Costs and Benefits of Immigration--A National Academy Report

Is immigration to the US good or bad for the economy? Both, as it turns out. Whether it is one or the other depends on who you are, but on balance some immigration is better than no immigration. That is the elevator speech conclusion of a new report just out from the National Academy of Sciences, which you can download for free from the website of the National Academies Press. It is a lengthy and impressive volume. Indeed, two members of the National Academy of Science committee responsible for the report are past presidents of the Population Association of America (Charles Hirschman and Marta Tienda) and two of the acknowledged reviewers of the volume are past presidents of the PAA (Ronald Lee and Douglas Massey). If you don't have time yet to read the whole book, check out the review by Thomas Edsall in today's NYTimes, which relates the report's findings to the current political situation.

The crux of the problem is that the plusses and minuses are not distributed equally. The academy found, for example, that the willingness of less-skilled immigrants to work at low pay reduced consumption costs — the costs to consumers of goods and services like health care, child care, food preparation, house cleaning, repair and construction — for millions of Americans. This resulted in “positive net benefits to the U.S. economy during the last two decades of the 20th century.” These low-wage workers simultaneously generated “a redistribution of wealth from low- to high-skilled native-born workers.”

In other words, low wages are not good for people having to cope with their own low wages, but the resulting lower price of goods and services is beneficial to everyone, even including those with low wages. Who benefits most from immigration? Businesses, landowners and investors who reap a greater profit from lower cost labor. Who suffers most? Low-skilled workers, including recent immigrants competing with even more recent immigrants. However, as Edsall notes, the report's conclusion is decidedly pro-immigration, as he quotes from the report itself:

Immigration is integral to the nation’s economic growth. The inflow of labor supply has helped the United States avoid the problems facing other economies that have stagnated as a result of unfavorable demographics, particularly the effects of an aging work force and reduced consumption by older residents. In addition, the infusion of human capital by high-skilled immigrants has boosted the nation’s capacity for innovation, entrepreneurship, and technological change.

As is true so often in life, complex issues can be interpreted in a variety of ways, so this report is likely to wind up being ammunition for both pro- and anti-immigrant groups. That's not very satisfying, but it is real. 

Cohabitation Overtakes Marriage Among Younger American Women

Esther Lamidi and PAA President-elect Wendy Manning have just posted a very interesting profile of the changing relationship patterns of American women aged 25-29. They use data from the National Survey of Family Growth to show that cohabitation has now overtaken marriage as the most common form of relationship that women have had at that age. But, as you can see below, this doesn't mean that young women aren't pairing up. Indeed, the opposite is true. In 2011/2013 (the most recent data available) a higher percentage of women had either cohabited or had been married than back in 1995.

Their data also show the very interesting trend that the percent of women who had ever-married by age 25-29 went down precipitously for every educational group except women with at least a bachelor's degree, for whom the percentage actually went up. At the same time, the percent ever-cohabiting went up noticeably for all educational groups, including those with a bachelor's degree. In other words, a college degree is becoming less of an impediment to establishing a relationship through cohabitation and/or marriage.

The data also show the troubling trend that the percent of Black women who have ever-married dropped to only 23%, compared to 51% for Whites and 57% for Hispanics. There are two troubling aspects that come to mind (though not discussed in the profile) are: (1) the high percentage of young Black men who are incarcerated and thus not "available" for marriage; and (2) the children born to women who are not married, since single women are likely to have fewer resources with which to cope with the task of raising children--a topic I have discussed before.

Saudi Women Are Tired of Being "Owned" by Men

Women in Saudi Arabia are petitioning the king to end the practice of male guardianship, which dramatically limits their life chances. The most obvious example of this is that women cannot drive alone, but there are many other examples, as the story in today's Wall Street Journal makes clear. "Legally, Saudi women need permission from a male guardian—typically a father, husband or son—to marry, travel outside the kingdom or study abroad, among other things." The woman leading the telegram petition drive has felt the pain:

Ramyah, 37, who led the telegram initiative, feels strongly about ending guardianship because of personal experience. A college-educated nurse, for years she was her family’s main breadwinner, supporting her unemployed husband. Even then, her husband refused to let her travel.

When she obtained a divorce and moved back with her parents, her guardianship—she calls it “ownership”—returned to her father.

“At work, I am very respected,” said Ramyah. “But when I come home I have another personality: I am a child again.”

Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most extreme case of a country in which women have been given access to education and the labor force, but where the culture at home remains very traditional and oppressive of women. To be sure, Saudi Arabia is not a low fertility country, but its birth rate has dropped considerably over the past few decades. Since 1985, the TFR has dropped from 7 children per woman to "only" 2.8, as I noted earlier this year.  The Saudi economy's reliance on oil means that it cannot afford to have a continued huge increase in population. A third of its population is under the age of 15, according to data from the latest PRB World Population Data Sheet. Economic survival really depends on the liberation of women and a continued sharp drop in the birth rate. 

The State of the World's Population is Decidedly Spatial

Last week the United Nations convened a summit on Migrants and Refugees, as I had mentioned last month. Now, you remember that demographers consider refugees to be migrants, but the UN chooses to separate the categories to emphasize that refugees are migrating for reasons beyond their control (essentially being pushed), compared to voluntary migrants who are pulled to someplace else. In all events, the NYTimes reported that relatively little of substance was accomplished at the summit. The reality is that few countries in the world want to take in refugees, so it is hard to cope with the current scope of refugees, particularly those out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where violence has forced people to seek shelter elsewhere. 

One response to the refugee/migration issue is to remind us that migration has been a fact of life for all of human history, and that the current levels are not all that high by historical standards. Thanks to my son, John, for pointing me to an article on Swissinfo.com that summarizes the work of demographers at the Vienna Institute for Demography on global migration patterns (see my most recent blog for more work on migration from researchers at VID). The percentage of humans migrating hasn't changed all that much, but of course the places of origin and destination are very different now than they used to be, as I noted when the research referenced in the Swissinfo article first was published two years ago. Others have commented on this same theme, as I noted earlier this year. Furthermore, as the population continues to grow (remember we are now at 7.4 billion) the number of migrants keeps going up, even if the percent of people migrating stays the same.

So, despite the clear concern about refugees, the overall demographic situation globally has been nicely summed up by Joseph Chamie, former director of the UN Population Division. The world is divided demographically (and in a lot of other ways) by the "doublers" and the "decliners".

The doublers are all located in sub-Saharan Africa except for Iraq and the State of Palestine. The largest countries among the doublers are Nigeria (187 million), followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (80 million) and Tanzania (55 million). Today the doublers together account for 10 percent of the world’s population. By 2050, however, due to the doublers’ rapid rates of demographic growth that proportion is expected to increase to 18 percent of the world’s projected population of nearly 10 billion people.

The top ten countries with the projected population declines of no less than 15 percent are all located in Eastern Europe. The country with the most rapid decline among the decliners is Bulgaria (27 percent), followed by Romania (22 percent), Ukraine (21 percent) and Moldova (20 percent).

The largest decliner population, China, is expected to decrease by more than 2 percent by 2050, with the Chinese population peaking in less than a decade. Other large populations projected to experience demographic declines by midcentury are Japan (15 percent), Russia (10 percent), Germany (8 percent) and Italy (5 percent). Moreover, some of the decliners have already experienced population decline for a number of years in the recent past, including Bulgaria, Hungary, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine.

And where does migration fit into this? If the doublers had their way, much of their excess would be siphoned off to the decliners through migration. If the decliners had their way, their own birth rate would go up, so that they would look less attractive to the potential migrants from the doublers. This isn't going to be easy.

Recent Refugees Arriving in Austria Tend to be Young and Well-Educated

Thanks to Debbie Fugate for pointing me to a paper just published in PLOS ONE by researchers at the Vienna Institute for Demography and IIASA. They were able to interview a sample of more than 500 refugees arriving in Vienna in 2015 coming mainly from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. 

This survey, the first of its kind in Austria and possibly in Europe, was carried out among adult displaced persons, mostly residing in Vienna, yielding 514 completed interviews. Information gathered on spouses and children allows for the analysis of 972 persons living in Austria, and of further 419 partners and children abroad. Results indicate that the surveyed population comprised mainly young families with children, particularly those coming from Syria and Iraq. Their educational level is high compared with the average level in their country of origin.

The authors caution that this is a small sample from the 88,000 people who applied for asylum in Austria in 2015, but they used a variety of tools to validate the underlying demographics of the people interviewed. Like most people showing up in Austria, these refugees largely got to Europe through Turkey, and then into Austria from Hungary, which is just south of Vienna. Additionally, the age structure of the sample (see below) is very similar to the profile of refugees in Europe by age and sex put together a few months ago by the State Department's Humanitarian Information Unit, which I discussed at the time. 

As you would expect, the vast majority of refugees from these three countries were Muslim, but responses to questions about issues such as gender equity suggested a more moderate view than might be guessed by political rhetoric in Europe and the United States. In general, the results suggest that this refugee crisis is replicating the usual pattern of selective migration.