Posted on 12/10/2012 3:32:21 AM PST by Kaslin
Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past?
At least for the moment, it is. Last May, the Pew Hispanic Center, in a study based on U.S. and Mexican statistics, reported that net migration from Mexico to this country had fallen to zero from 2005 to 2010.
Pew said 20,000 more people moved to Mexico from the United States than from there to here in those years. That's a vivid contrast with the years 1995 to 2000, when net inflow from Mexico was 2.2 million people.
Because there was net Mexican immigration until 2007, when the housing market collapsed and the Great Recession began, it seems clear that there was net outmigration from 2007 to 2010, and that likely has continued in 2011 and 2012.
There's a widespread assumption that Mexican migration will resume when the U.S. economy starts growing robustly again. But I think there's reason to doubt that will be the case.
Over the past few years, I have been working on a book, scheduled for publication next fall, on American migrations, internal and immigrant. What I've found is that over the years this country has been peopled in large part by surges of migration that have typically lasted just one or two generations.
Almost no one predicted that these surges of migration would occur, and almost no one predicted when they would end.
For example, when our immigration system was opened up in 1965, experts testified that we would not get many immigrants from Latin America or Asia. They assumed that immigrants would come mainly from Europe, as they had in the past.
Experts have also tended to assume that immigrants are motivated primarily by economic factors. And in the years starting in the 1980s, many people in Latin America and Asia, especially in Mexico, which has produced more than 60 percent of Latin American immigrants, saw opportunities to make a better living in this country.
But masses of people do not uproot themselves from familiar territory just to make marginal economic gains. They migrate to pursue dreams or escape nightmares.
Life in Mexico is not a nightmare for many these days. Beneath the headlines about killings in the drug wars, Mexico has become a predominantly middle-class country, as Jorge Castaneda notes in his recent book, "Manana Forever?" Its economy is growing faster than ours.
And the dreams that many Mexican immigrants pursued have been shattered.
You can see that if you look at the statistics on mortgage foreclosures, starting with the housing bust in 2007. More than half were in the four "sand states" -- California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida -- and within them, as the Pew Hispanic Center noted in a 2009 report, in areas with large numbers of Latino immigrants.
These were places where subprime mortgages were granted, with encouragement from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to many Latinos unqualified by traditional credit standards.
These new homeowners, many of them construction workers, dreamed of gaining hundreds of thousands of dollars as housing prices inevitably rose. Instead, they collapsed. My estimate is that one-third of those foreclosed on in these years were Latinos. Their dreams turned into nightmares.
We can see further evidence in last month's Pew Research report on the recent decline in U.S. birthrates. The biggest drop was among Mexican-born women, from 455,000 births in 2007 to 346,000 in 2010.
That's a 24 percent decline, compared with only a 6 percent decline among U.S.-born women. It's comparable to the sharp decline in U.S. birthrates in the Depression years from 1929 to 1933.
Beneath the cold statistics on foreclosures and births is a human story, a story of people whose personal lives have been deeply affected by economic developments over which they had no control and of which they had no warning.
Those events have prompted many to resort to, in Mitt Romney's chilly words, "self-deportation." And their experiences are likely to have reverberations for many others who have learned of their plight.
Surges of migration that have shaped the country sometimes end abruptly. The surge of Southern blacks to Northern cities lasted from 1940 to 1965 -- one generation. The surge of Mexicans into the U.S. lasted from 1982 to 2007 -- one generation.
The northward surge of American blacks has never resumed. I don't think the northward surge of Mexicans will, either.
I think it was as much the arrogance of the Romney campaign as it was any vote theft. One only has to look at how the Romney camp excluded conservatives, ran the most idiotic GOTV campaign in modern history (ORCA) and failed to have any kind of significant swing state voter drive to see they didn’t understand the fight they were in. They thought they just had to sit back and wait for Obama to lose, instead of playing to win.
Thanks for posting something resembling evidence.
Too many on this thread and elsewhere on FR think such questions should not even be asked.
Is net Mexico/US migration down or even reversing? I have no idea. But improving economy in Mexico and lousy one here has got to reduce the “pressure” leading to migration.
Are these numbers “unexpected”?
You mean we can’t burn the witch?
Crud. I brought my new torch.
Mexico is running at about a 6% annual growth rate.
Even with cooked, phony Obama numbers we are struggling to scrape 2%. Were it not for the threat of horrendous violence from drug gangs this might have stopped the flow altogether.
The US has never advertised for new social welfare customers in a foreign country before, as I believe the government selling food stamps in Mexico now.
What we have found out recently is some immigrants immigrate to work, while others immigrate for freebies. Surprise surprise. Those that came to work have returned south of the border.
I have no doubt the surge will continue as soon as the economy improves, if it improves.
Duuuh, the harvest season has ended so those have gone back home. All the others who want to be here are already here.
NAFTA is finally having the effect it was supposed to have. We sell pine boards to several companies that have manufacturing plants in Mexico. A lot of furniture, kitchen cabinet doors are now made in Mexico. It is cheaper to sell the raw material to there if the finished product(kitchen cabinets) are being shipped back into the U.S. than it would to ship it to China and then back here.
I would think this would also be the case with many other manufactured goods that are then sold in the US and Canada.
Go into any Home Depot or Lowes. Pick up a bathroom faucet. Most of the cheaper models are made in China. However, many of the better quality are now made in Mexico.
Also, wage hikes in China mean that the cost of labor in Mexico is now just slightly higher than China and there is a much lower transportation cost, so many factories from China are relocating there.
It seems very likely for Mexican immigration to stop
I wonder -- Obama is going to drive our economy into the ground. At the same time Mexico's is rising.
Even if we start to recover after 4 years, Mexico will not be that far behind the US in terms of quality of living and considering that Obama wants to reduce our quality of living, they may actually be close to us.
people won't migrate north then...
Barone is dead wrong here. All you have to do is look at the number of Mexican border apprehensions. It still same as the last few years
The number of illegals here is much larger than the 12 million commonly mentioned and it is growing all the time. Plus we get Hispanic illegal aliens who come here on a tourist visa and never leave. Colombians for example
“I just cringe when I read reports like the one posted.”
...Particularly coming from Mr. Barone, who embarrassed himself and discredited his reputation with his predictions for the election last November.
Barone is overlooking other things very important:
- The numbers of illegals “reported to be here” is probably far lower than the number that are actually here.
- The “chain migration” that will occur when illegals already in this country are amnestied.
- The reality that all children born to illegals (even those who may have been here but have now gone home) are American citizens by birthright.
The “big migration” may be over (I don’t believe that) or at least significantly slowing down (more believable), but the damage has been done.
Indeed, the “damages” we are seeing now from this disaster are relatively small, compared to the long-term damage the United States will experience due to our leaders’ refusal to recognize the danger and secure the border for the last thirty years....
I believe that Michael Barone is an illegal immigration apologist so you have to take what he says with a grain of salt. It could be that the cheap labor promoters are trying to keep us from being scared of illegals so that they can pass another amnesty.
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