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Comment by canoebuilder | Hacker News Reader

You raise some worthy questions, particularly, Is there no room for population expansion in Africa? with which I would be happy to engage, but without knowing that we are operating on the same baseline level of reality, I'm hesitant to do so.

Why would people start leaving Africa, and why would it be a problem if they did?

Are you completely unaware of events that have been transpiring in Europe the past couple years?

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But I don't think it makes sense to compare population expansion to a refugee crisis. People leaving Africa right now are being forced out by war and violence, most of them aren't choosing to leave. In your hypothetical, I assume people are leaving for economic and social reasons, normal motivations for voluntary immigration. I don't think the refugee crisis will continue forever, and I don't think malaria eradication will reach the sources of the refugee crisis until the violence has mostly subsided.

Edit: I phrased this a little wrong, the source of the current refugee crisis is mostly not Africa, but my point is that the societal disruption you're referring to is not caused by voluntary immigration.

People leaving Africa right now are being forced out by war and violence, most of them aren't choosing to leave.

As respectfully as possible, this is completely wrong.

https://www.google.com/search?q=migrant+crisis+economic

I phrased this a little wrong, the source of the current refugee crisis is mostly not Africa, but my point is that the societal disruption you're referring to is not caused by voluntary immigration.

Not even the majority of unauthorized border crossers into Europe are from Syria. Once again with all due respect, these are very definitely voluntary actions on the part of the border crossers.

Check out this article from 2 years ago, even then it wasn't primarily Syrians.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/closing...

The migrants come from a vast swath of Africa and the Middle East, spanning not only war-torn Syria (in the first four months of 2015, Syrians accounted for just 30 percent of those crossing the sea) but also Nigeria and the Gambia and Eritrea and Somalia and Mali.

The migrants who embark upon this journey are typically represented as terrorized and impoverished—as people driven (to quote Amnesty International) “to risk their lives in treacherous sea crossings in a desperate attempt to reach safety in Europe.” The demographic and economic facts complicate that story. When populations flee war or famine, they generally flee together: the elderly and the infants, women as well as men. The current migrants, however, are overwhelmingly working-age males. All of them have paid a substantial price to make the trip: it can cost upwards of $2,000 to board a smuggler’s boat, to say nothing of hundreds or even thousands of dollars to travel from home to the embarkation point in the first place. Very few of the migrants from Libya are actually Libyan nationals.

Thanks, that was plenty respectful and I didn't know that. I wish there were sources and numbers to define "overwhelmingly", and I think refugees are probably more likely to pay "a substantial price" than a voluntary migrant, but overall I get the point.

I'll fall back to my other question then, why would people leave? I was looking at this image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_migrant_crisis#/media...

It seems like most migrants at the moment are not from Africa. If their motivations are mostly economic, we would expect the numbers to rise in proportion with the population, right? And they would be tempered by economies improving as their citizens get healthier and more productive and they stop having to fight and treat malaria. After some time, people will adapt to having healthier children and the rate of population increase will get lower.

I'm just not seeing this imminent crisis of exploding numbers of African migrants, and I don't see how the issues of integrating people could possible outweigh the benefits of people not dying.

I also have some issues with what qualifies as "mass societal disruption", but I guess that's mostly a semantics argument.

Every single image I've seen of this has been overwhelmingly young males, the personal experience of everyone I know in the affected areas has been that they are overwhelmingly young males. In most cases cases "overwhelmingly" is an understatement, because they are all young males.

The data on that map is from 2015.

If you want to read about migrant/illegal border crossers from Africa in recent years, italy has been bearing the brunt of it.

https://www.google.com/search?q=italy+migrants

Here's a recent video from a spanish beach that looks like some kind of absurdist theater. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA02zZCGTdk

I also have some issues with what qualifies as "mass societal disruption", but I guess that's mostly a semantics argument.

How about pre-meditated and coordinated sex attacks with 1000+ perpetrators?

This was hardly an isolated incident, just one of the more shocking in scale and brazen in execution.

https://www.google.com/search?q=new+year%27s+eve+cologne

Societal disruption needn't be limited to large scale events like the above, just the steady flow of increased crime disrupts and degrades society. https://www.google.com/search?q=migrant+crime

The fewest are real refugees fleeing war and violence. Most migrants are just doing it for economic reasons.

This leads to surreal situations like in Germany, where asylum seekers went for holidays in the countries they had "fled" from in the first place. Everything on welfare payment, and the legal explanation was some convoluted "they have a human right to go back to their own country" kind of argument.

>People leaving Africa right now are being forced out by war and violence, most of them aren't choosing to leave.

That was probably true in the past, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore:

"The UN has said that seven in 10 people crossing the Mediterranean from Libya are economic migrants and the rest are 'people in need of protection' like refugees and asylum-seekers."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4661866/amp/UN-says-...

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12FDB/production...

Downvoted for citing UN data. Unbelievable.

I absolutely agree with you -- the great proportion of migrants are coming for economic reasons.

It seems that clear-cut numbers that do not fit the "women & children escaping war-torn Syria" narrative have a tendency to get down-voted...

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