Migration will upend Europe
21st September 2023
When hundreds of mostly African migrants escaped from the transfer center in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, last weekend and began roaming the town’s bakeries and shops begging for food, the mayor took to social media to explain. There were 2,000 migrants squeezed into a facility meant for 250, he told terrified locals. The conditions were inhumane. The repeated attempts to escape were inevitable.
On the island of Lampedusa, 11,000 migrants had arrived in the space of five days. There were 6,000 migrants in a facility meant for 600. The Sub-Saharan Africans were fighting with the North Africans. “To get food is a problem,” one migrant told a television interviewer. “If you don’t fight, you don’t have food.” Public transport was at a standstill as authorities commandeered buses to shift the migrants. Locals — and an increasing number of Italian politicians — refer to what is going on as an invasion. Migrant arrivals have doubled this year to 130,000 and the enormity of the crisis is about to shake European politics to its core.
However overwhelming the situation in southern Italy may look now, it is only the merest foretaste of the troubles that await. Europe’s population is shrinking, and fast. In countries where childbearing has been out of fashion for quite some time — Italy among them — each native generation is only about two-thirds the size of the last. Since Europe is rich and peaceful, migrants would be rushing to fill the void in any case, but Africa, especially south of the Sahara, is now growing at a rate never witnessed on any continent. Sub-Saharan Africa passed the one-billion population mark in 2015, but it is going to more than double, to 2.12 billion, by 2050. By then the population will be ten times what it was in 1950.