America is losing as many illegal immigrants as it’s gaining
You’d never know it from the Republican primary debates, but for the first time in more than four decades, illegal migration from Mexico has fallen to a net zero. All data indicate that the undocumented population of the United States is no longer growing. According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, that population peaked at around 12 million in 2008, fell to 11 million in 2009 and has remained constant since then. Independent estimates prepared by the Pew Hispanic Trust show the same thing, and Mexican census data reveal unusually large numbers of former U.S. migrants remaining home rather than heading northward.
These population estimates are consistent with individual-level data collected by the Mexican Migration Project, a binational program I co-direct that has been surveying legal and unauthorized migrants on both sides of the border for 30 years. Statistical analyses reveal that the rate of new migration to the United States is essentially zero, while repeat visits by returned migrants are rare. In keeping with these calculations, border apprehensions have fallen to the lowest number since 1970 despite the fact that there are more Border Patrol agents on duty than ever.
Surprisingly, this turn of events does not likely have anything to do with border enforcement. Historically, the volume of undocumented migration is uncorrelated with the size or budget of the Border Patrol. According to a recent assessment by the National Academy of Sciences, studies of migrant behavior “generally show that rising enforcement has little deterrent effect on undocumented migration,” which instead reflects the economic trends in Mexico and the United States and ongoing opportunities for legal entry to the U.S.
Demand for labor plummeted in the United States during the Great Recession, of course. That was especially the case in residential construction, which had been a key driver of migration beforehand. Between 2007 and 2010, Hispanics lost 764,000 jobs in the construction industry alone. Despite America’s recession, however, economic conditions in Mexico did not deteriorate very much. Although Mexican exports to the U.S. initially sagged, after 2009 they surged to surpass the 2008 level by 22 percent on strong sales of oil, tourism, crops and manufactured products, allowing many Mexicans to stay home rather than leave for the U.S. Mexican labor force growth has also slowed dramatically because of a sharp drop in fertility over the past two decades. That contributed to a rise in education levels among young Mexicans, who increasingly see opportunities at home.
Although labor demand continues in agriculture and other U.S. sectors, it has increasingly been fulfilled by legal temporary workers, whose entries rose to a record 517,000 in 2010. Permanent legal immigration, meanwhile, has averaged 165,000 entries per year since 2008. With so many opportunities for legal entry, slowing labor force growth and steady employment in Mexico, and stagnant labor demand in the United States, illegal migration has effectively ceased.
Net zero migration doesn’t just mean undocumented migrants are staying in Mexico; it also means those already here aren’t going home, in large part because the increase in border enforcement did have a very real effect, just not the intended one. Rising border enforcement naturally drove up the costs and risks of border crossing, and migrants quite logically decided to stop crossing the border – not by remaining in Mexico but by hunkering down and staying in the United States once they had made it across.
from James Pethokoukis:
Oh, about that U.S. economic recovery …
What might stand in the way of a robust economic turnaround. Gary Becker outlines the following factors:
The federal government is creating many programs, such as reducing student loan repayments and mortgage payments for persons with low incomes, which discourage the unemployed from finding jobs, and encourage the employed to become unemployed. The proposed caps of various kinds on executive pay, especially in the financial sector, the large government debt being created due to huge fiscal deficits that will put upward pressure on interest rates, the European style reorientation of anti-trust policies toward protecting competitors rather than consumers, the enormous excess reserves that have a considerable inflation potential, the federal government's likely incompetent management of two of the three American auto companies and a major insurance company, and the planned creation of a consumer czar that will interfere with the goods and services offered consumers are examples of policies that are likely to discourage business investment and risk taking.
Me: It is not about aggregate demand, gang, it's about confidence.
I recently read your article I thought i would share it as it has some very interesting facts and insights on the crisis and expected recovery.
http://studentsblog2.blogspot.com/2009/1 0/great-ways-to-student-debt-recovery.ht ml
The USA should enforce the same laws
Mexico uses to protect the border and regulate foreign workers.