The Power and the Money

What if America had been unpopulated in 1492?

The long Twitter debate between Pseudoerasmus and Gabe Mathy was triggered by an essay in Jacobin by my friend and colleague Suresh Naidu. He wrote a piece about what North America would have been like had the native population avoided decimation from infectious disease.

As a piece of counterfactual history, the essay has problems. The first is that we really do not know the pre-contact population of North America. Using his assumption of 0.5% population growth thereafter, we get a range of 26 million to 234 million native Americans today. Needless to say, those are radically different scenarios. The second is that the presence of large-settled native populations would have changed the dynamics of later immigration; would as many Europeans have arrived if North America had 45 million people in it around 1800? Finally, it seems likely that a large native population would have derailed the development of the institutions that sustained rapid North American economic growth. 

But as a polemic, the essay is quite successful. The latter two arguments unambiguously strengthen Suresh’s overall point, which is that there was nothing inherent in English culture that insured that its settler colonies would become rich and democratic places. The presence of an exploitable settled population would have permanently derailed the American experiment. Pseudoerasmus and Mathy were debating whether the English would have created an apartheid scenario (Mathy) or something more like Mexico (Pseudoerasmus). Neither seemed to doubt that the resulting society would be more oppressive and less democratic than what really emerged in the northern United States and Canada. Nor does Randy McDonald in his discussion of the piece. 

The essay raises an interesting question, however. If larger native American populations would have prompted the creation of a more extractive and generally nastier North American state, potentially with multiple rounds of civil war, what would have happened if there had been no native Americans when the Europeans first arrived in 1492? What would have been different?

It turns out that James Axtell was there in 1987.

First and foremost, Spanish colonization changes completely. Without the great civilizations in the highlands of Mexico and Peru, the Spaniards take much longer to move inland. Without the Taíno in the Caribbean, it is entirely plausible (albeit unlikely) that the Spaniards give up on the whole enterprise. Still, somebody would eventually set up Caribbean and Brazilian plantations based on African slavery but Mexico and Peru will remain backwaters. Nobody settles in the Río de la Plata until the 19th century. (And I suspect that it will be British settlers who land there, claiming it from a moribund Spanish empire.) With no silver fleets there is no Sir Walter Raleigh and his tropical adventures. So no British Guyana, just a vague area where Venezuela meets Brazil. Ditto, there is no French empire in Canada. No fur trade, no New France. 

Second, when the British finally do settle the eastern seaboard, later than in our world, their expansion is slower and messier. There are no American domesticated food crops. There are no native American agricultural techniques to learn. And with no seasonal burning by the native Americans, the forests are that much harder to clear. There is no native American medicine. No snowshoes. No toboggans. No longhouses. No canoes. And idiotic English hunters crashing around in bright colors and scaring off the game. In short, the colonists will have to invent a lot of wheels for themselves that in our world they got from the Native Americans and that is going to slow initial settlement by a lot, decades at the very least, possibly a century.

New York and Pennsylvania in particular will develop more slowly; without the profits from the Indian trade, it will be much harder to raise capital for settlement. North America will be even more skewed to the slave south.

Third, no independence until well after 1776. Once the eastern settlements are finally established, expansion is going to rocket westwards with no Indians, French, or Spanish to slow it down. Slaves will get sucked into the south even faster, but there will also be more escaped slaves lighting out to form colonies in the interior. Axtell postulates, plausibly but without a whole lot of solid evidence, that absent the Indian threat American society would be a lot less religious and lose its “garrison mentality.” In his words:  “The jeremiads of New England would certainly have been less shrill in the absence of the Pequot War and King Philip’s War, when the hostile natives seemed to be ‘scourges’ sent by God to punish a sinful people. Without the military and psychological threat of Indians within and without New England’s borders, the colonial fear of limitless and unpredictable social behavior would have been reduced.”

With much more evidence, he also postulates that with no wars, there is no need for Britain to raise colonial revenues. Nor is there any reason for Britain to restrict westward expansion. That is probably enough to head off the Revolution. And if later revolts should occur, the colonists will have two huge problems. First, they will be more separated from any martial habits. No militias, no real combat experience, just a vasty totalitarian infrastructure of slave catchers. Second, they will have no Indian opponents from which to learn guerrilla tactics. 

So by 1850 you have a British slave empire that sprawls over the entire continent, well into northern Mexico. (Who knows? Maybe it will British Americans heading south who discover the mines in Zacatecas and exploit them with slave labor.) The northern reaches will not have slavery, for the same reasons as in our world, but they may be less religious and less moralistic, more crassly commercial and more dominated by large landowners. 

You have a Caribbean and a Brazil that do not look entirely unlike our own ... but which have less European settlement. (With no natives to conquer and no native women to marry, Iberian migration will be slowed.) You have growing slave populations around the Mexican lowlands, parts of Central America, and possibly parts of the Peruvian coast ... but I would venture not much in the latter. There is no Panama Real or Camino de Cruces across Panama; those routes, primitive as they were, were constructed by native American slaves captured from Nicaragua.

American silver was less important to sustaining Spanish imperialism in Europe than many realize, but there will be no Price Revolution or Columbian Exchange ... and that will change Europe in unpredictable ways. 

But in America, well, things look ugly. If a Revolution does come, it looks likely to take the form of a Treasonous Slaveowner’s Rebellion against the Crown, but that assumes that a British government unexposed to the shock of the American Revolution will be as open to the movement of public opinion as our own. This British crown might not take any serious moves against the horror, and thus provoke no rebellion. The strain of New England moralism that produced abolitionism in our world might be weaker, or not there at all. 

Observatorio Argentino 36: What happened to the Afro-Argentines?

Today Argentina is not known for having a large black population.  

Being a country of Europeans is a deep part of Argentina’s national identity. The census stopped recording race in 1869. A bit more than 80 years later, when Josephine Baker visited, she was surprised at the absence of black people. So she asked Ramón Carilio, the dark-skinned minister of public health, where the black population lived. Carilio felt free to joke, “There are only two — you and I.”

When Era Bell Thompson visited Argentina in 1973 to report on the black population there, she recorded one Argentine’s ironic complaint about the United States: “Argentines are lumped in with all the rest of the Spanish-speaking peoples, even though we are white.” She had no problem finding black people, but she described them as “Not a viable, but a vanishing black people: relatively few in numbers, relatively free of racial discrimination and relatively content.”

Even now, some Argentines still joke — admittedly with some accuracy — that an Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and wants to be British. This view of Argentines is not only in Argentina: in 2001, when María Lamadrid visited Panama in 2001, immigration officials refused to believe that a black woman could actually be Argentine.

But  we know that colonial Argentina was heavily African! A census of Buenos Aires held in 1778 revealed a black population of 35%. (See Luis Wainer, La Ciudad de Buenos Aires en los Censos de 1778 y 1810.) As late as 1855, local B.A. surveys recorded race. George Andrews (page 41) estimated the total African population of Argentina in 1800 to be 69,000, roughly 22% of a total population around 310,000. 

So what happened to all the black Argentines? In comments, Luciano suggests that Argentine governments may have engaged in genocide, conscripting blacks to disproportionately fight in the War of the Triple Alliance and live in disease-ridden neighborhoods. 

The genetic ancestry data cited in the last post, however, shows only about a 4% presence of African genetic markers. That is a lot less than 22%! Does that provide evidence of some great genocide or expulsion in 19th-century Argentina?

Possibly not.

The Argentine-born population of Argentina grew by about 2.0% per year between 1800 and the first national census in 1869. (The link goes to the census; the data on the Argentine population is on page 686.) That is only slightly lower than the 2.2% rate of natural increase in the United States between 1800 and 1870, as estimated by Michael Haines. (See Table 1.) We know that the rate of natural increase in Argentina was 1.3% per year in 1869-95 and 1.6% per year in 1895-1947, so 2.0% for 1800-69 is likely on the high end. (We have no direct observations of the 1800 population; the 310,000 is an educated guess.)

If you assume that the Afro-Argentine population should have grown at the same rate of natural increase as the overall population, then you would have expected about 1.1 million Afro-Argentines by 1947, roughly 7% of the total population of 15.9 million. Intermarriage would not change the expected prevalence of African genetic markers: it does not matter if 7% of the population is of purely African descent or if the entire population has 7% of their ancestors from Africa. In other words, the mass immigration from Europe and the Levant can explain 15 percentage points of our estimated 18 point drop in the proportion of African ancestry. 

That still leaves a mystery, because 4% is lower than 7%. But it is a much smaller mystery. One possibility, of course, is that Afro-Argentines suffered differentially high mortality due to actions by the Argentine state.

But there are other possibilities that should first be eliminated before we conclude that President Domingo Sarmiento presided over a great crime. It may be that the 4% estimate of the proportion of African ancestry in the Argentine population is too low. More likely, our estimate of the 1800 population may be too low: if there were actually 450,000 people in the country in 1800, then the expected proportion of African ancestry would be 4% today. 

There is a lot of room for more scholarship. But the mystery is smaller than the headline figures would indicate ... and there may well be no mystery at all. 

How is Argentina like Puerto Rico?

Mostly, it isn’t.

But there is a sign of a disturbing history deep in the genetic heritage of most Puerto Ricans. And contrary to the popular belief, there may be some trace of the same history in Argentina. 

Some background. Over on Twitter, the great Pseudoerasmus and the great Gabriel Mathy began a debate over why North America saw relatively little intermarriage between Europeans and Native Americans compared to elsewhere. Pseudoerasmus argued that it was all about initial conditions. The Iberians migrated in smaller numbers to areas with bigger indigenous populations and in a heavily male-heavy environment. Gabe, conversely, argued that it was all about cultural norms. The English did not intermarry in significant numbers even in places with high numbers of indigenous and skewed sex ratios. 

It was an interesting discussion which I hope is put into a blog post. I participated for a bit but dropped out; Pseudoerasmus and I get along brilliantly, but in the heat of tweeting innocent responses can come across as more than slightly hostile. Moreover, the long threads are impossible to follow, quite unlike comment threads on a blog or the old newsgroups. (or ... gulp ... Reddit.) These are two of the reasons why I think Twitter is useless (at least for me) and am leaning towards quitting the platform, but I digress. If you must, try here and here. 

What does any of this have to do with Puerto Rico? Well, early DNA studies, from back when such things were new and neat, showed something a bit creepy. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed down through the female line, skewed Native American. But Y-chromosomes were entirely European and African. The implication is that something awful happened to the entire male Taino population; they were either killed or denied the possibility of procreation. Likely both.

Later studies upheld the results. Here is one from 2014, which sampled 326 people and found mtDNA that was 60% indigenous, 25% African, and 15% European, whereas the male Y-chromosomes were 85% European and 15% African.

Argentina is typically thought of as a European settler offshoot, and with good reason. In 1895, 25% of the population was foreign-born, overwhelmingly from Europe and the Levant. By 1914, that figure was up to 30%. Gross immigration between 1857 and 1914 came to 4.6 million people; net immigration ran about 3.0 million. (Pages 201-02 of the 1914 census.) All this with a population of only 7.9 million in 1914! Add in the Argentine-born children of those 3.0 million post-1857 immigrants, and you have a veritable transformation of the population. You might reasonably expect Argentines to have a similar genetic makeup to, say, white people in the northeastern United States or Ontario.

But there is some evidence that you would be wrong. 

A 2010 study found that 54% of Argentine mtDNA came from indigenous sources while 94% of Y-chromosomes traved to Europe. These results are strikingly close to Puerto Rico (minus the large African admixture on the island) ... shockingly so for a country which received mass immigration from Europe in relatively recent times.

So what explains the result?

Well, first, maybe it is wrong. It is one study of 246 individuals and sampling issues are not small. I suspect that the prevalence of indigenous mtDNA it is more-or-less correct; the result has been corroborated in multiple studies. The Y-chromosome part is dicier.

Second, another study added a wrinkle: half of the indigenous South American DNA appears to have originated outside the modern borders of Argentina. That opens up the possibility that at least half of the result may be driven by migration from Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru. As the authors write, “We did not collect bio-geographic information for most of the donors of our samples, and this is information was not available for most of the data collected from the literature; therefore, some donors could be in reality Native American immigrants (or descents form parents) from neighboring countries.”

Finally, European immigration to Argentina skewed male. (See page 271; it goes to CICRED 1974.) In 1869-1914, 1.7 males arrived for every female. That could explain some of the disproportionate prevalence of European Y-chromosomes compared to mtDNA without the specter of a Puerto Rican style past holocaust.

Nonetheless, the prevalence of native American ancestry in Argentina — and its apparent concentration in maternal ancestral lines — is a bit of surprise! There is a lot we do not know about the Argentine past ...

Alabama is not Mississippi

OK, that is clearly true. I just spent a big chunk of time in Alabama, I know this to be true. 

But John Marshall at Talking Points Memo is understandably surprised that a recent poll shows the Fat Crybaby only 2 points ahead in Mississippi while 21 points ahead in “the fairly politically and demographically similar state of Alabama next door.”

That cannot be right, can it?

Well, yes, it can! 

According to the Census Bureau, eligible voters in Mississippi are 60% white and 35% black. In next door, Alabama they are 68% white and 25% black. Also according to the census bureau, black people in both states turn out to vote at rates around six points higher than whites. (2012 turnout in both states was around 60%; 2008 turnout was 63% in Mississippi and 64% in Alabama.) That shakes out to an electorate that is 59% white and 38% black in Mississippi but 68% white and 28% black in Alabama.

Now assume that Hillary Clinton will get 95% of the black vote, 80% of the Latino vote, and 75% of the other vote in both states. (These assumptions do not really matter, but they make exposition easier.) What then needs to be true about the white vote for Clinton to receive 46% of the total vote in Mississippi but only 36% in Alabama?

Well, she would have to get 13% of white vote in Mississippi and 10% in Alabama. That is only a three-point difference. It is totally believable and certainly within the margin of error in the crosstabs. I can certainly believe it. If you give her 13% of the white vote in Alabama, her share there rises only two points; give her 10% of whites in Mississippi and her share there falls by only one point. 

Let’s check this with the 2012 results. Romney won 55% in Mississippi, but 61% in Alabama Obama got only 38% of the vote in Alabama, versus 44% in Mississippi. The six point difference in the 2012 election is less than the ten point difference in the 2016 polls, but ten points is not so great as to be unbelievable. 

Now, Mississippi is far from a swing state. To win there, Clinton needs to get 20% of the white vote, which ain’t gonna be easy. But that is a lower bar than in Alabama, where getting 20% of the white vote would get her only 43% of the total. In Alabama, she needs to pull in 31% of the white vote to win. 

Having been in Alabama, getting to 20% (let alone 31%) feels impossible. There is some deep-seated identity voting going on, more like political parties in Trinidad and Tobago than what most would consider normal American politics. (See here for more on ethnic politics in Trinidad.)

Many white people in Alabama were super nice. Think the amused gentleman in the pink shirt. But in picking the photos for this post, I noticed a lot of photos like the second one above, where people in the background are staring at us, especially if my wife was taking the picture. (Look at the father and son directly behind us. My wife takes pictures like a fashion photographer, so we have 15 full seconds of frames: they were staring the whole time.) That does not happen in family photo albums from the northeast or Florida. 

Yes, it is anecdotal, but I just do not think that it will be easy for any Democratic candidate to break the 20% barrier among white voters in Alabama (or culturally, albeit not demographically) state of Mississippi for some time to come. The WaPo-SurveyMonkey poll results are plausible. They may even hold until November. But they are not a sign that Mississippi is turning purple any time soon. 

But to repeat the punchline: given the very different demographics in the two states, it is quite reasonable to believe that Clinton is only two points behind in Mississippi while being 21 points down in Alabama. 

What if the United States bordered Russia instead of Mexico?

The United Kingdom has been in the midst of a giant immigration backlash prompted by the net arrival of roughly 1.4 million Eastern Europeans since 2004. From my perspective, that was surprising. After all, the Eastern Europeans are white and Christian or post-Christian. Don’t we all know that the reason the United States — or at least Trump supporters — gets all wiggy about Mexican immigration is because most Mexicans don’t look “white”?

Well, do we really know that?

There is evidence that racial phenotypes have had a strong impact on Mexican-Americans. Before 1945, many southwestern states (well, Texas) treated Mexican-Americans as black for the purposes of segregation. The historic impact of that has been under-studied. There is evidence, however, that once the legal barriers fell away in the late 1940s and 1950s, Mexican-Americans began moving into the “white” category, both de jure and de facto ... until the 1970s and the advent of mass immigration from Mexico.

At that point, native-born whites began to react against the arrival of Spanish-speaking immigrants. But because those immigrants were (in most but not all cases) phenotypically different, native-born Anglos began to discriminate against anyone who looked like the new immigrants. That in turn made race more salient in the lives of native-born Mexican-Americans and impeded assimilation. This is the finding advanced by Tomás Jiménez in his book. (Discussed here in the context of Reihan Salam’s misinterpretation of Jiménez’s results.)

So there is evidence that prejudice against immigrants hits most second, some third, and a few fourth-generation Mexican-Americans.* 

But imagine for a moment that the United States bordered Russia to the south, instead of Mexico. Is there any evidence that Americans would have reacted better to the net arrival of 12 million Russian-speakers between 1970 and 2015? Russia is a violent and corrupt country. Assuming (reasonably) that a Russia right next to the United States would have neither nuclear weapons nor imperial ambitions, it is not at all clear to me that the anti-immigration reaction right now would be any less were most of the immigrants pale-skinned, blond-haired Russians.**

Rather, the difference would be that native-born Russian-Americans would be far less likely to be bothered by anti-immigrant sentiments than native-born Mexican-Americans. Not because the Russian-Americans would be any different than the Mexican-Americans in their underlying attitude. Rather, native-born Russian-Americans, being clearly white and indistinguishable from other white people, would not face day-to-day prejudice imposed upon them by the reaction of non-Russians to the presence of their newly-arrived cousins. 

In short, in that world, Trumpism might be stronger. 

Will Mexico be nonviolent in 25 years?

 I just got back from a short and ridiculously busy trip to Mexico. (Next time, I want to make more unprogrammed time.) On the trip, of course, I spent some time thinking about the country’s future. Alejandro Hope thinks that by 2040, the place will have remarkably low crime rates. His reasons come down to three:

1. Mexico is aging;
2. Technology is disintermediating criminal markets;
3. The rising middle class will demand better public policies.

I agree with the third point, although the cynic in me has to admit that Mexico has spent many years failing to live up to the demands of its electorate.

The second point rather confuses me. It is true that the opportunities for nonviolent crime are increasing. It is also true that the internet makes it possible to sell narcotics retail in new ways ... but so did the beeper. (I remember New York in the 1990s.) Moreover, the wholesale shipments will still have to move, and in Mexico it is the wholesale trade that attracts the violence. So I am not sure why technology should reduce crime in this way. (As opposed to reducing crime by letting the authorities surveille much more. I am not sure, however, that crime-reductions engendered in that way will increase human happiness.)

As for the first argument, well, Mexico is aging, but it is not aging that fast. For example, in 2050, Mexico will have 27.9 million people aged 15-29. That will be down only a bit from 30.7 million today. Given that most violent crime is committed by and upon members of that age cohort, the incidence of violent crime will decline as young people decline as a percentage of the population ... but the absolute amount of mayhem will not fall by much as a result of population aging.

In addition, aging is not as good predictor as people might think, since age-specific violence rates rarely remain the same. Venezuela, for example, has become one of the most violent societies in the world over the past 30 years as the population in the 15-29 age group fell from 28% to 27%. That is admittedly a less dramatic proportional fall than the drop from 26% to 19% that Mexico will experience in 2015-50, but it should make us doubt predictions that demography is destiny.

Finally, Diego Valle did a great look at levels of cohort violence in Mexico. He found, as you might expect, that violence decline with age and by cohort: i.e., each group of (say) 25-years-olds was less violent than the one before. Until you reached the group born in 1985-89, the proportionately-smallest group in Mexico’s modern population history. At which point their propensity to violence exploded. In other words, levels of cohort violence are not driven by the relative size of the cohort.

In short, I think Mexico will likely be less violent in 2040 than in 2016. But I do not think that it will be due to technological changes in illicit supply chain management or population aging. 

Reihan Salam needs to read the papers he cites

 I am generally in sympathy with Reihan Salam. (DISCLOSURE: I went to high school with his older sister, Rifat.) He’s an old-fashioned non-crazy conservative. I am not, but I sympathize with his pro-natalist and mildly-nationalist priors. I certainly support his skepticism about  government intervention and his arguments against zoning laws. And he wants to abolish Stuyvesant! What’s not to like?

But sometimes the poor guy just has to twist himself into knots in order to convince himself that the “conservative movement” to which he’s hitched his professional wagon isn’t batshit crazy. You can see him attempting to justify the recent nativist turn in the GOP here. 

Much of Salam’s article isn’t crazy. In fact, the entire first section is quite well argued. He says that the rise of Donald Trump is troubling and that the Republican leadership has no idea how to discuss immigration in an intelligent way.

If he had said the following in the second section I might disagree with the conclusion but not the analysis:

1. Admitting poor immigrants is not in the national interest;
2. It’s perfectly fine for Americans to want lower levels of immigration for whatever reason;
3. The current immigration backlash ain’t got nothing on the events of 1917-31, which gave us such gems as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act and mob killings of Filipinos;
4. So the GOP should favor a Canada-style system with a lower overall cap and strict employment enforcement.

But that wasn’t the argument that Reihan made in the second section. Rather, his piece suddenly made a 90-degree turn and started to argue that the descendants of the post-1965 wave of immigration aren’t following the path of their predecessors from the Ellis Island wave.

Lest I be accused of misrepresenting his argument, let me quote him: “Why haven’t less-skilled immigrants followed the path of the less-skilled Europeans who settled in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s?”

His argument has two parts: one about economic mobility, the other about social assimilation. I’m going to focus on social assimilation, which Reihan states is happening much more slowly for current immigrants than for their European predecessors. We’ll briefly discuss the economics at the end.

1. Reihan Salam’s argument

One what does Reihan blame this alleged slow assimilation? Well, he asserts, “The most important reason that today’s immigrants have had such a different trajectory from those of earlier eras is that in 1921 and 1924, Congress passed legislation that sharply curtailed immigration.”

Reihan goes on to talk about the Italians, who did indeed arrive in a single relatively short wave. (See the above figure.) Reihan: “The end of immigrant replenishment led to sharp increases in inter-ethnic marriages for Italian Americans and other white ethnics. Mexican Americans, in contrast, are part of an ethnic community that until recently was constantly being replenished by new Mexican arrivals, which in turn has sharpened the distinctiveness of Mexican identity.” The, same, he says, is happening to other goups. “Over the course of the 1990s, the percentage of Asians marrying whites, and Hispanics marrying whites, fell sharply.”

In other words, the reason behind the alleged difference between earlier immigration waves and the current one is that the current ones are continuously replenished by new immigrants. His sources are a book by Tomás Jiménez (Stanford) and a 2007 article by Zhenchao Qian (Ohio State) and Daniel Lichter (Cornell). Jiménez has an article that summarizes his main findings here.

And now comes the fisking you’ve all awaited. It is not that Jiménez, Qian and Lichter are bad scholars. They are great scholars. (Particularly Jiménez.) Reihan just gets their work wrong.

In fact, he gets their work so wrong that it’s hard to believe that he read them. (Rifat is a good sociologist — can I blame her for not schooling her little brother?)

2. Social assimilation

Let’s start with Jiménez. Jiménez has elsewhere pointed out the astonishingly high outmarriage rates of Mexican-Americans! Moreover, Jiménez points out that those outmarriage rates have risen for second and third-generation Mexican-Americans, despite the continual waves of new immigration. In other words, Mexican exogamy has proven resilient to replenishment.

Jiménez’s argument is that replenishment inflames native-born non-Mexican irritation at new Mexican arrivals, which spills over into over into continued prejudice directed at native-born Mexican-Americans. Let me quote Jiménez’s three conclusions:

1. “First, non-Mexicans’ expressions of nativism sharpen inter-group boundaries.” Reihan could have said that immigration makes natives act like racist basterds, and it is a bad thing to be a racist basterd, so to discourage racist basterdism we should cut immigration. That is a perfectly legitimate argument. But it makes the GOP base look bad, so Reihan doesn’t make it.
2. “Second, immigrant replenishment bolsters the salience of race in the lives of respondents. In a context of heavy Mexican immigration, non-Mexicans use racial markers as proxies for a combination of ancestry, nativity, and legal status.” Again, this makes the GOP look bad, so Reihan misrepresents Jiménez’s argument.
3. “Finally, Mexican-immigrant replenishment sharpens intra-group boundaries by informing the criteria for ‘authentic’ expressions of ethnic identity. Mexican immigrants and the young second generation have come to define and police ‘Mexicanness,’ which entails, at the very least, speaking Spanish and having non-Anglo American tastes. Mexican immigrants and young second-generation individuals call into question respondents’ authenticity for not being able to openly display the cultural characteristics that might ‘prove’ their ethnic authenticity. Mexican Americans respond to these boundaries by attempting to avoid them altogether, and by providing a corrective to those who impose such boundaries. Respondents attempt to avoid inter-group boundaries by emphasizing their American national identity.” And that italicized conclusion is the opposite of what Reihan implies Jiménez argues.

Aaargh!

To be fair, Jiménez does argue that Mexican migration is unlike the Ellis Island waves that produced the Brooklyn I grew up in. But Jiménez is not arguing that there is anything unprecedented about the continuing stream of Mexican migration. Rather, he explicitly points out that both the Germans and the Irish immigrated in century-long waves; if you want historical parallels to Mexican-Americans, those two groups are the ones you should look to. And if you wanna talk about hard-to-assimilate waves of endless immigration, by a people who had no reluctance to use politics to cram multiculturalism down the throats of hard-working English-speaking Americans, then you really wanna look at the Germans. (You gotta scroll down at the link for the relevant information.)

Reihan writes, however, as if the Italians were the first immigrant group to get off the boat in America.

Hey, Reihan’s from Brooklyn, I’m from Brooklyn, to some extent it’s understandable. I went to college honestly believing that a third of all the white people in America were of Italian descent. I mean this literally: my friend Dev Patnaik cracked open an encyclopedia and disabused me of that notion. (For some reason, I knew that my personal experience about the number of Jewish-Americans was not representative, but it never occurred to me that this might also be true of the cujines.) I completely get why Reihan might assume that the Italian experience is the normal expected baseline for the American immigrant experience.

But I was 18 and a college freshman. Salam is 36 and a major public intellectual.

Now let’s move on to Qian and Lichter’s findings. Compare column (1) and column (2) below. For people aged 20-34, intermarriages among native-born Asian-American men fell from 50% to 46%, while intermarriages among Asian-American women rose from 58% to 60%.

This is not the decline Salam writes about.

Moreover, column (2) excludes multiracial people. If you classify anyone who checks off the boxes as half-white as minority — i.e., you classify people the way the 1990 census did — you would compare column (1) and column (4) and find that between 1990 and 2000 interracial marriages for native-born Asian-American men rose from 50% to 55% and for women from 58% to 67%.

Nor do Qian and Lichter believe that intermarriage rates have declined for Latinos. They spell out why on page 85, where they attempt to account for confounding demographic shifts. Bottom line: “Intermarriage with whites increased significantly among native-born Asian Americans and Hispanics, by 36 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Significantly, these multivariate results are different from the modest 1990s’ declines in intermarriage reported in Table 2.”

Heck, Qian and Lichter don’t even find a decline in intermarrige for foreign-born Asian-Americans! Page 86: “Intermarriage ratios with native-born whites declined by 19 percent for foreign-born Hispanics, from 27 to 22, and increased by only 11 percent for foreign-born Asians, from 28 to 31, during the 1990s.” It is true that Qian and Lichter find the increase in intermarriage rates for foreign-born Asians smaller than they would have expected given the increase in the number of foreign-born Asians: in other words, they did find that foreign-born Asian-Americans became somewhat less likely to marry non-Asian native-born Americans between 1990 and 2000 when you control for everything else. But that seems a pretty small reed upon which to argue that assimilation slowed down during the 1990s.

3. Economic mobility

Reihan also talks about the skill level of immigrants and their economic success, but he makes no explicit time-series comparisons. All he does is point out that immigrants are disproportionately poor after which he asks, “Why haven’t recent less-skilled immigrants followed the path of the less-skilled Europeans who settled in the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s?”

But that question makes no sense unless and until you establish that current immigrant waves are moving up the occupational and wage ladder more slowly than previous waves! Reihan does not do this. So I don’t have that much to say, other than that there is in fact a big literature on these issues. A not-bad place to start. For some economic history on the Ellis Island wave, see here. For even better economic history on the same topic, see this paper by Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan and Katherine Eriksson. For a broader look at current assimilation, see this piece by the very same Tomás Jiménez. For a complex long-term view, see this 2006 study by Jacob Vigdor (currently at the University of Washington). See also this NBER chapter on Mexican-Americans. Finally, this is a great short book comparing Italians from 1900 with Mexican migrants today.

Ironically, that latter three provide some support for Reihan’s underlying argument. To which, I repeat, I have some sympathy and could be convinced to support.

4. Summing up

In short, I am disappointed. Immigration restriction is a reasonable position. And I generally like Salam’s positions. Repeal zoning! Tax the childless! Good stuff, logical, makes America better. But I am saddened by this piece. It misrepresents facts in order to allow Salam to call for the Republican Party to address a cultural assimilation crisis that does not exist, except inasmuch as immigration is generating a native-born white backlash.

There is nothing wrong with the GOP being the party of immigration restriction. There is a lot wrong with the insane racist way that immigration restriction has come out in the 2016 primary race. Maybe you can justify the insanity, but Reihan only does so by misrepresenting the works he cites. For a broader takedown, using sources that Reihan doesn’t cite, see Alex Nowrasteh here.

I wag my finger at you, Reihan Salam of Brooklyn! Or in our shared old school vernacular, “You serious, B? Gedouttahere.”

Refugees in Germany: lessons from 1945?

 As the New York Times notes this morning, Germany is being inundated with Syrian refugees. And while many of them are highly educated, most of them are not. The median refugee is a young Arabic-speaking man with limited job skills that are not up to German standards. 

This has happened to Germany before. After World War 2, the Soviets transferred large chunks of eastern Germany to the USSR and the Polish People’s Republic. Czechoslovakia and Hungary also expelled their German populations. Within two years, more than 7.0 million people had been expelled to what later became West Germany; ultimately 8.5 million refugees would settle there. (Another 3.5 million settled in the Soviet Zone.) 

The entire resettlement was chaotic, with refugees settling down wherever the Western occupation authorities decided to set up camps. These camps were located wherever it was most convenient. In the words of the U.S. military government: “Expellees of Eastern Europe have been settled, not where their skills could be best utilized, but in accordance with the availability of food and housing to meet their needs. Thus, labor supply is often remote from the centers of labor demand ... Most of these have been placed without regard to their skills, and many where there is no demand or material for them to pursue their trades.” Despite their awareness of the problem, American officials were more afraid of further disruptive population movements than they were of mass unemployment: they proceeded to deploy military forces along state lines to prevent refugees from moving. 

By 1948, refugees made up 25% of the population of Lower Saxony but only 8% of neighboring Nordrhein-Westfalen. Refugees were kept out of the cities of Bremen and Hamburg. Remarkably, there was no mass population redistribution once the situation settled down after 1948: as late as 1969, the distribution of the refugees had barely budged.

So what happened? Michael Peters (LSE) looked into the data and found something fascinating. Not unexpectedly, the former easterners were crowded into low-skilled  jobs: by 1960, almost 45% of the refugees worked in unskilled occupations, as opposed to only 18% of the same age cohorts of Western natives. (Page 21.) Also not unexpectedly, refugees aged 20 and older in 1945 earned about 10% less than natives in 1961 and 6% less than natives as late as 1970. (Pages 22-23.) Two-thirds of that difference was due to refugees being shunted into lower-wage occupations, rather than earning less than a native at the same job.

OK, fine, whatever. But then it gets weird. Sure, the refugees didn’t close the wage gap after even a quarter-century. But wages grew much faster in the unskilled occupations they flooded into than in other occupations. (Tables 9 and 11 on pages 24 and 26.) A 10% higher refugee share in 1950 increases wages by about 5% in 1975. 

Basically, firms in refugee-rich counties picked technologies that unskilled workers could learn to use on the job. Those workers then got better as they worked ... and their employers got better at deploying technologies suited to their (lack of) skills. The individual refugees never recovered from the trauma of their separation. But they led to technological innovation that benefitted those low down on the ladder.

So does this have any bearing on the current refugee inflow? Sadly, probably not. The first thing to note is that the distribution of human capital was about the same for the refugees and the natives. Circumstances pushed the refugees into unskilled jobs. They may have therefore been more equipped to learn on the job and help their employers innovate than a less skilled refugee wave would have been.

The second thing to note is times have indeed changed: deskilling might have been relatively easy to do in an industrial sector with no computers, but harder to carry out today, where (at least in theory) computer-controlled machines can purely substitute for labor. 

Finally, discrimination was minor for the earlier wave. Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia might have been different from the rest of Germany, but they were not Syria.

In short, the work opens up the possibility that the influx of unskilled refugees might unleash a wave of income-inequality-reducing innovation, even if the refugees themselves never catch up to the natives. But it only opens the possibility. There are, sadly, too many reasons to believe that this smaller influx will end less happily than the giant migration of 70 years ago.

Syrians to South America?

 Here is a question for you: why aren’t flights from the Middle East to South America crowded with Syrian refugees?

On paper, most of the Southern Cone countries have remarkably liberal immigration regimes. Start with Argentina. Refugees are automatically accorded two years of residency and receive legal representation. (See the 2010 Migration Act.) Now, the law is not as liberal as American activists would have you believe: undocumented migrants can still be deported (page 17), but the Argentine government has explicitly opened its doors to Syrian migration. Uruguayan immigration law is even more liberal than Argentine. All you need to do to migrate to Uruguay is demonstrate an income stream of $500 per month. After that, naturalization comes within a few years. Brazil has a liberal new refugee law. 

The problem isn’t cost. A ticket costs around $800, rather less than the monetary cost of making it overseas to Europe. 

But in practice, all three countries are pretty much closed.

Start with the official Argentine program for Syrian refugees. The refugees need to have links to an Argentine sponsor either through family ties (out the fourth generation) or via a “pre-existing personal relationship based on whatever legal, reasonable, and justifiable reason: family, social, educational, work, etcetera.” 

Unless a Syrian in a camp somewhere can demonstrate a tangible documented link with somebody in the Argentine Republic, then they do not get a visa. This policy lets Buenos Aires claim that the doors are open while actually keeping them firmly shut. 

The policy may change, depending on how seriously Argentine authorities take the definition of a family link. Supposedly, 4 million Argentines trace some ancestry to Syria. In reality, no. In the peak years of 1897-1913, net migration from Syria came to about 103,000. To get from that to 4 million you have to assume almost total exogamy, which is not likely. (For the pedantic: if you assume the same birthrates as the general Argentine population, a generation of 35 years, and total exogamy, then about 3.4 million Argentines should have some “Syrian” ancestry by now.)

Moreover, a 1936 census registered only 11.2% of the Syrian-born residents of Buenos Aires as Muslim. (Page 17, once again.) Some of that is surely conversion, but it also implies that the “Syrians” came much more from Lebanon than from Syria.  

Nor is this policy in violation of Argentine refugee law. Article 10 exempts anyone under U.N. protection. Article 11 exempts anyone who has “voluntarily settled inside or outside the country which he left owing to fear of persecution.” Depending on the definition of “voluntarily settled,” that could include precisely every Syrian refugee. It certainly includes anyone in a UNHCR camp. Only a few hundred people have escaped under this not-so-generous regime. 

Uruguay is worse. After the country took in a whopping 42 refugee families, a counterreaction set in, and the door are now firmly shut. In theory, the country has pledged to admit ... wait for it ... 120. Now, Uruguayan law opens up an interesting way from European countries to send their unwanted refugees to Uruguay: give them an airplane ticket and a $500 per month stipend. That said, given what happened with the 42 refugees the law would be changed right quick if a European government tried to take advantage of it. 

Chile, meanwhile, has a liberal refugee law that only considers people who manage to make it to Chilean territory. So no visa for that plane ticket from Dubai. 

And then there is Brazil, which had settled 1,740 Syrian refugees as of March, and 2,077 as of this month. That is nice, but still a very small number. The Brazilian issue is that the bureaucracy is slow, so even without formal quotas few applications get processed. (The Brazilians also exempt anyone under U.N. protection.) It is probably the most open, but still not enough for a mass exodus.

The Brazilian case shows how much bureaucracy can turn an ostensibly open process into a closed one. The Mexican government is coming under a surprising amount of domestic pressure to accept 10,000 refugees. I bet there will even be a bill. And it will sound good.

But the devil will be in the details. Do not wait for Latin America to open its doors in any serious way.

Vox fails to defend open borders

 Removing all immigration restrictions is a pretty fringe idea. There are reasons for that, as a careful reading of this defense at Vox will show. Dylan Matthews is trying to justify an ideological belief by claiming that indulging it will have no costs on anyone, and what costs it does have can be compensated, and anyway those costs don’t matter because the gains to non-Americans are so much greater.

He makes those second two points because his claim that there are no costs is complete bullshit.

Some Vox  columnists have a skill at making me recoil from positions I hold. That is some sort of talent. 

Is it worth fisking the article? I will, but only if there is demand.

Stress-testing the IVF hypothesis for the rise in the fertility of highly educated American women

 The title of this blog post is terrible, I agree, but nothing pithy-yet-comprehensible came to mind. One way to see if a social science hypothesis is worth pursuing is to assume a ridiculous limit case and see if it leads to a significant result. If it does not, then the hypothesis is not worth pursuing. So that is what this post will do with the hypothesis that improved fertility technology caused the recent massive increase in the fertility of highly-educated women. (The credit for this hypothesis goes to Bitsy.) 

Between 1998 and 2013, IVF procedures resulted in approximately 803,000 babies. Over the same period, postgraduate women born between 1970 and 1974 gave birth to about 4.61 million children. They had a completed fertility rate of 1.74 children per woman, up from 1.33 for postgraduate women born in 1950-54. If we assume that all 803,000 assisted fertility births were born to postgraduate women in that age cohort, then their non-assisted completed fertility rate would have been only 1.47.

So the hypothesis cannot be dismissed out of hand.

But there are a lot of women born before 1970 who would have gotten IVF over that period. (Our group of interest was aged only 24-28 in 1998.) We can effectively throw out the data before 2000, but that only cuts the number of IVF births 711,000. So the hypothesis still cannot be dismissed.

Given that we know the approximate age of IVF patients, we can guess that the maximum number of IVF births over the years 2000-13 that could have fallen to women in our cohort of interest was around 400,000. (This assumes that the age distribution at the link held in every year, a somewhat heroic assumption but one which does not, I think, have a particular bias.)

If all 400,000 of those births accrued to postgraduate women, then their non-IVF completed fertility would have been 1.59. IVF would account for 40% of the increase. But given that postgraduate women were only 13.8% of all women born in 1970-74, that also seems unlikely. We are still above a reasonable upper bound.

Let us say that half of all births accrued to them, say 200,000. In other words, imagine that postgraduate women resorted to IVF at a rate 3.6 times that of other women in their age group. That assumption gives us a non-IVF completed fertility of 1.66. In other words, IVF would be responsible of 20% of the increase. 

This seems like a reasonable upper bound, but tell me if you think there is a logical or arithmetical mistake!

If we assume that a quarter of IVF births accrued to postgraduate women at a rate twice that of other women (for a total of 27.6% of all IVF births), then non-IVF fertility for postgraduate women jumps to 1.70. That is within spitting distance of the actual 1.74; IVF would account for only 10% of the increase from 1.33 children over the past two decades.

In short, IVF was a significant factor, but is unlikely to account for more than 20% of the increase in fertility.

The reproductive revolution among postgrad women in historical perspective

 We have written that the fertility of postgraduate women has markedly increased among women born 1970-74 relative to earlier cohorts. Claudia Goldin’s (Harvard) work on college-educated women implies that the change is even greater than it seems. Now, Goldin is looking at all college graduates, not just women with postgraduate degrees ... but that makes her findings even more striking.

Among women born in the late 19th century, fully half of college graduates had no children. That fell over time (in part because, as per Gareth’s hypothesis many more women began to graduate college). Nonetheless, for women born in 1958-68 (cohort 5 in the above table) fully 26% of them had no children by age 40. 

Yet the cohort of postgraduate-educated women born just a few years later (1970-74) has a childlessness rate of only 20%. That puts them very near the rate experienced by the college-educated parents of the baby boom. For college-educated women childlessness has fallen even faster.

Something very dramatic is going on to make professional educated women who hit their peak childbearing years in the first decade of the 21st century choose both family and career. Bitsy makes too good suggestions in comments, although I am not sure how to test the first one. 

The big question, unanswerable until we have a handle on causes, is whether the fertility rise will continue in the next few decades.

My generation reproduces itself!

 The Pew Research Center and the U.S. census are out with the numbers for completed fertility among American women aged 40-44. And they are interesting! Moreover, they tell you more than the often-abused Total Fertility Rate, which is a constructed number for an imaginary woman. These numbers are for real women born between 1970 and 1974 ... i.e., people my age.

Let’s start with the overall numbers. Back in 1976, women born between 1932 and 1936 had each given birth  to 2.85 children on average. These women were the tail end of the generation that produced the baby boomers, so the high number shouldn’t be surprising. Only 10% of them were childless; a full 36% of them had more than four children. My mother was part of this group, having been born in 1936. 

In 1994, things had changed. Women born between 1950 and 1954 had on average only 1.90 children. 19% of them were childless and only 11% of them had more than four children. 

By 2014, however, the average number of children born to women aged 40-44 rose to 2.02, fairly close to replacement. (About 2% of American children tragically die before age 20, which would put replacement around 2.04. See Figure 5.) In the aggregate, the moves were all around the margins: childlessness fell to 15% and families with more than four kids rose to 12%. 

The real change, though, was for women with postgraduate degrees. There you had a revolution between 1994 and 2014. (IIRC, Carlos Yu predicted what would happen; Doug Muir was more doubtful.) Completed fertility skyrocketed from 1.33 to 1.74. Childlessness crashed from 35% to 20%. Four-child-plus families jumped from 5% to 7%. 

This change is huge.

Any thoughts as to why?

Now my final word on the demographics of the War of the Triple Alliance, really!

 First, Brent is retired and the relatives do not live in affected areas. Thank you for the concern!

Second, Paraguay. While I await the coming storm of comments and questions (hah!) here is the population pyramid for the 1870 data with the estimated undercounts from 1899 added in:

Devastation among males (55%!), but little sign of a generalized crisis. Which is actually somewhat surprised: I would have expected blowing that big a whole in the labor force would have led to severe general famine.

Note that these adjusted figures are a clear undercount. First, the 1899 figures include only those who survived to 1899; some people who were not counted in 1870 passed away in the interim. Since males have shorter lifespans than females, this will also increase our projections of missing males. The 47% figure from the 1886 census is a more reasonable upper bound.

Second, the total number is too low. It comes to about 176,000. That implies an annual growth rate of 3.8% between then and 1886, which is impossible unless there were lots of Paraguayan refugees in Argentina and Brazil in 1870. There almost certainly were ... but that means that the 1870 census cannot be used to impute total deaths. 

Here is a table of plausible populations given an 1886 population of 325,000:

1870 pop at	3.0%	201,067
1870 pop at	2.5%	217,813
1870 pop at	2.0%	235,954
1870 pop at	1.6%	251,549

The irony? The War of the Triple Alliance was still devastating. It was on the same scale as the Greek War of Independence, the French conquest of Algeria, World War I in Serbia, and the Great Patriotic War. It was more destructive than the Carlist Wars, the Ten Years War, the Russian Civil War, and the two Congo Wars. It was more than twice as bad as the Napoleonic Wars were for France, inflicted over half as much time. It was a horrible event.

What it was not was singular or unprecedented. Which says terrible things about human beings.

Paraguayan demographics in the late 19th century

 Here is my final word on the demographic impact of the War of the Triple Alliance. Let’s start with the 1899 population pyramid. There is some guess work here, because Asunción accounted for 10% of country’s enumerated population of 480,000 but provided no age breakdown. These figures heroically assume that the capital had the same distribution as the rest of the country, which is almost certainly wrong. (Cities skew older in general; more so in the age before modern urban sanitation.) But the numbers are what we have.

What do they show? Unfortunately, the age groupings make it hard to see whether there are any signs of a general demographic disaster (that is, one affecting both sexes) during or right after the war, but there is nothing particularly obvious. With two exceptions, each cohort looks more or less the size you would expect in a growing mostly-rural population. 

The exceptions are the 1854-63 and the 1882-84 birth cohorts. The number of females in the first cohort is slightly smaller than you would expect given the size the cohorts around it. That population was aged 1-10 at the start of the war, so it is possible that we are seeing some effect of disease and malnutrition. The problem is that the cohort after that includes everyone born between 1864 and 1881: war-related mortality among those born in 1864-70 would be swamped by those born in the postwar decade. 

The other exception is the 1882-84 birth cohort, which is much bigger than you would expect for both sexes. I suspect that the reason is a head tax on adults or some sort of labor draft that affected both sexes: children who were actually aged older than 18 in 1899 were reported as aged 15-17 instead. (There may be an alternate explanation, but it is unlikely to involve the war.)

Now let’s take a glance at the 1886 pyramid.

What I’ve done here is add back the missing birth cohorts from the 1899 census. The categories did not easily overlap, so I have divided up the cohorts from the 1899 census equally among all the years inside that cohort. (This introduces biases, although I think they run against the hypothesis that the war had no effect.) 

Why were the undercounts so large? Well, one possibility is evasion. Another is a sloppy census. But commentator Thomas Masterson hits on a third hypothesis: temporary migration to Argentina. Argentina was booming during the 1880s and getting their from Paraguay was easy. Paraguayan migrants, however, had to compete with the waves of Spaniards and Italians pouring into that country. The Paraguayans would face racial and language discrimination (Guaraní the primary language of most locals at the time), which would not be conducive to permanent settlement. Finally, the 1899 census identified Paraguayans by nationality, not place of birth, and so Paraguayans born in Argentina but who moved back would be counted in the 1899 census as local. 

What about the impact of the war? There are clear signs of mass casualties among males: the 1886 male population is a full 41,000 less than might have otherwise been expected ... although that calculation does not account for the fact that male mortality is generally higher than female. Excess male mortality comes to 47% of the population of the relevant age group, which is consistent with the idea that about one out of every two Paraguayan males perished as a result of the war. (It also implies that almost the entire male population served, but that is consistent with Paraguayan records and the overwhelming reports of children and elderly being pressed into service.) 

That said, it is a little perplexing that there is also excess male mortality among children born during the war ,i.e., too young to have been child soldiers. There are reasons to think that male children might have been more susceptible to famine and disease, but that smacks a little of post hoc reasoning to me.

Looking at the female half of the distribution, there are some signs of higher-than-expected mortality among the cohorts born during and immediately after the war, but they are not pronounced. Paraguay experienced disease and famine (the latter partially as a result of a huge diminution of the agricultural labor force for military service) but not outside the realm of the historical experience of 19th-century wars.

Finally, it should be noted that even with my adjustments the 1886 number is still an undercount. To be fully consistent with the 1899 number the population would need to grow by 3.0% per year. That is really outside historical experience in the latter 19th century: Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic were the highest (without mass immigration) at around 2.6%. Most countries were around 1.5% or less.

Criticisms, suggestions, new information and additional questions, please! (I know that Randy is interested in why Paraguay survived as an independent nation ...)

How not to do history, Paraguayan edition

 Commentator J.H. asks what I think of the Whigham-Potthast methodology for estimating Paraguayan deaths in the War of the Triple Alliance. Coincidentally, the Whigham-Potthast article was exactly what I planned to be the subject of this post!

But first, let me say that I agree with J.H.’s point that had the country really lost 90% of its male population, then we would have seen bigger effects on its culture and literature than we do. Let me also say that careful researchers (like Reber) have tried to adjust for Paraguay’s territorial losses, but regardless those losses affected very little populated territory.

Which brings us to the work of Thomas Whigham (U-Georgia) and Barbara Potthast (Bielefeld). They uncovered an 1870 population survey taken at the tail end of the war. The survey was the work of the Provisional Government established by the Allied countries, who were not yet prepared to simply partition Paraguay between them. It isn’t entirely clear why the Provisional Government wanted the survey, but the answer is likely taxation: the government asked that information be gathered on the acreage sown with various crops in addition to the population data. 

Now, the survey wasn’t really a census: rather, the government asked the political chiefs and justices of the peace in the various counties to report the data. Age groups were divided into children, adults and elderly, with no further elaboration. In addition, the survey omitted the cities of Asunción and Pilar. But it was data, and data are always useful! Consider what we were able to do with the highly flawed 1886 census.

So what did Whigham and Potthast do with their data? First they added estimates for Asunción and Pilar. The Asunción data came from an 1872 British diplomatic report; the Pilar data came from an 1871 newspaper article. Then they added up all the reported numbers of people.

And ... uh ... well, that is what they did. They got a total of 116,351. To that they added a guess of 50,000 people in non-reporting districts. That made a high estimate of 166,351. They then divided that number by their estimate of a prewar population of 389,000 to 457,000. Ergo, a population decline between 57% and 69%.

Do I have to explain why this is unlikely?

Oh, all right. The 1870 numbers do not jibe with other data. First, the 1870 survey reports 39,334 children. Whigham and Potthast take “children” to mean age 12 and below; which would place them as born between 1858 and 1870. In 1886, the number of the children born between 1856 and 1871 was 78,605. That is a difference of more than 39,000 people. A simple adjustment to remove 1856, 1857 and 1871 would cut that difference to 32,000, but it would still mean that more than 60% of the Whigham-Potthast upward adjustment of 50,000 would have to consist of uncounted children for their results to match 1886.

It is harder to match other cohorts. In 1870, adults were defined as anyone born between 1820 and 1857. They totaled 29,310. In 1886, people born between 1816 and 1855 totaled 52,584. Even people born just between 1836 and 1855 totaled 40,648. That is an additional 11,000 people at minimum, which would when combined with the missing children just about eat up their 50,000 fudge factor.

The Whigham-Potthast numbers are still remotely possible but ...

... the second problem is that we know that the 1886 census was also an undercount. How do we know that? Well, the 1886 census reported 28,113 people born between 1882 and 1884. By 1899, that cohort had grown to 43,907 people, all Paraguayan-born. That is, shall we say, not possible unless the 1886 count was too low. The same applies to later cohorts. The 1886 census found 80,476 people born between 1866 and 1881; the 1899 census reported 122,955 people born between 1864 and 1881. Unless 1864 and 1865 were rather astounding fertile years (which would be odd, considering as they were the first two years of the war) then the 1886 count once again has to be too low. (This problem does not apply to older cohorts; it seems that 1886 was particularly bad at recording children and young adults.) 

In other words, 1886 suffered a minimum undercount of 58,000 relative to 1899; and 1870 suffered a minimum undercount of 43,000 relative to 1886. That is a total minimum undercount of 101,000. Lopping off the 50,000 fudge factor leaves us with an additional 51,000 missing people ... for a new minimum 1870 population estimate of 217,000.

To double-check, let’s adjust the 1886 numbers using the 1899 data for the undercounted cohorts. That would give us a minimum population of 290,061. (I feel ridiculous using more than two significant digits to report these numbers, but whatever.) That implies a growth rate of 3.5% per year between 1870 and 1886, which is really not possible in the age before antibiotics. In fact, Paraguay never mustered growth much above 1.7% per year; the figure of 3.1% between 1886 and 1899 is an artifact of the 1886 undercount. 

To triple check, let’s match the 1870 data to the 1873 data. (Which actually reported numbers for 1872.) Now, we do not have original manuscripts for 1873, but I am not clear as to why we should discount its existence given that it was reported in British consular reports and Argentine newspapers. I am certain that the 1873 data are terrible, but that also applies to 1870. Anyway, the 1873 data report 86,079 people born between 1858 and 1872, which about 46,000 more than the 39,334 reported born in 1858-70 in the 1870 survey. (Jan Kleinpenning of the University of Nijmegen got to this point first.) 

Finally, their 1864 baseline is almost certainly too high. It ignores the 1864-67 survey data. (That would be point #4 at the link.) The lowest estimate that they have is barely possible, but still not that likely. 

I hate to make the calculation, but if we combine the high estimate of the 1864 population (370,000, assuming an average household size of seven people) with the low estimate of the 1870 population (217,000) we get a roughly 41% decline over the six years. Not all of that will be excess mortality, of course. Some will be international refugees, others away from their homes in Paraguay (for example, men still in the field who have not returned home), others undercounted, and some normal deaths that were not compensated for due to low fertility during the war. In other words, 41% is a meaningless figure ... but it does at least serve as a bracket. 

A more realistic 1864 estimate uses an average household size of 5.5, which was typical for Chile and Mexico at the time. That would give a prewar population of 292,000. A population size of 292,000 implies 1.8% growth between 1864 and 1899 (and 2.2% growth from 1870 to 1899). Combining that figure with an 1870 population pf 217,000 pushes the total population fall to 22%. That is still, of course, a meaningless figure ... but it is the equivalent calculation to the more dramatic claims.

In short, the Whigham-Potthast method is a good one, but in this case it relies on bum data. The war was clearly catastrophic, but a 57%+ genocidal massacre it was not. 

The existing debate on the Paraguayan War

 After I finished the legwork that went into the last two posts, I discovered two other scholars had gotten there first. In 1988, Vera Blinn Reber took on the idea that Paraguay had lost more than half its population. Her evidence fell into four buckets:

1. We have four decent censuses: 1792, 1846, 1886 and 1899. The intercensal growth rates are 1.7%, 0.8%, and 3.1%. The censuses distinguish between native-born and foreign-born populations, so we can strip out immigration, which was anyway near negligible. The numbers given imply a slowdown between 1846 and 1886, but not a catastrophe;
2. The 1857 census that gave a population of 1.3 million does not exist. It appears to have been a Stalinesque propaganda ploy by the Paraguayan government to frighten its enemies. 
3. Once the war broke out, the Paraguayan government undertook a series of annual household surveys for the purposes of taxation and conscription. If we assume a household size of 6.98 people (which is very high by the standards of contemporary Latin American countries, but about what the 1846 census showed) then the population was 370,073 in 1864. It declined to 304,824 by the end of 1867, but that could have been evasion combined with the fact that much of the male population was at war.
4. Finally, biannual figures on crop production (Paraguay had a remarkably well-organized war economy) show no declines between  1863 and 1867. 

While she effectively debunked the genocidal claims, her conclusion that Paraguay lost most likely 8% of its population is still largely conjecture. For example, roughly 80,000 Paraguayan men cycled through the armed forces during the war. She posited that it was unlikely that casualty rates could have been much higher than 24,000; roughly 30% of everyone who served. 

I am not so sure. For example, the standard figures for Confederate military mortality (including disease) in the U.S. Civil War ranged from 23% to 38%. But when J. David Hacker (Binghampton) used census records to estimate excess male mortality for the 1860s, he found numbers that were more in line with mortality rates of 33% to 54%. Considering the sex imbalances in the 1886 census, I do not find 50% mortality among Paraguayan soldiers to be inherently unbelievable. 

Her doubt comes from the fact that the size of the Allied forces arrayed against Paraguay has been greatly exaggerated. For example, there are claims that Brazil fielded an expeditionary force of 100,000. The problem is that we know that it took the Brazilians a full 49 steamships to move a single brigade consisting of 5,445 enlisted men up the Paraná river and the Brazilians never possessed that sort of logistical capability. That said, however, even if Allied forces never much exceeded 43,500, they could have caused much higher casualties upon the Paraguayan defenders through disease and malnutrition inflicted via the astute use of strategic interdiction. 

Given the evidence from 1872 and 1886, I would lean towards her high estimate of 18% total losses (including a net refugee outmigration around 3% of the prewar population), simply because the military mortality rates that she considered too high for a 19th century war are not in fact outside the bounds of historical reality. Disease made many 19th century wars more dangerous for soldiers than their early 20th century equivalent; in the second half of the 20th century advances in body armor, medevac technology, and trauma medicine produced a second prolonged decline. Consider, as evidence, the below graph of the wounded-to-killed ratios in various wars (from the amazing work of Tanisha Fazal of Notre Dame, available here):

An 18% loss, however large, is still a far cry from over half. 

In 1999, two scholars attempted to resurrect the vision of a devastated Paraguay using evidence from an 1870 population survey. Their attempt was terrible. So terrible that it is almost not worth discussing. But I will! So stay tuned.

Meanwhile, any thoughts before we turn to the political implications of the conflict?

The plot thickens about the War of the Triple Alliance

 Paraguay appears to have attempted a desultory census on January 1, 1873, three years after the end of the war. What we have available is not as comprehensive as from 1886, but there are some age data. The resulting population pyramid both confirms and contradicts the data from 1886:

It confirms the data from 1886 because it also shows a giant skew in the sex ratio for the population born between 1848 and 1857; that is to say, the population aged 7 to 16 at the start of the war and 13 to 22 at its end. So far, so good.

The problem? Well, consider this table:

Birth cohort	Males	Females
1848-57 in 1872	15,083	45,567
1846-55 in 1886	6,420	18,697

That is a whole lot of decline over 14 years! (57% for males, 59% for females, although the cohorts are not exactly comparable.) Is that an indication of the terrible coverage of the 1886 census? If it is, other age cohorts should experience similar declines. 

Birth cohort	Males	Females
1858-72 in 1872	39,507	46,572
1856-76 in 1886	43,202	55,447

and

Birth cohort	Males	Females
Pre-1847 in 1872	13,663	60,678
Pre-1846 in 1886	13,125	42,395

They do not. In fact, given expected mortality, measurement errors and the fact that the cohorts are not equal, the 1848-57 and 1846-55 cohorts stack up remarkably well between the censuses. (The implication is that the 1886 count was a little better for that cohort.) The fit for the pre-1847 and pre-1846 cohorts is worse but still decent; it implies that men aged 25 and above were undercounted in 1872 relative to other groups because it is not possible for their numbers to have declined so little over 14 years. 

The weirdness of the first cohort poses a problem. At face value, these numbers imply that something in 1872-1886 dramatically reduced the measurable population aged 15-38 while leaving other groups untouched. (15 is the youngest member of the cohort in 1872; 38 is the age of the oldest member in 1886.)

I have no idea what that could possibly be. Something that disproportionately kills prime-age adults? Unlikely. Something that makes prime age adults more desirous of avoiding the census in 1886 than they were in 1872? Paraguay was still under foreign occupation in 1872, so its possible that they distrusted their own government more than the occupation authorities. But it seems unlikely.

In short, its a mystery. It seems as though the war ripped a chunk in the fighting age male population of the country. And there is (weaker) evidence that epidemics in the late stages of the war reduced the overall population. But as for everything else the numbers seem far too unreliable to make an estimate.

As you might expect, some scholars have been there before us. A review of their evidence will be forthcoming. 

Did Paraguay really lose 70% of its population in the Great War?

 Apologies for the absence. Work and travel, which may generate some future posting. But right now, some promised history.

The War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70), in which Paraguay went to war with Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, could fairly be considered one of the world’s most obscure conflicts. But it nonetheless comes up in the most unexpected quarters, usually as an example of the futility of war. The claim to fame is the loss of 90% of Paraguay’s male population (and some unknown but significant portion of its female population as well) making it one of the first genocidal conflicts of the modern age.

So what do we know? We will be looking at this in a series of posts, but let’s start with the Census of 1886. As censuses go, it is completely unreliable in its count. For example, the only way to jibe it with the 1899 census is to assume natural population growth of 8% per year (page 10 here) which is, to put it mildly, not possible.

That said, a population pyramid may start to shed light on the question of wartime population loss. If one assumes that either (1) the undercount was equal across ages and sexes; or (2) the undercount was randomly distributed across ages and sexes, then sudden shifts in the relative size or sex ratio of various cohorts may contain useful information. And so, we present to you the 1886 population pyramid for Paraguay, broken down by birth cohorts:

Something appears to be going on. First, the size of the 1866-1876 cohort is unusually small. This could be a random undercount ... or it could indicate very high mortality among that cohort. The first four years of the cohort coincided with the end of the war and large-scale cholera outbreaks; mortality could have been unusually high.

Still, high child mortality due to war-related disease is not what people commonly think of when they discuss the mortality of the War of the Triple Alliance. Rather, what they think of is massive male mortality from combat. (That would include disease, of course, but disease caused by terrible field conditions rather than a general epidemic.) Is there evidence for that?

Yes. As shown above, sex ratios reported in the 1886 census declined monotonically with age. It is of course likely that heads of household (e.g., males above the age of 30) disproportionately avoided census takers. (Widows were rather less likely to be taxed or drafted.) But that applies to other censuses in other countries as well, and those censuses do not show these sorts of extreme skews in their adult sex ratios.

In short, the 1886 census cannot tell us how badly the war impacted the Paraguayan population, but it can tell us that the violence was significant. More to come.

Singapore is not serious ...

... about raising fertility.

Over at Demography Matters, my friend and occasional co-blogger Randy McDonald brings our attention to the Singaporean government’s preoccupation with below-replacement fertility. They seem quite worried about it, to the point of calling for ever-greater immigration designed to keep up the population at 5.3 million.

The thing is, “seem” is the operative word. Judging from actions, the Singaporean government does not care that its native-born population is going to fall. And it is probably right not to care! But I find it mildly vexing that it makes so much noise while doing so little.

You can find the current natalist policies on page 72 of this population white paper. The highlights:

• 75% of the cost of fertility treatments;
• $4,800 (U.S., at an exchange rate of 80¢ per Singaporean dollar) for the first and second child, rising to $6,400 for the third and beyond;
• A deucedly vague “affordable” rental scheme for people with enough money to buy an condominium but are waiting to move in;
• $480 a month for day care;
• A tax rebate of $4,000 for the first child (doubling to $8,000 for the second and $16,000 for later ones ... but not refundable);
• A cumulative tax deduction for working mothers of 15% of earned income for the first child, 20% for the second, and 25% for the third.

So what does this all come to? Well, the median income in Singapore is $28,800 per year. For a couple with two children, you get a one-time gift of $9,600. Then you get $5,760 for day care ... which drops in half when the child is no longer an infant. (And does not get you much unless day care is much cheaper than in the United States. Unlicensed housefront operations in Queens Licensed home operations in Upper Manhattan cost more than about $480 a month.) Our hypothetical two-income couple has an income tax liability of $2,232 (calculated using this chart from the Singaporean tax authorities) which unless I am greatly misunderstanding means that the value of the subsidy is effectively capped.

Total annual payments for a first child in a two-income family, with both earning the median: a one-time first-year gift of $12,792, followed by $5,112 per year until the child enters school. Life-changing, this is not. And worse yet, if you needed fertility treatments, which most older couples do, you needed to think about the cost. (Israel does it differently.)

This is not serious.

What would be serious? Ah. Well. In 2011, the Singaporean government ran a surplus of $21.3 billion. There were 42,600 births in the country. A fertility rate high enough to replace the population (in fact, a bare tad higher) would imply roughly 70,000 births. $21.3 billion ÷ 70,000 ≈ $300,000 per child.

OK, then: offer $300,000 per child. Tweak as desired. That would be serious policy. Of course, I am not saying that paying a $300,000 child bonus would be good policy.

But it would be affordable. And it would live up to Singapore’s reputation for social engineering! So before they give up and say it cannot be done, they really should at least try. Or stop complaining.

Don’t count on the end of Mexican emigration

A month back, we argued that the job and wage data in Mexico implied that when U.S. job growth picks back up, so will immigration from Mexico. Jobs are plentiful in Mexico these days, but wages are low: the reason for low emigration, in that view, is the lack of American demand rather a lack of Mexican supply.

It appears as though survey results from Pew are consistent with that view.

Teddy Roosevelt and Spanish labor unions save Barbados, hate Barbadians!

  I don’t have a whole lot of emotional attachment to the madre patria, not where it counts.  After all, the parliament has passed a law giving the descendents of Civil War refugees the option to apply for a passport.  Yet I have zero desire to do it.  No, I have a negative reaction to doing it.  In other words, at the level where it counts, my people are the people of the United States of America.

But sometimes I can’t resist borrowing a phrase from my good friend (and great American) Carlos Yu:  “Oh, my peoples.” The story of the labor troubles on the Panama Canal is one of those times.

 
In 1904, the United States began construction of the Panama Canal in earnest.  Problem was, it needed laborers.  Lots of laborers.  Preferably cheap laborers, which ruled out hiring Panamanians.  (The Canal labor force would peak at more than a quarter of Panama’s economically active population.  Wage rates would have skyrocketed, even had that many people been interested in killing themselves to dig a big ditch ... which they were not.)  So the U.S. turned to the same place from which the earlier French canal effort had got its workers:  Jamaica.  Problem was, the Jamaican government remembered the disaster that was the repatriation of Jamaican workers after the French canal effort collapsed in 1889.  The Crown Colony government insisted that the Americans guarantee repatriation costs for any and all workers.  That ended the idea of using Jamaican labor; ultimately, only 47 worked on the Canal.

At this point the Barbadians, and later the Spanish, enter the story.

With Jamaica out, the Isthmian Canal Commission began recruiting in Barbados.  The first groups of Barbadians to arrive, however, proved too malnourished to accomplish their assigned tasks. “Not only do they seem to be disqualified by lack of actual vitality, but their disposition to labor seems to be as frail as their bodily strength.”   Governor Stevens himself wrote, “I have no hesitancy in saying that the West Indian Negro is about the poorest excuse for a laborer I have ever been up against in thirty-five years of experience.”  This should not have been surprising to anyone who knew about conditions on the island at the time, but we’re talking about Americans.  (Insert the first “oh, my people.”)  After bringing in almost 10,000 Barbadians, the Canal Zone management was disappointed with the results.

The Isthmian Canal Commission now decided to turn to, in the words of a Commission official, the “semi-white foreigner (Dago).”  Between 1906 and 1908, the Isthmian Canal Commission hired 8,000 Spanish workers.  It paid them twice what it paid Barbadians.  Now, it would be entirely reasonable to conclude that this was due to racism, but the Americans running the show weren’t particularly enamored of “dagoes.”  Rather, the higher salary was what they needed to offer to get people to leave the madre patria for Panama, and the Americans were willing to pay it because the Spanish were physically stronger and more robust than the half-starved Barbadians. 

The Spanish, however, were also the heirs to Spain’s militant labor tradition.  (Here is where the second “oh, my people” comes in.)  Spanish workers started the first major strike on the Canal in 1907.  The United States tried to use Italians to break the strike, but it didn’t work; they could only attract a total of 1,941 in 1906-07, after which they received no more.  So the American managers used the Barbadians to restrain the Spanish.  As one foreman wrote, “I could keep them both on their metal by rivalry between the two.”  The result, unsurprisingly, was an all-out riot between Spanish and Barbadian workers in 1909.  

Spanish militancy led the Canal Zone to replace Spanish workers by any means necessary.  The Americans pretty quickly figured out that Barbadian productivity rapidly rose to Spanish levels with access to enough calories.  The head of the Canal effort, a racist Brooklynite named George Goethals, reduced the work day from ten hours to nine in 1907, which lowered exhaustion, and required all workers to purchase three full meal tickets every day.  Previously, many Barbadian workers had chosen to subsist on sugar cane in order to save more money to send home — understandable, considering that meal tickets cost 9¢ ($1.98 in today’s money) and they earned only 68¢ for a nine-hour day, but terrible for their health and energy levels.  Add to that the fact that American foremen (with some head-banging from higher management, regardless of their own retrograde racial attitudes) learned to treat the Barbadians with some modicum of respect, and you can predict the result:  by 1909, the Americans were able to get the same work for less cash from the Barbadians, and stopped hiring Spaniards. 

The Spanish did not go quietly.  A violent wave of strikes rocked the Canal Zone in 1911 and 1912.  But the result was predictable.  (Oh, my peoples.)  The strikes ended with the complete replacement of Spanish labor by West Indians, mostly from Barbados.   By 1913, the Isthmian Canal Commission had brought in 19,900 Barbadians, not including the many women who followed their husbands and a continuing (if less well-recorded) migration as construction work continued after the Panama Canal’s offical opening in 1914.  In fact, the Canal would not be fully open to commercial traffic until 1920.

The ultimate migration turned out to be much bigger than 19,900.  In 1901, Barbados had a population of 195,558.  In 1921, it had a population of only 156,744.  Extrapolating from existing birth and death rates, the population of the island should have been 220,412 in 1921, implying a net outmigration of 64,000 people.  This obviously had massive effects on Panama (which had a population of only 450,000 in 1921, not including the Canal Zone) ... but what did it do to Barbados? 

Truth be told, I do not know for sure, but I have a strong guess, which will have to wait for a later post.  While we’re waiting, what do you think?

Demography matters, and a music video

  There is an interesting (if rarely updated) blog called “Demography Matters.” It's hit a few interesting topics lately.  Randy McDonald is the driving force behind it.  For those of you who don't know him, he wrote the defining takedown of the whole “Eurabia” nonsense, aka the idea that immigration and differential birthrates will eventually give Europe a Muslim majority.  But the blog is a lot more than that.

Here is a discussion of Greenland.  Short version:  considering the country's dependence on Danish expats for skilled labor, even a non-independence independence of the sort negotiated by other microstates could lead to disaster.  The population is shrinking despite high birthrates.  Maybe they'll get lucky and find oil.  More likely they will remain a dependency of Denmark forever, most likely de jure but definitely de facto.

The blog also recently discussed Iran.  Short version:  looks like Europe!  Crashing birthrates could fuel an economic boom if only the place could get the policies right.  In comments there is an interesting discussion of the fact that American birthrates have stayed above replacement ... and that much of that difference is because urban birthrates in the U.S. aren't appreciably different from their suburban or rural equivalents.  The really weird fact?  Canadian birthrates are crazy lower than U.S. ones, even in such similar places as Washington and British Columbia. 

Finally, it presents a scary version of Cuba's future, in which the country enters a demographic death spiral.  All it lacks is a projection of the worst case scenario: what would Cuba's population and age pyramid look like in 2050 if it goes the way of Ukraine and stays there?

Below the fold is a music video.  It is for Randy, for reasons he understands.  Essentially, while not my cup of tea, it shows what can be accomplished in his preferred genre in both aural and visual terms when attempted by two rather accomplished artists.  Enjoy.

Cuidando a los niños en la madre patria

I am a firm believer in the power of personal experience.  Of course, it’s dangerous on its own:  you never want to reason by anecdote.  On the other hand, some abstract hypotheses are just hard to accept in the face of personal experience.  When the data are ambiguous, I turn to my lying eyes.

There has been an increasing amount of discussion given to low European fertility in recent years.  One problem with the whole discussion, among many, is that there is low fertility and then there is low fertility.  Almost all of Europe is “low fertility” by historical standards, but some countries like France and Norway are certainly going to replace themselves, and others like Ireland and Denmark and the U.K. are quite likely to follow suit.

But there are the superduperultralow fertility countries, like España, where people seem to have given up on child-bearing as a bad deal.  As many people besides me have pointed out, TFR is a really bad measure of fertility, but for what it’s worth Spain clocked in at 1.4 in 2006.  Unlike some other countries, however, in Spain the pictures match the impression given by the TFR.

Some very rough thoughts below the fold. 

The Middle Passage

Is a nation more like a business or a family?

OK, now that I’ve got your attention, I’ll point out the obvious and confirm that the above picture is not from Trinidad.  It is, however, one zip code over from the old stomping grounds of Vincent Chase and the boys.  More relevantly, it’s in the middle of one of the largest Trinidadian communities in North America.

So, yeah, this post is about emigration.  The World Bank estimates that 361,596 Trinidadians live outside the two islands.  That number is so precise as to be obviously false, but it’s what we got.  Anyway, of that number, 55 percent live in the U.S. of A. (another 14 percent live in Canada), and of those who live in the United States, 13 percent live in Queens.  (Another 26 percent, of course, live in Brooklyn.  Yeah, Brooklyn!)

What can I say about the Trinidadian-born population of the United States?  68 percent of them are Afro-Trinidadian, 9 percent Indo-Trinidadian, and 4 percent Euro-Trinidadian, with the rest “mixed.”  The median household income is $40,168, or 90.4% of the median for the white native-born population.  Median full-time male wages are $33,000, or 90.0% of the U.S. median, while the same number for Trini females is $28,933 . . . or 108.3 percent of their native-born sistern.  Only 18 percent of Trini-Americans over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher.   

Man, that bored even myself.  A (slightly) more interesting discussion below the fold.

Beyond Belief

Hinduism isn't the only religion India brought to Trinidad, of course.  Twenty-thousand Muslims (20,007, to be precise) arrived in the great migration.   

For reasons that I don't know, the Muslim population grew slowly at first, numbering only 26,000 as late as 1922.  (Conversion to Christianity?  Reverse migration?  Undercounting?)  After that, though, it began to swell.  It's now about 68,000.

Most of the growth came from natural increase, but conversion played a role.  In 1922, Indo-Trinidadians made up the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Today, they make up only about 85%, according to the Guardian newspaper.  The remaining 10,000 are Afro-Trinidadian converts or their children. 

And that's caused trouble.  Trouble worthy of the phrase "beyond belief," trouble that would be downright hilarious in a comic opera way if it hadn't gotten 40 people killed.  More below the fold.

A House for Mr Biswas

That’s it.  That’s Mr. Biswas’s house.  Right behind the white car.  The street now resembles Union Turnpike more than anything in the novel, but the house is still there. 

Between San Fernando and Port-of-Spain lie the towns of Chaguanas, Waterloo, and Couva, the demographic center of the country’s East Indian population. 

When the British finally got around to abolishing slavery, the sugar plantations decided to import Chinese and East Indian indentured servants instead.  The Chinese soon stopped coming, because their government insisted on free return passage for its nationals.  Only 1500 arrived, mostly from Guangdong.  They now form an influential but small community of about 15,000 — a fellow named Dereck Chin built the island’s first multiplex, and as already-mentioned the NGC is led by one Frank Look Kin.  The white population — mostly Syrian Christian, with a few Portuguese and the strangely-named French Creoles, who are neither French nor Creole — is about the same size.   

The Indians, though, arrived in massive numbers.  By the time all was said and done, 150,000 of them had made a one-way trip to Trinidad.  Their descendents make up 40.3% of the population, as against a Afro-Trinidadian share of 39.5%.

Racial divisions shape Trinidadian politics.  The Afro-Trinidadian party is the People’s National Movement, founded by Eric Williams in 1956.  The main Indo-Trinidadian party currently is the United National Congress, founded in 1988 amid splits in then-ruling National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR).  I think it’s a brilliant name, enough to hint at its ethnic base without ruling out the possibility of gaining support across the racial divide.

That said, the racial divide isn’t as stark as it could be.  21% of the population is mixed, up from 18% in 1990 and 15% in 1980.  Unlike the Guyana formerly known as British, communal violence is unheard of in Trinidad.  You see Hindu flags outside houses in mostly African suburbs—did you know that Hindus mark various family and religious events by flying colored flags?  I didn’t—and you can spot Afro-Trinidadians liming in most Indo-Trinidadian neighborhoods. 

It helps that most Indo-Trinidadian links to India have faded away.  Nobody knows what village their ancestors came from—hell, they don’t even know the state.  The Bhojpuri language is pretty close to dead, and spoken accents in English don’t appreciably vary between racial groups.  (I’ll admit it: it’s kinda cool when you hear a white guy or a Chinese fellow bust out in pure Trini.) 

Last year I found myself watching the Ukraine-Tunisia World Cup match in a run-down little bar in the town of Waterloo.  Most of the people in the place were Indo-Trinidadian, and the (Indo-Trinidadian) female propietor had hung a Union Jack over the counter.  When I asked her about it, she said, misunderstanding my question, "Oh, that’s the English flag.  Meh daughter and grandchildren live there, and we get a lot of English visitors out this way." 

Alerted, I began to spot "English" and Canadian paraphenalia in the area:  bumper stickers, posters, ads for cheap flights.  But links to India?  Nobody even seemed to know that Mittal was an Indian company.  One fellow sensibly-enough guessed it to be German.   

Migration has brought Trinidad many things, but special ties to one of the 21st-century’s emerging superpowers doesn’t seem to be one of them.