Russians Vote With Their Feet

By all accounts, Russians have plenty to protest about, living in a country rife with corruption and few opportunities to get ahead. Of course, there is no youth bulge to push an agenda to the streets, as has happened in several of the now volatile Arab nations. Indeed, Russia has been slowly losing population since the mid-1990s, due to very low fertility, high mortality (life expectancy for males is about the same as in Ghana), and...outmigration. The Washington Post features a story this week about the slow, but steady leaking of people out of Russia.

The departures are not easily documented because they are mostly unrecorded, but they have become the talk of the independent press and professional circles here. Russians blame their malaise on an authoritarian system in which political limits have settled over society as a whole, dead-ending career opportunities.

Slow Growth Comes to California

The Census 2010 redistricting data for California were released yesterday and, as the NewYork Times notes, the results reveal a substantial slowing of California's population compared to previous decades.

Perhaps the legendary beaches here are losing their pull. California, once the very symbol of sun-drenched American growth, had a population increase of only 10 percent in the last decade, the slowest rise in the state’s history. And for the first time since California was became a state in 1850, it will not gain a Congressional seat.

Here in San Diego the demographic pattern very closely resembled the state pattern, as noted in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Africans Left in the Lurch in Libyan Mess

The civil war in Libya has created a flood of refugees, as I have already noted. However, today's New York Times reports on the genuine tragedy of sub-Saharan Africans who are stuck at the Tripoli airport (not IN the airport, just AT the airport) and seemingly have no way out of the country.

As wealthier nations send boats and planes to rescue their citizens from the violence in Libya, a new refugee crisis is taking shape on the outskirts of Tripoli, where thousands of migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa have been trapped with scant food and water, no international aid and little hope of escape.

The migrants — many of them illegal immigrants from Ghana and Nigeriawho have long constituted an impoverished underclass in Libya — live amid piles of garbage, sleep in makeshift tents of blankets strung from fences and trees, and breathe fumes from a trench of excrement dividing their camp from the parking lot of Tripoli’s airport.