Worldwide Demographics

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by eschaton

There's not a huge difference in shade between the average Algerian and average Turk, is there?

In fact many Algerians (and Tunisians) look European, because of centuries of capturing slaves on European coasts.

Some North Africans look very distinct from the Europeans, but others look very similar to Spaniards or Italians. Some Kabyles even could pass as Northern Frenchmen or Northern Europeans with their blue eyes and fair hair.

Oftentimes, I cannot guess if someone is North African. What gives them away is gonna be either the way they dress, or their accent, or their attitude. But if the guy dresses like a Westerner, has no particular accent and no special attitude, it's impossible to tell. A few years ago I traveled with a guy who was an engineer, born of Algerian parents, he dressed in a sleek way like upper-class engineers, had no accent, and was pretty intelligent/articulate. You would never have guessed his ancestry wasn't French, because he looked totally European. Guys like him have 0 problem integrating in French society, because the French don't care about ethnicity, what they care about is external appearances (no accent, behaving middle-class, dressing appropriately, etc). I asked him, and he told me he had never encountered racism in his entire life in France (like no landlord ever refused to rent an apartment to him), and I wasn't surprised, because people here judge the book by its cover, and he had an immaculate book cover.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Yuri

We're in 2026 and people keep dropping vile petty racism as it was nothing.

It's very frequent in Europe, particularly online (they would dare less to say it face to face), so I wasn't particularly surprised. It's much more frequent than in the US (in the US, due to their troubled history, racism is much more taboo than in Europe, if people don't like other races they don't dare to say it openly).

[Yuri]

Speaking of Ukraine

1983
Births: 807,111; Deaths: 583,496; Surplus:+223,615

1995
Births: 492,861; Deaths: 792,587; Surplus:−299,726

2001
Births: 376,478; Deaths: 745,952; Surplus:−369,474

2012
Births: 520,705; Deaths: 663,139; Surplus:−142,434

2019
Births: 308,817; Deaths: 581,114; Surplus:−272,297

2021
Births: 271,983; Deaths: 714,263; Surplus:−442,280

2025
Births: 168,778; Deaths: 485,296; Surplus:–316,518

Jan-Mai 2025
Births: 70,561

Jan-Mai 2026
Births: 60,867

As Russia and many Eastern European countries, they've always had a high mortality rate, mostly amongst men, since always (alcoholism) but it got even worse in the 1990's. All those countries had smaller improvements on the 2000's and 2010's, but in Russia and Ukraine's case, it had collapsed due the war.

Regarding births, Ukraine is heading for 145,000 births in 2026, that just above 1/6 of the number it registered in 1983.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

In fact many Algerians (and Tunisians) look European, because of centuries of capturing slaves on European coasts.

Some North Africans look very distinct from the Europeans, but others look very similar to Spaniards or Italians. Some Kabyles even could pass as Northern Frenchmen or Northern Europeans with their blue eyes and fair hair.

Oftentimes, I cannot guess if someone is North African. What gives them away is gonna be either the way they dress, or their accent, or their attitude. But if the guy dresses like a Westerner, has no particular accent and no special attitude, it's impossible to tell. A few years ago I traveled with a guy who was an engineer, born of Algerian parents, he dressed in a sleek way like upper-class engineers, had no accent, and was pretty intelligent/articulate. You would never have guessed his ancestry wasn't French, because he looked totally European. Guys like him have 0 problem integrating in French society, because the French don't care about ethnicity, what they care about is external appearances (no accent, behaving middle-class, dressing appropriately, etc). I asked him, and he told me he had never encountered racism in his entire life in France (like no landlord ever refused to rent an apartment to him), and I wasn't surprised, because people here judge the book by its cover, and he had an immaculate book cover.

Well, there is something off there...

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

It's very frequent in Europe, particularly online (they would dare less to say it face to face), so I wasn't particularly surprised. It's much more frequent than in the US (in the US, due to their troubled history, racism is much more taboo than in Europe, if people don't like other races they don't dare to say it openly).

Sadly that's rather common in Brazil as well, not only online but face to face as well.

Low people often resort to this. As they've never accomplished nothing on their lives, they tend to attach themselves to something bigger, their race, their nationality, their religion, to feel better about themselves by putting others down.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

The Munich metro area has 14.6% of its population who are non-EU immigrants, as opposed to 15.6% in the Marseille metro area. It's very close. And higher than the Bordeaux metro area (8.0%).

Non-EU doesn't mean Sub-Saharan Africa, obviously. It can mean UK, Switzerland, Norway, and most of former Yugoslavia. Germany has tons of Slavs.

My point isn't about immigration status but demographics. Marseille is a very nonwhite city, with lots of brown and black people, presumably from Africa. Munich doesn't have such demographics so will be less likely to draw the ire of bigots. And Bavarians are the least "Aryan" Germans so most of the immigrants hardly look different. An immigrant from Belgrade or Turin won't look different.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Marseille is a very nonwhite city, with lots of brown and black people, presumably from Africa.

Actually there are very few Black people in Marseille. You're confusing Marseille and Paris. Black Caribbeans migrate to Paris, not Marseille where there are extremely few of them. And sub-Saharan Africans also don't migrate to Marseille for some reason (with only the exception of people from the Comoros Islands and Mayotte, for reasons that remain mysterious).

Marseille attracts predominantly a Mediterranean immigration (Italians, Spaniards, Armenians, Corsicans, and later North Africans).

Originally Posted by Crawford

And Bavarians are the least "Aryan" Germans so most of the immigrants hardly look different. An immigrant from Belgrade or Turin won't look different.

Lots of immigrants from North Africa also don't look different, as already explained. Especially in Marseille where there are lots of people with Italian and Spanish ancestry.

Italian or North African? He plays in the Marseille soccer team. The only way you can tell is because his first name is Karim. But if it wasn't for his first name, you couldn't tell.



Italian or North African? He's a rap singer from Marseille. I would have said North African, because he has that awful banlieue accent when he sings, and mimicks their gestures, but it turns out his ancestry is actually Italian (from Sicily).



Really, appart from the women who wear veils, and the men who wear traditional North African dresses, or the minority who have distinctly non-European traits, in general it's hard to tell (unless their accent betrays them, but as a non-Francophone you wouldn't know anyway). Most people in Marseille just look "Mediterranean". If the Germans find them "brown", then they would equally have found them "brown" in 1943 back when there were extremely few North Africans in France (and in fact they did, that's why Himmler ordered the destruction of the entire Medieval harbor district of Marseille, in 1943, by dynamite, after having expelled the entire population, checked their ID cards and sent many of them to concentration camps).

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Longer version:

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[Crawford]

The vast majority of peoples from the Maghreb would not be mistaken for Europeans. The Berber-Arab mix is not similar to most Spaniards, Italians, or even Greeks or Turks.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by Crawford

The vast majority of peoples from the Maghreb would not be mistaken for Europeans.

That assertion is simply wrong.

Originally Posted by Crawford

The Berber-Arab mix is not similar to most Spaniards, Italians, or even Greeks or Turks.

North Africans are not just Berbers and Arabs. They are also Romans, Vandals (i.e. Germanic people), and southern Europeans raided by their pirates for more than a millennium. That plus also some Phoenicians, and some Jews converted to Islam, and also some Black slaves who mixed with the local population.

Tunisia is where there was the strongest presence of Romans and Vandals, and that shows in the faces of people, who look more European than in the rest of North Africa. Algeria also had Vandal presence plus lots of Southern European slaves over more than 1,000 years (plus the native Kabyles who often have North European traits). So European faces are frequent in Algeria too.

Morocco is where people look the least European in general. It's also where there are the most Black people (in the southern oases of the country, like in the Draa Valley).

These are Black people from Southern Morocco (not immigrants):



And this guy is Tunisian (name is Omar Rekik). If this is not a European face, then nothing is.



Eyes as blue as his Vandal Germanic ancestors:



There's a reason why in the 1900s Tunisia was the most sought destination by French homosexuals (upper class homosexuals back then). It still is today to some extent. I'm not an expert in this, but I once met a gay guy (rather old, like in his 50s) who told me he travels to Tunisia often because it's very easy to pick men there. He even got laid with policemen there (for free! it's all about flirting there, charm, not money). And the men are known to be gorgeous there (the women have less of a reputation for some reason).

[muppet]

There's also something to be said about southern Mediterranean Europe looking like the Arabs and Turks across the sea, in the darker skin tones and hair colour, in part due to sharing the weather but also the millennia of taking slaves from there (thankyou Rome) as well as being conquested by the Moors for 800 years and Ottomans (600 years).


Sicilians, Greeks and Libyans



In short all sides of the sea can look stereotypically Arab as well as European. The main difference though is in face structure imo, which can be used to identify (or equally mistake) people, though it can be subtle too.

Genetics shows the commonality of light coloured eyes in the Arab world actually came from the east, from the Caucasus, Turkey, Levant and Iran, rather than European admixture. It's highest in Lebanon (1/5). It's from these places that they spread into Europe, North Africa and Central Asia who have had it just as long as each other (6,000 -10,000 years ago). However the colder climes favour this mutation whereas hotter countries favour darker eyes for more UV protection, which is why blue eyes became preponderent in say Nordic countries more so than in the source.


Anyway, Marseilles vibes if anyone's interested:

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[muppet]

On an unrelated note, not many people know this but there is a seam of Mediterranean looks that runs through cold Celtic nations such as Ireland and Wales. Some say it's how Celts always looked before the Anglo-Saxons came over, others it's a Roman hangover, others a normal genetic mutation. My black-haired flatmate is constantly asked where his ancestry is from, most guess Spanish or Arab rather than a Welsh farmboy.

Irish (Colin Farrell recently revealed his DNA is 99% Irish and 1% other European):



Welsh:

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

That assertion is simply wrong.


North Africans are not just Berbers and Arabs. They are also Romans, Vandals (i.e. Germanic people), and southern Europeans raided by their pirates for more than a millennium. That plus also some Phoenicians, and some Jews converted to Islam, and also some Black slaves who mixed with the local population.

I think it's worth mentioning that most of the black admixture in North Africa is relatively recent - a result of the trans-Saharan slave trade during the Arab period. Unlike how chattel slavery worked in the U.S., in the Islamic world mixed-race children of slave mothers were accepted as free Arabs, and thus the result is that Muslim Arab populations across North Africa (and even into the Near East) tend to be at least 10%-15% sub-Saharan today (often higher in areas like Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, etc.).

However, black people integrated mostly into the main urban Arab Muslim identity, not the different ethnic and religious minorities. This is the primary reason why in the Maghreb Berbers often "look whiter" than Arabs. Or why in Lebanon Christian Marionites look different from Muslim ones. Or why you don't really see black Copts in Egypt.

But yeah, as others have noted, there's simply no hard/fast line for "white passing" that can be drawn through the Mediterranean. Historically within the U.S. context, essentially all Middle Easterners who could pass for white have been accepted into whiteness (there was a big migration of Christian Lebanese and Syrians in the early 20th century, for example). In recent years it's almost flipped, and now that claiming nonwhiteness is more popular, you're keep seeing college students who are like of southern Italian background or something trying to claim nonwhite status.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by eschaton

But yeah, as others have noted, there's simply no hard/fast line for "white passing" that can be drawn through the Mediterranean. Historically within the U.S. context, essentially all Middle Easterners who could pass for white have been accepted into whiteness (there was a big migration of Christian Lebanese and Syrians in the early 20th century, for example). In recent years it's almost flipped, and now that claiming nonwhiteness is more popular, you're keep seeing college students who are like of southern Italian background or something trying to claim nonwhite status.

Not always. Middle Easterners and North Africans being categorized as "white" was the result of a court case in the early 20th century. A Lebanese immigrant sued the U.S. government in order to be allowed to naturalize as a citizen because people from Asia were not allowed to naturalize at the time (Chinese Exclusion Act, etc). The claimant in this case convinced the court to be recognized as white and allowed to naturalize by arguing that if he was not white then neither was Jesus Christ:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_v._United_States

[New Brisavoine]

In Lebanon there was a strong inflow of Frankish lords (and their retinues) during the Crusades. That explains why many people look European in Lebanon. Much more so than Caucasian slaves (which were more a thing in Turkey anyway, not really in Lebanon).

About Black admixtures: in general the Arab slave owners castrated their Black slaves (unlike what the Europeans did), so there were few admixtures. The Black people of Morocco (in the south of the country) never mixed with the rest of the Moroccans, and still constitute a marginalized group today.

In Algeria, the Black slaves lived on the margin of society, and when the French conquered Algeria in 1830 they were freed by the French (there's a French soldier who served in Algiers and Oran shortly after the conquest who wrote a book about what he saw, and it's very interesting how he describes the Black people in these cities, who lived on the margin on society, often doing peculiar jobs like street singers and dancers). But since most of them were castrated, the Black population of Algeria has entirely disappeared (until recently and the arrival of many Black African migrants, who are treated very badly and forced to live in shacks on the outskirts of Algerian cities).

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Racism against Black people is still extremely strong in North Africa (akin to southern USA in the 1920s). One Senegalese student in Morocco (there are more and more Senegalese students who go study in Morocco due to shared university language, i.e. French, and easier visas than going to Europe) was saying in an article in Le Monde that one day he gave some coins to an old begging women in the street (Casablanca or Rabat), and when the woman saw that, she exclaimed in Arabic "oh Allah, what a wretched woman you've made of me, now being given money by some [derogative Moroccan Arabic word for Black people]!" She didn't know the student understood street Arabic. He replied to her harshly in street Arabic, she was stunned. He said this happens frequently.

More recently, there have been social movements by Moroccans to fight against this racism, associations to protect the migrants, scandals in the media, etc. It's the North African country that is most advanced in this respect, Algeria and Tunisia are far worse, dictatorships with almost no one there helping or supporting the Black migrants.

In this video you can see some of the Moroccans helping the Black migrants (at the beginning of the video, they don't translate it, but the Moroccan trade unionist says "Us, as a trade union, we were conscious of the migrants' situation etc.").

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[Yuri]

This discussion is interesting. People obsessing about immigration when the entire European/Mediterranean world was formed by several waves of mass immigration.

And we here in Americas, way worse: we simply invaded, uprooted Natives and took the whole continent for us.

So it’s quite rich to complain about immigration in such a vile wave.

[New Brisavoine]

It's very common for countries built on immigration to complain about immigration. In 1900 the Argentinians in Buenos Aires were extremely hostile to new arrivals of migrants (and these were European migrants!).

Also in NYC, there were several riots in the 19th century against the newly arrived migrants (Irish in particular).

[New Brisavoine]

Typical case: I passed by one woman talking to a Black woman today. From a distance I thought the woman talking to the Black woman was North African, both due to her face and due to hearing an accent from a distance, but when I approached them I realized her accent was in fact... Portuguese.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Also in NYC, there were several riots in the 19th century against the newly arrived migrants (Irish in particular).

Yes, this is partly why the 14th Amendment specified birthright citizenship. There has been a revisionist history floating around lately that birthright citizenship was written into the U.S. Constitution (14th Amendment) only to guarantee citizenship of former slaves. The 14th was indeed meant to codify citizenship for black people living in the U.S., but its purpose was also to make it unambiguous who was considered a citizen since citizenship eligibility was not specified in the constitution before the Civil War. Up until that point U.S. citizenship eligibility was only addressed by Congress via the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that only white persons "of good character" could be naturalized as U.S. citizens. (People who were born free in the U.S. -- both white and black -- were considered citizens if they resided in a state that did not exclude black people from citizenship of the state.)

In the decade or so before the Civil War there was a major wave of anti-immigrant fever directed mostly at Irish and German Catholics that were immigrating to the U.S. in waves. There were various attempts by some political groups to limit accessibility to citizenship for these groups: some attempts were made to have them not be classified as white (thus not eligible to naturalize), to change the waiting period for naturalization, and challenges for whether the children of these immigrants were eligible for citizenship at birth. The 14th Amendment was written with full memory of these political battles as that had happened less than a decade before it was created.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

It's very common for countries built on immigration to complain about immigration. In 1900 the Argentinians in Buenos Aires were extremely hostile to new arrivals of migrants (and these were European migrants!).

Also in NYC, there were several riots in the 19th century against the newly arrived migrants (Irish in particular).

Yeah, people have always been evil, selfish and pathetic since ever.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

In the decade or so before the Civil War there was a major wave of anti-immigrant fever directed mostly at Irish and German Catholics that were immigrating to the U.S. in waves. There were various attempts by some political groups to limit accessibility to citizenship for these groups: some attempts were made to have them not be classified as white (thus not eligible to naturalize), to change the waiting period for naturalization, and challenges for whether the children of these immigrants were eligible for citizenship at birth. The 14th Amendment was written with full memory of these political battles as that had happened less than a decade before it was created.

The U.S. was anti-Catholic in colonial days and remained strongly so well into the 20th century. There were virtually zero Catholics in any prominent political or business role prior to about 1950. Understanding this is central to understanding the country's history and current culture. Even now there is groaning by NPR and similar entities over Catholics on the Supreme Court.

Immigration from Africa to all parts of the United States has accelerated since 2010 and we now have a lot of friction between black Americans and African immigrants. Most black Americans never met an African in real life until recently and Africans don't hesitate to tell you that they avoid black Americans as much as possible.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

In Lebanon there was a strong inflow of Frankish lords (and their retinues) during the Crusades. That explains why many people look European in Lebanon. Much more so than Caucasian slaves (which were more a thing in Turkey anyway, not really in Lebanon).

The crusader DNA thing has been found to be largely mythical with modern DNA analysis. Lebanese people are about 90% identical to bronze age samples from the area, with most of the remaining 10% likely due to admixture during the Hellenistic/Roman eras.

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

About Black admixtures: in general the Arab slave owners castrated their Black slaves (unlike what the Europeans did), so there were few admixtures. The Black people of Morocco (in the south of the country) never mixed with the rest of the Moroccans, and still constitute a marginalized group today.

Yes, they did that to male slaves. They didn't, however, do that to female slaves. And unlike how chattel slavery worked in the West, an Muslim Arab man was expected to recognize the parentage of his children via slaves and elevate them to full free men within his house. This is the primary reason why most Arabs have at least some black ancestry. There are many examples of this, from Tippu Tip to the Saudi prince Bandar Al Saud (famous for palling around with George W. Bush - his mother was an Ethiopian "concubine.").

That isn't to say that there hasn't historically been racism towards black people throughout much of the Muslim world. It's just saying historically there's not been a strict color line like in the U.S. In some ways, it's more akin to how race has functioned in Latin America.