Human
Events...
Shrinking
problem: Illegal immigration from Mexico
by Michael
Barone
04/26/2012
The illegal
immigration problem is going away.
That’s the
conclusion I draw from the latest report of the Pew Hispanic Center on
Mexican
immigration to the United States.
Pew’s
demographers have carefully combed through statistics compiled by the
U.S.
Census Bureau, the Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican
government,
and have come up with estimates of the flow of migrants from and back
to
Mexico. Their work seems to be as close to definitive as possible.
They
conclude that from 2005 to 2010 some 1.39 million people came from
Mexico to
the United States and 1.37 million went from the U.S. to Mexico. “The
largest
wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United
States,”
they write, “has come to a standstill.”
The turning
point seems to have come with the collapse of housing prices and the
onset of
recession in 2007. Annual immigration from Mexico dropped from peaks of
770,000
in 2000 and 670,000 in 2004 to 140,000 in 2010.
As a
result, the Mexican-born population in the United States decreased from
12.6 million
in 2007 to 12.0 million in 2010. That decrease consisted entirely of
Mexican-born illegal immigrants, whose numbers decreased from 7 million
in 2007
to 6.1 million in 2010.
Mitt Romney
has been ridiculed for saying that illegal immigrants should
“self-deport.” But
that seems to be exactly what many of them have been doing. The U.S.
government
has been sending back more illegals lately, but most of the flow to
Mexico has
been voluntary.
The Pew
analysts hesitate to say so, but their numbers make a strong case that
we will
never again see the flow of Mexicans into this country that we saw
between
1970, when there were fewer than 1 million Mexican-born people in the
U.S., and
2007, when there were 12.7 million.
One reason
is that Mexico’s population growth has slowed way down. Its fertility
rate fell
from 7.3 children per woman in 1970 to 2.4 in 2009, which is just above
replacement level.
Meanwhile,
Mexico’s economy has grown. Despite sharp currency devaluations in 1982
and
1994, its per capita gross domestic product rose 22 percent from 1980
to 2010.
Mexico,
like the United States, experienced a recession from 2007 to 2009. But
since
then, Mexico’s GDP has grown far faster than ours -- 5.5 percent in
2010 and
3.9 percent in 2011.
Mexico
seemed yoked to the U.S. growth rate after passage of the North
American Free
Trade Agreement in 1993. But since the recession it seems yoked to the
more
robust growth rate of the state with the biggest cross-border trade,
Texas.
An end to
the huge flow of immigrants from Mexico has huge implications for U.S.
immigration policy.
Because of
our long land border with Mexico (the Rio Grande is a trickle most of
the
year), it has been far easier to emigrate illegally from Mexico than
from any
other country.
As a
result, Mexican immigrants tend to be younger, poorer, less educated
and less
fluent in English than immigrants from other countries. They are also
more
likely to be illegal -- Mexicans are 30 percent of all immigrants but
58
percent of illegals -- and less likely to become U.S. citizens.
A continued
standstill in Mexican immigration means that the number of illegals in
the
United States will probably continue to decline, even in an economic
recovery.
Children of illegals born in the U.S., who are automatically U.S.
citizens,
don’t add to the illegal numbers.
And no
other country has produced or is likely to produce anything close to
the number
or share of illegals.
The central
focus of the debate over the so-called comprehensive immigration bills
that
came to the floor of the Senate in 2006 and 2007 was their provisions
for
legalization of those illegally here -- amnesty, to opponents. On the
campaign
trail, Barack Obama is promising to push for such legislation just as
he
promised in 2008.
But he
didn’t deliver when Democrats had supermajorities in both houses and is
unlikely to get anywhere on this project in a second term.
It may not
matter much. With the Mexican reservoir of potential illegals dried up,
and
with better border enforcement and increased use of the much improved
e-Verify
system in workplaces, the illegal population seems likely to decline.
The key
immigration issue for the future is whether America, like our
Anglosphere
cousins Canada and Australia, will let in more high-skill immigrants.
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