The future of immigration

Steve notwithstanding, I sincerely hope raw beef and fatty soup are not the best examples.

And…

“The projections imply that pressure on Third World emigration over the next two decades will not increase.”

Pressure which way? Ugh. Or is that Arrrrrrgh.

If I am an African seeking to emigrate, why the U.S. as opposed to western Europe?

Interesting.

So as the rest of the world gets relatively wealthier, overall immigration to the U.S. will shrink and a greater proportion of those immigrants will be from Africa, which is the part of the world where the wealth is not increasing as fast.

Of course, geography and current U.S. immigration means that many of the African immigrants will be well-educated, English-speaking (from places like Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa etc), and comfortable with Anglo-Saxon culture. In fact it’s possible to envisage a scenario where well-educated African immigrants replace the stream of similar well-educated immigrants from India and southeast Asia that the U.S. has had since the immigration reform of 1965 which may now be tapering off.

Domestically, the presence of relatively successfully “non-asian minority” immigrant groups will no doubt challenge some biases. Even more interesting will be to see if the emigration of well-educated people will have as positive an impact on development of african countries as the emigration of well-educated, driven, southeast asians seems to have had on that part of the world.

re: african immigrants
I’ve often wondered how America is able to attract African immigrants. Almost all the continent has ties to some european colonizer or another, usually with far more lax immigration requirements of former colonials, similar language and culture, and a hundred(s) of year old interrelationship. It is subjectively much “easier” to go to the UK form Nigeria that to go to the US.
While the US may be “richer”, thinking on the margin makes this less important. if I earned “x” in Nigeria and could earn 200X in the UK or 210X in america, it’s reasonable to assume that difference is almost invisible.

In other words, as the gap between the U.S. and Mexico narrows, fewer Mexicans will want to come to America.

This can happen in two ways: Mexico could become more like the U.S., or the U.S. could become more like Mexico.

Which is it, Tyler?

Steve Sailer:

“This can happen in two ways: Mexico could become more like the U.S., or the U.S. could become more like Mexico.

Which is it, Tyler?”

No, this can happen three ways. The omitted alternative is that each becomes more like how the other was previously. This is what has been happening and it will continue to happen. But the faster the better.

Will Wilkinson writes:

“The omitted alternative is that each [America and Mexio] becomes more like how the other was previously.”

Well, California is certainly on its way toward becoming more like the Good Old Days in Mexico — low bond ratings, huge budget deficits, low school achievement test scores, high inequality of wealth, leftist machine politics, etc. etc.

In return, they have to promise not to break American immigration law again, and we take ID evidence from them that shows we’re not kidding about enforcing the law.

Because federal prosecutors have so much free time on their hands right now and federal prisons have plenty of space to handle routine immigration offenders. If these people are supposedly too afraid to take the bus I don’t see why they wouldn’t also be afraid of the risk of dying of thirst or heat stroke that typically comes with crossing the border by foot. If they try to arrive illegally by air again, intercepting them is easy.

By the way, Texas, Illinois, New Mexico, and Colorado are other high-immigration states. I am sure you can find a way to link them to the housing bubble, can’t you?

Look here.
And here’s Sailer a few weeks ago:

Nevada had the worst 2008 foreclosure rate at 7.3%, followed by Arizona at 4.5%, Florida at 4.5%, California at 4.0%, Colorado 2.4%, Michigan 2.4%, Ohio 2.4%, George [sic] 2.2%, and Illinois 1.9%.

He explored the differences between Texas and California about six months ago.

It’s important to fully understand why the lessons the two Texans, Rove and Bush, learned in their home state didn’t apply in other heavily Hispanic states.

So far, the mortgage meltdown hasn’t been as bad in Texas as in the four “Sand States† (as they were known on Wall Street during the Bubble): California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. These are home to half of the foreclosures and a large majority of the defaulted mortgage money.

Partly this is due to the Oil Bubble, which now appears to be ending. Oil prices over $100 per barrel kept the Texas economy strong in 2008, allowing debtors to avoid foreclosure.

Also, the enormous amount of land and the lack of environmental restrictions on home development in Texas means that when the federal government stimulates demand, the supply of housing increases quickly as well, keeping housing prices reasonable.

Finally, what Rove and Bush missed was how different the economic and immigration history of Texas over the last three decades was relative to the seemingly similar Sand States. Due to OPEC’s oil price increases in the 1970s, Texas experienced a huge construction boom thirty years ago. That mostly attracted construction workers from the rest of the U.S. rather than from Mexico, because Mexico was simultaneously experiencing its own oil boom following massive new discoveries.

When oil prices collapsed in 1982, the economies of Texas and Mexico slumped simultaneously. The big wave of post-1982 unemployed illegal aliens therefore headed for California rather than for Texas.

That’s why San Antonio had “surprisingly low levels” of immigration from 1965 to 2000, according to the important new book quantitatively comparing Mexican-Americans in San Antonio and Los Angeles in 1965 and 2000, Generations of Exclusion, by sociologists associated with the UCLA Chicano Studies Program.

The 2000 Census found that California’s foreign-born population (26 percent of all residents) was almost twice as large as Texas’s (14 percent).

As Texans, Rove and Bush apparently just couldn’t understand the quantity and quality of the immigration situation in the other heavily Hispanic states. In 2000, Texas had a large but fairly well-rooted, stable, and assimilated Mexican-American population that had a reasonable potential to make enough money in resource-extraction or other blue-collar jobs to afford to buy Texas’s cheap houses.

In sharp contrast, California had a huge and mostly new, ill-educated, and unassimilated Mexican-American population that didn’t have even a chance of making enough money in Silicon Valley or Hollywood to afford California’s already expensive houses.

And Nevada, Arizona, and Florida were more like California than they were like Texas.

The Rove-Bush policies weren’t directly disastrous in Texas, the state they understood. But in other heavily Hispanic states, they were like trying to put out fire with gasoline.