Is the Demographic Fit With Mexico Ending?

Damien Cave of the New York Times has pieced together evidence that the net flow of undocumented migrants from Mexico to the US may have dropped to zero or even have reversed itself. That does not mean that no one is crossing the border heading north, but the flow is considerably lower than it used to be, and may be matched by people heading back to Mexico from the US. Elizabeth Aguilera of the San Diego Union-Tribune has also pulled together a similar story. 


The evidence comes collectively from the latest round of data collected by the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University (which interviews migrants in Mexico about their experience in the US), the calculations of undocumented migration by the Pew Hispanic Research Center, which are based especially on the Current Population Survey, by Border Patrol apprehension data, and by organizations such as the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC, San Diego which regularly track data from selected communities in Mexico.


The reasons for the decline represent a type of "perfect storm". The "Great Recession" is an obvious factor, along with the greater cost of crossing the border as a result of increasingly tighter border security, the increased Federal deportation of undocumented immigrants, and the increasingly hostile legislation passed in a variety of states over the past few years. At the same time, as I (and my son and co-author, Greg Weeks) have been noting for some time, the long-term decline in the birth rate in Mexico (accompanied in the US by the birth of children of immigrants) is closing the gap in the age structures of the two countries that has been filled by immigrants for the past several decades. If this really is the end of the demographic fit between the two countries, it happened even more quickly than we would have predicted largely because of the unexpected impact of the Great Recession.

World Bank Opens its Data Vault

If you are new to research that involves comparisons between countries, you may not appreciate how important it is that over the past year or so, the World Bank has made its huge international database increasingly available to the public over the internet. 

Created in 1944 and, by custom, headed by an American, the World Bank initially helped finance the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Since then, it has extended many trillions in loans for a wide variety of projects, be they institutions like schools and hospitals, infrastructure like roads or, controversially, environmentally unfriendly projects like coal-fired power plants and hydroelectric dams. Along the way the World Bank, like the I.M.F., has tinkered with entire economies, sometimes with disastrous results.

In the process of handing out gobs of money, the World Bank has collected gobs of data and until very recently parsed it out sparingly and usually only for a fee. That approach began to change when Robert Zoellick became head of the Bank four years ago.

“As opposed to some imperious bureaucracy in Washington, we’re making things open and accessible to people,” he says. “That makes for better performance, it makes for a more open system, it makes for people having a different attitude about the World Bank.”

This has been a very welcome change and I encourage you to explore the data available online at www.worldbank.org.

Anti-Immigration Legislation Bubbling Through the South--Redux

The Fourth of July is a good time to contemplate various aspects of freedom, and the opposite of that--namely the anti-immigrant laws recently enacted in several states in the south. An editorial in the New York Times picks up the theme:

If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following — and in some ways outdoing — Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.

The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.

Keep in mind that for the first 100 years after the American Revolution there were no restrictions on immigration to the US--if you wanted to come, you came. Period. But, the very first restrictions were, like those today, essentially racist in origin. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Then in 1924 Congress passed the Japanese Exclusion Act, following the 1921 passage of the Quota Law of 1921 which put the first numerical limit on migration into the country, aimed especially at southern and eastern Europeans uprooted by World War I. The fact that we have a rather sad history of racist immigration laws does not, of course, excuse the current round of legislation. Rather, it should serve as a reminder that those whom we used to wish to exclude are now regular members of American society, and we can hope that the same will be said in the future about those currently being discriminated against simply for wanting to take the jobs that are on offer in this country.

South Suburbs of Chicago Grow as Blacks Leave the Loop

The New York Times today followed up on a story that I commented on several months ago as the first data from the 2010 Census were being released--the City of Chicago has been shrinking because the black population has been heading to the suburbs. More specifically, the southern suburbs of Chicago.

One path that so many black middle-class home buyers have followed from Chicago’s South Side in recent years ends just off Lincoln Highway, past the entrance to the Newbury Estates subdivision in Matteson.

The subdivision, about 30 miles from the Loop, represents only part of a much greater migration to the south suburbs from 2000 to 2010. In all, Chicago’s black population declined by about 181,000 people, or 17 percent, in that period, according to recently released figures from the 2010 census. The rapid contraction of the black population was the main driver of the city’s overall population loss of about 200,000 in the last decade, a fact noted by Rahm Emanuel in his mayoral inauguration speech in May.

“No great city can thrive by shrinking,” Mr. Emanuel said. “The best way to keep people from leaving is to attract the jobs that give them a good reason to stay.”

But many left despite having good jobs in the city. Although the census data does not indicate where those who left Chicago ended up, the new population figures show that Matteson recorded the largest numerical increase in blacks of any city in the Chicago area.

This is a pattern repeated almost everywhere in the US, and the people involved in suburbanization would probably think that is really as a type of "smart" growth. One person interviewed by the Times talked about the fact that the old neighborhood in Chicago was like a shooting gallery every night. It's smart to get out of there if you can. But it also raises important questions about the adaptability of older cities in the face of the suburban transition (part of the overall urban evolution). The roles and functions of inner cities have been changing for a long time, and some cities have done better than others in realizing this and adjusting to it.

Kansas Anti-Abortion Rules Blocked for the Time Being

The state of Kansas has tried to stop legal abortions from taking place there by creating a new set of rules by which all abortion providers (of whom there are only three) must abide. However, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the implementation of those rules until a trial is held to determine their legality.

U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia's injunction will remain in effect until a trial is held in a lawsuit challenging the Kansas rules. A new licensing law and state health department regulations had taken effect Friday, and abortion providers were given the latest version of those regulations less than two weeks ago.

The new law requires hospitals, clinics and doctor's offices to obtain an annual license from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to perform more than five non-emergency abortions in a month. The regulations tell abortion providers what drugs and equipment they must stock and, among other things, establish minimum sizes and acceptable temperatures for procedure and recovery rooms.

In blocking the law, Murguia said evidence presented in court documents showed the providers would "suffer irreparable harm" through the loss of business and patients, and that at least two women currently seeking abortions would be harmed by not being able to go to the provider of their choice.

The licensing law was part of a wave of anti-abortion measures enacted this year by Kansas and other states with new Republican governors or GOP-dominated legislatures. Utah and Virginia are also imposing new regulations on abortion providers, but Kansas moved with unusual speed to enact its rules by Friday — a major issue in the lawsuit.

Interestingly enough, one of the state's three providers--Planned Parenthood--had actually met the requirements and had been issued a license to perform abortions.