More people are also delaying parenthood until later in life, which can shorten their reproductive window.

This Sunday, Cross Country Checkup is asking: Which parenting issue is causing the most debate in your family? How did your upbringing impact the way you parent today? Fill out this form and you could appear on the Oct. 6 show or have your comment read on air.

But there's also a significant cultural aspect — larger families with multiple children are simply no longer the ideal like they were a few generations ago, said Lisa Strohschein, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta and the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Studies in Population.

A black and white historical photo of a family watching television together at their home

Larger families with lots of children — like this one watching television together in a photo from 1960 — were more common a few generations ago.
Today, one-child families are the most common type in Canada. (Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

We've shifted from a society that had children to help ensure the survival of the household, to one where people choose to become parents out of a desire for personal fulfilment. And "you don't need lots and lots of kids to derive meaning out of life," Strohschein said.

That's reflected in a number of parenting platforms dedicated to those raising only children, like the "One and Done" subreddit with 72,000 members, or the 21,500 videos posted with the #OneAndDone hashtag on TikTok.

There are also influencers like Jen Dalton of Sudbury, Ont., whose @oneanddoneparenting account on Instagram has 55,500 followers.

"No longer do sleepless nights and postpartum anxiety and depression plague me. I do have time to focus on myself, while also focusing on my daughter and my marriage," Dalton wrote in a post in May.

"We have a beautiful balance in our lives."

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Is parenting harder today than it used to be?
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A public health advisory says today’s parents face unique challenges that can impact their mental health. Some parents from older generations say raising children has always been, and always will be, a struggle. Can we really say which generation has had it the worst?

'They just don't want to'

The recognition that having children is increasingly costly, time-consuming and stressful was reflected in a recent public health advisory issued by the U.S. surgeon general. In August, Vivek Murthy warned about the impact of modern stresses on parents' mental health, saying today's parents face unique challenges.

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"Parents across all backgrounds want to provide their kids with a foundation for happiness and success. Yet too many fear they won't be able to provide what's necessary or their kids won't be able to access what they need in order to lead a fulfilling life," Murthy said in the report.

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On top of that, some experts have argued that parenting has become more intense. Data shows parents today spend more time with their children than in previous generations (even while more women are working full-time), and the predominant modern parenting style centres on acknowledging a child's feelings — which has left many parents feeling burned out.

And for some, that's just not appealing — at all. For instance, the share of U.S. adults younger than 50 without children who say they are unlikely to ever have them rose from 37 per cent in 2018 to 47 per cent in 2023, according to a Pew Research survey of 8,638 respondents published in August.

The most common reason those adults gave, at 57 per cent? "They just don't want to," research analyst Kiley Hurst wrote in the report.

In Canada, one-third of adults aged 15 to 59 in 2022 said they didn't intend to have any children, according to Statistics Canada. The agency noted that younger respondents were more likely to desire fewer children, and suggested this could be due to "variations in financial security."

WATCH | Why fewer people are having kids:

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7 months ago
Duration10:05

Research suggests a significant shift over the last two decades in the number of North American adults who are planning on having kids. Andrew Chang explores three main reasons for the generational change.
Broadly, it comes down to economics and culture, said Rania Tfaily, an associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University who studies social demography.

Historically, getting married and having children were defining markers of adulthood, Tfaily explained. But these markers have been increasingly replaced with those related to independence, economic stability and pursuing individual interests.

"Having children requires considerable time commitment and investment to ensure their well-being," Tfaily said. "Given this and the increasing cost of having children, many are choosing to have one or two children only, or none at all."

One-child families on the rise

According to the 2021 census, one-child families are the most common type in Canada, comprising 45 per cent of families with children that year. (Families with two children made up 38 per cent and those with three or more made up 16 per cent.) The totals include one-parent families, common-law families and step-families.

Economists have pointed out that the decision to have children is often a trade-off between quantity and quality — the number of children you have and how much you invest in their future prospects and wellbeing. The theory is that everyone only has a finite amount of time, money and affection; in the past, people would spread that out thinner between more children, Strohschein said, but in recent years, that calculation has flipped.

For instance, in 2022, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pointed out that typically, as parents get richer, they invest more in the "quality" (like education and extra-curricular activities) of their children, which is costly. Additionally, the IMF notes "how time-consuming it is to raise children," and that devoting time to childcare is also costly — especially for mothers who could otherwise earn more in the workforce. So, for these reasons, they have fewer children.

A silhouette of a happy young mother, laughing as she plays with her toddler child and lifts him over her head outside, isolated against the sunset.

In 2023, Canada recorded a rate of 1.26 children born per woman, according to Statistics Canada, joining the ranks of 'lowest-low' fertility countries. (Shutterstock)

Families are also shrinking worldwide, according to a kinship study published in December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. That study, using international demographic data for every country in the world, projected that by 2095, a 65-year-old person could have 38 per cent fewer living relatives than they did in 1950. (They determined this using data modelling based on a hypothetical 65-year-old from the population.)

Over time, this could mean more "vertical" family networks — grandparents, parents, children — and fewer "lateral kin" such as cousins, aunts and uncles, lead author Diego Alburez-Gutierrez told CBC News in an email interview.

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There's also a growing polarization in fertility behaviour, said Alburez-Gutierrez, who leads the Research Group on Kinship Inequalities at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany.

Fertility behaviour tends to be inherited over generations, he said, which essentially means if you grew up in a large family, it's possible you will have more children, and vice versa.

"This can lead to a polarization in family sizes, where some members of the population have large families, while other have increasingly small families," Alburez-Gutierrez said.

The low-fertility trap

Canada's fertility rate has been falling since the 1970s, but this has historically been offset by admitting large numbers of immigrants, Tfaily said. It gets more challenging if Canada's low rate persists long term, she added.

"In such a case, Canada's population growth would slow down and eventually become negative," Tfaily said.

Once the fertility rate falls below 1.3, it can set off a self-reinforcing cycle called a low-fertility trap, Strohschein said. Demographers coined the term in the early 2000s, explaining that "social inertia and self-reinforcing processes may make it difficult to return to higher levels once fertility has been very low for some time."

A family makes their way along the steps of a footbridge.

Experts say there has been a cultural shift toward parents choosing to have fewer children and focusing more time and attention on them. (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images)

At that point, it becomes harder to convince people to become parents because they don't see as many role models, Strohschein said. And they start to see having one child as the ideal — which is what happened in China as a result of its one-child policy, she said. Now, the UN warns China's population could shrink by half by the year 2100.

"If we entrench in Canadian culture that only one child is good, we will be China in just a few decades," Strohschein said.

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On the "One and Done" subreddit, meanwhile, some parents question their decisions, wondering if their child will suffer for not having siblings. Others note that it wasn't a choice at all — medical issues or secondary infertility prevented them from having more than one child.

But many say having one child was the best choice they could have made.

"It is hard undoing the brainwashing of 'two kids, happy family' but since I have made the decision, my mood has dramatically shifted," one parent wrote this week.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Natalie Stechyson
Senior Writer & Editor

Natalie Stechyson has been a writer and editor at CBC News since 2021. She covers stories on social trends, families, gender, human interest, as well as general news. She's worked as a journalist since 2009, with stints at the Globe and Mail and Postmedia News, among others. Before joining CBC News, she was the parents editor at HuffPost Canada, where she won a silver Canadian Online Publishing Award for her work on pregnancy loss. You can reach her at [email protected].

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fertilit ... -1.7338668

[kmaherali]

One of the Loneliest Countries Finds Companionship in Dogs

They have become pampered family members in South Korea, which has the world’s lowest birthrate and where much of the population lives alone.


O Hanna, a teacher, at Dogkingabout, a “total dog care center” in Seoul.

Choe Sang-HunChang W. Lee
By Choe Sang-HunPhotographs and Video by Chang W. Lee
Choe Sang-Hun reported from Seoul, Gwangju and Jeungpyeong, South Korea.

Oct. 12, 2024
The deceased lay wrapped in a cotton blanket, surrounded by white roses and hydrangea, angelic figurines and lit candles and incense. A wall-mounted screen displayed photographs of him. His 71-year-old companion, Kim Seon-ae, convulsed with tears as she bid farewell, caressing his head and face. Next door, young uniformed morticians prepared for his cremation.

The elaborate and emotional ritual was for a white poodle named Dalkong, who was nestled in a willow basket with his eyes still open.

“He was like a virus that infected me with happiness,” said Ms. Kim, who had lived with Dalkong for 13 years until he succumbed to heart disease. “We were family.”

Image
A woman touches a small dog lying in a basket while another woman stands next to her, hand on her face.

Kim Seon-ae and her daughter Kim Su-hyeon said goodbye to Dalkong, their poodle, at Pet Forest, a funeral home for pets in Gwangju, a Seoul suburb.

Image
A casually dressed person stands holding a small bag, face distorted with crying.

Im Ji-yeong wept as she held Kangyi’s ashes after the dog’s funeral at Pet Forest, which she attended with her mother, Kim Kyeong-sook.

Not long ago, South Korea often made global headlines — and raised the ire of animal rights groups — for its tradition of breeding dogs for meat. But in recent years, people here have gravitated toward pets, especially dogs. They are looking for companionship at a time when more South Koreans are choosing to stay single, childless or both. More than two-fifths of all households in the nation now consist of only one person.

The pandemic also did much to bring pets into homes, as people cooped up indoors adopted dogs and cats from shelters and the streets.

Now, one out of every four families in South Korea has a pet, up from 17.4 percent in 2010, according to government estimates. Most of them are dogs. (The Korean numbers are still low compared with the United States, where about 62 percent of homes have a pet, according to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center.)

“In this age of mistrust and loneliness, dogs show you what unconditional love is,” said Ms. Kim’s 41-year-old daughter, Kim Su-hyeon, who raised two dogs but has no plans for children. “A human child may talk back and rebel, but dogs follow you like you are the center of the universe.”

Kim Kyeong-sook, 63, whose 18-year-old dachshund, Kangyi, was cremated on the same day as Dalkong, agreed. “When I left home, he saw me off at the door until it was closed behind me,” she said. “When I returned, he was always there, going crazy as if I were coming home from war overseas.”

Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/10/01/126 ... g_720p.mp4

Pet Forest staff members prepared Kangyi for cremation as Ms. Im and Ms. Kim looked on.CreditCredit...

The boom in pet services has changed the country’s urban landscape. Hospitals and shops catering to pets have become ubiquitous, while childbirth clinics have all but disappeared, as South Korea’s birthrate has become the lowest in the world. In parks and neighborhoods, strollers are more often than not carrying dogs. Online shopping malls say they sell more baby carriages for dogs than for babies.

Politically, dogs have led to a rare case of bipartisanship in a country that is increasingly polarized. In January, lawmakers passed a law that banned the country’s centuries-old practice of breeding and butchering dogs for human consumption.

Now, dogs are family members that get splurged on.

Sim Na-jeong says she wears an old, $38 padded jacket but has bought $150 jackets for Liam, a jindo she adopted from a shelter four years ago.

Image
Two women sit on mats in an outdoor area of a Buddhist temple. A dog sits between them.

Park Young-seon, left, her daughter, Sim Na-jeong, and their jindo, Liam, at Mireuksa, a Buddhist temple in central South Korea.

Image
Two people sit on stone steps under a tree, each holding a small, fluffy dog.

Kim Sang-baek, his wife, Kang Hyeon-ji, and their Pomeranians, Pposong and Pporong, at Mireuksa, one of a number of temples in South Korea that encourage visitors to bring their dogs.

“Liam is like a child to me,” said Ms. Sim, 34, who does not plan to get married or have children. “I love him the way my mom loved me. I eat old food in the refrigerator, saving the freshest chicken breast for Liam.”

Her mother, Park Young-seon, 66, said she felt sad that many young women had chosen not to have babies. But she said she had come to accept Liam as “my grandson.”

On a recent weekend, the mother and daughter joined six other families who took their dogs on a picnic to Mireuksa, a Buddhist temple in central South Korea. So-called temple stays are a way for ordinary people to meditate and enjoy the monastic quiet. Now, some temples encourage families to bring their dogs along. All participants, human and canine, wear gray Buddhist vests and rosaries.

Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/10/01/126 ... g_720p.mp4

Visitors, human and canine, at Mireuksa.CreditCredit...

“I feel more attached to my dogs than to my husband,” said Kang Hyeon-ji, 31, who got married last October and was there with her spouse and two snow-white Pomeranians. Her husband, Kim Sang-baek, 32, shrugged with an embarrassed smile.

Seok Jeong-gak, the head monk of the temple, patted her own dog, Hwaeom, as she preached that humans and dogs were just souls wearing different “shells” in this cycle of life, who may switch shells in their next incarnation. As the sermon went on under a large canvas shade in a temple lawn, Liam was busy licking his paw.

The visitors had booked the temple stay through Banlife, a smartphone app that helps people find pet-friendly restaurants, resorts and temples.

“When I started my business in 2019, people doubted that many would take pets on vacation,” said Lee Hyemi, who runs Banlife. “Now there are people who not just walk their dogs but do everything with them.”

Ko Jee-ahn runs Dogkingabout, a “total dog care center” in Seoul that includes day-care specialists, trainers, doctors and groomers.

Image
A woman sits on a floor, smiling down at a dog to whom she is offering a treat.

Ko Jee-ahn, who runs Dogkingabout, training a dog named Eunsol.

Image
A man squats on the floor as three small dogs play near him.

Jason Jeon, a teacher, playing with dogs at Dogkingabout.

“People used to treat pet dogs as something they owned and showed off, something they could also discard if they behaved badly,” Ms. Ko said. “Now they treat them like family members. If they turn aggressive, they don’t think of replacing them but think of what the problem is and what they can do to fix it.”

The growing industry surrounding pets has an underbelly: Last year, animal rights activists led the authorities to raid a puppy mill and rescue 1,400 dogs kept there under cruel conditions. Officials found dozens of dog carcasses in freezers.

As shocking as the episode was, the government’s role in rescuing the dogs and finding them shelters also reflected the country’s shifting attitude toward animal rights. At the National Assembly, lawmakers have proposed new legislation that would ban the auctioning of puppies and tighten other regulations for dog breeders.

Elaborate pet funerals like Dalkong’s did not start until around 2017, when Pet Forest, a pet funeral service company, envisioned them as a way to help people deal with their pet-loss syndrome.

“Pet funerals have since become much like human funerals,” said Lee Sangheung, the president of Pet Forest.

Now, there are 74 licensed pet funeral centers across South Korea. Families select coffins and shrouds for their pets.

After cremation, they receive the ashes in a small urn or have them turned into gemlike stones and carry them home. Or they can deposit them in a memorial hall, where they keep their pets’ memory alive with photographs and handwritten notes, pet toys and snacks and flowers. One family had visited their dog’s ashes seven times since the white Maltese “crossed the rainbow bridge,” or died, in 2022, according to the notes they left.

“No matter how old the dog is when it dies, it is still a child to its human family,” said Kim Wonseob, a pet mortician.

Image
A wall of partitioned shelves, each niche containing a funeral urn and an assortment of flowers, photographs of dogs, and other small items.

A columbarium at Pet Forest.

Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/12/worl ... arity.html