Are we seeing a end to large-scale immigration? That’s the implication in this June 6 story in the Wall Street Journal. Key sentence: “Emigration from Mexico to the U.S. dropped 13% in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, with more Mexicans leaving the U.S. than coming in.” There are more details farther down in the story. “Data released this week by the Mexican government shows emigration to the U.S. dropped 13% in the first quarter of 2009. In the same period, more people returned to Mexico than left Mexico for the U.S., about 139,000 and 137,000 respectively.” My initial assumption is that Mexican statistics here are more reliable than U.S. statistics. American statisticians are trying to measure a cross-border flow which is in large part illegal under U.S. law. Mexican statisticians are trying to measure a cross-border flow which is almost entirely legal under Mexican law.
If you go back in American history, you will find that very few if anyone predicted that our great migrations—the great surges of immigration and of internal migration—would occur, and very few predicted when those migrations would abruptly end, as they usually do. For example, net migration from Puerto Rico to the Mainland (almost entirely to New York City in those days) began in the late 1940s and ended abruptly in 1961, when household incomes in Puerto Rico reached about one-third the level in the Mainland (and about one-half those in Mississippi).
Barack Obama has said that he wants to make revision of our immigration laws a priority this year. I doubt that most Democratic congressional leaders agree. But whether or not there’s a major push for a so-called comprehensive immigration bill of the type put forward in the Senate in June 2007, there’s a need on all sides to rethink immigration policy. Both advocates and opponents of comprehensive bills have based their arguments on the assumption that large-scale immigration from Latin America and parts of Asia will continue indefinitely. But what if that assumption is false? Yes, our current recession is presumably temporary. But there is at least one other reason to assume that immigration from Latin America may not resume at previous levels: birth rates in Mexico and other Latin countries fell sharply around 1990. I’m going to take a look at the Mexican statistics and try to keep an eye on this.
