Doug Massey on How Politics Can Trump Theories of Migration

Readers of the last several editions of my population text will be familiar with the set of migration theories laid out over the years by Doug Massey and his collaborators. Readers of my text and of this blog will also be familiar with Massey's recognition of the fact that the steep rise in the number of undocumented immigrants in the US was not predicted by migration theory. Rather, it is an artifact of the political decision in the US to militarize the US-Mexico border, thus effectively eliminating the circular migration that used to exist between Mexico and the US. The more tightly sealed border trapped millions of undocumented immigrants in the US, because it is now too expensive and dangerous to go back and forth as previous generations did subsequent to the end of the guest-worker programs just before the 1965 Immigration Act was passed.

Now Doug Massey has laid out the story of how migration theory has been trumped (no pun intended--but it fits) by politics. Thanks to Philippe Bocquier for pointing out a paper published last month by Massey in Migration Letters. The consequences of this have been enormous, as Massey points out in his concluding paragraph:

The transformation of Mexican immigration from circularity to settlement and its geographic spread throughout the United States between 1986 and 2008 has transformed the social demography of the United States, increasing the percentage of Latinos to 17.3% and making them by far the largest minority group in the United States. Moreover, no matter what the future of Mexican migration might be, this transformation is already built into the demographic structure of the United States for in 2012 less than half of all U.S. births were to non-Hispanic whites while a quarter were Latino (Passel, Livingston, and Cohn, 2012). This remarkable transformation arose from a dynamic socio-political process that was completely untheorized by prevailing models of international migration but which in two decades will nonetheless turn the United States into a “minority-majority” nation in which European origin whites no longer predominate.

So, the point is that when politicians complain about these changing demographics, they have to recognize that the explanation lies with politics and cannot be explained away as events that were beyond the control of politicians and now, finally, must be dealt with by politicians. At the same time, of course, it is the long-term decline in Mexican fertility that is drying up the stream of migrants. That is a demographic phenomenon over which American politicians thankfully had very little influence.

Nobel Prize For Battling Parasites

The remarkable battle against death that we've been waging for the past two hundred years has lots of heroes and the Nobel Prize committee just recognized three of them, as reported in USAToday:

Three scientists from Ireland, Japan and China won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that helped doctors fight malaria and infections caused by roundworm parasites. 

The Nobel judges in Stockholm awarded the prestigious prize to Irish-born William Campbell, Satoshi Omura and of Japan and Tu Youyou — the first ever Chinese medicine laureate.

You will recall that there are three major types of communicable disease mechanisms--bacteria, viruses, and parasites. We most successfully battle bacterial infections with antibiotics, viruses with vaccinations, and parasites with (a) avoidance of the vector such as mosquitos; and/or (b) medicines to kill the parasite once it has attacked our body. 

Campbell and Omura were cited for discovering a drug that has helped lower the incidence of river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, two diseases caused by parasitic worms.

Tu discovered a drug that has helped significantly reduce the mortality rates of malaria patients [the powerful malaria drug artemisinin--widely used throughout Africa, in particular]. 

The two discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people annually,” the committee said. “The consequences in terms of improved human health and reduced suffering are immensurable.”

Two hundred years ago there was were essentially no places on earth with life expectancy above 40 years. Today, a quick glance at the PRB World Population Data Sheet shows that lowest life expectancy of any country is 49 years in Swaziland--a small African kingdom beset by a high incidence of HIV/AIDS. The global average is 71 years. The work of these three prize winners, among so many others over the years, is why we have made such progress. This is science at its best.

Demography of Asian-Americans

The Economist has a lengthy story this week on Asian-Americans with the provocative title "The model minority is losing patience." This major point of the story is that at least some Asian-Americans are not happy that their academic success up through high school has not been matched by high levels of acceptance to Ivy League universities. Much of the story, though, is a review of the genuinely remarkable success of Asian-Americans, told with considerable assistance by reference to the work of U.S. demographers. The article first reports on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Amy Tsin of CUNY and Yu Xie, who was at the University of Michigan when the paper was published but has since moved to Princeton University. [Note also that The Economist incorrectly refers to Ms Xie, rather than Mr (or more appropriately Dr) Xie.]

[They] examined the progress of 6,000 white and Asian children, from toddlers through school, to find an answer. They rejected the idea that Asians were just innately much cleverer than whites: there was an early gap in cognitive abilities, but it declined to insignificance through school. The higher socioeconomic status of Asian parents provided part of the explanation, but only a small part. Their data suggested that Asian outperformance is thanks in large part to hard work. Ms Hsin and Ms Xie’s study showed a sizeable gap in effort between Asian and white children, which grew during their school careers.

The Economist then moves on to reference a book by social demographers Jennifer Lee of UC-Irvine and Min Zhou of UCLA.

In “The Asian American Achievement Paradox”, a study based on interviews with young Chinese and Vietnamese in Los Angeles, as well as Mexicans, whites and blacks, Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou argue that it is not just what happens at home that matters. They point to “ethnic capital”—the fact that these groups belong to communities that support education—as part of the explanation.

The article also references a book published by Princeton demographer Tom Espenshade and his former PhD student Alexandria Walton Radford:

Some Asians allege that the Ivy Leagues have put an implicit limit on the number of Asians they will admit. They point to Asians’ soaring academic achievements and to the work of Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford of Princeton, who looked at the data on admissions and concluded that Asian-Americans need 140 SAT points out of 1,600 more than whites to get a place at a private university, and that blacks need 310 fewer points. Yet in California, where public universities are allowed to use economic but not racial criteria in admissions, 41% of Berkeley’s enrolments in 2014 were Asian-Americans and at the California Institute of Technology 44% were.

In the end, the article suggests that Asian-Americans are at a point in history where they need to become more involved in the American political system. 

As Jerome Karabel’s study of Jews and the Ivy League (“The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton”) shows, it was only when Jews had gained political power that the Ivies stopped discriminating against them. And Asian-Americans are under-represented in politics as well as in business. Only 2.4% of the 113th Congress were Asian-Americans; by one count, fewer than 2% of state legislators are.

Becoming political may well be the final stage of assimilation and it is likely to benefit not only the Asian-American community, but the broader American society as well. 

The Economics of Demographic Aging

If we're lucky, we'll all live long lives. But how well will we live in those older years? That depends. And in the answer to that question we find some complicated economic problems. Last week's Economist raised some of the issues:

THE population of the developed world is ageing. Everyone knows that it is happening but no one is sure what it will mean. A new paper from Morgan Stanley, part-written by Charles Goodhart, a former member of the Bank of England’s rate-setting committee, along with Manoj Pradhan and Pratyancha Pardeshi, suggests there may be dramatic economic impacts.

In particular, the paper suggests that the greying population may reverse three long-term trends: a decline in real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates, a squeeze on real wages and widening inequality. That is because those trends were driven by previous demographic shifts; first, the entry of the baby boomers into the workforce after 1970 and second, the more than doubling of the globally integrated workforce as China and eastern Europe joined the capitalist system.

Baby boomers produced a genuine demographic dividend for North America and Western Europe, but that dividend is drying up as boomers age and cheaper labor takes their places. These trends have heightened inequality in the rich countries, particularly because they have pushed down interest rates, increasing the value of assets already owned by the rich. This was aggravated by the Chinese, where a "relatively closed financial system and lack of a social safety net created a savings glut that added to the downward pressure on real interest rates."

The attempt to fix the poor Chinese safety net was on display today in a paper out of Yale University, where the author, Professor Xi Chen, notes that in 2009 China instituted the New Rural Pension Scheme, to help the older population. It is not very generous, but it is enough money to allow the children of the rural elders to leave home and get a job elsewhere--so much for filial piety, as I've noted before. 

But Americans cannot be very smug, either, about well-being in old age. A report in May from the General Accounting Office noted that:

Many retirees and workers approaching retirement have limited financial resources. About half of households age 55 and older have no retirement savings (such as in a 401(k) plan or an IRA). According to GAO’s analysis of the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, many older households without retirement savings have few other resources, such as a defined benefit (DB) plan or nonretirement savings, to draw on in retirement.

Very few businesses offer defined pension plans any more. That has lowered the cost of doing business and, in the process, has also exacerbated inequality. In the country with the highest average per person income, we have become accustomed to spending money, rather than saving it and of course the low real interest rates have unfortunately lowered the incentive to save, while the cheap wages now going into products lower their prices thus increasing our incentive to buy things. Can we get out of this loop? The Morgan Stanley report thinks that interest rates are about to rise, and that will be a good thing. Stay tuned.

A Positive Spin on Global Changes

The United Nations new Sustainable Development Goals have ambitious aims and while I (and many others) have been critical of the low level of emphasis on population growth, Nicholas Kristof spent time in today's NYTimes reminding us of the positive things that have happened in developing nations over the past few decades. It is not war and disease all the time, although those things continue to threaten us, and we can't let our guard down. Nonetheless, we need to acknowledge the good stuff going on.

• The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.

• In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5; this toll has since dropped by more than half.

• More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do.

But Kristof ends on what I think is a false premise:

There’s one last false argument to puncture. Cynics argue that saving lives is pointless, because the result is overpopulation that leads more to starve. Not true. Part of this wave of progress is a stunning drop in birthrates.

Haitian women now average 3.1 children; in 1985, they had six. In Bangladesh, women now average 2.2 children. Indonesians, 2.3. When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.

I personally do not know anyone who thinks that saving lives is pointless. The point is that as we save lives we must spend equal effort making sure that women are having children at the same rate as is consistent with the declining death rate. We demographers call this the net reproduction rate (NRR)--the number of girl children a woman has that will survive to reproductive age. Historically the NRR has been very close to one. As mortality has dropped, the NRR has risen well above one, and that is why we have more than seven billion people now, when there were "only" one billion people a scant two centuries ago. We can't emphasize enough that it is much easier to get people to reduce the death rate (we'll set aside the anti-vacccinators for the time being!!) than it is get people to limit fertility.