Thread by @lymanstoneky

Got a question about African population forecasts. Basically question was: if Africa really grows as huge as its forecast to, will that create huge migration pressures into Europe? i.e. will Africa become overpopulated leading to massive migration spillovers?

So here's population density for some selected countries using the UN's 2019 World Population Prospects dataset.

Nigeria in 2100 will still be ***less densely populated*** than Bangladesh is today.

Sorry, that's people per square mile.

Rwanda will be very dense. But Rwanda is also rather small. And Bangladesh has managed to get very fast economic growth and improved living standards despite arguably *worse* natural resource endowments and similar densities.

So I think that there's no reason to suppose that *population pressure* in Africa poses any large migratory "risk."

The "risk" is that investments in travel and communications will outpace the growth of local economies.

That is, the risk that we'll get innovation in human trafficking which outpaces innovation in human capital.

The real "risk" is that Africa will face recurrent violence and conflict, which is pretty much exogenous to population growth in terms of its causes. The real "risk" is that African economic development will be too slow and thus fail to provide enough jobs.

If African economies sputter out/can't find a pathway to growth, i.e. if the level of violence on the continent rises significantly again (or fails to fall), if progress on property rights and democratization is reversed by Chinese influence, etc, then outmigration will rise.

Climate change can also obviously drive desertification especially in the Sahel which can stimulate out-migration.

These are the risks. "Too many people" is an absurd red herring.

The population of Syria is a triviality next to the population of Africa TODAY, and yet refugees from Syria practically overwhelmed the European political system, because Syria was stricken by a devastating civil war leading to a high rate of outflow.

In the same way, a sudden decline in African population could drive a *higher* rate of out-migration!

Imagine, if you will, some unforeseen climate event leading to an entire rainy season being missed. Dust storms envelop the entire Sahel for months. Famine sets in.

Exploiting the opportunity, various groups restart chilled wars. Under the strain, several Sahelian states essentially collapse, leading to endemic violence. Then an innovation in energy leads to plummeting oil prices.

Nigeria's economy bottoms out as northerners flood south to escape the drought, and southerners are tossed out of work by the collapse in oil revenues.

Suddenly you have eight different wars raging across the region, hundreds of thousands at risk of death from malnutrition, a nightmare scenario in terms of delivering food aid, and excess mortality from all angles.

In that scenario, it's easy to imagine that population growth could stall out. Population could even shrink for a period! You'll notice that dip in Rwanda's population density: that's AIDS + Rwandan genocide.

But if such an event happened and population growth sputtered out, would migration into Europe rise or fall?

*Obviously* it would rise! It would be a huge refugee crisis!

Anyway. That's my take on the African-population-growth-and-migration question.