The Coming White Flight in Europe
Here are the 2017 population estimates by the United Nations for four famous European countries — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy — and four obscure African countries — Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, and Niger. According to the UN’s Population Division, these little known countries will come to dwarf Europe’s traditional Great Powers in numbers by the second half of the 21st Century. (The UN demographers assume only modest migration flows.)
Keep in mind that the UN’s forecast of 192 million people in 2100 in Niger is not for Nigeria. I couldn’t adroitly fit Nigeria’s expected 794 million on the graph, so I left it off. Instead I went with the much less well known country of Niger, Nigeria’s northern neighbor on the southern fringe of the Sahara. Of course, it is extremely unlikely that 192 million people will be living in Niger in 83 years. One possibility is that the people of Niger will choose to limit their fertility.
As of 2014, Niger’s total fertility rate was 7.6 babies per woman. As far as anybody can tell (and African vital statistics are not hugely reliable), this rate has not changed much for several generations, even as most of the non-African world has moved toward more sustainable levels of fertility. It’s important to note that the phenomenon of demographic momentum means that even if Niger’s total fertility rate fell to the replacement rate tomorrow, it’s population would continue to grow up into, perhaps, the early 2060s. Another possibility is that the people of the region will limit their population through resource wars or disease or starvation.
A third possibility is that vast numbers of people in Niger will move to other places, such as Europe. One thing to keep in mind is that Europeans, unlike Americans during the Great Migration from the South to Northern cities in the postwar era, do not have a frontier tradition. Americans upped stakes and headed for the new frontier in the suburbs, abandoning America’s cities to the newcomers and, often, ruin. The Great Migration from the South destroyed the city of Detroit, but the metropolis of Detroit survived because Anglo-Americans are pretty good at heading for unsettled territory, like Tom and Huck at the end of Huckleberry Finn and rebuilding. (In contrast, the Central Europeans of Pittsburgh hunkered down in their city and appeared to have come out the other end of the wringer largely intact.)
Europeans, however, don’t have that kind of tradition of moving on. They like their cities. They’ve been living in them for hundreds of years. Moreover, the American resettlement to the suburbs was facilitated by 29 cents per gallon gasoline. How this will all work out is not something that Europe’s political elites want to discuss with their voters. Since the future of the world will be heavily influenced by the huge number of Sahelians headed our way, here’s the opening of John Updike’s 1978 novel The Coup, in which he describes a fictionalized Sahelian country much like Niger. Keep in mind, however, that the population of Niger in 1978 was 5.7 million. Today it is 21.5 million. In another 39 years, the span of time since Updike’s novel, it is expected to grow to 81.4 million. The Coup begins with the Col. Gadaffi-like Col. Ellellou writing his memoirs in a Nabokovian-Updikean prose style:
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archive.fo/Nz0rj
unz.com/isteve/the-coming-white-flight-in-europe/