AP Human Geography — population and migration

Unit 2 carries between twelve and seventeen per cent of the multiple-choice score, and most of it comes down to a handful of models applied to countries a candidate has never heard of. That is how these ten questions are built. Every country in the bank is invented and described only by its characteristics, so a country cannot be placed by recognising its name — a planner in a largely desert country wants to know the pressure on land that can actually grow food, and the question is which of arithmetic, physiological and agricultural density answers her, and what each of the others would measure instead. A country with falling deaths and still-high births has to be placed in the demographic transition by what its two rates are separately doing rather than by how fast it is growing. A country with a very wide base of children turns out to have a high dependency ratio for the opposite reason to the usual one.

The migration half begins with push and pull, which almost always operate together, and moves to the regularities Ravenstein set out: most moves are short, volumes fall off with distance, and every large stream generates a smaller counter-stream. The question about them turns on what kind of claim they are. A counter-flow does not refute a law of migration, because these are tendencies drawn from records rather than laws in the physical sense, and a war or a recruitment scheme can produce a long flow with no counter-stream at all without the account being damaged. The legal categories come next, stated as international law states them: a refugee has crossed an international border, an internally displaced person has not, and an asylum seeker is someone whose claim has yet to be decided — three statuses regularly used as though they were one word.

The last three look at what populations do to states. The epidemiological transition shifts the leading causes of death from infectious to chronic conditions as public health improves. A pro-natalist policy commits a government to spending now against a workforce that arrives about twenty years later, which is the real trade-off rather than any question of whether such policies work. And the closing question takes a country well past the transition — low fertility, long lives, a shrinking workforce — and asks what follows for its pensions, its labour market and its likely reliance on migration.

The subject is handled with some deliberate care. No real country, region, ethnic group or religion is the subject of any claim about migration or fertility; no group of people is described as a burden or a problem; no stereotype is offered as a wrong answer; and no position is taken on any real border or immigration debate. Nothing is drawn from any College Board publication, released examination, course and exam description, scoring guideline or stimulus. There are no maps and no population pyramids — every structure is described in words, which means the diagram-reading that a real Unit 2 exam requires is not practised here.

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• Choose between arithmetic, physiological and agricultural density for a stated question, and say what each of the others measures
• Place a described country in the demographic transition by what its birth and death rates are each doing
• Read a described age structure for its dependency ratio, and say what a young base implies for public spending
• State Malthus's argument and Boserup's counter-argument as two positions, and say which way the causation runs in each
• Sort the factors in a described migration into push and pull, and see that most involve both
• Recognise distance decay and counter-flows, and treat Ravenstein's regularities as tendencies rather than laws
• Distinguish a refugee, an internally displaced person and an asylum seeker as international law distinguishes them
• Describe the epidemiological transition as a shift in the leading causes of death
• Name the real trade-off in a pro-natalist policy, which is the delay between the spending and the workforce
• Work out what an ageing population implies for pensions, the labour force and the demand for migration

A planner in the invented country of Aridia wants to know how much pressure the population puts on the land that can actually grow food. Two-thirds of Aridia is desert. Which measure of density answers her question?