Pew data: Heavy majority of asylum seekers in Europe are young men under the age of 35

Two tables from the new survey by Pew, which I missed yesterday but which Ross Douthat didn’t. Table one: Where are the refugees coming from? As it turns out, exactly where you expect.

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Of the top 10, only Eritrea and Nigeria aren’t majority-Muslim and both of those countries contain large Muslim minorities.

Table two: What’s the gender split on who’s coming? As it turns out … pretty much what you’d expect.

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Compare the gender parity in arrivals from Serbia, Ukraine, and Russia to the heavy male skew in arrivals from non-European, i.e. mostly Muslim, nations. The non-European country with the greatest percentage of women seeking asylum is Somalia, with a measly 31 percent. The male skew for Pakistan is 95/5. For Syria, which sent the greatest number of refugees to Europe of any country by far, it’s 71/29. In every non-European case, the percentage of men aged 18-34 — just that subgroup, excluding minors and men aged 35-and-over — exceeds the percentage of women of all ages.

As Douthat notes, one of three things is going to happen. Either the young male refugees will be allowed to bring wives to Europe from back home, they’ll find wives among the native population, or they’ll remain unmarried — and knowing what the world knows from painful experience about coping with large populations of young unmarried men, option three isn’t much of an option. If you choose option one, letting refugees bring their wives over (or giving priority going forward to single young women refugees from the Middle East to increase the pool of marriageable Muslim women in Europe), you’re obviously committing to accepting a much bigger pool of refugees overall in the years ahead. If you choose option two, capping immigration and forcing refugees who are already in Europe to find wives there, you’re guaranteeing that some pool of local men, either natives or refugees or a mix of the two, ends up doomed to resentful bachelorhood because there simply aren’t enough women to marry. One way or another, option two ultimately leaves you stuck with option three, which sounds like a fine recipe for social harmony. One would think that Germany’s open-borders brain trust, before embarking on its grand cultural re-engineering project with Middle Eastern immigrants, would have at least insisted on gender parity among new arrivals in order to ease the strain of assimilation, in particular assimilation into domesticity. Nope. What do they do now about this ferocious gender skew? Maybe it’s time for a national conversation about how many European refugees the U.S. should be prepared to accept circa 2045.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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