Yes, There Was a "Surge" in Border Apprehensions in March...

It is reported that at least one of the reasons for the Trump administration to make the border wall a big issue right now (besides catering to the base to whom he promised a wall) is that there was, in fact, an unexpected rise in border apprehensions in March. As CNN reports, it is not yet clear why this happened.

The number of people either caught trying to cross the southern border or rejected for admission increased 37% from February into March, a sudden rise in figures that had been holding relatively steady. The increase was driven especially by a jump in the number of people apprehended trying to cross illegally. The number of families and unaccompanied children trying to come into the US increased at a higher rate than the general population.

Last month's numbers were three times those of March 2017, when crossings were at their lowest in two decades of records.

The Trump administration had taken credit for the low numbers in March of 2017, but last month's rise in numbers suggests the hollowness of that claim. Even with this rise, the number of people attempting to cross the border is low by historical standards, and these seem to be people trying to flee horrible situations in Central America, rather than being Mexicans looking for work. This latter point is consistent with the comments I made in yesterday's blog post about the predictability of the long-term downward trend in undocumented immigrants from Mexico.

Does the Border Really Need a Wall or the National Guard?

Donald Trump famously campaigned for President promising a wall along the border (and Mexico was supposed to pay for it). More than a year into his presidency, the wall doesn't yet exist and, of course, it is not necessary. Nor is the National Guard a necessity in place of the wall. Why not? Well, among other reasons, the number of people attempting to cross the border has been steadily dropping for several years now. Look at the chart that was posted by Steve Rattner on the "Morning Joe" show this morning on MSNBC:

Since the beginning of this century the total number of people apprehended trying to cross the border has dropped dramatically. Historically, the apprehensions have been mainly Mexican citizens, and the fall in the overall number of apprehensions is almost entirely due to the drop in Mexicans crossing the border. 

Why has this been happening? Two reasons: (1) demographics; and (2) economics. Here's how my son, Greg Weeks, and I, explained what was happening when we published our book Irresistible Forces back in 2010 (pp. 89-90):

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the demographic fit that pushed immigration levels in the 1990s was much less in evidence, and there are two complementary reasons for this: (1) declining fertility in Mexico has slowed down the rate of growth of the young adult population; and (2) the previous high rates of immigration of young adults from Mexico to the United States produced a large number of children of immigrants, who have helped to increase the rate of growth of the 15-24 age group in the United States. These trends suggest that the era of demographic fit between the US and Mexico may now be coming to a close, and that future migration is most apt to be a consequence of the longer-term “economic fit” between the two countries—young people in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America seeking higher paying jobs in the United States that they lack at home. 

However, the end of the demographic fit should also mean that the Mexican labor pool, in particular, will be smaller, thereby increasing the chances that a given individual in Mexico will find employment in Mexico, assuming—and this is no sure assumption—that the Mexican economy does not contract. But this is what the Mexican government had in mind when it created family planning policies, and launched a public relations campaign that aired commercials claiming “the small family lives better.” That logic has been the driving force of fertility decline in many countries, including the United States.

So, we are now seeing clearly the trends that Greg and I thought were in place almost a decade ago. We don't need a wall or the national guard. We just need some social science combined with common sense. 

The Demographics of Bilingualism in the U.S.

Over the years there has been a big push in American schools, especially in colleges and universities, to get young people to learn a second language. Here in Southern California the obvious alternative to English is Spanish and I and my wife (and subsequently our children) learned Spanish in school, although in truth we only speak English at home. I thought about this when I read this week's article in The Economist asking whether Spanish can avoid America's language graveyard.

Linguists have often referred to America as a “language graveyard”. Despite being a country of immigrants, it has tended to snuff out foreign languages within two or three generations. Spanish, it has long been thought, might be different. Hispanics account for 18% of America’s population and are projected to make up 28% by 2060, according to the United States Census Bureau. Given the large size and rapid growth of the Hispanic population, some people used to fear that Spanish would not only endure but overtake English, especially in states like California and New Mexico, where Latinos are the largest ethnic group.

That concern has turned out to be unfounded..In his well-known study on “linguistic life expectancies” in southern California in 2006, Rubén Rumbaut, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, found that Spanish was following the same trajectory as other languages in America had—just more slowly. He established that only 5% of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans in southern California could speak Spanish very well: “After at least 50 years of continuous Mexican migration into southern California, Spanish appears to draw its last breath in the third generation.”

But here's the catch. Professor Rumbaut found that bilingualism is good for your pocketbook:

Controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, parents’ socioeconomic status and living with parents, he found that fluent bilinguals in southern California made nearly $3,000 more per year than Californians who spoke only English.

I know that it was good for me. In a very real sense, I am a demographer because I could read and write Spanish when I got to college. In my sophomore year as a sociology major at the University of California, Berkeley, I needed a job and it turned out that Professor Kingsley Davis was looking for a student to hire. He had just completed a year as President of the Population Association of America (and had previously been President of the American Sociological Association) and needed an undergraduate research assistant who was literate in Spanish to help him with a grant he had just gotten to study the demography of Latin America. He hired me and the rest, as they say, is history...

The Predictive Power of Political Demography

Thanks to Duane Miller for the link to a very good post from Richard Cincotta titled "8 Rules of Political Demography That Help Forecast Tomorrow's World." If you've read the book that Debbie Fugate and I edited on "The Youth Bulge," you'll know that Cincotta is author of one of the chapters in that volume. And, despite the fact that the "8 Rules..." article was published several months ago, its insights are timely.

Political demography, the study of population age structures and their relationships to political trends and events, has helped some analysts predict geopolitical changes in a world that, from time to time, appears utterly chaotic.

Much of my recent work has focused on democratic transitions and age structure – that is, what the median age of a country can tell us about its propensity to become a “liberal democracy” or remain either undemocratic (without free, fair, and politically meaningful elections) or illiberal (short on civil liberties and rule of law). There is, in fact, a strong correlation in recent history between increasing median age and increasing liberal democracy, and vice versa (the younger a population is, the less likely it is to be a liberal democracy). These and other age-structural relationships have become so evident over the past three decades of research, that political demographers can now identify “rules” that link demographic characteristics to expected political outcomes.

Why do political demography’s rules work as well as they do? Because age structural maturity both affects and reflects multiple aspects of society and state capacity. After all, the past century’s dramatic age-structural changes, where the world experienced tremendous growth in population followed by steep declines in fertility rates in many countries, are the result of many changes, including higher educational attainment (particularly women’s education), gains in wealth, advances in sanitation and health care, and access to modern contraception. 

There really isn't space in this blog post to enumerate Cincotta's 8 rules, but I strongly encourage you to go over his list while, at the same time, paying attention to this graphic:

I also encourage you to visit the website that Richard Cincotta has created on political demography--there are a lot of valuable resources there.

Trump Administration Quietly Reforms Immigration

If there is one thing that the U.S. Congress has consistently been unable to agree upon for the past two decades, it is immigration reform. There have been no major changes to the immigration system since 1996, and this has left the last three administrations (Bush, Obama, and now Trump) to use administrative measures to cope with the changing circumstances and politics of immigration. The Obama administration was active on this front, as I noted back in 2015, and we have to keep in mind that Obama was sometimes called "deporter-in-chief."

The Trump administration has been doing its own "tweaking" of the immigration system, as summarized in a recent story by CNN. Many of these policy shifts seem generally to be mean-spirited and nothing else. What else would explain this:

President Donald Trump opted to not extend work permits and protections for approximately 840 Liberians who have been living and working in the US for at least 16 years and in some cases decades. Previous presidents had extended the permits on humanitarian grounds.

...or this: 

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement announced it would no longer default to releasing pregnant immigrants from detention, paving the way for more pregnant women to be held in lengthy custody awaiting immigration proceedings.

...or the hypocrisy and cruelty of this (from another CNN story on this topic):

The move follows controversial efforts by the Department of Health and Human Services to keep unaccompanied minor immigrants in custody rather than releasing them to obtain abortions, a policy that has been the subject of intense litigation and criticism from the advocacy community.

Everyone (and especially Native Americans) understand that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Given that fact, the ugly history of immigration policies (both legislative and administrative) has been pretty amazing.