Where Will The Sub-Saharans Go?
06/04/2012
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Michael Barone writes:
But the next big immigration source, I think, will be sub-Saharan Africa. We may end up with prominent politicians who actually were born in Kenya. ... 
America is getting to look a lot more like Texas, and that’s one trend that I hope continues.

Since "African-American" is already taken, we need a term for people such as Akeem Olajuwon: Sub-Saharan Americans? Houston, where Olajuwon played in college and the NBA, appears to be the capital of Sub-Saharan America, due to the oil industry's connections to Nigeria, climate, Houston's Lagos-style city planning regulations, and, maybe, Olajuwon himself. 

So far, the U.S. has mostly been skimming the cream off black Africa, so immigration from sub-Saharan Africa hasn't proved to be a huge problem, yet. Still, regression toward the mean in the next generations is always problem, especially when regression is turbocharged by the most attractive set of bad examples in the world to a 13-year-old boy: the rap-industrial complex.

Worse, there isn't much cream in that coffee.

While fertility is low in much of the world, it remains extraordinarily high in Sub-Saharan African. Where all those people will end up is one of the major questions of the 21st Century.

One possibility is that Sub-Saharans will conjure up another new disease to go along with AIDS. A Chinese scholar writing five years before Malthus pointed out that the four horsemen of the apocalypse tend to arrive late but in a hurry: population swells slowly, then falls quickly.

Another possibility is emigration.

The advanced economy most conveniently located by land for many black African emigrants is Israel. Israelis, however, are increasingly aware of this fact, and are, shall we say, less sentimental about immigration than are their American cousins. 

Europe is next closest, but the political mood appears to be unwelcoming there, although not as much as in Israel.

In the U.S., however, sentimentality is increasingly militant, so Barone may be right.

The most extraordinary prediction, however, is Peter Frost's: that the country that will be overrun by surplus sub-Saharans is ... China.

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