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.
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.Consider this:
Analyst Ömer Taşpınar, writing for the Washington, DC-based Brookings Institution, estimates that the Muslim birth rate in Europe is three times higher than the non-Muslim one.Europeans, in general are breeding at a little less than replacement rate. That means a little less than 2 2.2 children per couple. So let's say 1.8.