Europe's Wave of Migration Brought Too Many Men

[Purveyor]

There’s a lot of interesting data on Europe’s wave of refugees in Pew’s latest report. But here’s a piece of information that is not so much interesting as disturbing: Only 27 percent of those refugees are female. In every age group, from nearly every country of origin, women are greatly outnumbered. And the difference is even more pronounced for immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Gambia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, for example, sent virtually no women at all. Over all, refugee men outnumber refugee women nearly two to one.

There are two scenarios that can unfold from this fact. The first is that destination countries simply end up with an imbalance between the number of men and women in their populations. That would be a problem; even slightly out-of-whack gender demographics can have substantial social impacts. The refugees -- already predisposed to experience isolation, disconnection and disaffection from their host society -- will thus also bear the desperation of men who have little hope of forming a long-term relationship with a woman and starting a family. This is a recipe for disaster.

So why not allow additional women to emigrate from these men’s countries of origin? This would aggravate another set of problems.

Just last year, several of the more popular destinations for immigration saw their foreign population shares increase by more than 1 percentage point. (The U.S. has long been the world’s most popular destination for immigrants. For comparison, it saw a similar increase over 10 years, from 2005 to 2015.) To allow enough additional women to fix the gender imbalance would imply something like another half-percentage-point increase, over a very short period of time.

more...

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-09/europe-s-wave-of-migration-brought-too-many-men

[pscot]

1. a casual look at any film from the check points

made that crystal clear as it was happening. people were calling it a recipe for disaster then.

[Warpy]

3. Women whose husbands have died in the fighting are largely stuck where they are

because nothing bogs down any potential for movement like kids. Men without families are the most mobile, so they leave as soon as they can get out.

Short term, it will be a terrible problem for everyone, especially the isolated, culture shocked men. Eventually enough of them will marry into the dominant culture that they'll serve as human contact and interpreters for their single friends. Others will take the first opportunity to save enough for a ticket home as soon as the fighting stops, just to return to the familiar and find out who's left.

A very few will go bonkers and kill people in the host country.

Unless they can manage truces during which they can actively pull woman-headed families out of the war zone, this is going to continue. Countries that can afford support systems for refugees beyond food and shelter will have fewer incidents than those who can't. And this is just the beginning. As climate change famines occur, it will get worse.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. It also means that a disproportionate number of females

are left behind, causing all sorts of other problems.

I believe that generally speaking, immigration is skewed male. It was certainly true for immigration to this country much of the time, and noticeably so in the entire westward movement of settlers.

[Igel]

4. Yes, it probably is.

However, that doesn't negate that the way this wave of migration was sold wasn't accurate and was visibly inaccurate at the time. Yet those who pointed out the inaccuracy were simply shamed and even excommunicated. Because, well, those who said otherwise were simply right.

Many of the migrants were just migrants. But it was "these are refugees, think of the women and children, how dare you call those poor people migrants, fleeing Syria with the shirt on their back" ... And then sitting in Lebanon or Jordan or Turkey for years until hope was provided by a wave of immigrants being given shelter and sympathy. The first attempt at dismissing the facts was to say that these were the gate-openers, the brave souls going ahead to prepare a place for their families. Well, apparently the men decided to just say, "Screw my family." These were disproportionately young adult males who were simple economic migrants, as many of their stories simply indicated. "There's nothing for me in the refugee camps," "I have no future in Turkey," or even, "I wanted to go to a school in Germany, but wasn't accepted--as a refugee they'll take me."

This is what the data strongly suggest, however "counterfactual" it may be to those who need to believe otherwise.