Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [49]
Yes, it’s true that Mexican immigrants are distinguished from prior immigrants groups by the fact that their homeland abuts the United States. But the significance of this distinction is often overstated. Keep in mind that the Mexican side of the border is mostly uninhabited. America-bound migrants tend to come from much farther south. Raul Hernandez-Coss of the World Bank traced the flow of remittances from different parts of the United States to different parts of Mexico, which mirror the migration flows from south to north. What he found is that Mexican emigrants are often traveling thousands of miles to seek work in the United States. The Latino immigrants you find in Omaha, Chicago, and Seattle, for example, typically hail from the rural Mexican state of Michoacán, which is just east of Mexico City, the capital. Michoacán is more than fifteen hundred miles from Chicago and some two thousand miles from Seattle. Mexican immigrants in Boston tend to come from the Mexican state of Jalisco, a little farther north, and those in New York come from Puebla, a state that is south of the capital and more than two thousand miles away. Let’s just say these folks aren’t any more likely to pop back home for weekend visits than were their European and Asian immigrant forbears.
It’s also tempting to exaggerate the permanence of immigration from Latin America, but we shouldn’t. Just because we see high numbers coming today doesn’t mean they will continue coming tomorrow and the next day. In fact, we already may have passed the high-water mark for illegal immigration from our main “sending country,” Mexico. Demographic trends south of the border show that the size of the young adult Mexican cohort, from which most immigrants are drawn, is declining. Mexico’s population growth rate has dropped by more than 50 percent during the past five decades, from 3 percent in 1960 to 1.3 percent today. By 2050 the rate will be negative, according to United Nations forecasts. Indeed, the population growth rate in Mexico today is only slightly higher than Canada’s. Just twenty-five years ago, Mexico had a population growth rate that was more than double that of our neighbor to the north.
Youth unemployment has also fallen as the Mexican economy has continued to expand, decreasing the likelihood of people heading north in search of employment. According to a Pew Hispanic Center study, the share of first-generation immigrants in the U.S. Latino population is on track to drop from about 40 percent in 2000 to closer to a third by 2020.
The political scientist Michael Barone says the Puerto Rican experience also suggests that Mexican immigration will taper off sooner rather than later. “In the 1950’s of ‘West Side Story,’ it seemed that Puerto Rican immigrants would take over New York City,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal . “There were no barriers to that migration: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and there were cheap flights from San Juan to New York. But around 1961, when per capital incomes in Puerto Rico reached about 35% of the U.S. average, net migration from Puerto Rico tapered off to zero, where it has remained ever since.” Barone allows that incomes in Mexico are still well below that level, but adds, “at some point immigration from Mexico and other parts of Latin America will likely fall, as immigration from Germany and Britain and Ireland fell in the late nineteenth century as those countries’ economies grew.”
The traditional indicators of American assimilation