French President Emmanuel Macron said that Europe is facing an "unprecedented migration phenomenon that will last." Due to migration and demographics, Macron said, "Europe's destiny is tied to that of Africa."
Atheists are a very small minority in Africa. A study conducted by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life says that Africans are among the most religious people on Earth.
In 2018, the Brookings Institute indicated:
The issues around refugees and migration remain some of the most hotly debated topics in Europe. With European per capita income roughly 11 times that of most of sub-Saharan Africa and tens of millions of young Africans with poor job prospects, the attraction of migrating to Europe is and will remain immense. While there is migration from all over the world into Europe, geography makes Africa the biggest potential source of migrants.
In 2018, Pew Research reported:
International migration from countries in sub-Saharan Africa has grown dramatically over the past decade,1 including to Europe2and the United States. Indeed, most years since 2010 have witnessed a rising inflow of sub-Saharan asylum applicants in Europe, and lawful permanent residents and refugees in the U.S.In 2006, the Council on Foreign Relations indicated:
Europe is the primary destination for migrants worldwide. Countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea such as Spain, Italy, and Malta are most affected. Under the 2003 Dublin II Regulation, the first country in which an asylum seeker lands is solely responsible for examining that person’s asylum application. Predictably, this has placed greater strains on countries closest to Africa, the source of the vast majority of immigrants. In 2006, Spain received at least 636,000 migrants, representing almost half of the EU’s total and 122,500 more than the number of migrants arriving in Germany, France, Italy, and Britain combined. Authorities on Spain’s Canary Islands alone caught almost thirty thousand Africans trying to enter in 2006. Malta, located only two hundred miles from Libya’s coastline, has seen up to two hundred immigrants a week, and the Italian island of Lampedusa has also been affected. Non-European countries along the migration route such as Morocco have been strained by mass migration to Europe.In April of 2016, it was reported: "Today, Africa has the world's highest fertility rates. On average, women in sub-Saharan Africa have about five children over their reproductive lifetime, compared to a global average of 2.5 children."
On December 23, 2012, Professor Eric Kaufmann who teaches at Birbeck College, University of London wrote:
I argue that 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious.
On the other hand, the secular West and East Asia has very low fertility and a rapidly aging population... In the coming decades, the developed world's demand for workers to pay its pensions and work in its service sector will soar alongside the booming supply of young people in the third world. Ergo, we can expect significant immigration to the secular West which will import religious revival on the back of ethnic change. In addition, those with religious beliefs tend to have higher birth rates than the secular population, with fundamentalists having far larger families. The epicentre of these trends will be in immigration gateway cities like New York (a third white), Amsterdam (half Dutch), Los Angeles (28% white), and London, 45% white British.
