SOCIAL TRENDS

[kmaherali]

Can the Government Get People to Have More Babies?

Japan has been trying to boost its fertility rate for 30 years. Now the rest of the rich world is, too.



In 1989, Japan seemed to be an unstoppable economic superpower. Its companies were overtaking competitors and gobbling up American icons like Rockefeller Center. But inside the country, the government had identified a looming, slow-motion crisis: The fertility rate had fallen to a record low. Policymakers called it the “1.57 shock,” citing the projected average number of children that women would have over their childbearing years.

If births continued to decline, they warned, the consequences would be disastrous. Taxes would rise or social security coffers would shrink. Japanese children would lack sufficient peer interaction. Society would lose its vitality as the supply of young workers dwindled. It was time to act.

Starting in the 1990s, Japan began rolling out policies and pronouncements designed to spur people to have more babies. The government required employers to offer child care leave of up to a year, opened more subsidized day care slots, exhorted men to do housework and take paternity leave, and called on companies to shorten work hours. In 1992, the government started paying direct cash allowances for having even one child (earlier, they had started with the third child), and bimonthly payments for all children were later introduced.

None of this has worked. Last year, Japan’s fertility rate stood at 1.2. In Tokyo, the rate is now less than one. The number of babies born in Japan last year fell to the lowest level since the government started collecting statistics in 1899.

Now the rest of the developed world is looking more and more like Japan. According to a report issued in 2019 by the United Nations Population Fund, half of the world’s population lives in countries where the fertility rate has fallen below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman.

Why should countries care about shrinking populations at a time of climate change, increasing risk of nuclear catastrophe and the prospect of artificial intelligence taking over jobs? At a global level, there is no shortage of people. But drastically low birthrates can lead to problems in individual countries.

Tomáš Sobotka, one of the authors of the U.N. report and a deputy director at the Vienna Institute of Demography, does a back-of-the-envelope calculation to illustrate the point: In South Korea, which has the lowest birthrate in the world at 0.72 children per woman, just over a million babies were born in 1970. Last year, 230,000 were. It’s obviously too simple to say that each person born in 2023 will, in their prime working years, have to support four retired people. But in the absence of large-scale immigration, the matter will be “extremely difficult to organize and deal with for Korean society,” said Mr. Sobotka.

Similar concerns arise from Italy to the United States: working-age populations outnumbered by the elderly; towns emptying out; important jobs unfilled; business innovation faltering. Immigration could be a straightforward antidote, but in many of the countries with declining birthrates, accepting large numbers of immigrants has become politically toxic.


How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World

The most powerful countries have benefited from large work forces for decades. What happens when they retire?
Across Europe, East Asia and North America, many governments are, like Japan, introducing measures like paid parental leave, child care subsidies and direct cash transfers. According to the U.N., the number of countries deliberately targeting birthrates rose from 19 in 1986 to 55 by 2015.

The topic has surfaced in the American presidential campaign, with the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, chastising the country for its low birthrates and defending his past comments about “childless cat ladies” running the nation. Mr. Vance has suggested raising the child tax credit and said he would consider a policy, like one in Hungary, in which women with multiple children are taxed at a lower rate. On the Democratic side, Kamala Harris has proposed a $6,000 tax credit for families with infants. While Ms. Harris doesn’t present this as a pro-fertility policy, it echoes what other countries are doing.

More in Asia Pacific
//So, Are You Pregnant Yet? China’s In-Your-Face Push for More Babies.Oct. 8, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/worl ... tions.html


Advocates sometimes suggest that if you offer paid family leave or free day care, birthrates will magically shoot up. But for some 30 years Japan has been a kind of laboratory for these initiatives — and research shows that even generous policies yield only slight upticks.

After years of political grandstanding and a growing menu of government initiatives, modern families just don’t seem to want to grow larger. “The policies would need to be very, very coercive to push people to change their preferences,” Mr. Sobotka said. “Or to have kids they didn’t want or plan to have.” So what kinds of measures might actually induce people to have more babies? And if nothing really works, why not?

The Great Baby Bust

There’s plenty of evidence that governments can change fertility rates, but generally in one direction: down.

In East Asia, many of the countries that now have exceedingly low fertility initially imposed it on themselves. For more than three decades, China enforced a one-child policy. After World War II, Japan encouraged the wide use of contraception and decriminalized abortion in an effort to shrink the population. Likewise, in South Korea, the government legalized abortion in the early 1970s and discouraged families from having more than two children.

Minchul Yum, an associate professor of economics at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied South Korean birthrates, said his mother told him that “if you brought more than two kids onto public transportation, it was like a social stigma.”

In Europe and the United States, fertility rates declined as more women entered the work force and the influence of religion — particularly Catholicism — receded. Young people, who started to leave the communities where they were raised, pursue careers and build networks that normalized postponing marriage, had fewer children as they started childbearing later.

Lower birthrates signify progress: Declining infant mortality rates reduced the need to have many children. As economies transitioned away from predominantly agricultural or family-owned businesses that required offspring to run, people focused on leisure and other aspirations. Women could now pursue career goals and personal fulfillment beyond raising children. Undergirding it all was the rise of birth control, which meant women could determine whether and when they got pregnant.

But the impediments to having multiple children have also grown. Housing costs are ballooning and the gig economy has made young people worry about their own — and their potential offspring’s — financial security. The cost of educating children and preparing them for a more competitive and inequitable job market keeps increasing. The kinds of institutions that once helped people meet future partners with whom they might want to have children, such as the church or formal matchmaking services, have waned.

As families have fewer children, they invest more in those they have. Parents in China, Japan and South Korea compete to enroll their children in the best schools and pay for rigorous tutoring from a very young age. Some of those practices have become familiar in the United States, too. In August, Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general, issued an advisory to call attention to rising levels of stress and mental health concerns among American parents.

Children no longer provide direct economic value with their labor, or an insurance policy in the way that in previous generations it was virtually guaranteed that children would take care of their parents in old age, according to Poh Lin Tan, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies in Singapore. “We are at the place where having children is really a matter of pure joy and a preference where you kind of have to pay for and make some sacrifices in terms of your leisure and career advancement,” Tan said.

Better Dads, More Babies?

Despite changes in family and work life, traditional ideas about who should take care of children — women, of course — have proved resistant to policy prescriptions. “Cultural expectations are designed to fit a way of living that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Matthias Doepke, an economist at the London School of Economics. “That is the root cause of these extremely low fertility rates that we have in rich countries.”

In Japan, a demanding work culture that originated in an era when many women stayed home makes it difficult to balance career and family. Despite some changes, employees are still expected to put in long hours, socialize with colleagues or clients at night and travel frequently for business. More than in the West, Japanese mothers, even those with careers, take care of the majority of child care and housework.

Kumiko Nemoto, a sociologist and gender scholar at Senshu University in Tokyo, interviewed 28 Japanese women in executive or managerial positions. Many did not have children. Those who did either relied heavily on their parents or paid as much as $2,000 a month for child care. “Almost all of these women said their husbands did not help them,” Ms. Nemoto said.

Some governments on the other side of the world have tried to address these kinds of inequalities. Scandinavian countries have enacted policies to shift some of the burden onto men in the hope that they can support bigger families.

In 1995, Sweden introduced what came to be known as the “daddy month,” a month of parental leave given to the spouse — usually the father — who had not already taken leave after the birth of a child. If that spouse did not use the month, the couple would lose it. With the addition of second and third “use it or lose it” months in subsequent years, more fathers took paternity leave. “That has created a change in cultural expectations on what it means to be a good father,” said Ylva Moberg, a researcher in economics and sociology at Stockholm University.

Yet fertility rates in Sweden have not increased. Economists say it’s not clear that that means the policy has failed, given that Sweden’s rates are higher than those in East Asia. “The problem for economists is that even if the fertility rates haven’t gone up, they could have gone down more,” said Anna Raute, an associate professor of economics at Queen Mary University of London.

Some conservatives and religious scholars suggest that rather than encourage fathers to do more, governments should incentivize women to quit work to raise children. But even countries like Finland and Hungary that provide generous benefits, such as letting a parent take up to two or three years off after a child is born, have not seen significant increases in their fertility rates.

Marriage, or Something More Fundamental

If more gender equality between parents, tax rebates and cash allowances can’t create bigger families, what else can a desperate government do?

In Japan, policymakers are trying a new gambit: promoting weddings. Last year, fewer than 500,000 couples got married in Japan, the lowest number since 1933, despite polls showing that most single men and women would like to do so. One obstacle is that many young adults live with their parents — close to 40 percent of people aged 20 to 39, according to data from 2016, the latest year for which it is available. “Living with your mom is not the best romantic environment for finding your lifelong partner,” said Lyman Stone, director of the Pro-Natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies in Charlottesville, Va.

Japanese politicians have also talked about the importance of raising wages, and some economists say the government should support corporate social activities that could lead to relationships. L.G.B.T.Q. advocates argue that Japan should legalize same-sex marriage and help such couples have children.

The Tokyo government recently launched its own dating app, but it has not released any enrollment figures. On social media, the initiative seems to have gotten more attention from Elon Musk than from local residents.

It’s hard to imagine that this pro-wedding push will succeed in boosting the birthrate any more than Japan’s last three decades of initiatives have. In the end, it seems that governments can only do so much.

In China, intrusive efforts by the authoritarian government to encourage childbearing have generated a backlash. In democratic countries, policies with a whiff of a mandate will likely engender fierce opposition, too. The truth is that a decision as momentous as whether to have children rarely comes down to mere economics or who will change the diapers.

Influencing those choices may be beyond the reach of traditional government policy. For most people in affluent countries, having children is deeply personal, touching on our values, what kinds of communities we want to be part of, how we view the future. Sometimes it’s also about luck. “Policies cannot find you the best possible partner you dreamed of at the right time,” Mr. Sobotka pointed out.

That’s not to say that some of the policies implemented to spur higher birthrates, or at least partly for that reason, are not meaningful. Providing high-quality, subsidized child care, motivating fathers to take part in their children’s lives and refashioning the workplace to let employees engage with their families can all help improve the lives of those who do have children.

Here in Tokyo, friends with young children rave about the wonderful, affordable nursery schools where children from early infancy to as old as 5 eat nutritional lunches and caregivers send daily photos and personalized updates. Compared to when I was here as a newspaper intern in the late 1980s, I see more fathers taking their children on the subways and to playgrounds on weekends.

Still, it’s hard to escape the feeling that old people far outnumber babies. And I’ll tell you what I see more frequently than parents walking with toddlers: adults with their dogs dressed in sweaters and bootees, toting them in carriers strapped to their chests or pushing them in strollers.

Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Australia's birth rate hits rock bottom with severe consequences for economic future


Australia's fertility rate is at a record low of 1.5 babies per woman. (ABC News: Danielle Bonica)

In short:

Australia's birth rate of 1.50 represents an all-time low.

Experts say younger Australians are increasingly concerned about their economic security and that's influencing their family planning decisions.

What's next?

Australia has bounced back from low fertility rates before in similar economic circumstances, and demographers say the nation can do it again.

There are warnings that Australia's birth rate — having hit a record low — is now at a critical level.

Bureau of Statistics figures show 286,998 births were registered in Australia in 2023, resulting in a total fertility rate of 1.50 babies per woman.

Australian National University demographer Liz Allen said the nation's birth rate is perilously low.

"We've hit rock bottom," she said.

A woman with long dark hair in a red blazer smiles standing in front of an office bookshelf.
Demographer Liz Allen says Australia is reaching the point of no return. (ABC News: Luke Stephenson)

The Total Fertility Rate, or TFR, over the past 30 years has slowly dropped from 1.86 in 1993 to 1.5 in 2023.

The birth rate for girls and women aged 15 to 19 has fallen by more than two thirds over that period.

There's also been a large decline for women aged 20 to 24 years.

"We've got to a position where young people are saying now is inhospitable to having children," Dr Allen said.

"And young people are unlikely to achieve their desired family size.

"I'm not talking oodles and oodles of children — I'm talking a child, maybe a second one."

On the flipside, the fertility rate of women aged 40 to 44 years has almost doubled over the past 30 years.

Getting to the point of no return

Looking at the numbers overall, Dr Allen sees a big problem.

"What is so important about this particular number, 1.5, is that once we hit this figure we are basically staring down the barrel of no return," she said.

Dr Allen said the reason why dropping below a birth rate of 1.5 would make it so hard to come back up again was that having so few new babies coming through hampers economic growth, which in turn leads people to have even fewer babies.

A pregnant woman works at her desk.

Dr Allen says women are carefully considering how many children they have. (AAP: Tracey Nearmy)

She described a "deep-seated attitudinal problem" facing millions of younger Australians.

Many, the demographer said, lack enthusiasm about the future, and that relates to their views on climate change, housing affordability and gender equality.

"Once we hit ultra-low fertility like say, for example, countries in our region, like South Korea, there is generally no return," Dr Allen said.

"We are not going to see a baby boom of the likes of Australia's post-World War II period because we don't have the necessary ingredients for a baby boom."

Effect on economic activity

Terry Rawnsley is an urban economist at accounting firm KPMG.

He agrees, and describes the fertility rate of 1.5 as a "dramatic number".

"If you look at the international data and you look at countries who have slipped below [a fertility rate of] 1.5 — places like Italy, South Korea, Japan — and in those countries you do start to have this demographic time bomb starting to go off," he said.

A man wearing a blue jacket, standing in front of an office window overlooking a city.

Terry Rawnsley says birth rates are an indicator of economic confidence. (Supplied: KPMG)

"There's less and less workers being able to generate economic activity, people start to leave the country due to a lack of economic opportunities, and you do start to have a slippery slope towards a declining population.

"So the 1.5 is a place we want to start having some real firm conversations about how we try to turn this number around, because I don't think we want to be pushing much below this in the longer term."

As for solutions to a critically low fertility rate, Mr Rawnsley said Australia had dug itself out of fertility holes before.

"When you look at the drop-off in the number of births, you have to go back to the early 1970s to find a drop of a similar size," he said.

"And that's during a period of very high inflation, an increasing unemployment rate during the 1970s, so there's a bit of a parallel towards that sort of 1970s drop-off and what we're seeing 50 years later."

//Why women are choosing not to have babies https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-18/ ... /103849978
//Photo shows A woman with hands on her hips poses in front of a monument on a holiday.A woman with hands on her hips poses in front of a monument on a holiday.
//For decades, women in Australia have been told they should have more children for the good of the country, but there's many reasons why more are choosing to stay child free.

Dr Allen pointed the finger squarely at governments, both state and federal.

"Change the language, have leadership that really signals positivity for the future, but at the heart of it, four main areas: housing affordability, economic security, and that really comes down to job security, gender equality and climate change," she said.

"Invest in those four policies."

Official figures show the median birth age of mothers has also now risen to 32.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-17/ ... /104480816

[kmaherali]

The 20 Countries With the Lowest Fertility Rates in 2024



The 20 Countries With the Lowest Fertility Rates in 2024

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Worldwide, fertility has fallen from an average of 5 births per woman in 1950 to 2.3 births per woman in 2021.

With fewer children being born, concerns have arisen that there may soon be ‘too few’ people to sustain economies.

This graphic lists countries with the lowest fertility rates as of 2024, based on data compiled by Statista. All figures are estimates.

Understanding Fertility Rate

The fertility rate refers to the average number of children born to a woman of childbearing age in a given country. Typically, women between the ages of 15 and 45 are considered to be in their child-bearing years.

A fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, known as the “replacement rate,” keeps the population stable by replacing both parents and accounting for infant mortality—assuming no migration and stable mortality rates.

Taiwan’s fertility rate is estimated at 1.11 children per woman, the lowest in the world.

Region Country Children per Woman
Asia Taiwan 1.1
Asia South Korea 1.1
Asia Singapore 1.2
Europe Ukraine 1.2
Asia Hong Kong SAR 1.2
Asia Macau SAR 1.2
Europe Moldova 1.3
North America Puerto Rico (U.S.) 1.3
Europe Italy 1.3
Europe Spain 1.3
Europe Poland 1.3
North America Montserrat 1.3
Africa Mauritius 1.4
Europe Bosnia and Herzegovina 1.4
North America British Virgin Islands 1.4
Asia Japan 1.4
Europe Greece 1.4
North America Costa Rica 1.4
North America Bahamas 1.4
Europe Belarus 1.4
-- Global Average 2.3

Europe leads the ranking with eight countries, followed by Asia with six, North America with five, and Africa with one.

Europe is also the only region in the world expected to experience an overall population decrease in the near term (between 2022 and 2050), with a projected decline of 7%.

In contrast, populations in other regions—including Central, South, and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and North America—are expected to continue growing but will reach their peak populations before 2100.

Still, countries with low fertility rates have taken measures to mitigate the eventual impact on their economies.

For example, South Korea has started allowing families to hire foreign nannies to encourage higher birth rates.

Meanwhile, Japan has allocated as much as 3.6 trillion yen (US$22.3 billion) annually in an effort to reverse the trend.

Learn More on the Voronoi App
To learn more about fertility around the world, check out this graphic that shows when the world will reach its peak population.

https://www.voronoiapp.com/demographics ... -2024-2662

[kmaherali]

South Korea's Birth Rate Sees Glimmer of Hope

The number of births in South Korea increased for the second consecutive month in August, offering a small but encouraging sign for the country with the world's lowest birth rate.

Last year, the nation's fertility rate—measuring the number of expected births per woman—dropped to 0.72. President Yoon Suk Yeol has called the declining birth rate a "national emergency," with concerns that prevailing demographic trends could negatively impact the economy.

Despite over $200 billion in government spending on initiatives such as child care and cash subsidies, these efforts have yet to reverse the trajectory.

Couples Prepare for Wedding Performance

A couple prepare for their performance at a mass wedding ceremony on February 7, 2020, in Gapyeong, South Korea. Marriages were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in turn affecting the birth rate. JUNG YEON-JE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

According to a report from South Korea's statistics agency, 20,098 babies were born in August, marking a 5.9 percent increase compared with the same month last year. It was also the second consecutive month to see over 1,000 additional births, with the largest increase for August since 2012, when births rose by 6.1 percent.

From January to August 2024, a total of 158,011 births were recorded, a 0.4 percent drop from the same period in 2023. However, the agency cited the COVID-19 pandemic as a factor in the uptick, noting that many couples had delayed marriage until 2022, which in turn postponed births.

Newsweek emailed a request for comment to the South Korean embassy in the U.S.

Statistics Korea anticipated the birth increase may continue for a few more months.

"There is also a base effect of the low number of births last year, so there is a possibility that the increase in the number of births will continue until the end of the year," local media cited the agency as saying. If the upward trend holds, 2024 could mark the first net rise in births since 2015.

Despite these developments, it remains to be seen whether these trends will continue over the long term.

Cultural shifts and rising housing prices, especially in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, have led many millennials and Gen Z South Koreans to delay or avoid starting families. The central and local governments have introduced numerous policies to support child-rearing, but these efforts have not yet delivered significant long-term results.

In response to the crisis, the government is establishing a new ministry to address demographic issues. Newly released data also shows 20 percent year-over-year increase in marriages, while divorces dropped by 5.5 percent.

READ MORE South Korea

https://www.newsweek.com/south-korea-bi ... pe-1974157

[kmaherali]

Russia is putting pressure on women to boost the birth rate — but demographers say the main problem is too many people dying



According to U.N. projections, Russia’s population of around 146 million could shrink by 20 million people by the end of the century, with worst-case estimates predicting a dramatic decline of nearly 60 million people. In response to this looming crisis, the Kremlin has rolled out various initiatives to tackle the “demographic problem,” from promoting “family values” in schools to restricting access to abortion. The independent outlet Holod spoke with demographic experts to understand why these government efforts aren’t boosting birth rates, what could realistically slow the population decline, and whether immigration could be part of the solution. Meduza shares an English-language summary of their findings.

A 2024 U.N. report on demographic trends around the world puts Russia’s current fertility rate at 1.45 children per woman — well below the 2.1 needed to maintain population levels. According to the report, the country’s population has already peaked and is projected to decline, with estimates suggesting it could drop to 125–130 million by 2100.

Russian demographer Alexey Raksha has an even more pessimistic view. While U.N. experts predict that Russia’s birth rate could start rising as early as next year, Raksha is doubtful. “There’s no basis for that right now,” he said. “Given the current situation, the U.N.’s forecast for Russia in 2100 is overly optimistic. If nothing changes, the population could fall below 100 million.”

Fellow demographer Dmitry Zakotyansky argues that it’s difficult to even make predictions beyond 2050 due to the rapid pace of societal change. Scientists are working on breakthroughs like cancer vaccines, new treatments for heart disease and diabetes, and advances in reproductive technologies such as IVF and egg freezing. Zakotyansky believes that if these developments extend women’s reproductive years by even 10 years, they could significantly boost birth rates. “This could help ease the problem of depopulation,” he said.

The main driver of Russia’s population decline is natural attrition, explains demographer Aby Shukyurov. More people are dying than being born. Unlike Raksha, he considers the U.N.’s forecast of 125 million by the end of the century realistic. However, while some experts are optimistic that the generation born during the 2007 baby boom could improve Russia’s demographic outlook, Shukyurov believes this won’t be enough to halt the overall decline in the birth rate.

The bitter truth is that events in Russia affect your life, too. Help Meduza continue to bring news from Russia to readers around the world by setting up a monthly donation.

Death over life

Russia’s current birth rate can be attributed to the fact that a smaller generation, born in the late 1990s, is now reaching the average age to have children, says demographer Dmitry Zakotyansky. Even so, he points out that Russia’s fertility rate remains relatively high compared to many other regions. In East Asia, it’s around 1.1–1.2, and in Southern Europe, it hasn’t exceeded 1.4 in recent decades.

“For instance, during the crisis in the 1990s in East Germany, the fertility rate dropped to 0.7. In Russia, it’s barely fallen over the past two years — by just 0.1 child per woman, which is negligible,” Zakotyansky explained. “What worries me more is that society doesn’t seem to notice what’s really happening. Right now, the birth rate might be fine, but the mortality rate isn’t.”

Aby Shukyurov concurs, noting that while Russia’s birth rate is comparable to Europe’s, its mortality rate remains high. Cardiovascular diseases continue to be the leading cause of death, unlike in developed countries where cancer took over as the primary cause back in the 1970s.

The war in Ukraine has also impacted Russia’s demographics. Using open-source data, Meduza and Mediazona estimated that by the end of June, 120,000 Russian soldiers had died since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Meanwhile, Western intelligence puts the number of wounded around 400,000, according to The Wall Street Journal — and severe injuries can significantly shorten life expectancy.


Russia had one of the world’s highest life expectancy gender gaps. Then Putin sent hundreds of thousands of men to war.
2 months ago

Economic inequality is another key factor contributing to Russia’s low life expectancy, says Zakotyansky. Around 30–40 percent of Russians live in poverty, many of whom continue to smoke, drink heavily, and are more likely to be involved in or affected by crime. However, he believes this gap has narrowed somewhat over the past two years due to increased military payments, which have risen the most in some of Russia’s poorest regions.

Both Shukyurov and Zakotyansky believe the country’s declining birth rate is part of a broader demographic trend driven by scientific advances, vaccinations, and improved sanitation, all of which have greatly increased life expectancy. “No country has managed to bring back the birth rates of 20–30 years ago,” said Zakotyansky. “Russia’s ‘Social Support for Citizens’ program aims to raise the birth rate to 1.8, just to slow the decline. But I don’t think the current pro-natalist policies are enough to achieve that.”

All stick, no stork

In an apparent attempt to boost birth rates, Russian lawmakers are considering a bill to ban “childfree propaganda,” and many private clinics across the country have “voluntarily” stopped performing abortions. However, experts interviewed by Holod agree that these measures are more symbolic and politically motivated than effective in raising birth rates.

Banning “childfree propaganda” won’t make a difference, says Aby Shukyurov, explaining that research shows childlessness in Russia is often due to personal circumstances, not ideology. Alexey Raksha echoed this, calling the ban purely ideological, with no real demographic impact.


To tackle Russia’s ‘demographic problem’ schools prepare to teach children the virtues of home, marriage, and reproduction
2 months ago

Shukyurov also pointed to other measures, like reviving the Soviet-era “Mother Heroine” award for women with 10 or more children, “Conception Day" in the Ulyanovsk region, and requiring both a doctor’s and priest’s approval for an abortion in the Belgorod region, as equally ineffective. “On one hand, these measures seem almost laughable, but on the other, they’re clearly damaging because they make women’s lives harder,” he said.

There’s also talk of reintroducing a “childlessness tax,” similar to the one from Soviet times. “It’s just another way for the government to collect more money,” Shukyurov commented. “People who don’t plan to have children aren’t going to change their minds because the government charges them 2,000 rubles [$21].”

Abortion bans and restrictions are another common talking point for Russian officials. However, with the spread of contraception, abortions are already less common in Russia, says Dmitry Zakotyansky. And history, he adds, clearly shows that these measures won’t stop people from ending unwanted pregnancies. When abortions were banned during Stalin’s era, maternal mortality skyrocketed — pregnancy-related deaths rose by 76 percent in the first year, and maternal mortality doubled within five years. After abortion was legalized in 1955, those numbers returned to previous levels.

Now, Zakotyansky notes, generations of Russian women have grown up with the right to abortion, and taking that away won’t be easy. And even though these rights are slowly being chipped away, “it’s clear this won’t improve the birth rate,” he argued.


Invisible barriers Do Russian politicians really want to ban abortion?
3 months ago

Since the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine, anti-feminist rhetoric has become increasingly common in Russia. Lawmakers have called for a “legal ban” on feminism, claimed the “fight for equality is relegated to the archives” and said young women should “give birth, give birth, and then give birth again.” The Russian Orthodox Church has also weighed in, with programs on the religious Spas TV channel arguing that women who become pregnant from rape should give birth, while priests lament that the world is in a “difficult period in history” where women are “demanding equal rights with men.”

The Russian government has now officially incorporated patriarchal “family values” into its strategy to boost birth rates. However, Zakotyansky warns that this approach could backfire. He argues that modern women are more likely to forgo having children if they can’t balance family life with their careers, fearing it will hold them back professionally.

A policy at odds

Despite the Kremlin’s professed concern over population decline, it’s been tightening migration policies and escalating anti-migrant rhetoric. After the March 2024 terrorist attack at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, Russian authorities ramped up raids on migrant communities and passed laws creating a “special deportation regime,” sharply limiting migrants’ rights and reducing the length of time they can stay in the country without a visa. By April 2024, more than 30 regions, including occupied Crimea, had banned migrants from working in key sectors such as transportation, healthcare, and education.

The threat of being drafted is another deterrent. In the summer, Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, announced that more than 30,000 migrants who had obtained Russian citizenship but failed to register for military service had been added to the registry, with around 10,000 already sent to the front lines in Ukraine.


‘Unlawfully deported’ Police crack down on Russia’s migrant community after Central Asian suspects arrested for Moscow terrorist attack
7 months ago

All this this has predictably led to a steady decline in the number of economic migrants, even as Russia grapples with a historic labor shortage across various industries. Dmitry Zakotyansky notes that until 2022, immigration helped offset Russia’s low birth rate, with up to 300,000 people arriving each year. But this figure could soon fall to just tens of thousands. (He estimates that Russia has lost one to two million labor migrants over the past two years.)

Emigration has also taken a toll. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of Russians left the country after the 2022 invasion — whether due to opposition to the war, concerns about its economic impact, or fear of being drafted. While some have returned, many have not.

LISTEN:
Russia’s wartime emigration sparks a ‘reckoning’ in Central Asia

In a country with high immigration rates (and minimal emigration), there’s no need to aim for a total fertility rate of two children per woman, Zakotyansky explains. For example, the U.S. population is growing due to immigration, even though birth rates there are falling simultaneously.

Shukyurov concurs that migration would be the best way to counteract Russia’s shrinking population. However, as he points out, the country is taking the opposite approach: “The government is doing everything to boost birth rates, but at the same time, it’s restricting migration.”

Still, with Russia’s current fertility rate of 1.4, even immigration can’t fully offset population decline, Zakotyansky says. The country would still need a rate of at least 1.7 to see growth.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/10/22 ... ople-dying

[kmaherali]

Nigeria fertility rate dropped to record low in four years – Report
Anthonia Obokoh by Anthonia Obokoh 2 days agoin Health, Sectors

Nigerian women are having fewer children, with the fertility rate dropping to 5.01 births per woman in 2024, a decline over the past four years, according to Macrotrends data.

In 2023, the fertility rate was recorded at 5.076 births per woman, reflecting a 1.32% decline from the previous year.

The downward trend began in 2021 when the fertility rate stood at 5.212 births per woman, followed by rates of 5.144 in 2022 and 5.076 in 2023, each indicating declines of over 1% from their respective years, according to the report.

Buhari launches revised national policy on population, to address high fertility rate https://nairametrics.com/2022/02/04/buh ... lity-rate/
FEBRUARY 4, 2022

As Nigeria’s population is projected to exceed 400 million by 2050 even with declining fertility, experts suggest that together, these figures point to a steady reduction in reproductive behavior within Africa’s most populous nation, said Ojo Sikiru, a medical practitioner in Lagos.

“The decline rate may signal shifts in economic pressures, and access to family planning resources that are reshaping reproductive behavior.

“Rising living costs, particularly have led many families to opt for fewer children.”

“Many women are now aware of the benefits of spacing children and are choosing family planning options that work best for them. This level of awareness was not as widespread ten years ago,” he observed.

Additionally, data shows that Nigeria’s birth rate have continued to shift and has also fallen, now at 35.683 births per 1,000 people—a 0.95% decrease from 2023.

The data also shows that despite a gradual decline, Nigeria’s fertility rate remains almost two births higher than Kenya’s and 1.4 births higher than Ghana’s, whose fertility rates are at 3.604 and 3.214 births per woman, respectively.

“Nigeria has a unique opportunity to balance population growth with economic development by investing in family planning, healthcare, and education,” Larne Yusuf, a medical doctor in Lagos stated.

“With sustained effort, Nigeria can stabilize its fertility rate, improve living standards, and position itself for long-term growth.” agreeing that the country’s leadership must prioritize family planning and healthcare reforms.

By learning from regional neighbors like Ghana and Kenya, Nigeria may be able to chart a path toward a more balanced demographic profile that supports both development and improved quality of life for its citizens.

What You Should Know

Over the four years from 2021 to 2024, Nigeria’s fertility rate has steadily declined. Here’s a breakdown of the change:

2021: 5.212 births per woman
2022: 5.144 births per woman (decline of 1.31% from 2021)
2023: 5.076 births per woman (decline of 1.32% from 2022)
2024: 5.009 births per woman (decline of 1.32% from 2023)
Over these four years, Nigeria’s fertility rate decreased by a total of 0.203 births per woman.

Between 2021 and 2024, Nigeria’s birth rate has shown a consistent decline each year. Here’s the year-by-year breakdown:

2021: 36.855 births per 1,000 people (1.11% decline from 2020)

2022: 36.440 births per 1,000 people (1.13% decline from 2021)

2023: 36.026 births per 1,000 people (1.14% decrease from 2022)

2024: 35.683 births per 1,000 people, (0.95% decline from 2023)

Over these four years, Nigeria’s birth rate dropped by 1.172 births per 1,000 people (from 36.855 in 2021 to 35.683 in 2024), averaging around a 1% decline each year.

https://nairametrics.com/2024/10/28/nig ... ata-shows/

[kmaherali]

South Korea’s Radical Solution to Asia’s Birth Rate Crisis

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAT5wl3RjYk

South Korea is facing a demographic time bomb. The nation is grappling with the world’s lowest fertility rate and a rapidly aging population, which threaten its very future. The unfolding crisis mirrors a global trend that’s hitting East Asia hardest, forcing a reckoning between tradition and modern day realities for women. The choices South Korea makes now might provide a path for others to follow.

00:00 Intro of South Korea’s birth rate problem
01:57 Government-run matchmaking event
02:24 Where South Korea stands
02:45 Why young people avoid marriage and childbirth
04:25 How they got here
06:28 Gender equality plays a role
08:22 The wider global trend
09:07 What’s next?

[kmaherali]

Canada braced for migrants as Trump reiterates mass deportation vow

Police say plans in place to deal with rise in border crossings as US president-elect pledges to remove 11m people

Trump says deportation plan has ‘no price tag’


The Roxham Road crossing between New York state and Quebec. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/Reuters

Canada is bracing for a surge of migrants to its southern border after Donald Trump doubled down on his pledge to conduct the largest mass deportation in American history.

On Thursday, Trump told NBC News there was “no choice” but to proceed in removing some of the estimated 11 million undocumented people in the United States.

During Trump’s first term in office, tens of thousands of Haitians fled to Canada after he ended temporary protected status for the group (it was later restored). Many passed through the Roxham Road crossing, a rural country road that served as funnel for refugees attempting to safely traverse the world’s longest land border.

That crossing was closed in 2023 after Canada and the US amended the Safe Third Country Agreement, expanding it to cover the entire land border instead of only formal crossings.

The RCMP says it has plans to deal with a fresh increase in crossings that has been “several months” in the making. A spokesperson for the federal police said officers had the “tools and insight” to deal with another increase, including a scenario in which hundreds of people cross every day.

If those crossing claim asylum, the RCMP cannot send them back to the United States. Instead, their claims are entered into a system with an estimated backlog of 250,000 cases. The average processing time for a case is 44 months, a parliamentary committee heard on Thursday.

Experts fear that with formal crossings closed to migrants, desperate families will take increasingly dangerous routes across the 5,500-mile border. In many locations, the terrain and the weather can be deadly.

In January 2022, a family of four – including a baby – died after attempting to cross from Canada to the United States. Police said the group died from the intense cold and punishing winds, where temperatures had dipped to -35C (-31F).

Last year, the bodies of eight people, including two young children and their parents, were discovered on the banks of the St Lawrence river near the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, which spans Quebec, Ontario and New York state.

Both cases involved groups heading from Canada into the US, but migrants heading north face the same challenges, which as winter approaches include sub-zero temperatures, deep snow and frostbite.

In Quebec, the province that absorbed most of the crossing, politicians warned the federal government was unprepared for a repeat of the last Trump administration.

Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the separatist Bloc Québécois party, said Ottawa was “refusing to acknowledge an obvious and very serious situation” and that more resources were needed to anticipate new routes used by human smugglers.

Quebec’s premier, François Legault, told reporters he did not believe the province had the capacity to absorb a significant number of new arrivals, adding that although border security falls under the purview of the federal government, his government would possibly send its own officers to monitor crossings.

Earlier this week, the deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, said her government “absolutely recognize[d] the importance to border security and of controlling our own border, of controlling who comes into Canada and who doesn’t”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ation-plan

[kmaherali]

U.S. fertility rates are tumbling, but some couples still go big. Why?


Catherine Pakaluk.

Economist’s ‘Hannah’s Children’ is an up-close look at large families

Samantha Laine Perfas

Harvard Staff Writer


Birth rates are falling globally. In fact, the fertility rate in the U.S. hit a record low of 1.64 expected births per a woman’s lifetime in 2020.

At the same time, about 5 percent of women in the nation currently have five or more children. Catherine Pakaluk, Ph.D ’10, a Catholic University economist and mother of eight (and stepmother of six), wanted to find out why, both academically and personally. Her new book, “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” offers an intimate view into the lives of families around the country who have decided to pursue large families.

Pakaluk spoke with the Gazette about what she learned. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What drew you to this topic, and why do you think it’s an important one to talk about in the current moment?

As an economist I’ve been interested in questions related to population growth as it relates to labor market and human development for a long time. But in the last 10 years, especially since the Great Recession, it’s become increasingly a puzzle: Why have birth rates been declining so rapidly and why aren’t they responding to some of the [policy] things that we would assume they would respond to? I thought this was really interesting.

I’m also interested in women’s choices and labor market choices. I was noticing that around the world, countries are about to get kind of bossy about women having children. They’re applying bigger and bigger incentives to try to get people to have kids. It’s becoming a mounting policy concern, with nations wanting people to have kids. That always sounded a little alarming to me, so I wanted to see what we could learn. Falling birth rates represent one of the main concerns for the contemporary political economy, mainly because the social welfare programs [like Social Security] are creaking and straining under these decreasing birth rates.

In your book, you talk to women who are defying the birth rates by having five or more children. You found that they faced misperceptions by those around them about why they had so many children. What were they?

The main misperception would be that the kind of women who decide to have a lot of children — whether they have careers or not — must be part of religious cults or are people who lack full human agency. That’s concerning that the assumption is that other people are making decisions for these women, be it their religious leaders or husbands. That’s not the case.

The other main misperception that I heard commonly is that women who have a lot of children probably reject modern forms of birth control, either because they don’t know how to access it or don’t believe in it. I knew that wasn’t true in my life, but I thought it was worth exploring.

Book cover: "Hannah's Children".


Nobody I talked to said that not using birth control was the reason for their family size. Some women did prefer to use fertility awareness methods for spacing their children, but I found that whether they did or didn’t use birth control they truly and intentionally chose to have their children.

Did you find any connection between religion and family size?

What I found (and this will sound very economist-y of me) is that the choice process followed a cost-benefit, rational choice model. In that framework, when people make a decision they weigh the expected joys or benefits with the expected costs.

In the case of women making purposeful decisions to have large families, they definitely described the costs in their choice. What I heard was an acute description of the costs, which didn’t seem to be expense-driven, but were more about waking up every two hours for a long time, the effects on their bodies, the trade-offs made in regard to their personal identities.

But when it comes to faith and religion, what I heard was a uniting around the idea that children are a great blessing. That provided a huge benefit to the women in my study that outweighed the significant personal costs. Faith played a role of tipping the scales toward having more children.

I will say, I didn’t talk to people who had smaller family sizes. That wasn’t the purpose of this project. But this group was a group of people who really felt that they began their families intentionally, experienced great joy, felt the blessings were tangible in their lives, so they decided to keep going.

Studies have shown many women want more children than they eventually have — you call this the fertility gap. What’s causing this?

If I could easily answer what’s causing the gap, I’d probably be a candidate for the next Nobel Prize. But in all seriousness, I think of recent Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin’s work, which helps us see what’s going on. I would point back to her work on the “Power of the Pill” and what the pill does in shaping the lives of American women. It opens the choice set, right? And, of course, I think her more recent work on women’s labor is so insightful and helps us see that when you change the choice set for people, who are rational agents making decisions, you create a new comparison class for the goods that you can choose.

What hormonal contraception did in the 20th century is it provided women with more choices. If you wanted to pursue a career, you didn’t have to give up marriage. In the past, if you wanted to go to college or have a profession, you had to give up marriage and partnership. What ends up happening when you broaden the choice set is that a lot of people want both. And so they end up choosing a little bit less of each. So if, objectively speaking, you might have chosen three kids, you might be okay with the trade-off of fewer children to also have a profession.

What we’re seeing is the outcome of a constrained optimization. People are choosing the bundle career and family, and in this constrained world there’s only so much time. One of the women in my study said, “Look, there’s some things that are best done young.” She says, of her medical training, “I would never want to go through that later in life.” But it’s also the easiest time to build the family size that you might want to have. So you have these two things that are in tension. I don’t think that’s an enormous mystery.

Most of the families that you talk to in the book describe themselves as happy and healthy. Did you speak to any who are struggling — economically, emotionally, physically — with dealing with a larger family?

My sample is not representative, and people volunteered to talk to me. So I’m sure, in that sense, there’s a bit of a bias in favor of people who are pretty happy with how things were going. But within that sample, I intentionally looked for families who are at all ends of the wealth distribution. I talked to families who were either on food stamps or eligible for food stamps or other forms of income supplements.

I also spoke to people who were going through postpartum depression, women who were struggling to manage ongoing mental illness, depression, or anxiety. But I would say that everybody that I talked to, mostly due to the study design, felt that whatever troubles they experienced were worth it. I certainly don’t believe having a large family is any guarantee that everything will work out well. However, the purpose of the book was to examine motive: What could lead people to have more children than normal?

The women you spoke to were fully on board with their decisions to devote so much of their lives to their families, even while acknowledging that it took incredible sacrifice. Is there anything policymakers can glean from their experiences that can help make things better for parents and families overall?

I don’t think women have children thoughtlessly. I think a lot of blood, sweat, and tears goes into the decision. And I would say that the same thing must be true for people who choose not to have children.

The sometimes flippant nature of political discourse on women’s family and fertility decisions doesn’t take the issue as seriously as it should. The idea that we could influence a couple with $1,000 more of a tax break or a baby bonus is almost offensive. Or even to say you can influence people with a lot of money, like $200,000 to $400,000 per baby, that it would move the needle. I think this is a really sacred and private decision.

So if we know that, what could make things easier? One thing that came out of this work was the story of faith, but I think that story has just as much to do with community and social support. Where can we put our dollars (in a fiscally responsible way) that helps people in this way?

What I took away from my study was that whatever we can do from a policy perspective to protect and enlarge spaces — religious or not — for people to grow and develop, those are the kinds of things people should think about.

I also think about role modeling. Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s book “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice” is so interesting. They look at these deep-seated fears that people have about making the choice to have children. But if you can see others who have gotten over the hurdles, you might be more open to it. I think policymakers could think harder about how we treat faith institutions and think about them as a favored means to provide support to families.

What do you hope readers take away from the experiences of the women in your book?

I wanted to leave people with a message of hope. These are serious topics. But if there’s some people out there defying the odds and not undershooting their own fertility desires, here’s a model of people who are pulling this off.

A lot of times you read the news and see how nobody’s having the families they want to or it’s getting harder and harder. It’s helpful to realize that trends in society are measured in averages. But in fact, many people live lives that are very different from the average.

If we’re interested in building a family, I think there are some concrete lessons from people who have done it. It shows that what’s happening with family size isn’t deterministic. I hope people feel hopeful and optimistic about it, and not like these falling birth rates have to be the whole story of the future.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/ ... o-big-why/

[swamidada]

CNN Business
‘Your body, my choice’: Attacks on women surge on social media following election
Clare Duffy, CNN
Mon, November 11, 2024 at 4:33 PM CST·

Online trolls from the "manosphere" have shared abusive comments about women in the days following Donald Trump's reelection.
Sexist and abusive attacks on women, like “your body, my choice” and “get back to the kitchen,” have surged across social media since Donald Trump’s reelection, according to an analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

An X post from White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes last Tuesday night saying, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” has been viewed more than 90 million times and reposted more than 35,000 times. Between Thursday and Friday, the ISD recorded a 4,600% increase in mentions of the phrase on X. And a number of women on TikTok posted videos saying their comments had been filled with users posting the phrase.

“Nick Fuentes” was still trending on X and TikTok on Monday. The phrase “we own your body” was also trending on TikTok, although many of the videos featured women pushing back on the trend.

“Your body, my choice” is an apparent subversion the phrase “my body, my choice,” which was used by women as a rallying cry in support of reproductive rights.

The rise in harassment signals that far-right online trolls and extremists feel emboldened by the outcome of an election that many had viewed as a referendum on women’s reproductive rights. On the campaign trail, Trump himself came under fire for comments about women, including that he would protect women whether “they like it or not.” Vice President-elect JD Vance also took heat for comments about women, including deriding “childless cat ladies” and calling Vice President Kamala Harris “trash.”

Many of those trolls are part of the so-called “manosphere,” which the ISD describes as online “misogynistic communities that vary from anti-feminism to more explicit, violent rhetoric towards women.”

And as with many types of online provocations, experts worry that this type of harassment could spill over into the offline world.

Already, the ISD said, “Young girls and parents have used social media to share instances of offline harassment” involving the phrase “your body, my choice.”

“They include the phrase being directed at them within schools or chanted by young boys in classes,” according to the report, published Friday.

In some cases, X and TikTok users responded to posts saying “your body, my choice” with vague threats of retaliatory violence.

Other, similar posts have also gone viral on X in recent days, including one from Jon Miller, a former contributor to conservative media outlet TheBlaze, saying, “women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” which received 85 million views. (The post appeared to refer to conversations among young liberal women across TikTok and Instagram about South Korean feminist movement in which straight women refuse to marry, have children, date or have sex with men.)

Posts calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote, also surged 663% on X last week, compared to the prior week, the ISD reported.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The platform’s harassment policy generally prohibits only targeted abuse of specific individuals.

A TikTok spokesperson said “your body, my choice” violates the platform’s community guidelines and that content with mentions of the phrase would be removed unless it is explicitly speaking out against such language. TikTok removed three videos identified by CNN that appeared to suggest threats of retaliatory violence.

The ratcheting up of violent online rhetoric also comes as Black people across the country last week received anonymous, racist text messages referencing slavery and telling them they were “selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation,” raising further concerns about violence in the wake of the election. Federal and state authorities are working to find the origins of the messages.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 38722.html

[kmaherali]

Top 10 countries that will have the highest population in 2100



Population Trends

From a global population of approximately 2.5 billion in 1950 to an estimated 8 billion in mid-November 2022, the world’s population has grown exponentially. This growth is projected to continue, reaching about 9.7 billion by 2050 and potentially 10.4 billion by 2100. Population trends reveal varying paths ahead: while some countries are set to experience significant growth, others may see a drop in population. These shifts reflect changing birth rates, aging populations, and migration trends, all of which will shape the future global population landscape. In this list, we present the top 10 countries that will have the highest population in 2100, as projected by the UN Population Division.



What is UN Population Division?

The UN Population Division, part of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, collects and analyzes global data on topics such as migration, urbanization, fertility, and population growth. Using these insights, it generates the official United Nations demographic estimates and projections for every country and region worldwide.



Factors influencing population growth

There are three major factors that influence the population rate: fertility rates, increasing longevity, and international migration. High fertility rates lead to more births, driving population increases, while rising longevity extends the average lifespan, contributing to an aging yet larger population base. Migration also plays a role as people relocate across borders, often shifting population balances in both origin and destination countries.



India and China

India became the most populous country in the world in 2023, surpassing China. The UN has estimated that India's population will continue to grow for several decades, while China's population recently reached its maximum size and has shown a decline since 2022. By 2100, India will remain the most populous country with an estimated population of 1,533 million, while China's population will be 771 million.



Nigeria

Nigeria's estimated population is around 546 million, making it the third most populous country in the world. Africa has the highest rate of population growth among major regions.



Pakistan

Pakistan is the third Asian nation to appear on the list of the most populous countries in 2100. It is predicted that Pakistan will have a population of 487 million.



Congo

As of November 3, 2024, the population of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is 110 million, which is 1.34% of the world's population. The population is projected to increase by 110% by 2050, reaching 218 million. The population is expected to reach 431 million by 2100.



USA

As of July 2024, the United States is the third most populated country in the world, with a population of 336 million. The United States' population growth is primarily due to immigration, as the fertility rate is lower. By 2100, there will not be much growth in their numbers compared to other countries. It is expected to reach 394 million.



Ethiopia and Indonesia

Indonesia is the fourth most populated country in the world, with a population of 284 million, but this number will not grow by much by 2100. As per the projections by the UN Population Division, the country will have a population of 297 million. On the other hand, Ethiopia, with a current population of 133 million, will see a sharp increase in population. It is predicted to have a population of 323 million by 2100.



Tanzania

Tanzania's population is projected to increase from 61.7 million to 244 million by 2100, making it the 9th most populated country in the world and the 4th most populated country in Africa.



Egypt

Egypt's population is expected to increase to 225 million by 2100, which is a 120% increase from current projections.



Does excessive population growth have adverse impact on a country?

Excessive population growth can negatively impact a country in various ways. It strains resources such as food, water, and energy, leading to shortages and higher prices. Overpopulation exacerbates environmental degradation through increased pollution and deforestation. The pressure on infrastructure and public services, like healthcare and education, can lead to inadequate provision. Economic challenges arise with higher unemployment and poverty rates. Social issues, including overcrowded living conditions and increased crime, can deteriorate the quality of life. Unplanned urbanization creates slums and insufficient amenities. Addressing population growth through effective policies is essential for sustainable development and ensuring a better quality of life.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/eti ... =115192319

[kmaherali]

Trump Immigration Targets: Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Haitians

The president-elect has vowed to end a program that allows thousands of people from troubled nations to stay in the United States.


During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said he would order mass deportations. It is one of many threats that have stirred concerns among immigrants and prompted protests like this one last Saturday in Manhattan.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed a crackdown on immigration like never before.

While his hard-line rhetoric about illegal immigration harks back to his first campaign, one of the president-elect’s targets this time is a decades-old program providing temporary legal status to about one million immigrants from dangerous and deeply troubled countries such as Haiti and Venezuela.

Known as Temporary Protected Status, the program was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush to help people already in the United States who cannot return safely and immediately to their country because of a natural disaster or an armed conflict.

But for some immigrants, the program, which allows them to work legally, has become all but permanent, a reflection of how troubled many corners of the world are and how little Congress has done to adapt the U.S. immigration system to the realities of global migration in the 21st century.

About 200,000 people with T.P.S. are from Haiti, a long-troubled island nation where the assassination of the president in 2021 led to the collapse of the government and the killings of thousands of people by gangs that now control much of the country. Haitians have emerged as the focus of Mr. Trump’s threats to effectively end the program after he and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, spread false rumors that Haitians who have settled in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets.

Image
A mural on the side of a building reads “Greetings from Springfield Ohio.”

Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, spread false rumors that Haitians who have settled in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Thousands of Haitians have settled in the city, and the majority of them have lawful status, often through the program. That has made them attractive to local industries in need of workers. But the influx has strained resources and caused friction among some residents, and Mr. Trump seized on those tensions, vilifying the Haitians who have made Springfield home and threatening to effectively end the program for them and hundreds of thousands of other immigrants.

“Absolutely I’d revoke it,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with News Nation last month, adding that he would send the immigrants back to their country.

Mr. Vance, for his part, has repeatedly characterized Haitians in Springfield and other T.P.S. holders as “illegal aliens” granted “amnesty” by the Biden administration at the wave of a “magic government wand.”

“We’re going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status,” Mr. Vance said at a campaign event last month.

The biggest group of people granted protection under the program — about 350,000 — comes from Venezuela, where political repression and economic collapse under the Maduro regime have led millions to leave in recent years.

Immigrants from some countries, including El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, have been eligible for the protection for more than two decades. Other countries, including Ethiopia, Lebanon and Ukraine, were added more recently.

Proponents of limiting immigration have been critical of the program, which they say allows people who receive the designation to ultimately stay in the United States indefinitely.

Image
Thomas Homan, in a black suit and blue tie, stands at a white podium on a stage.

Thomas Homan, who led the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency during Mr. Trump’s first term, has been picked to manage border policy for the White House.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

Mr. Trump’s advisers have made clear that his administration will reverse course on T.P.S., and his early choices for key immigration roles include notable hard-liners.

Late Sunday, the president-elect announced that Thomas Homan, who led the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency during Mr. Trump’s first term, would manage border policy for the White House. On Tuesday, he selected Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a key ally, to run the Homeland Security Department. And the president-elect is expected to name Stephen Miller, who was instrumental in the crackdown during Mr. Trump’s first term, as the White House deputy chief of staff.

The secretary of homeland security decides whether conditions in a given country merit granting its nationals protected status. The status lasts six to 18 months at a time and can be renewed indefinitely, so long as conditions warrant. Immigrants in the United States, whether they entered legally or not, are eligible for the status, which does not place them on a path to permanent legal residency, or green cards.

The Biden administration has renewed, reinstated or added protections for 16 countries.

Ending the program could uproot people who have been in the United States for years. Many would have to quit their jobs and return to troubled countries, and some families with U.S.-born children could end up separated, with parents forced to leave the United States while their sons and daughters remain.

The Obama administration offered the special status to Haitians in the United States in 2010, after a cataclysmic earthquake devastated the capital and killed at least 250,000 people. At the time, the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, noted that the program would allow Haitians to work legally and send money home to family members, which she called an indirect form of aid.

Since the assassination of the country’s last president in 2021, Haiti has plunged into political chaos and been plagued by gang violence that killed thousands of people and made water, food and health care far harder to obtain.

On Monday, a Spirit Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was struck by gunfire while trying to land in the capital, Port-au-Prince. It was one of three international aircraft hit by gunfire in recent days, which led the F.A.A. to ban U.S. carriers from flying to Haiti for 30 days.

Image
Lesly Joseph, a Haitian-born dentist, sits on a blue-and-gold patterned sofa, his legs crossed and his hands clasped and resting on his left knee.

“I can’t even think of it,” Lesly Joseph, a Haitian-born dentist, said of the prospect of losing Temporary Protected Status, which has allowed him to work as a researcher at Boston University.Credit...Kylie Cooper for The New York Times

Lesly Joseph, a Haitian dentist, and his wife, flew to the United States in 2021 on tourist visas after being threatened at gunpoint by gangs. The couple felt fortunate, he said, when the Biden administration designated Temporary Protected Status for nationals of Haiti, based on the spiraling violence within a day of their arrival.

“T.P.S. offered me sanctuary to live here and protect my family from harm,” said Dr. Joseph, who lives in Boston and has a 3-year-old American daughter.

Dr. Joseph was hired as a researcher at Boston University and is working toward obtaining a license to practice dentistry in the United States.

If the temporary status gets stripped away, he would immediately lose his job. “I can’t even think of it,” he said.

Returning to Haiti would be akin to a death sentence, Dr. Joseph said, noting that a physician friend had been murdered by gangs this week.

The Trump administration tried to scrap the program in 2017 and 2018 for El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan, and was sued in federal court. The administration argued that the program had turned into a quasi-permanent benefit for hundreds of thousands of people.

The American Civil Liberties Union won a preliminary injunction to keep the program in place, and the Trump administration appealed the decision. The case was still before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit when Mr. Trump left office in 2021, but it became moot after the Biden administration signaled its support for the program.

Now, with three of Mr. Trump’s nominees part of a conservative super majority on the Supreme Court and many more elsewhere in the federal judiciary, a renewed effort to end T.P.S. could fare better in the courts.

Image
Dozens of people sit in rows of chairs at a meeting.

Immigrants, rights groups and concerned citizens attend a meeting with Connecticut state and local officials to discuss the uncertain future following Mr. Trump’s win in the election.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

“This time around, the Trump administration is likely to be more sophisticated in documenting its policy rationale for why Temporary Protected Status is no longer justified,” said Lenni Benson, a professor at New York Law School.

President Biden has used Temporary Protected Status for “more foreigners from more countries than any previous administration,” said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that sees legal immigration as essential to a healthy economy.

He said that the president had “appropriately” responded to the increase in the number of countries in turmoil.

The designation helped relieve pressure on Democrat–led cities, like New York, Chicago and Denver, struggling to assist tens of thousands of migrant arrivals. The mayors of those cities urged the administration to allow the migrants to work so that they could achieve self-sufficiency more quickly, and Temporary Protected Status was the answer.

Ahilan Arulanantham, who was lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the case that in 2020 reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, said that he was prepared for another court battle to defend the program.

“The statute requires that the government undertake an objective assessment of the conditions for each country to decide whether that country is safe for the return of nationals,” said Mr. Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.

“Haiti, which has been the subject of intense political controversy, is obviously very unsafe at the moment,” he said.

Image
A man in a dark shirt, left, hugs Lindsay Aimé, right, who is wearing a dark blue plaid shirt.

“We will try to live peacefully and stay alive here,” said Lindsay Aimé, right, a Haitian community leader, seen embracing Carl Ruby, pastor at Central Christian Church in Springfield, Ohio, during a service in September.Credit...Jessie Wardarski/Associated Press

Lindsay Aimé, a Haitian community leader in Springfield, said that if Mr. Trump revokes T.P.S., he will cause grave harm to Haitians who have found refuge and stability in the United States.

“Without T.P.S., you can’t work, you can’t drive, and you won’t be able to pay your bills,” he said. But even so, the Haitians who are here already would be unlikely to leave, he said.

“We will try to live peacefully and stay alive here.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/us/t ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

On Migration, Europe Warms to Ideas Once Seen as Fringe

As in the United States, a decline in the numbers of migrants crossing borders has not stopped anti-migrant sentiments from gaining ground.


A police officer near Dunkirk, in northern France, trying to prevent a group of migrants from crossing the English Channel in April.Credit...Sameer Al-Doumy/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Jenny GrossSteven Erlanger and Christopher F. Schuetze
Jenny Gross reported from Brussels, Steven Erlanger from Berlin and Erfurt, Germany, and Christopher F. Schuetze from Görlitz, Germany.

Nov. 18, 2024
Updated 7:50 a.m. ET
Europe has been struggling for years to limit the number of unauthorized migrants entering by land and sea, instituting increasingly tough policies. Those moves now appear to be working, with the numbers of migrants crossing into European Union countries decreasing dramatically from highs last year.

But despite the decline in migrant arrivals, anti-immigrant sentiment is flourishing, with leaders adopting or considering harsher policies that mainstream political parties would have balked at just a few years ago.

As in the United States, the steep drop in border crossings has done little to diminish the political potency of the issue.

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is trying to send migrants rescued in the Mediterranean to Albania. Germany, one of the most welcoming countries during the wave of migration in 2015, has extended patrols to all its land borders. And Poland plans to introduce legislation to temporarily suspend the right of new arrivals to ask for asylum.

The crackdowns have been driven in part by xenophobic, anti-immigrant parties that have played on fears of uncontrolled migration and a dilution of national identity. Their arguments are gaining a more receptive audience with Europeans who worry that the influx of migrants is unmanageable and are frustrated that roughly 80 percent of failed asylum seekers never leave, according to E.U. data.

Their leaders, some of them facing elections, have taken note. In Germany, the Christian Democrats — the party of former chancellor Angela Merkel, who famously welcomed immigrants in 2015 — have been pressing hard for tougher measures to control illegal immigration and is leading in the polls.

Image
People can be seen on a dock alongside and on the deck of a ship.

Migrants disembarking from an Italian Navy ship in Albania this month. Credit...Florion Goga/Reuters

“The far right is the mainstream when it comes to migration now,” said Susi Dennison, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Paris.

What do tougher measures look like?

Europe has tried many methods over the years to limit unauthorized migrants from arriving, including controversial programs that paid countries like Libya and Turkey to stop them from taking rickety boats out to sea.

Other measures were seen as either too harsh or potentially illegal. A 2018 E.U. report outlining options concluded that sending asylum seekers to third countries without processing their requests was not permitted under European Union and international law.

So it was a sign of how far the discussion has moved to the right when Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, praised Italy’s plan to send migrants to Albania as “out-of-the-box thinking.” Under Ms. Meloni’s plan, migrants would be screened in Albania and stay in detention centers while they await decisions on their asylum applications.

That plan has been held up by an Italian court that questioned whether asylum seekers from possibly unsafe countries could be held in Albania.

Other ideas floated by European leaders would involve paying countries outside the bloc to process asylum applications and take on the responsibility of deporting those whose claims fail. Human rights groups have questioned the legality of such programs.

Britain unsuccessfully tried a more extreme approach, attempting to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing and resettlement. Even those whose claims were accepted would never have been allowed to settle in Britain. The country’s Supreme Court ruled the policy illegal.

Other countries, including Poland and the Netherlands, are, like Germany, intensifying border controls.

Image
People can be seen through the bars of a border wall.

Migrant families standing behind the border wall at the border between Poland and Belarus in 2023.Credit...Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Those increased border checks appear to be making a difference, and having something of a domino effect.

On a recent morning in the German town of Görlitz, which sits on the Polish border, police were conducting random checks on people crossing into Germany by car and bus over two of the main bridges spanning the river Neisse, asking to see their identification.

Michael Engler, a federal German police officer, said his colleagues now typically stop about a half dozen unauthorized migrants per day, compared with about 250 in October of last year. The reason, he said: fewer migrants are making it that far, since Poland — on the outer periphery of the bloc — is tightening its own borders.

What is driving the anti-immigrant backlash?

One reason is the sheer numbers of migrants over the last decade and the failure of many governments to integrate them effectively. Some of the blame is also placed on extremist parties exaggerating the problem and the dangers. As they have attracted voters, they have also pushed more centrist parties to take a harder line.

While the numbers of unauthorized migrants attempting to cross into the E.U. dropped 43 percent in the first ten months of this year compared to the same period last year, that follows a year in which the bloc experienced its highest number of such crossings since 2016. At that time, Europe was in the throes of a migration crisis driven in part by more than a million Syrian and Afghan refugees fleeing war.

According to Frontex, the E.U.’s external border agency, there were about 380,000 irregular border crossings into the bloc in 2023.

In addition, more than four million Ukrainians have been offered temporary protection in the European Union since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Image
A large group of people standing at a fenced-off area.

Refugees from Ukraine lining up to receive Polish identification numbers in Warsaw in March 2022.Credit...Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York Times

Also driving outrage is the failure to deport rejected asylum seekers, a task that can be complicated.

Often the migrants’ countries of origin refuse to take them back, especially if the people destroy the paperwork proving where they were born. While the deportation process drags on, migrants can move undetected to other countries in the bloc since there are few restrictions on travel between many European nations.

The anger over failed asylum seekers boiled over in Germany in August, after a Syrian whose application for asylum had been rejected confessed to fatally stabbing three people and wounding eight others at a festival in the city of Solingen. The attack happened just months after a police officer was killed in a knife attack in Mannheim; the Afghan man indicted in that case had also been denied asylum, but then married a German so was in the country legally.

Germany has been successful in integrating many of the refugees who came in 2015 and 2016, but for many Germans, the attacks added to worries that immigration was costing too much when the economy is flagging.

Some local officials and dozens of Germans interviewed in the former East Germany say that the large numbers of immigrants have also strained public services.

Katja Wolf, a state politician from an anti-immigrant party and a former mayor of Eisenach, a German town with a population of 40,000, said people there had embraced migrants early on but soured on them as the numbers overwhelmed schools and health-care facilities.

The town had welcomed 1,000 Syrian refugees in 2015, a number that has grown to 1,600, she said in an interview. “But in two or three years it completely changed the surface of the city,” she said. “Our local people felt that they were not getting help, that as Germans they were being left alone by the state and the refugees got everything they needed.”

She called the higher numbers of migrants “not a healthy increase.”

Image
Officers in green uniforms struggling with a man in jeans next to a helicopter.

Officers leading the suspect in a Solingen stabbing attack in Germany to his arraignment in August in Karlsruhe.Credit...Ronald Wittek/EPA, via Shutterstock

But some leaders have also publicly noted Europe’s need for workers as the population in Europe ages and the birthrate stays low, leaving gaps in the work force.

Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain, said last month that immigration is “not just a question of humanitarianism, but it’s also necessary for the prosperity of our economy and the sustainability of the welfare state.” The key, he said, “is in managing it well.”

What happens next?

For now, Europe remains frozen in its attempts to balance the economic necessity for more workers, the concerns of its citizens over migration and the need to abide by longstanding European laws meant to protect refugees.

In Italy, Ms. Meloni has appealed the court’s ruling against her outsourcing plan, a ruling that will be closely watched by other leaders. For now, the detention centers in Albania remain empty.

One thing the European Union has been able to address is the longstanding demand for more countries to share the burden of accepting or caring for migrants, but even that plan does not come into effect until 2026. The program aims to more evenly distribute migrants and the cost of receiving them, reducing pressure on countries like Greece, Italy and Spain, where many migrants first land.

In the meantime, ideas like Ms. Meloni’s are gaining favor, with other leaders also considering paying countries to process asylum applications and possibly deport those whose claims are denied.

Raphael Bossong, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said it would be an enormous challenge to find countries that are willing to take failed asylum seekers, when there is no clear way to legally deport them. “There is a lot of hot air in terms of what could be done next,” he said.

Image
The remains of a boat on a beach with the sea in the background.

The remains of a boat carrying migrants and asylum seekers that was part of a deadly shipwreck in February 2023 in Steccato di Cutro, Italy.Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens, and Emma Bubola from Rome.

Migration in Europe

After Years of Wrangling, E.U. Countries Reach Major Deal on Migration https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/20/worl ... sylum.html
Dec. 20, 2023

Where Germany’s Immigration Debate Hits Home https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/worl ... ation.html
July 13, 2024

A Fatal Knife Attack Puts an Immigration Spotlight on a German City https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/worl ... right.html
Aug. 27, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Trump Confirms Plans to Use the Military to Assist in Mass Deportations

Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser has discussed using military assets to build detention centers and support civilian immigration agents.

President-elect Donald J. Trump confirmed on Monday that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

On his social media platform, Truth Social, Mr. Trump responded overnight to a post made earlier this month by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, and who wrote that Mr. Trump’s administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.”

At around 4 a.m., Mr. Trump reposted Mr. Fitton’s post with the comment, “TRUE!!!”

Congress has granted presidents broad power to declare national emergencies at their discretion, unlocking standby powers that include redirecting funds lawmakers had appropriated for other purposes. During his first term, for example, Mr. Trump invoked this power to spend more on a border wall than Congress had been willing to authorize.

In interviews with The New York Times during the Republican primary campaign, described in an article published in November 2023, Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

The Homeland Security Department would run the facilities, he said.

One major impediment to the vast deportation operation that the Trump team has promised in his second term is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, lacks the space to hold a significantly larger number of detainees than it currently does.

That has sometimes led to allowing asylum seekers into the country while they await court dates with immigration judges, a practice critics deride as “catch and release.”

The Trump team believes that such camps could enable the government to accelerate deportations of undocumented people who fight their expulsion from the country. The idea is that more people would voluntarily accept removal instead of pursuing a long-shot effort to remain in the country if they had to stay locked up in the interim.

Asked about the proposal, Sabrina Singh, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, declined to comment, calling it “a hypothetical.” In general, she added, such a plan would typically undergo “a rigorous process” before being enacted, but she declined to elaborate.

Immigrant advocates assailed the move, raising alarms about the potential fallout.

“President-elect Trump’s dystopian fantasies should send a chill down everyone’s spine, whether immigrant or native-born,” said Karen Tumlin, the director of the Justice Action Center, an immigrant advocacy organization. “Not only is what he is describing in all likelihood illegal, this move would be the exact opposite of the legacy of service in which my family members were proud to participate.”

Robyn Barnard, the senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First, asserted that the consequences would be far-ranging. “Families will be torn apart, businesses left without vital employees, and our country will be left to pick up the pieces for years to come,” she added.

Congressional Democrats responded with a similar level of incredulity, asserting that such a move was all but certain to violate federal laws preventing the use of the military on American soil.

“We’re pursuing whatever we can do to make clear that the Insurrection Act should not permit that use of the military,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, referring to the 1807 law that grants presidents emergency power to use troops on domestic soil to restore order when they decide a situation warrants it. Under that law, “if there is no threat to public order of a fundamental, far-reaching kind, it would be illegal,” he added.

Republicans, however, suggested that Mr. Trump’s proposal might not be a radical departure from the status quo.

“Obviously they’re not law enforcement, but I have to see what their process is,” said Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, who served as the lead Republican negotiator on a bipartisan immigration deal that failed to pass the Senate after Mr. Trump urged the G.O.P. to reject it. “If the National Guard is providing transportation, they do that a lot already.”

Hard-right members of Congress and staunch supporters of Mr. Trump have expressed broad support for his proposal for mass deportations. Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, chimed in on social media on Monday to back using the military for such an effort, saying Mr. Trump was “100% correct.”

Mr. Miller has also talked about invoking a public health emergency power to curtail hearing asylum claims, as the Trump administration did during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr. Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border amid a surge in asylum seekers and his reprogramming of military funds toward his border wall in 2019 was a face-saving way out of a spending standoff with Congress that had led to a government shutdown. It led to legal challenges that had not been definitively resolved before President Biden took over and halted further construction on the border wall.

Mr. Trump’s team said it had developed a multifaceted plan to significantly increase the number of deportations, which it thought could be accomplished without new legislation from Congress, although it anticipated legal challenges.

Other elements of the team’s plan include bolstering the ranks of ICE officers with law enforcement officials who would be temporarily reassigned from other agencies, and with state National Guardsmen and federal troops activated to enforce the law on domestic soil under the Insurrection Act.

The team also plans to expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal, which is currently used near the border for recent arrivals, to people living across the interior of the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years.

And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.

Mr. Trump has already signaled his intent to follow through on his promises with personnel announcements. He named Mr. Miller as a deputy chief of staff in his administration with influence over domestic policy. And Mr. Trump said he would make Thomas Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants, his administration’s “border czar.”

Mr. Homan told The New York Times in 2023 that he had met with Mr. Trump shortly after the now president-elect announced that he would seek office again. During that meeting, Mr. Homan said, he “agreed to come back” in a second term and would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/us/p ... ation.html

[kmaherali]

What ‘Mass Deportation’ Actually Means



If you didn’t think they were serious before, you certainly ought to know better now.

Donald Trump’s team has construed his victory as a mandate for carrying out what it has described as mass deportations. Even before Mr. Trump announced a nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, he named Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, and Tom Homan (who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during part of Mr. Trump’s first term) as a White House-based czar to oversee “all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin.”

It is tempting to assume that after his first term and four more years of planning, Mr. Trump and his administration will find no obstacles to impose their will swiftly and completely.

But that’s not true. No executive order can override the laws of physics and create, in the blink of an eye, staff and facilities where none existed. The constraints on a mass deportation operation are logistical more than legal. Deporting one million people a year would cost an annual average of $88 billion, and a one-time effort to deport the full unauthorized population of 11 million would cost many times that — and it’s difficult to imagine how long it would take.

So the question is not whether mass deportation will happen. It’s how big Mr. Trump and his administration will go, and how quickly. How many resources — exactly how much, for example, in the way of emergency military funding — are they willing and able to marshal toward the effort? How far are they willing to bend or break the rules to make their numbers?

The details matter not only because every deportation represents a life disrupted (and usually more than one, since no immigrant is an island). They matter precisely because the Trump administration will not round up millions of immigrants on Jan. 20. Millions of people will wake up on Jan. 21 not knowing exactly what comes next for them — and the more accurate the press and the public can be about the scope and scale of deportation efforts, the better able immigrants and their communities will be to prepare for what might be coming and try to find ways to throw sand in the gears.

Understand, first of all, that no change is needed to U.S. law to start the deportation process for every unauthorized immigrant in the United States. Being in the country without proper immigration status is a civil violation, and deportation is considered the civil penalty for it. Just as he did during his first term, Mr. Trump will almost certainly issue guidance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that every unauthorized immigrant is fair game for arrest, and that deportable immigrants who happen to get caught up by ICE, even if agents aren’t specifically looking for that person, could also be detained.

ICE agents already have authority to conduct enforcement in residential and commercial areas; the reason they usually haven’t (even under Mr. Trump) is because those raids take a lot of planning for the frequently low numbers of people they actually nab. It requires far less effort to simply pick up immigrants from local jails, which is why ICE tends to prefer working with local law enforcement. Since some local police are more willing to cooperate than others, this makes deportation risk a matter of geography.

But the arrest of immigrants isn’t the same as their removal.

For most immigrants — those who haven’t been apprehended shortly after their arrival — deportation isn’t a quick process. It generally entails the right to a hearing before an immigration judge, to prove that the immigrants lack legal status and that they can’t apply for relief (such as asylum). In the meantime, they’re either released on supervision or held in immigration detention.

In fiscal year 2024, Congress gave ICE the money for 41,500 detention beds. This is insufficient for anything that would constitute mass deportation. Extra holding facilities can be spun up as needed, but not immediately — and at higher cost (because of, say, noncompetitive contractor bids) than building a detention facility the usual way.

Immigration courts are famously backlogged, not least because that’s where asylum-seekers end up to present their cases. (An initial screening at the border can weed out some asylum claims, but frequently — especially under the Biden administration — bottlenecks at the screening stage can get fixed by skipping people straight to the no-less-bottlenecked immigration court stage.) As of the end of September, 3.7 million people were waiting for their claims to be resolved. This includes an overwhelming majority of the recent border crossers whose arrival under President Biden so incensed Mr. Trump and his allies. They can try to rush their court cases through faster (though they’ll need people, meaning money, to do it), but there’s not much juice to squeeze in rounding up people who are already, legally speaking, in deportation proceedings.

The only people who can be both easily rounded up and deported without a court hearing are those who have already been ordered removed from the United States but are allowed to stay if they come in for regular check-ins. Indeed, those were some of the first people targeted in 2017. The problem there — and a problem for any mass deportation operation — is that many of these people were not immediately deported because their countries had not agreed to accept deportation flights from the United States, or had limited the number of deportees they would accept. Mr. Trump has no problem using any diplomatic cudgel available to get other countries to cooperate on immigration enforcement. But it’s going to be tricky to argue simultaneously that, say, the United States is in some sort of conflict with Venezuela that would somehow allow for the deportation of its nationals through the activation of the Alien Enemies Act (which requires a declared war or an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by a foreign government), and also that Venezuela must bend the knee and allow large numbers of deportation flights onto its soil.

Who gets targeted first — who is most at risk in the days after a second Trump inauguration — will depend in part on which of these problems the administration tackles first. If Trump officials get a diplomatic breakthrough with a country previously deemed recalcitrant, expect large numbers of people to get arrested at their ICE check-ins and deported under existing removal orders. If they don’t, expect deportations to be limited to countries that are generally already willing to take U.S. removal flights (like Mexico, Guatemala, Peru). People with prior contact with the criminal justice system are politically appealing targets, but if they haven’t already been deported, it may be because their cases are complicated and will need to be worked out in court. People who have a form of legal status that has lapsed, or legal protections that the Trump administration might try to strip, such as Temporary Protected Status, may be easy to find but won’t be quick to remove.

Many Trump critics are liable to wave off such considerations, because they assume that a second Trump administration will have no problem breaking the law en masse to deport large numbers of people. Even if true, that doesn’t exempt them from the logistical realities: beds in detention, seats on planes.

That this mass deportation will happen with no legal restraints, accountability or oversight is by no means a premise to be granted without contest. Because resigning oneself in advance to a maximalist vision of mass deportation helps accomplish the same goal: making immigrants feel they have no choice but to leave the United States.

There are two previous occasions in which the U.S. federal government can be said to have engaged in mass deportation — around the 1930s and the 1950s. Both entailed horrific conditions for those caught and deported, and the tearing apart of families with claims to both the United States and other countries. But in both cases, the federal government ultimately took credit for “deporting” some people it never actually laid hands on — those who had been pressured or terrorized into leaving.

In the 1930s, high-profile raids in Los Angeles didn’t net that many immigrants to deport — the real impact was in sending the message that raids might happen, leading some immigrants to pick up and leave and many more to stay home and out of the public eye. In 1954 and 1955, the so-called Operation Wetback probably arrested and removed fewer immigrants than had been removed the year before — historians think of it as a retroactive P.R. campaign for the previous year’s efforts, but one that had effects of its own. In the first month of Operation Wetback, one historian estimates, 60,000 immigrants left Texas voluntarily — about as many as the government apprehended throughout the country per month.

For those who believe the United States will be better off if every unauthorized immigrant leaves the country — no matter how many native-born U.S. citizen children they have to take with them to keep families together or how many American communities are surveilled and disrupted for years — making people afraid enough to deport themselves is a convenient and low-cost way to do it.

Conversely, those who do not wish to see millions of people leave the United States under coercion during a second Trump administration should do what they can to prevent that reality. That starts with a committed and cleareyed understanding of what is actually happening, and a willingness to treat abuses of power as a rupture and an aberration — something that can, and should, be fought.

They can document and communicate when the government is breaking the law; pressure state and local officials to refuse to collaborate with federal removal efforts by refusing to share information, and especially by objecting to deployment of the military or National Guard in their states’ territory; and support efforts to provide legal representation to immigrants.

This work will require, particularly for those who are not themselves immigrants, a promise not to let pessimism do the Trump administration’s job for it. The government will do things that hurt people. It will do things that look scary.

But how many people will be caught up in a deportation machine, and how quickly, is by no means a settled question — and it’s one that a public sympathetic to immigrants should continue to care about the answer to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

How Hostility to Immigrants Will Hurt America’s Tech Sector


An improvised ladder hangs from a portion of the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in Sunland Park, N.M.Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times

Will business prosper under a second Donald Trump presidency? As far as I can tell, many business leaders are pinning their hopes on the belief that he won’t actually follow through on his campaign pledges on tariffs and mass deportation — that they’ll be like his border wall, which, for the most part, he never built but claimed he had.

But I believe that such optimism is misplaced. Trump’s obsessions with tariffs and immigration go way back, and he probably won’t respond well if people ridicule him for not delivering on his signature policy ideas.

If he does not moderate his policies, the damage will be considerable — bigger than even pessimists realize. Hostility to immigrants won’t just create labor shortages for many grueling manual jobs that native-born Americans are reluctant to do. It will also undermine American leadership in technology.

As you may know, Trump has declared his intention to declare a national emergency and deploy the military to help round up huge numbers of undocumented immigrants, initially placing them in what Stephen Miller, one of his top immigration advisers, has called “vast holding facilities.”

Such actions would be a humanitarian and civil liberties nightmare. But these considerations probably won’t deter Trump. If anything, he may welcome an uproar because it would make him look strong and decisive.

The economic impact may be another matter. Mass deportations would create shortages and raise prices in industries that employ large numbers of undocumented immigrants (plus workers legally here who might be caught up in the dragnets), including agriculture, meatpacking and construction.

I honestly don’t know how all this would play out, and I doubt that anyone does. Would it be ugly? Or would it be very ugly?

Beyond these near-term effects, however, there’s a likely consequence of Trumpism that hasn’t received a lot of attention: the threat that it will pose to American technological leadership.

Our technology sector is the wonder of the world. Circa 1995, the world’s major wealthy economies all seemed to be on roughly the same technological level, with similar levels of productivity; if Europe had lower levels of real G.D.P. per capita, one of the main reasons was that Europeans work fewer hours, because unlike us, they take real vacations.

But as a recent report for the European Commission by Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank, points out, America has pulled ahead again in recent decades. What I find interesting about this U.S. surge is that it isn’t broadly based: Europeans do most things about as well as we do. Instead, it’s all about America taking the lead in digital technology.

What’s driving that success story? No doubt it has multiple causes, not least the network externalities created by the technology cluster in Silicon Valley, which has incredibly high per capita income. But spend time in America’s tech hubs, and it becomes obvious that immigrants — often highly educated immigrants from South Asia and East Asia — are also a key part of the story.

Well, you may say, that shouldn’t be an issue. MAGA’s antipathy is aimed at undocumented immigrants taking blue-collar jobs, not tech wizards from India, right?

Wrong.

The first Trump administration was clearly hostile to legal, highly educated immigrants as well as undocumented blue-collar workers. It made getting or renewing visas significantly harder for high-skilled foreigners, which is the main way they can work here. And many of these workers fear that these policies will return, only worse.

If you want a sense of what Trump’s inner circle probably believes, it’s worth looking at a 2016 conversation between Miller and Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally who was released from prison in time to campaign for Trump. Bannon declared that legal immigration is the real problem, denouncing the “oligarchs” bringing in foreigners to do I.T. jobs he believes should go to Americans. “Well, that was brilliantly stated,” replied Miller.

Will it matter that some of these oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, were big Trump supporters? Probably less than they think. Historically, oligarchs who imagine that they have bought influence with an authoritarian leader discover that they are far more dependent on his good will than he is on their money. My guess is that Musk, in particular, will soon learn that he needs Trump more than Trump needs him.

So I’ll be very surprised if the turn against immigrants spares highly educated workers. Specific policies aside, one reason America has been so successful at attracting the world’s best and brightest is the openness of our society; more, perhaps, than any other nation, we have been a place where people from different cultures can feel welcome. That era may come to an end.

For the next couple of years, the proposed raids and detention facilities would probably dominate the news, and rightly so. But a decade from now we may also be acutely aware that by turning on immigrants, we undermined the technology sector, one of the things that actually makes America great.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3