The Muslim Overpopulation Myth That Just Won’t Die

The sheer number of Rohingya Muslims fleeing genocide in Burma—over 10,000 per day since late August—has become too huge to ignore. It’s the reason why U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will visit Burma on Wednesday. In his briefings on the crisis, Tillerson will likely encounter another question of numbers: the claim, voiced often by Burmese officials and hardline Buddhist monks, that Rohingya Muslim “overpopulation” threatens their country’s Buddhist majority.

“The population growth of Rohingya Muslims is 10 times higher than that of the Rakhine [Buddhists],” said Win Myaing, a spokesperson for Burma’s western Rakhine State, where most of the stateless Rohingya live. That was in 2013, when the state passed a controversial law that applied only to Muslims. Just last month, an administrator of a “Muslim-free” village outside Yangon told , “[Rohingya] are not welcome here because they are violent and they multiply of Burma’s immigration ministry is, “The Earth will not swallow a race to extinction, but another [race] will.”