Radical Demography

A beginning

The need for public demography – some examples

• New Orleans mayor expects only half of the city’s population to return– Which half?

• Trevor Phillips’ ghettos: “Black holes which people fear to enter and from which no-one can leave”– Are there such areas?

• UK census questions: “Colour cannot and will not be asked” (1966) “Ethnic group must be asked” (1986).

• “A focus on survey data encourages individualised explanations and solutions, and discourages study of the social and structural…”

• Attempts to define Britain and Britishness, also in US• Concern with economic and social progress of 2nd generation

children of immigrants

Structure of this session

• Jamie – US academic geography, and more– What is radical demography?

• Ludi – shifting the accepted view on race and population change– What is radical demography?

• Participants – Migration Watch– What is radical demography?

Academic Theory: Spatial Assimilation

and Concentration in Space • US academic framework has permeated public

discussion: spatial assimilation theory’s normative concerns with concentrations of non-whites– Immigrant progress marked by move into % white

neighbourhoods (of which, in immigrant cities there are increasingly few)

– Also demographic composition issues: age structure means that these “white neighbourhoods are older

• Emphasis on individuals rather than place limiting

A case study: leaving Los Angeles

• Much academic and policy attention devoted to “problem” of immigrant Latinos clustering in concentrated ‘unequal’ Los Angeles - and idea that 2nd generation will fail to assimilate if they continue to live there

• Yet 2nd generation Latinos are less likely than their parents to leave Los Angeles, especially if university-educated - emergence of Latino immigrant middle class

• Harold Meyerson: neighborhood clustering has allowed Latinos in LA to organise political power (American Prospect 2003 article)

Configurations of Immigrant Inequality in Los Angeles

• Decreasing immigrant Latino inequality in Los Angeles in last decade: Living Wage movement

• Even though immigrant/native wage gap is still high in Los Angeles, racial wage gap (Latino/white) is narrower than in other (non-immigrant) cities

• So, dispersal from Los Angeles may not be sign of economic progress, and remaining may not be linked to a failure to assimilate/integrate - but a sign that LA itself is changing

Instrumental Geographies

• London’s East End discussion: class versus race politics

• Who are the engineers?• “British/American values”?: ie former strategies of

extended families and support networks lamented in East End and US midwest - but coded as “crowding” and “voluntary segregation” when immigrants perform them - especially in contested (integrated!) spaces

• Place and space used in anti-immigrant (and academic debate) to frame difference (segregation, invasion, non-white spaces)

The Nation in the Neighbourhood: Popular Public Concern

• Focus has not been about regions or neighbourhoods in terms of why place matters (jobs, housing, inequality, health, access) - but rather in terms of what/how bodies mark that space (‘ghettos’, ‘immigrant areas’)

• Multicultural Britain/London discussion and maps in Guardian - where are they? How many?

• But in US, as well as in Britain, neighbourhoods themselves are changing in ways that make dispersion a problematic concept

Suggestions for a Radical Demography

• Focus on concentration without attention to place problematic (Why are people in certain places rather than others?)– Radical Demography would explore, for example,

disinvestment in East End and restrictions on immigrant/refugee settlement rather than promoting racialised citizenships

• Does not allow that assimilation and integration, in multicultural societies, are shifting referents (ie what is Britain/US? What is an immigrant neighbourhood?)– Radical Demography would question spatial dispersion as

integration, concentration as (self)segregation, and static notions of place

Radical Demography Continued

• Radical Demography would seek to challenge ideas of place (whether Britain or America, London or Los Angeles) that are:

– Racialised in their definitions• “Everyone is mixed, but not everyone counts as

mixed” (Gilroy)

– Historic rather than processural

– Theoretically rather than democratically instrumental (or investigative)

Shifting the accepted view on race and population change

• “Black areas are bad for all of us”

• Previously: “Black people are bad for all of us”

• An alternative, demographic view of segregation / integration

• Evidence

• What is Radical Demography?– Burawoy’s Public Sociology

Views of segregation, summer 2005

• Segregation at levels of black ghettoes in US cities (Guardian, 1 Sept 2005)

• Ghettos blighting Asian integration (Times, 1 Sept 2005)

• Multiculturalism is failing to bring Britain's races together, says Ted Cantle (Times, 21 Sept 2005)

• Are we sleepwalking towards apartheid? (Sunday Times, 18 September 2005)

• Our worry is this is fertile breeding ground for extremists. (Trevor Phillips radio interview reported in Daily Mirror, 23 September 2005)

Academic views

• Segregation indices– How evenly spread is a group across areas (schools, …)– ‘Remarkable’, ‘stubborn’ segregation, ‘not optimistic’

• Michael Poulsen, Telegraph 1st Sept 2005– Dr Poulsen said isolated enclaves were a feature of immigration:

"You could argue that tighter control on immigration was the only way to curtail continuous growth."

– He said that Europeans' assumption that immigrants would be assimilated into the wider culture with time had not been thought through.

– The danger is the assimilation process is so slow that for many it is just not possible."

• Danny Dorling, Ludi Simpson, Ceri Peach, Tariq Modood– Trevor has got it wrong; segregation indices mis-interpreted

(sensitive to geog scale and population composition); there are no ghettos in Britain; White ; flight worth investigating

Founding fathers of statistics and demography

• Francis Galton… “It would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations” (1869)… “as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races” (1892).

• Ronald Fisher “To increase the birth rate in the professional classes and among the highly skilled artisans would be to solve the great eugenic problem of the present generation and to lay a broad foundation for every kind of social advance.” (1917: 206)

• PK Whelpton “By means of eugenic sterilization, it is planned to lower the incidence of certain undesirable qualities in the next generation… this plan should be watched carefully by populationists in all parts of the world and such tests of its effectiveness made as are possible.” (1938: 183)

• Also Spearman, Yule, Edgeworth, Dublin and Thompson – (see Donald MacKenzie (1999), and Tukufu Zuberi (2001)

Alternative view of Britain’s changing cities

Race and population geography- hypotheses (1) -

• Immigration leads to clusters and population growth– Occupational labour shortages in specific

locations– Clustering provides social and economic

capital– Chain migration and family building follows– Age-structure leads to rapid natural growth in

settlement areas– Natural growth becomes greater than

immigration

Race and population geography- hypotheses (2) -

• Pressure on housing leads to dispersal– To neighbouring areas with similar social

conditions– Counter-urbanisation to better housing,

further away– New clusters to maintain cultural and

economic capital: a residential mosaic– Constraints to dispersal: ‘forced segregation’– Indigenous population: flight, avoidance,

racial housing market, or none of these?

Race and population geography- headline evidence -

1991 2001

1. Electoral wards with non-White majority 57 118

Proportion of the group who live in these areas:

All non-White groups 15% 23%

Pakistani and Bangladeshi 22% 35%

2. Net migration within UK, 2000-2001Non-White White

118 Electoral wards with a non-White majority -14,716 -9,747

All other wards +15,308 +4,818

Population dynamics• After immigration, clusters are to be expected• Growth of Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi

populations is more through natural growth (reproduction) than immigration

-20% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

African

Bangladeshi

Pakistani

Chinese

Indian

White

CaribbeanBlack: natural change (excess of births over deaths).

Grey: Net migration.

Source: Williamson (2003)

What is Radical Demography?

• Burawoy’s Public Sociology

Audience: academic

Audience: other

Instrumental Professional sociology

Policy sociology

Reflexive Critical sociology

Public sociology

Case study: Migration Watch

• Distribute MW leaflet and MW Advisory Council

• Ask for professional, policy, critical and public challenges/questions to the MW leaflet

• Canvass for willingness to collaborate on a fuller critique of MW.

Ideas

• Idea of population change• Timing of integration• Language undefined/flexible• Is overcrowding uniform? Everyone? Just immigrants? All

immigrants (EU/non-EU)? Who crowds? How is crowding/overcrowding determined? Is it overcrowded?

• Where do they (MW people live?• What about skilled immigrants? Emphasis on asylum seekers?• Immigration (esp skilled) has been increasingly encouraged as UK

population has aged – this is part of increase/change. Immigration has been recruited/encouraged. Scare story of job-taking from earlier labour-shortage recruitment periods.

• Give examples of good practise (Finland)

• Issues surrounding National ID card / estimation