A Decade Without a Mexican
"The illegal immigration problem is going away," declares ace U.S. political analyst Michael Barone. The occasion for Barone's pronouncement, which would have been outright shocking a few years ago, is a newly-released Pew Research report claiming that the net level of migration, legal and illegal, from Mexico to the U.S. has decreased to roughly zero.
As the Pew report mentions, "[t]he U.S. today has more immigrants from Mexico alone -- 12.0 million -- than any other country in the world has from all countries of the world." As recently as 2004, nearly 700 thousand Mexicans were migrating to the U.S. each year.
For reasons that aren't entirely clear -- the collapse of the housing bubble, an increase in border security, and many others among them -- only 1.39 million Mexicans migrated to the U.S from all of 2005 to 2010. In that same period, 1.37 million moved from the U.S. to Mexico. By 2010, births had surpassed immigration as the main source of growth in the Mexican-American population.
Immigration is still a hot-button issue in U.S. politics. Over the past two years, according to Mother Jones, states have passed 164 different laws intended to restrict immigration, including a half-dozen modeled on Arizona's controversial SB 1070. Immigration was a deciding topic in the GOP presidential primaries. And it is one of the most cited issues in polls of voters' concerns.
It's hard to know what role stepped-up enforcement of immigration laws has played in reversing the trend of Mexico-U.S. immigration, especially relative to changes in the economy. But if there's no rapid change in U.S. border policing and the Mexican economy continues to improve as it has over the past few years, it's quite possible that very low levels of immigration will be the new norm.
If that happens, the effects on the U.S. economy and society could be enormous. Many of what were perceived as difficult societal problems will likely cease to cause concern at all.
Two such issues highlighted by the Occupy Wall Street movement, namely, income inequality and economic mobility, are closely related to the fact of high Mexican and other Hispanic immigration in the U.S.
Mexicans are unlike other immigrants to the U.S. in that they are less educated and poorer than the general public on average. If Mexican immigration really has abated once and for all, the U.S. won't be adding hundreds of thousands of people to the low end of the income distribution each year. Consequently, measured inequality and economic mobility could become less pronounced.
Although the impact of low-skilled immigration on native workers' earnings is a contentious subject, a 2006 study by the economists Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri found persuasive evidence that low-skilled immigrants depress the wages of previous immigrants. In other words, Mexican immigrants new to America tend to look for low-skill jobs in construction, restaurants, landscaping and other service industries -- putting them in competition with Mexican-born workers who already held those jobs.
So while Mexican immigration may not worsen existing income disparities between natural Americans, they may keep other immigrants' earnings low, thereby making the total gap between all workers look worse than it otherwise would.
A similar dynamic is at work with the question of economic mobility, another area in which the U.S. is thought to lag behind other developed nations. Mobility can mean many different things, but in this case it's taken to mean that people born into lower income classes are less likely to reach the upper class in America than they would be in other countries.
The fact of high immigration from poor countries complicates such statistics for the U.S. While a snapshot of Americans at any one time indicates that mobility is low, younger generations report earning more than their parents did. As economist Nathan Grawe of Carleton College has argued, immigration helps explain the discrepancy.
How can this generation earn less than their parents' generation and yet kids consistently out earn their parents? The answer is interesting and illuminating: immigration.... Because new immigrants earn less (on average) than others, their inclusion makes it look like things are heading toward less opportunity when in reality nearly all kids from lower-income families (and 2/3s of all kids) are doing better than their parents.
This is really important news. It helps us to reconcile many Americans' sense that their families have made progress...with the average earnings data we hear every year.
While many countries have high rates of immigration, only the U.S. has such high immigration from poor countries. About half, or fewer than half, of migrants to countries like Norway, Sweden, and France, come from other European or North American countries. A much higher percentage -- closer to 80 -- of immigrants to the U.S. are from Mexico or other less wealthy countries.
In other words, a significant part of the reason the U.S. lags behind other advanced economies along the key metrics of inequality and income mobility is the huge number of poor and uneducated Mexican immigrants who have come to the U.S. over the past 40 years. A reversal of the immigration trend should also improve the U.S.'s standing in such measures.
Such a reversal would be not be all good news. The evidence is far from clear that America would be better off with drastically fewer immigrants. Furthermore, Mexico's per capita GDP is one-third that of the U.S.'s: reduced immigration could mean that more poor Mexicans are trapped with little opportunity for advancement.
Nevertheless, the Mexican-American migration of the past 40 years was a historically important one. We may only be able to fully discern what it's meant for the U.S. now that it's over.
