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World Youth and Globalization Part 1

One of the great ironies of our unbalanced world is that as many developed nations (and a few emerging markets, such as China - and Chinese is the world's most spoken language) cope with depopulation and advanced aging, much of the developing world is confronting an unprecedented "youth bulge." Even where populations are not growing rapidly, the number of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 is on the rise, as is their share of total population. India's workingage population, for instance, is projected to grow by 335 million people by 2030 - almost as many as the entire working-age population of Europe and the United States today. As a result, poor countries throughout Latin America speaking Spanish and Portuguese, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa are struggling to deal with an abundance of workers, while advanced economies contemplate a future of jobs without the labor force to fill them.

Of course, jobs are a powerful motivator, and their abundance in advanced economies will attract young workers from the developing world. Today, legal and illegal immigrants account for more than 15 percent of the population in more than 50 countries. That number will only continue to grow, as citizens in the developing world flock to industrialized countries in search of employment and higher wages. If developed countries hope to maintain a fiscally sustainable ratio of workers to pensioners, they would have to accept a vast number of migrants: for each of the years between 2010 and 2015, more than nine million in the European Union and nearly eight million in Japan.

Managing these immigration flows will put a tremendous strain on governments in the decades ahead and may spark friction between nations. An estimated four million would-be migrants living in the eastern and southern periphery of the EU are poised to emigrate (mostly illegally) into the region. Already, Italy is known as the "soft underbelly" of EU immigration barriers; it is home to 1.5 million legal immigrants and probably 500,000 illegal immigrants.58 The Italian government has had frequent diplomatic spats with Libya, which it accuses of being a funnel for illegal immigrants from all over Africa. Similarly, Mexico and Central America will remain a substantial source of illegal immigrants into the United States, while illegal immigration in the Russian Far East will be a point of contention between Russia and China.

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