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These books each concentrate on the interface between population studies and ethnic conflict. The main political bone of contention is ethnic conflict over control of territory -- a rather ancient human preoccupation -- whose contours have been radically reshaped in the contemporary world by the relative ease of migration over long distances.
The issues raised by these books are of profound importance both for demography as a science and for the political landscape of the world. Teitelbaum and Winter point out that there has been a decline in the influence of professional demographers as issues related to population have become increasingly politicized, and politicization results from competition between ethnic groups. Unfortunately, none of these books provides any scientific understanding of group competition.
Teitelbaum and Winter focus primarily on conflicts surrounding high migration of predominantly non-European peoples into Western societies (Western Europe, the United States, and Canada) in the context of low native fertility. In each country there has been anxiety and hostility to this influx among some sections of the native population. In Germany, the mainly Muslim guest workers have built permanent communities clustered in major cities. Visas originally scheduled to expire after one year were extended as a result of pressure by the workers and their employers as well as liberal church groups. There have been scattered outbreaks of violence against these immigrants, but more interestingly there is a deeper hostility that remains unexpressed because of "the trauma of the recent German past" (p. 24), i.e., National Socialism and World War II. The consensus is in favor of immigration of ethnic Germans, as occurred on a large scale after World War II, while questions relating to the immigration of non-German refugees and economic immigrants "become entangled with the painful history of the Holocaust" (p. 25).
In France, the issue is framed in terms...
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