The future of immigration

by  Tyler Cowen in

Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson report:

This paper documents a stylized fact not well appreciated in the
literature. The Third World has been undergoing an emigration life
cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have
been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the
early 1990s. The current economic crisis will serve only to accelerate
those trends. The paper estimates the economic and demographic
fundamentals driving these Third World emigration life cycles to the
United States since 1970 — the income gap between the US and the
sending country, the education gap between the US and the sending
country, the poverty trap, the size of the cohort at risk, and migrant
stock dynamics. It then projects the life cycle up to 2024. The
projections imply that pressure on Third World emigration over the next
two decades will not increase. It also suggests that future US
immigrants will be more African and less Hispanic than in the past.

A non-gated version is available here.  A more imaginative title for this post would have been "Steve, the good news is…Steve, the bad news is…" but I'm not sure how many MR readers would get the reference.  I am in any case impressed by how much African immigrants have brought to the Washington, D.C. area.  Don't forget to visit Abay Market, currently the best Ethiopian place in my area.  The menu has moved from having three items — raw beef only, plus fatty lamb soup — to some vegetables and cooked items as well.

Comments

Bob Knaus

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Surely you underestimate the attentiveness of your readers!

I personally am grateful for Mr. Sailer's comments. The eye-rolling they induce has improved my range of vision considerably.

Andrew

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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.

franko

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i'll bite - i don't know the steve reference

but perhaps i'll challenge with:

"no matter where you go, there you are"

and if ur hint is:

"not BigBooteeeee, BigBootay!!"

Cyrus

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

Rhys K.M.

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I know for a fact that people don’t just migrate from Africa or Mexico to the U.S., they are only given a chance to do so if they have a fitting reason why it is that they want to come to the U.S. or if them coming to the U.S. can benefit the U.S. economy in any way. People always try to sneak in through the boarders but when in the U.S., they find themselves running from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and are faced with a lot of hardships. It is true that a lot of people try to migrate to the U.S. because of the economic crisis most countries are currently facing, but the fact still remains which is that immigrants have a fifty fifty chance of getting into a country. I think the Abay Market being mentioned in the post can be considered as one of the ways that the U.S. economy as a whole benefits from the services of immigrants who were giving the chance to migrate to the country.

DJ

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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.

Thorfinn

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The binding constraint on immigration isn't the income gap with other countries, but immigration restrictions. For the foreseeable future, America will remain richer than much of the world. Mexico has a per capita income of something like $12000; China and India even will not reach this level for some time. Skilled immigration may drop off (again, lower H1B visas are another cause) but there is plenty of unskilled labor that would love to move here.

farmer

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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.

Ben R.

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Whatever happened to 'eat the rich'?

Burn the rich, eat their houses.

Steve Sailer

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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?

rtbhyjj

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that wont work they will be poor enough to risk coming back and our jails are already pretty clogged up

Will Wilkinson

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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.

Steve Sailer

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From the Los Angeles (actually, San Fernando Valley) Daily News, 1/27/09.

Too broke to buy a ticket home, Valley's immigrant day laborers just hang on

by Tony Castro

They are down and out in the United States and homesick for Guatemala. And El Salvador. And Honduras. And Mexico.

And they would go back without even an American penny in their pocket if only they had enough to get home.

They are the discouraged and disillusioned Central American and Mexican day laborers who, in a sign of how hard times are in this economy, find themselves so broke they can't send much, if any, money back to loved ones they haven't seen for years. ...

"In Guatemala, I could live with my family at my parents' house," Ochoa said.

"I would find some kind of work. I might not make much more a week there than I do here working only one day a week. But I would be home. I wouldn't be a stranger in another country."

But now Guatemalan day laborers wishing to go home face the task of saving $400 or more for the airfare to return home.

"If you're from Guatemala and you want to go home, it has to be by plane," said Ochoa. "We're not trying to be picky. But it's not a trip that can be done safely by bus."...

The long journey through Mexico, especially with the ongoing violence of the drug wars in that country, is especially intimidating to Central Americans.

Steve Sailer

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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.

Ricardo

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Steve - CA, AZ, FL, and NV also have warm weather... perhaps it was the Sun that caused the global crisis and not immigrants? Or, can you entertain the possibility that these are states where many people would want to live (including a lot of retiring baby boomers) and that's why they were so important for the housing bubble?

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?

The one thing left for you to do is find a link between 9/11 and Mexican immigrants. I am sure one day you will find one.

Ricardo

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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.

Bob Montgomery

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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.

fuwen

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