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World Youth and Globalization Part 2

Massive migration also promises increased friction within societies as new arrivals reshape national cultures. English and French speaking Canada, with a population of only 30 million, receives over 130,000 new Asian immigrants every year. More than one-third of Vancouver's population is of Asian descent, and over 60 percent of the city's primary school students speak English only as a second language. France's five million Muslims constitute 8 percent of the population and now outnumber Jews and Protestants combined. In Germany, foreigners will make up 30 percent of the population by 2030, and over half the population of major cities like Munich and Frankfurt. The United States, the largest recipient of immigrants in the world, will undergo a profound demographic change. Hispanics have just replaced African-Americans as the largest minority group in the country, and their demographic importance will continue to grow rapidly. By 2025, Hispanics will likely be the major ethnic group in Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Texas. By 2050, whites may constitute less than half the population in the United States. As we'll discuss in the next chapter, these trends are already changing the rules of consumer behavior and creating new opportunities for forward-looking companies.

Societies characterized by centuries of cultural homogeneity might be reluctant to accept immigrants - even though such a policy could prove vital in replenishing their dwindling labor forces. In Japan, where national identity remains predicated on the concept of minzoku (race), fewer foreigners are naturalized each year than in tiny Switzerland, whose population is only 5.8 percent the size. In Europe, sluggish economic growth coupled with latent xenophobia has fostered the rise of far-right politicians, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jörg Haider in Austria, who campaigned on antiimmigration platforms.

Migrant workers are the very embodiment of the anxieties fostered by globalization - the fear that outsiders are threatening jobs and cultural cohesion. Even the European left has lashed back, with some warning that Muslim immigrants and their allegedly backward traditions threaten free speech, gay rights, and women's emancipation. Internationally renowned Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci gave voice to the latent fears of Europeans when she published “The Anger and the Pride" in the Italian newspaper Corriera della Sera, declaring that, “Giving space to the immigrants is equivalent to throwing out Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raffaello, the Renaissance, the Risorgimento, the Liberty we have conquered, our Fatherland . . . If in certain places the women are so stupid as to accept the chador or rather the thickly-embroidered veil through which they see the world, too bad for them . . . But if they presume to impose the same things on me, in my home . . ."

Denying access to migrants could create other problems. Immigration offers a pressure valve for developing countries lacking the economic and political infrastructure to integrate their youth into society. Ominously, the largest youth bulges are among the world's poorest and most politically unstable countries, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iraq.

The CIA warns that “the failure to adequately integrate large youth populations in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa is likely to perpetuate the cycle of political instability, ethnic wars, revolutions and anti-regime activities that already affect many of these countries. Unemployed youth provide exceptional fodder for radical movements and terrorist movements, particularly in the Middle East." (The U.S. government has even developed a demographics formula to predict political volatility: A country's probability of instability increases when the cohort of 15- to 29-year-olds surpasses the 30- to 54-year-old group by a ratio of 1.27 or more.)

The youth bulge is said to have been one of the underlying causes of the revolution that toppled the Shah in Iran, where, by the mid- 1970s, 50 percent of the population was under 16 and two-thirds was under 30. (Interestingly, the conservative Islamic regime in Iran now boasts the most effective fertility-control program in the world. Contraceptives are distributed for free, and engaged couples are required to take family-planning classes before they can qualify for a marriage license. Fertility rates have dropped from 5.2 in 1986 to 1.9 in 2002.)

Developing nations that have not effectively curbed fertility rates are besieged with social crises. In Zimbabwe, where half the population is under the age of 18, young people are bearing the brunt of escalating unemployment and a deteriorating economy. Inflation there is expected to reach up to 700 percent, and as many as five million people are undernourished.

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