Posted on 07/14/2011 5:57:39 AM PDT by Kaslin
The United States is a country that has been peopled largely by vast surges of migration -- from the British Isles in the 18th century, from Ireland and Germany in the 19th century, from Eastern and Southern Europe in the early 20th century, and from Latin America and Asia in the last three decades.
Going back in history, almost no one predicted that these surges of migration would begin -- and almost no one predicted that they would stop when they did.
Thus when the 1965 Immigration Reform Act was passed, almost no one predicted that we would have massive immigration from Mexico. Experts told us that immigrants came in large numbers only from Europe.
The experts got that wrong. From 1980 to 2008, more than 5 million Mexicans legally entered the United States. And Mexicans account for about 60 percent of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. today.
Immigration policymakers have assumed that the flow of Mexican immigrants would continue indefinitely at this high level. But now evidence is accumulating that this vast surge of migration is ending.
The Pew Hispanic Center, analyzing Census statistics, has estimated that illegal Mexican entrants have been reduced from 525,000 annually in the 2000-04 years to 100,000 in 2010.
"The flow has already stopped," Douglas Massey of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton recently told The New York Times. "The net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative."
One reason is the deep recession and slow economic recovery here in the United States. Tens of thousands of construction jobs, once plentiful in high-immigration states, have disappeared. Foreclosures on mortgages that should never have been granted have been especially high among Hispanics.
State laws, like Arizona's law requiring use of the federal e-Verify system to check on immigration status of new hires, have clearly had some impact. And the cost of crossing the border illegally has sharply increased.
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates the 2010 illegal population at 11.2 million, down from the 2007 peak of 12.0 million and just about the same level as in 2005. It's probably lower today.
Even more important, things have changed in Mexico. Its birth rate has fallen from 7 children per woman in 1971 to 3.2 in 1990 and 2 in 2010, barely enough to prevent population loss.
Mexico has finally become a majority middle-class country, former Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda argues in his recent book "Manana Forever?" Mexico has more cars and television sets than households now, most Mexicans have credit cards, and there are almost as many cell phones as people.
There has been a boom in higher education, especially in technical schools. The increasing numbers of well-educated Mexicans have no need to go to the United States to live a comfortable and even affluent life. Mexico has grown its way out of poverty.
The historic experience has been that countries cease generating large numbers of immigrants when they reach a certain economic level, as Germany did in the 1880s. Mass migration from Puerto Rico, whose residents are U.S. citizens, ended in the early 1960s, when income levels reached one-third of those on the mainland.
All of which has implications for U.S. immigration policy. It seems clear that tougher enforcement measures, like requiring use of e-Verify, can reduce the number of illegals in the United States. Returning to Mexico is a more attractive alternative than it used to be.
And the desire of legal immigrants to bring in collateral relatives under family reunification provisions is likely to diminish. That means we can shift our immigration quotas to higher-skill immigrants, as recommended by a panel convened by the Brookings Institution and Duke University's Kenan Institute and as done currently by Canada and Australia.
Such a change would be in line with the new situation. Mexican immigrants have tended to be less educated and lower-skill than immigrants from other Latin or Asian countries. Lower Mexican immigration means lower low-skill immigration. Employers of such immigrants may have to adjust their business models.
Probably they are already doing so. But government adjusts more slowly.
Barack Obama has been calling for immigration legislation similar to what George W. Bush sought, legislation geared to a status quo that no longer exists and seems unlikely to return. That's going nowhere. But sooner or later we should adjust the law to address the new emerging reality.
I am dubious of this "fact"
E-Verify should be required for employment AND public assistance.
One thing they missed: the civil war going on in Mexico. And that’s what it is.
Civil wars create large numbers of refugees dependent on the government of the nation they move into. Hence another reason for Fast and Furious (fuel the violence) and other obastard policies.
“E-Verify should be required for employment AND public assistance.”
Every attempt to trim the welfare roles down to just the people that welfare was designed to help have been reversed by the courts. There are wanted felons living off welfare. Various police agencies have sued to get the addresses so they could make arrests. The courts have constantly ruled against this as a violation of (fill-in-the-blank) rights.
Currently the socialists just want warm bodies...it doesn't take much skill to vote for a rat.
Wouldnt it be great if its true?
Why does it feel like its sourced from “the onion”?
Maybe if they slapped a 50% tax on all money transfers out of the country by people who couldnt produce valid id that they are U.S. citizens or legal aliens. Mexico will never willingly wean itself off of American cash.
Not to toot my own horn, but I predicted just such an outcome when it was being discussed, and knew I was being lied to by the sainted Ted Kennedy, and others. And I was just a kid (17 to be exact).
But great prognosticator that I am, even I didn't know it would get this bad, this fast.
Foreclosures on mortgages that should never have been granted have been especially high among Hispanics.
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housing is what triggered the depression.
caused by the Community Reinvestment Act,
forcing banks to meet minority quotas.
“No SSN” mortgages fit nicely.
i read of illegals selling (flipping) to each other,
until the last person, simply disappeared.
i’d love to see some real stats, but i suspect they are mind-numbing. the costs of illegal immigration, both direct and indirect, are destroying our great nation.
You have described the very successful, well played execution of the Cloward-Piven strategy.
After all didn't democrat Ted Kennedy, one of the principle movers of the 1965 Immigration Bill and later democrat Chuck Schumer & RINO Alan Simpson, principle movers of the 1986 Amnesty, tell us that their Immigration Reform Bills would not increase but would in fact solve the illegal alien problem.
Who would have thought? Certainly not the Pew Hispanic Center, the author Michael Barone, Chuck Shumer or any of these hucksters now pushing their versions of "Immigration Reform!"
Teddy Kennedy specifically designed that act so that we’d stop getting immigrants from Europe and start getting mass waves of them from third-world countries. He should have called it the Democrat Party Future Registrations Act of 1965.
I swear on the few days that man ever drew a sober breath he must have stayed up all night thinking of new ways to screw this country.
Barone needs to retract this column and start studying the congressional districts and states for the coming 2012 elections.
The difference they always gloss over is the legal/illegal component. Only the Mexicans come in as invaders. The rest fill out the paperwork and submit to the background checks.
I have heard of this strategy. I guess it is to collapse the economy and replace it with Communism? It may backfire and just collapse the Communist programs.
This story is 100% made up BS, just another attempt to stop the states from taking over the fight against illegals. The tide has not stopped, there are over 30 million illegals here from all over the world, just the most of them are from the south.
All the while lying to the American people and telling them that the act would not cause the US to be swamped with a million immigrants a year, nor would it upset the ethnic balance of the country. I sincerely hope that when he died, there was a special spot in Hell just waiting for him.
I agree. I think the ,Things are Looking up in Mexico, attitude of this piece is naive and don’t match what we’re seeing anecdotally.
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