Europe’s Man Problem
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.
To see how these overall figures affect specific countries—and why there is reason for concern—consider the case of Sweden, which has been especially transparent about its migration statistics and whose ratios mirror the broader trend in Europe in many respects.
According to Swedish government statistics, as of the end of November, 71 percent of all applicants for asylum to Sweden in 2015 were male. More than 21 percent of all migrants to Sweden were classified as unaccompanied minors, representing more than half of all minor migrants to the country. For accompanied minors, the sex ratio was about 1.16 boys for every one girl. But for unaccompanied minors, the ratio was 11.3 boys for every one girl. In other words, the Swedish case confirms IOM’s statistic that more than 90 percent of unaccompanied minors are male. Indeed, on average, approximately 90 unaccompanied boys entered Sweden every single day in 2015, compared with eight unaccompanied girls.
Those numbers are a recipe for striking imbalances within Sweden. Consider that more than half of these unaccompanied minors entering Sweden are 16 or 17 years old, or at least claim to be. (There are no medical checks of age for Swedish asylum-seekers, and applicants who say they’re under 18 receive special consideration in the asylum process.) In this age group more than three-quarters are unaccompanied, meaning they are overwhelmingly male. According to calculations based on the Swedish government’s figures, a total of 18,615 males aged 16 and 17 entered Sweden over the course of the past year, compared with 2,555 females of the same age. Sure enough, when those figures are added to the existing counts of 16- and 17-year-old boys and girls in Sweden—103,299 and 96,524, respectively, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Database—you end up with a total of 121,914 males in Sweden aged 16 or 17 and 99,079 females of the same age. The resulting ratio is astonishing: These calculations suggest that as of the end of 2015, there were 123 16- and 17-year-old boys in Sweden for every 100 girls of that age.
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There are also clearly negative effects for women in male-dominated populations. Crimes such as rape and sexual harassment become more common in highly masculinized societies, and women’s ability to move about freely and without fear within society is curtailed. In addition, demand for prostitution soars; that would create a deeply ironic outcome for Sweden, which invented the path-breaking Swedish abolitionist approach to prostitution.
While the humanitarian needs of the refugees streaming into Europe must be foremost in our minds at this time, policymakers in Sweden and other countries should also think of the long-term consequences of an unprecedented alteration in the young adult sex ratios of their societies.
As anthropologist Barbara Miller has persuasively argued, a normal sex ratio is a “public good” and therefore deserves state protection. For Sweden—or any other European country—to wind up with the worst young adult sex ratios in the world would be a tragedy for European men and women alike.
Here we go again.
