Europe’s
man problem
Migrants
to Europe skew heavily male — and that’s dangerous.
By VALERIE HUDSON
1/6/16, 12:54 PM CET
The recent surge of
migration into Europe has been unprecedented in scope, with an
estimated 1 million migrants from the Middle East and North Africa
this past year alone, making for a massive humanitarian crisis, as
well as a political and moral dilemma for European governments. But
one crucial dimension of this crisis has gone little-noticed: sex or,
more technically, sex ratios.
According to
official counts, a disproportionate number of these migrants are
young, unmarried, unaccompanied males. In fact, the sex ratios among
migrants are so one-sided — we’re talking worse than those in
China, in some cases — that they could radically change the gender
balance in European countries in certain age cohorts.
As many governments,
including in the United States, debate how many migrants to accept
onto their shores, they would be wise to take gender balance into
consideration. That might sound sexist on the surface, but years of
research has shown that male-dominated societies are less stable,
because they are more susceptible to higher levels of violence,
insurgence and mistreatment of women. In Germany, scores of women
recently reported being attacked on New Year’s Eve by men whom the
authorities describe as of “North African or Arabic” descent.
While it is not yet known whether the alleged perpetrators were
migrants, the attacks may finally be alerting policymakers to the
risks of a male-dominated migration wave. Why would European
societies, many of which rank highest on global measures of gender
equality and stability and peace, jeopardize those hard-won and
enviable rankings?
It makes good sense
that so many young men are leaving countries like Afghanistan, Iraq
and Syria: Their demographic is often at greater risk of being
coerced into joining fighting groups, or being killed rather than
captured by such groups. But the result is that 66.26 percent of
adult migrants registered through Italy and Greece over the past year
were male, according to the International Organization of Migration.
That imbalance might
not sound radical, but it is, especially when you look more closely
at who those males are. It’s true that many male migrants hope
that, if granted asylum, they will be joined in Europe by their wives
and children, who would help balance out national sex ratios. But
importantly, more than 20 percent of migrants are minors below the
age of 18, and the IOM estimates that more than half of those minors
traveling to Europe are traveling as unaccompanied minors — 90
percent of whom are males. This heavily male subset is all but
guaranteed asylum because of their status as unaccompanied minors,
but they get no special dispensation to bring spouses, especially
since the European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that European
Union countries are not required to recognize the legality of child
marriages among migrants.
To see how these
overall figures affect specific countries — and why there is reason
for concern — consider the case of Sweden, which has been
especially transparent about its migration statistics and whose
ratios mirror the broader trend in Europe in many respects.
TURKEY-GREECE-EUROPE-MIGRANTS
A group of refugees,
led by Turkish police, are escorted to buses in place of sailing to
the Greek island of Chios via raft, at a beach in the western Turkish
coastal town of Cesme, in Izmir province, on November 5, 2015. Bulent
Kilic/AFP/Getty
According to Swedish
government statistics, as of the end of November, 71 percent of all
applicants for asylum to Sweden in 2015 were male. More than 21
percent of all migrants to Sweden were classified as unaccompanied
minors, representing more than half of all minor migrants to the
country. For accompanied minors, the sex ratio was about 1.16 boys
for every one girl. But for unaccompanied minors, the ratio was 11.3
boys for every one girl. In other words, the Swedish case confirms
IOM’s statistic that more than 90 percent of unaccompanied minors
are male. Indeed, on average, approximately 90 unaccompanied boys
entered Sweden every single day in 2015, compared with eight
unaccompanied girls.
Those numbers are a
recipe for striking imbalances within Sweden. Consider that more than
half of these unaccompanied minors entering Sweden are 16 or 17 years
old, or at least claim to be. (There are no medical checks of age for
Swedish asylum-seekers, and applicants who say they’re under 18
receive special consideration in the asylum process.) In this age
group more than three-quarters are unaccompanied, meaning they are
overwhelmingly male. According to calculations based on the Swedish
government’s figures, a total of 18,615 males aged 16 and 17
entered Sweden over the course of the past year, compared with 2,555
females of the same age. Sure enough, when those figures are added to
the existing counts of 16- and 17-year-old boys and girls in
Sweden—103,299 and 96,524, respectively, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau’s International Database—you end up with a total of
121,914 males in Sweden aged 16 or 17 and 99,079 females of the same
age. The resulting ratio is astonishing: These calculations suggest
that as of the end of 2015, there were 123 16- and 17-year-old boys
in Sweden for every 100 girls of that age.
If that trend
continues into 2016 or even beyond, each successive late adolescent
cohort of 16- and 17-year-olds will be similarly abnormal, and over
time the abnormality will become an established fact of the broader
young adult population in Sweden. (Hans Rosling, the Swedish data
visualizer who created the GapMinder Foundation, has similar
estimates regarding the alteration of Swedish sex ratios.) In China,
long the most gender-imbalanced country in the world, the
male-to-female ratio of approximately 117 boys for every 100 girls in
this age group now comes up short of Sweden’s gender gap. China’s
sex ratios are still more abnormal across other age groups; the
imbalances there extend all the way down to birth sex ratios due to
the country’s severe birth restrictions, while Sweden’s
abnormalities do not. But young adult sex ratios are arguably the
most crucial of all for social stability.
Canada is the one
country so far that seems to think this is cause for concern. Faced
with similarly skewed sex ratios among asylum-seekers, the new
liberal administration of Justin Trudeau announced in late November
that, starting in 2016, it would accept only women, accompanied
children and families from Syria. Specifically excluded would be
unaccompanied minor males and single adult males (unless they are
members of the LGBTQ community); those excluded will primarily be
older teen and young adult men.
Fear of terrorism
could well be part of Canada’s calculus, especially in the wake of
attacks perpetrated by migrants in Europe and the United States; in
the overwhelming majority of cases, terror attacks are carried out by
unattached young adult men. Most of these men are unmarried, and
virtually none have children. Indeed, the Islamic State reportedly
discourages its male fighters from having children so that they are
more willing to engage in suicide attacks, and widows of suicide
bombers are quickly forced to remarry, while remaining on birth
control.
But fear of
terrorism might not be the only reason to be leery of highly abnormal
sex ratios among the young adult population. As my co-author Andrea
Den Boer and I argued in our book, societies with extremely skewed
sex ratios are more unstable even without jihadi ideologues in their
midst. Numerous empirical studies have shown that sex ratios
correlate significantly with violence and property crime—the higher
the sex ratio, the worse the crime rate. Our research also found a
link between sex ratios and the emergence of both violent criminal
gangs and anti-government movements. It makes sense: When young adult
males fail to make the transition to starting a
household—particularly those young males who are already at risk
for sociopathic behavior due to marginalization, a common concern
among immigrants—their grievances are aggravated.
There are also
clearly negative effects for women in male-dominated populations.
Crimes such as rape and sexual harassment become more common in
highly masculinized societies, and women’s ability to move about
freely and without fear within society is curtailed. In addition,
demand for prostitution soars; that would create a deeply ironic
outcome for Sweden, which invented the path-breaking Swedish
abolitionist approach to prostitution.
Europe is famously
progressive on women’s rights, and some European governments have
even created voluntary classes for migrants to understand how the
treatment of women may be profoundly different in their new homes.
But even with such efforts there is the potential for real regress
when the young adult sex ratio is so high. And what is often
invisible in the debates over migration is that the women left behind
by this largely male exodus are usually left in dire situations: In
displaced persons camps in Syria or refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan
and surrounding countries, female-headed households live in fear and
penury, prey to exploitation and abuse. Sweden’s foreign minister,
Margot Wallström rightly emphasizes her country’s “feminist
foreign policy”—but can Sweden really consider its migration
policy to be feminist?
While the
humanitarian needs of the refugees streaming into Europe must be
foremost in our minds at this time, policymakers in Sweden and other
countries should also think of the long-term consequences of an
unprecedented alteration in the young adult sex ratios of their
societies. The Canadian approach should be carefully studied, and
perhaps adapted by other countries. After all, if the sex ratios of
the migrants’ countries of origins are balanced, is it not odd to
accept predominantly male migrants for asylum?
As anthropologist
Barbara Miller has persuasively argued, a normal sex ratio is a
“public good” and therefore deserves state protection. For
Sweden—or any other European country—to wind up with the worst
young adult sex ratios in the world would be a tragedy for European
men and women alike.
Valerie Hudson is
professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at
Texas A&M University and co-author, most recently, of The Hillary
Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy.
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