The Great Debate

America is losing as many illegal immigrants as it’s gaining

Douglas S. Massey

Apr 12, 2012 13:28 EDT

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.

Sarah Palin, big political lies and the U.S. immigration debate

Bernd Debusmann

Jul 26, 2010 11:18 EDT

The prize for the biggest political lie of 2009 went to Sarah Palin, the darling of the American right, for injecting fictitious “death panels” into the health reform debate. This year, fact-benders are hard at work to control the debate on another controversial topic, immigration. Competition is intense.

It comes from opponents of immigration reforms that would  simultaneously offer better control of the 2,000-mile U.S-Mexico border, a new visa system, and a path to legal status for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, the majority Mexicans, who are already in the country. The official term for this is “comprehensive immigration reform.”

But influential politicians insist there must be no reform before the border is entry-proof to illegals, and they portray the frontier as a virtual war zone, on both sides of the line.

There is Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, who is talking about the discovery of decapitated bodies on the American side of the border. There is Senator John McCain, who has said violence along the border is the worst he has ever seen. There is a letter 12 members of congress (10 Republicans, two Democrats) wrote to President Barack Obama saying border violence is increasing “at an alarming pace.”

None of this stands up to factual scrutiny though perhaps none of it is quite at the toxic level of the claim Palin put on her Facebook page last year — that the government’s proposed health care reforms included setting up panels that would decide whether elderly or disabled Americans were worthy of continued health care or should be let to die.

This was entirely fictitious but it “set political debate on fire,” said the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-check site Politifact.com, which rated the death panels the biggest political lie of 2009, based on a poll of 5,000 readers. The death panel canard contributed to the rapid growth of the anti-government tea party movement and threw doubt over the passage of the health reform bill. It finally passed in March, against unanimous Republican opposition.

On the emotional issue of immigration, perception trumps reality and the widely-held perception is of an “unsecured border” (McCain’s phrase) and a cross-border invasion by criminals rather than people in search of work and a better life. There has been no corroboration of Governor Brewer’s claim that 87 percent of illegal border crossers have prior criminal records.

George W. Obama and immigration fantasies

Bernd Debusmann

Jun 4, 2010 09:38 EDT

In the waning days of his presidency, George W. Bush listed the failure of immigration reform as one of his biggest disappointments and deplored the tone of the immigration debate. It had, he said in December 2008, undermined “the true greatness of America which is that we welcome people who want to work”.

The way things look a year and a half into the administration of Barack Obama, he too may end his presidency deploring the failure to fix America’s dysfunctional immigration system. The tone of the debate is even more rancorous now than it was when Bush pushed reform and it features the same arguments, including the fantasy that you can fully control the frontier between the U.S. and Mexico, the world’s busiest border.

That illusory target was set in the Secure Fence Act of 2006, signed into law by George W. Bush on October 26 of that year. It provided a definition of the term “operational control”, one of the most frequently used buzz phrases of the debate. (The other is “securing the border”). Under the letter of the law, operational control means “the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”

Note the word “all”. Then contrast it with what is at stake: almost 7,500 miles of land borders (with Mexico and Canada), 12,300 miles of coastline and a vast network of airports, seaports and land crossings. In the long-running debate, sound bites alone could fill a library and one of the best came from Janet Napolitano when she was governor of Arizona: “Show me a 50-foot wall and I show you a 51-foot ladder.”

That quote has history on its side. There has never been an impenetrable border. Not the Great Wall of China, the 5,500-mile mother of all walls, not the Berlin Wall, not the Iron Curtain, the lethal system of walls, fences, minefields and watch towers manned by guards with shoot-to-kill orders that sliced 2,500 miles through Europe.

Napolitano, now head of the Department of Homeland Security, the 160,000-strong bureaucratic behemoth charged with ensuring “operational control”, no longer uses the wall-and-ladder simile. Instead, she talks of the need for “comprehensive immigration reform”, as does her boss, Barack Obama, and as did George W. Bush.

Bush’s attempt to push through a reform addressing all aspects of the complex, emotion-laden issue fell through because he could not convince legislators in his own Republican party that there should be a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the United States. Obama does not have enough votes in the Senate for a reform bill.

In praise of Latin American immigrants

Bernd Debusmann

Apr 30, 2010 09:39 EDT

The United States owes Latin American immigrants a debt of gratitude. And Latin American immigrants owe a debt of gratitude to lawmakers in Arizona. How so?

Thanks largely to immigration from Latin America (both legal and illegal) and the higher birth rates of Latin immigrants, the population of the U.S. has kept growing, a demographic trend that sets it apart from the rest of the industrialized world, where numbers are shrinking. That threatens economic growth and in the case of Russia (U.N. projections see a decline from 143 million now to 112 million by 2050) undermines Moscow’s claim to Great Power status.

A country’s population starts shrinking when fertility falls below the “replacement rate” of 2.1. births over the lifetime of a woman. For white American women, that rate is around 1.8 now. For Latin American immigrants, the rate is 2.8. According to the U.S. census bureau, nearly one in six people living in the U.S. are Hispanics. By 2050, they are projected to make up almost a third of the population.

That translates into the biggest minority group of consumers. Their spending is expected to exceed $1 trillion by next year despite the recession. A point worth noting but rarely mentioned in the often overheated debate about immigration: illegal immigrants in effect subsidize social security payments to Americans over 62.

This is because people working with false papers have their social security taxes withheld from wages but are not entitled to receive benefits. The sums involved are substantial — the Social Security administration has an “earnings suspense file” of payments under names that do not match social security numbers. The file has been growing by around $7 billion a year which goes to pay benefits to legal workers.

And the benefit to immigrants of the Arizona law?

“It may finally wake up the whole country to the consequences of the current approach to illegal immigration in which ever tougher border enforcement is seen as the only solution to the problem,” says Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank. “That approach is gravely flawed.”

Migration statistics: our biggest weak spot

– Angel Gurría is Secretary-General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Nancy Birdsall is President of the Center for Global Development. The views expressed are their own. —

All financial crises end. The question is not if we will recover, but how we can build a resilient global economy to speed and bolster that recovery. While many immediate dangers remain, now is the time to look beyond the exigencies of today.

We must take a hard look at weaknesses in the international system that might stand in our way as we rebuild. There are several, but we take this opportunity to highlight one weakness in our ability to build a resilient global economy for the future: the inadequate state of comparable data on international migration.

This is our biggest weak spot on globalization. While many countries collect and publish detailed data on who legally enters or leaves their territory, they do not do it in the same way. In consequence, it is difficult to know clearly and to compare across countries how many persons immigrate and emigrate, for how long and for what reason.  Strangely, it is much easier to get a good picture of global movements of textiles and Treasury Bills than global movements of human beings. Vast disparities in income per head between countries mean that small changes in labor mobility may have large effects on the global economy. But we cannot begin to manage such changes well if the community of nations is not counting even legal migrants in the same, systematic way.

The main obstacle to good statistics is not that labor mobility is such a hot-button political issue. That would tend to raise interest in better data. Rather, the main obstacle is that statistics are a classic “public good”: the benefits are generalized, but the costs are localized. Everyone would gain from better statistics, but the individual governments that must bear the cost of compiling them have competing priorities. Result: decades of international recommendations for better and more comparable migration data have gone largely unheeded. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations, the World Bank, and many others have made great strides towards compiling better public global data, but much more is needed.

That is why, last year, the Center for Global Development in Washington convened a blue-ribbon commission to tackle this issue. It was co-chaired by Patricia Santo Tomas, a former cabinet minister of the Philippines and current chairwoman of the board at the Development Bank of the Philippines, and Lawrence Summers, a Professor at Harvard University prior to joining the Obama administration. The commission brought together a small, stellar group of some of the world’s top experts on migration data. It asked the group to name five ways to improve international migration data in the short term, within existing institutions, at the lowest cost.

The resulting report, Migration Counts: Five steps toward better international migration data, starts with the simple recommendation that every census on earth include a small number of questions relevant to migration.  These include, “In what country were you born?”  Answers to this simple question, asked in every country, can be a powerful tool in systematically tracking all types of international movement. The 2010-11 round of censuses is already beginning, but this basic question is still not even asked in many countries where migration is important and growing—including Japan, Mexico, Korea, the Philippines, and Egypt.

We lose when graduates are told to hit the road

John Chen has served as chairman, chief executive officer and president of Sybase, Inc. since 1998. All views are his own.

As I watched the news showing President Obama reaching out to University of Notre Dame graduates eager to shake his hand, I was impressed by the coalition of colors and nationalities in the faces all round the President that says much good about the United States. I also wondered who, among those shaking President Obama’s hand, will be told by an immigration official next week, ”Congratulations, graduate. Now hit the road, leave the U.S., go home!”

When that happens, if it hasn’t already happened to thousands of graduates across the country, the U.S. will be the loser.

The fact is that at commencement time, foreign science and engineering graduates from U.S. universities are itching to stay in America, especially at this time, and put their energy into the most valuable work. This would eventually help us recover economically and go on to thrive as an innovative world trading powerhouse.

Instead, they’ll be told we don’t want their intelligence and their problem-solving skills, or their innovative or entrepreneurial abilities. They’re told to just go back to where they came from — go back to India, to China, to Brazil, to Russia, and to all the other places that we compete with for wealth around the world.

These aren’t queue-jumping immigrants, or illegals trying to outwit border guards. They’re professionals, some with doctorates or masters’ degrees, who observe the rules. U.S. companies want to employ them. Unfortunately, they get lumped in with the general, anti-immigrant bias that cycles through Congress at times like these. and mocks the legal immigration system.

These foreign talent wanted to utilized our H1-B program that allows U.S. companies to hire a limited number of highly skilled foreign workers for the short-term or as a first step to a green card or permanent residence. Every April 1, U.S. corporations—from financial to high-tech firms—file petitions to hire these individuals under the H1-B terms.

Fix immigration by next Thanksgiving

– Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The opinions expressed are her own. —

The first Thanksgiving festival was celebrated in 1621 in Massachusetts by the Pilgrims, immigrants to America, out of gratitude for a plentiful harvest.

As we sit around our Thanksgiving tables this Thursday, almost all of us immigrants or their descendants, we’re reminded that one of President-elect Obama’s most important challenges will be to mend our broken immigration policy.

Instead of a rational immigration system, we have occasional raids by immigration officers on plants suspected of employing illegals. Then come deportations that may separate an undocumented parent and children whose birth in the United States made them citizens.

The most controversial facet of the immigration challenge is what to do about the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants. Most are unlikely to return to their native lands, even in today’s tough economic climate.

Nor would we want them to do so. They work at jobs that few Americans choose to do, both in high-skill area—scientific and medical research, for instance—and in mundane yet essential low-skill jobs, such as gardening, washing cars, and cleaning.

In 2007, Congress did not pass President Bush’s comprehensive immigration proposals, supported by the Democratic leadership and many Republicans. Will Obama succeed where Bush failed?