MUSLIMS TAKING OVER EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA-56

There is a widely circulating video on the internet, titled demographic_problem.wmv, which shows the dire probability of Muslims taking over Europe and North America in a few decades on the basis of population expansion relative to the indigenous Europeans and North Americans.

Demographics is a subject I know something about so I will make this essay as concise and informative as I can. I have written on the subject before in the last third of my blog essay titled Energy (there is a link between population and energy requirements) so you may want to look at that; also one of the best sources around, as I noted in my essay, is the 2004 book Fewer by Ben J. Wattenberg who is recognized as a demographics expert and who has been following and analyzing population trends for the last 40 years or so.

That video is alarmist and extreme and illustrates how selected facts can be used to draw unrealistic, false, and even outrageous conclusions. The video says that action must be taken before it is too late (presumably too late to prevent a takeover of the world by Muslims), but what is the action that is recommended? It is not specified. The video is correct in stating that the replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman; anything less leads to population decline and of course anything more will cause population growth.

Before I start refuting the ominous conclusions of this video I will denote what some of the real concerns are for the coming worldwide and individual country population declines as anyone who is paying attention knows. Just as our Social Security system is now predicted to be in the red in 2010 because fewer and fewer workers are paying into the system and more and more retirees are collecting benefits, the Europeans have greater economic problems because of their even more severely aging population and concomitant falling total fertility rates (TFR). There may well be massive societal dislocations and reordering of priorities and possibly lowering of economic well being, in spite of technology advances, in the coming decades. As I noted in my essay, quoting Wattenberg, the world population will rise from approx. 6 3/4 billion in 2010 to 8 to 9 billion in 2050 and then may drop to between 2 and 3 billion by 2300!

Now let’s discuss the supposed Islamization of Europe and North America in the coming years. The figures for the TFR for several European countries given in the video are as follows with the figures given by Wattenberg in parentheses: Germany 1.3 (1.35); France 1.8 (1.89); Italy 1.2 (1.23); Great Britain 1.6 (1.6); Spain 1.1 (1.15); Greece 1.3 (1.27); and the average of 31 countries in the European Union 1.38 (1.38). As you can see these figures are practically the same so there is no dispute for these data. The claim in the video for an 8.1 TFR for the Muslims in France is highly suspect given the TFR for various Muslim and Arab countries in North Africa (where most of the Muslim emigrants to Europe come from) and in the Middle East as given by Wattenberg: North Africa as a whole 40 years ago had a TFR of 7.1 and now is 3.2 and sinking like a stone and Tunisia is now 2.0. In 40 years Syria went from a TFR of 7.6 to 3.3; Jordan 8.0 to 3.6; Iraq 7.2 to 4.8; Saudi Arabia 7.3 to 4.5; Iran 7.0 to 2.3; and Egypt, the most populous Arab/Muslim country in the world, went from a TFR of 7.1 in 1960-65 to 3.3 in 2004.

The total population of all of the Arab nations in the world is approximately the same as the USA with the world Muslim population being circa 1/6 of the total world population. The non-Arab country with the largest Muslim population in the world is Indonesia at about 230 million and is the fourth most populous nation after China, India, and the USA. The TFR of Indonesia went from 5.7 in 1960-65 to 2.35 in 2001. In addition to Indonesia, the TFR in Turkey, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are falling rapidly although the TFR is Pakistan was one of the world’s highest at 5.08; however it fell one full point from 1990.to 2000.

The oft expressed fear that the Palestinians would overwhelm the Jewish population in numbers is not materializing. The TFR for the Jewish population in Israel was 2.6 in 2002; the Arab women in the Occupied Territories went from 8.0 in 1970 to 7.0 in 1985 and 5.6 in 2002. The trend is favorable to the Jews.

A few years ago lawyer Alan Dershowitz and columnist Richard Cohen were lamenting that 1/3 and an increasing ratio of young Jews in the United States were marrying outside their religion. They were concerned that Jewish people in the USA were losing their culture and something needed to be done about it. Wattenberg’s comment was “Yah, and good luck with that.” In democracies, people, especially young people, are going to do what they want to do.

To quote Wattenberg: “The Catholic Rule is broken and so too is the Muslim rule. It would be remarkable if it were not so as it has happened everywhere else. Joseph Chamie, Director of the UN Population Division (UNPD) puts it this way: “There was the Industrial Revolution. There was the Information Age. Now there is the Demographic Revolution.” In his PhD dissertation in 1976 and his 1981 book, Religion and Fertility Chamie clearly predicted just what has happened.” This was in stark contrast to the inchoate and chimerical, ipse dixit, population predictions made by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb (see my blog essay Fools, Frauds, and Fakes).

Again quoting Wattenberg: “People are people; sooner or later Catholics behave like Protestants; and Muslims like Christians.” Some people react emotionally to what they perceive as alarming situations. As for me, I prefer to act rationally and be guided by what the data reveal.