Building a Demographic Simulator to Model a Refugee Influx and Its Impact on Demographic Structure

Many developed countries of the world such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, Germany etc., are facing the issue of decreasing birth rates and increasing aged populations. One of the potential solutions for this problem is liberal immigration and refugee laws. Korea has stringent immigration laws and most of the immigration into the country is temporary in nature. However, we have witnessed exodus from Middle East countries to many European countries. Such a phenomenon could have lasting impacts on the host country. Following this cue, we built a demographic simulator for modeling the rapid influx of people seeking refuge in Korea. In this particular simulation test case, we observed the change in demographic distribution of Korea.

The demographic simulator is based on a general purpose agent based model and shows the result of a steady influx of a total of one million immigrants into Korea over a course of two years. With AnyLogic demographic analysis software, we were able to simulate agents with characteristics like education, age, gender, marital status, desired and current number of children, income, etc. It must be noted that the proposed demographic simulator is fully dynamic in nature with all the agent characteristics evolving with every simulation tick. A simulation tick corresponds to one year and simulation is run for 70 years (from 2005). Fertility and immigration events add agents, whereas agents are removed by mortality event. All the demographic activities are governed by real data and are not assumed randomly. The agents in the demographic simulator also interact with each other and influence behavior (partic-ularly desired education, desired children). These interactions thus also influence immigrants’ behavior and that of the native population too. This whole functioning of the demographic simulator delivers us interesting insights and results.

With the help of AnyLogic demographic analysis software, we can see that there is an obvious initial increase in the population numbers. But as time goes by, the effect of immigration starts decreasing. This implies that only a sustainable immigration over many years would lead to a lasting positive effect in the demographic change, and the effect of sudden influx of migrants would eventually diminish. Studies and observations like these can be used for designing and contemplating immigrations polices for the future. This demographic simulator excludes other social and economic effects of immigration. The demographic simulator, built with AnyLogic demographic analysis software, could be put into use for evaluating other similar policies (such as change in education policy, salaries, social interactions, etc.) concerning demographics. We are working towards generalizing our model using machine learning tools.