Aging Europe needs the migrants it doesn't want

PARIS: Europe is ageing faster than any other region of the world. It badly needs immigrants. But many Europeans don’t want them.

The “old continent” may be able to offset the impact of a greying workforce until around 2020 by bringing more women and elderly people into work, encouraging mobility within Europe and making better use of existing migrants, EU and OECD experts say.

But in the medium to long term, the European Union will need to attract significant numbers of skilled workers from beyond its borders — and overcome growing public opposition highlighted by the rise of populist anti-immigration parties.

“If you close the door (to immigration), you will pay an economic price,” says Jean-Christophe Dumont, an expert on migration at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based intergovernmental think-tank.

“For now, we can make better use of migrants who are already here, matching their skills better to labour market needs. In the longer term, it will not only be about matching skills, it will also be about numbers,” he said.

Going by current trends, Europe’s industrial powerhouse Germany, along with Spain and Poland, will see its population shrink from now on, slowing potential economic growth.

Germany’s 82 million residents will dwindle to 74.7 million by 2050 and their average age will rise to nearly 50, assuming unchanged levels of migration, according to EU statistics agency Eurostat. Some projections are even more dire, putting the German population as low as 65 million by 2060.

That will mean “serious labour supply constraints” in some of the strongest EU economies — Austria, the Netherlands and Finland as well as Germany — according to a European Commission study by Joerg Peschner and Constantinos Fotakis that took a baseline economic recovery of just 1 per cent.

By contrast, Britain, France, Ireland and to a lesser extent Italy can expect healthy expansion. Britain will have overtaken the Germans by 2050 as the EU’s most populous nation with 77.2 million — if it stays in the bloc — while France will have caught up with Germany on 74.3 million.

Regardless of their place on the scale, many European countries still recovering from six years of economic crisis are being tugged in the opposite direction from demographic realities by a tide of anti-immigration political rhetoric.

Marine Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in Britain and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands are attracting working-class voters by raging against freedom of movement of workers within the EU, from the poorer east and south to the wealthier north.

They accuse the EU of opening the flood gates to “job stealing” migrants, driving down wages and living standards and raising crime rates.

DRIVE DEMAND: The backlash against immigration prompted Pope Francis to appeal in the European Parliament for an “elderly and haggard” continent to show a more welcoming face to those who cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life.

Another pressing argument for rational debate is the growing impact of the demographic reversal on the funding of pensions and healthcare, especially in countries such as Germany and Spain which will have the oldest populations.

As the post-World War Two baby boom generation retires, the ratio of over-65-year-olds to the working age population is set to rise dramatically, while the number of under-15s declines by nearly 15 per cent by 2060, according to projections by Eurostat.

At present, the age dependence rate is 27.5 on average in the 28-nation EU, but Germany and Italy are well above that level. The rate is projected to jump to 49.4 in 2050, when there will be only two people of working age for every retiree.

Most EU countries have raised their retirement age to 65 or beyond and are making citizens contribute longer for a full pension - but further increases lie ahead.

Meanwhile there’s the impact on Europe’s economy of having a big chunk of the population focused on “needs, rather than wants,” to consider, as Paul Hodges, co-author of the e-book “Boom, Gloom and The New Normal”, explains.

“Demographics drive demand,” he said. “Older people have less need for houses, cars and consumer goods and have to make do on lower incomes as they move on to pension age, slowing the wheels of the economy.” Before the financial crisis erupted in 2008, economic growth in the euro zone averaged 2 percent a year, roughly made up of a 1 per cent gain in employment and 1 per cent in productivity.

That growth potential, regarded as necessary to maintain the current level of European welfare provision, collapsed during the crisis and has yet to return in most countries.

Without employment gains from migration, Europe will need an improbably big boost in productivity to sustain its living standards - or see them decline.

Bhopal children paying price 30 years after disaster

BHOPAL: When Champa Devi Shukla’s granddaughter was born with a raft of facial deformities in the Indian city of Bhopal, she was not left short of advice.

“Many people said you should kill her. They said she is of no use, you should stuff tobacco in her mouth” to suffocate her, said Devi Shukla.

“But I thought, I’m not going to let her die. I’ve already lost three sons to this tragedy so I’m not going to lose someone else.”

When a cloud of highly toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas blew across Bhopal on the night of Dec 2, 1984, around 3,500 people were killed in the immediate aftermath and up to 25,000 are estimated to have died in the long-run.

The tragedy didn’t end there for locals living around the Union Carbide chemical plant at the centre of the disaster, with many later giving birth to children with abnormalities.

While the exact numbers are impossible to pin down, the streets near the now abandoned factory are full of families whose children born post-1984 have either died prematurely or have major health problems.

But the government has not confirmed a link, which would have major implications in terms of compensation so far limited to people who were alive at the time of the world’s deadliest industrial disaster.

Devi Shukla lost her husband and three sons on the night. One of her daughters, Vidya, was also left partially paralysed after inhaling fumes, although her condition improved after extensive physiotherapy.

The family was overjoyed when Vidya fell pregnant, but more pain was to come. Her first child, a son called Sushil, was stunted and is now less than four feet tall at the age of 18.

A second son, Sanjay, died after five months. And then Vidya gave birth to a daughter, Sapna.

“She was born with a cleft lip and palate. She has had three lots of operations so far” with one still to go to reconstruct her nose, said Devi Shukla.

Sapna, now a happy 13-year-old, says she wants to become a doctor when she is older.

Her own family’s experience having convinced her of the link, Devi Shukla helped set up a clinic for children of survivors who have health problems.

The Chingari Trust has 705 pupils, many with conditions such as autism or deafness. The centre provides physical and speech therapy along with schooling and sports.

‘Poisoned water’

Rasheeda Bee, a co-trustee, says she believes most of the illnesses stem from “drinking poisonous water”.

Her determination to help began after she saw her sister and then her three nieces die of respiratory illnesses.

It was fuelled by a trip to Japan, where she met children of victims of the 1945 Hiroshima nuclear bombing.

Although she is not a doctor, she was involved in tests on the breast milk of 20 mothers. Half were from neighbourhoods close to the factory and the others were on the other side of town.

“The figures for one half were normal but nine out of the 10 living near the plant had high levels of mercury in their milk,” she said. Mercury stunts the development of foetuses.

A report a decade ago in the Journal of American Medical Association found boys born to families exposed to the gas were on average 3.9 centimetres shorter than those from other parts of the city.

The head of Amnesty International, which is campaigning for more compensation, says there is clear evidence of poisoning.

“We are now dealing with inter-generational health problems which are being passed on from the parents to the next generation,” said Salil Shetty while attending commemorations for the 30th anniversary of the disaster.

“There have been multiple studies over the years... It’s very clear that water contamination has happened,” said Shetty, adding some water and soil contamination from the plant happened even before the gas leak.

Devi Shukla said even now pupils “have a fear of the drinking water”, although the pipes have been changed.

A doctor at a government-funded institute which has been studying child health in Bhopal says it is too early to draw a link between the plant and congenital illnesses.

“It has not been established, but it has not been denied either,” said the doctor on condition of anonymity.

Shetty acknowledged the exact cause of some illnesses was contested, but said the onus was on the government.

“Why can’t the government of India conduct proper medical research and study? It’s not like India doesn’t have the capacity to do this. Thirty years is too long for the victims to wait.”

When home is Congo's triangle of death

KIPETO: When the Mai-Mai militiamen came, their faces streaked with flour and talismans hanging from their arms, the villagers in the DRC’s “triangle of death” ran for their lives.

“We saw them coming with arrows and weapons,” Kalongo Musonda told that from the safety of the Kipeto camp for the internally displaced, in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“They were singing as they came,” said the 46-year-old, flapping his hand before his mouth while producing high-pitched whoops in imitation of the feared fighters.

The Bakata Katanga are among the most powerful of the dozens of Mai-Mai militias still operating in the DRC’s east more than a decade after the end of devastating back-to-back wars, in 1997-1998 and 1998-2003.

“They wore ripped trousers and they had powdered their faces with flour. They had lashes tied round their arms with fetishes tied on,” Ghislaine Kibombe, who teaches the camp’s 150 children, recalls with horror.

The Mai-Mai insurgents are fighting for independence for Katanga province, which is the size of Spain and provides about half the world’s cobalt and boasts substantial copper supplies, along with diamonds.

They also want a greater share of the mineral resources concentrated in Katanga’s south, for the underdeveloped north.

The Kipeto camp lies about 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of the town of Pweto, in an area in the heart of Katanga’s violence nicknamed the “triangle of death”.

Since 2012, insurgents have ravaged whole tracts of the “triangle”, where the UN mission in the country, Monusco, accuses them of murder, rape and looting, as well as burning down homes and entire villages.

‘Our brothers, our uncles’

Kibombe, 37, says she does not understand how “a group of civilians who weren’t heavily armed” could have “stripped all away” around them, while the Congolese army arrived “late, after they had destroyed everything”. At the time, there was no military facility near her community.

“We saw atrocious things,” said Kasongo Tshombe, a community worker at the Mwashi camp, also in the Pweto region. “I saw my brother-in-law shot down and decapitated, just like that,” said the 49-year-old.

Even crueller is the fact that these rebels often come from the communities they now terrorise.

“They are our brothers, our uncles, our cousins who didn’t go to school and went away to enlist,” Tshombe said.

The United Nations estimates the number of displaced in the Pweto region at 178,500, many of them children taken out of school who now risk becoming recruits for the rebels.

Tshombe founded an association to try to keep local youths out of the militia, with many of those displaced unable to afford monthly school fees of $2 (1.6 euros).

In Pweto itself, a school for displaced children opened last year with the same goal, taking in 180 youths aged nine to 15 — most of them orphans, some of them rescued from the clutches of armed groups.

Thirteen-year-old Adele was briefly held captive by militiamen after they murdered her parents.

“They used me as a cook, made me carry water,” she said. “I also carried a bucket full of bullets and a weapon. After two days they let me go, along with my sister”. Today, Adele hopes to become a schoolteacher.

The Pweto centre — financed on a two-year basis by a dozen different donors — is set to close in 2015 unless it finds a new source of funding.

For Ignace, who tells with a trembling voice how the militia shot his father in the back, that would spell disaster.

“Since I have no father, I have to study here to look after my little brother,” the 13-year-old said.

His schoolmate Mariam, whose parents were murdered in similar circumstances, speaks of their killers without hatred: “May God forgive them for what they did to our parents.” Her message to the fighters? “To stop what they are doing and let us rebuild our country.”

‘Going to burn you!’

Between January and October this year, nearly 4,700 homes in 75 villages were torched in the Pweto area, according to the NGO International Emergency and Development Aid.

Along the road from Pweto to Kakolona, around 15 kilometres away, several villages have been razed to the ground.

“There’s one group that only carries out theft and extortion, while the others start fires,” said the group’s Jean-Pierre Ruti Mutembera.

The rebels are accused of enrolling fighters by force.

“They tell you, ‘You don’t want to join our movement? We’re going to burn you!’” said Marie-Louise Ngoy, a teacher at the school in Mwashi.

In Kakolona itself, a number of residents have dared return from exile to live beside what remains of the brick dwellings.

The army maintains a small outpost in the town, but a lieutenant explained that if the situation remains calm, the troops may be ordered to leave — a terrifying prospect for the displaced.

“If they ask the soldiers to go, the Mai-Mai will find out, and then they will come down on our heads,” warned one refugee, Kadjiba Katombo.

UN suspend food programme for Syrian refuges

UNITED NATIONS: Shortage of funds has forced the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to suspend a critical programme providing food vouchers to more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries, the agency announced in a press statement here on Monday.

Under this programme, poor Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt use vouchers to buy food in local shops.

Sources told Dawn that the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was likely to make an urgent appeal to donor countries to increase aid to fund the food programme for Syrian refugees. Without WFP vouchers, many families will go hungry.

For refugees already struggling to survive the harsh winter, the consequences of halting this assistance will be devastating.

Turkey assumes G20 presidency

ISTANBUL: Turkey on Monday assumed the presidency of the G20 group of major economies for the first time in its history, pledging to fight global inequality during its turn at the helm.

The presidency of the G20 is seen by Ankara as a major opportunity for Turkey to showcase its status as an economic and political power under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Three words will guide Turkey... inclusivity, implementation and investment,” Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan told a press conference in Ankara in televised comments.

“We aim to make the G20 reach out to low income countries and take care of countries that are not G20 members in an inclusive way,” Babacan said.

“Turkey will bridge the gap between developed economies and undeveloped countries to fight global inequality,” he added, vowing to include poor countries in decision-making.

Turkey took over the presidency of the G20 group of developed and major developing economic countries from Australia. China is preparing to take over the presidency for 2016.

Babacan said the 2015 G20 leaders’ summit, to be held in November in the southern resort city of Antalya, will discuss topics including “strong, sustainable and balanced economic growth”, climate change, global development and the fight against corruption.

“Hosting the G20 summit in 2015 is a big opportunity and a big responsibility for Turkey,” he said.

Babacan noted that global unemployment all over the world is still a major problem and the G20 would prioritise the “most vulnerable segments of society”.

Hong Kong teen protest leader on hunger strike

HONG KONG: A prominent Hong Kong teen protest leader said on Monday he’s going on a hunger strike after a failed attempt by pro-democracy activists to step up their flagging movement for democratic reforms by surrounding government headquarters.

Joshua Wong’s announcement came after protesters carrying umbrellas — which have become symbols of the pro-democracy movement — battled police armed with pepper spray, batons and riot shields for hours overnight before being driven off a main road outside the complex at dawn.

The government complex was forced to shut temporarily and the city’s Beijing-backed leader said public patience was wearing thin, adding that police would “continue to take decisive action to enforce the law”.

Student leaders conceded that their attempt to escalate their movement had failed. With options running out, the 18-year-old Wong announced at a rally late Monday that he and two other members of his group would go on an indefinite hunger strike to press demands that the Hong Kong government drop restrictions on inaugural 2017 elections for the city’s top leader.

Wong leads Scholarism, one of two student groups that have played key roles organizing the protests that have occupied major streets around the city for two months. Hundreds of protesters overran police lines as they tried to block traffic on a main road, but were stopped by police barricades from going down a side road to Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying’s office.

The protesters, many wearing surgical masks, hard hats and safety goggles and chanting, “I want true democracy,” said they wanted to occupy the road to prevent Leung and other government officials from getting to work in the morning.

Iran to turn uranium into reactor fuel under extended deal

IENNA: Iran will convert more of its higher-grade enriched uranium into reactor fuel under an interim nuclear deal with six world powers, making the material less suitable for building atomic bombs, a diplomatic source said on Monday.

Iran and the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China, and Russia failed to meet a Nov 24 deadline for resolving their dispute over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

They gave themselves until the end of June for further negotiations.

It was the second time this year they had missed a self-imposed target for a comprehensive agreement to scale back Iran’s nuclear programme, in exchange for phasing out sanctions that are hurting its oil-dependent economy.

As a result, a preliminary agreement reached late last year, designed to buy time for the talks on a final settlement, will remain in force. Under its terms, Iran halted its most sensitive nuclear activity in return for limited sanctions easing.