UN Approves Migration Pact

The United Nations has been working on a global migration pact for quite a while now, and today there were 165 countries who signed on to it. The United States and several other countries chose not to participate, "citing concerns about migrant flows and national sovereignty" as the New York Times reported. 

The text of the accord was approved in July by every member of the United Nations except the United States. But it has since gotten caught up in a nationalist movement in Europe that has centered on the issue of immigration and prompted around a dozen countries to reject the compact outright, or to pull back from endorsing it in Morocco.

The United Nations has insisted all along that this pact was not a mandate for rich countries to take in poor migrants. Rather, it was an acknowledgement that migration is a fact of life, and every country should make good decisions about how to cope with it.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, a 34-page document, asserts that “no state can address migration alone” and outlines 23 objectives. They include the collection of better data on the movement of migrants, the strengthening of legal paths to migration, efforts to combat human trafficking and cooperation to ease the safe return of migrants to their countries of origin.

Most migration is not from “south to north” but between developing countries, he said, seeking to dispel other falsehoods and noting that there were more African migrants in other African countries than there are in Europe.

Moreover, migrants provide a boost to the economies of their host countries as well as to their countries of origin, he said. Migrants spend 85 percent of their earnings in the countries where they work. They send the remaining 15 percent home in remittances, providing vital lifelines to developing countries that add up to three times the value of official development assistance from richer nations.

The fact that most migration is not "south to north" is important to remember, but of course that does not assuage people who want to raise alarms about the south to north migration that they feel affects them. And, to be sure, part of the global compact is an attempt to address xenophobia and the integration of migrants into societies. These are not easy to do and almost always take more time than people think they should. 

Age at First Birth is Steadily Rising

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that data from the Current Population Survey show that the age at marriage in the United States has been been steadily rising. This week a closely related analysis shows that the age at first birth has also been going up. Indeed, between 1970 and 2017 it went from 21.4 years to 26.8 years. These data were put together by Karen Guzzo and Krista Payne at Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family & Marriage Research. 

The results are especially interesting because they show that there are clear geographic differences in the delay in first birth. Thus, while the age at first birth has been going up everywhere, it is going up much more in some states than in others, as you can see in the map below.

The increases have been greatest along the west coast and in the northeast. Two southern states--Arkansas and Mississippi--share the honors of having the lowest age at first birth in both 1970 and 2017. By contrast, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey were all consistently at the older ages with respect to first births in both 1970 and 2017. However, in 1970 the difference between the youngest and oldest was considerably less (22.5 - 20.2 = 2.3) than it was in 2017 (29.7 - 24.1 = 5.6). 

These results suggest yet another way in which the population of the United States is growing more diverse, since the differences in delaying the first birth are both a cause and a consequence of a wide array of changes that are taking place all over the country. 

It's Still 1986 When it Comes to Immigration Reform

If you watched today's memorial service for President George H.W. Bush, you had to have laughed and cried a lot, especially at the stories told by Alan Simpson, a former Senator from Wyoming and a good friend of the late President Bush. He was essentially ambushed politically after co-sponsoring the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The Daily Beast talked to him about it today:

Designed to stem the tide of illegal immigration, it was passed by a Democratic House and Republican Senate and signed into law by President Reagan. Former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson co-sponsored the legislation together with Democratic Rep. Romano Mazzoli from Kentucky. Neither lawmaker seemed an especially natural fit for an issue with little direct impact on their constituents, but as chairs of their respective immigration subcommittees, they were thrust together into a position of leadership.

It was a model for bipartisan congressional problem solving, but the legislation that resulted is widely viewed as a failure—part of the problem, not the solution. It built on a three-legged approach—controlling the borders, increasing the number of visas for agricultural workers, and offering “earned legalization” to immigrants who had illegally entered the country before 1982. Instead of slowing the flow of people across the border, illegal immigration accelerated, and the politics of reform stretched to a breaking point. The cross-party alliances that had worked so well in the ‘80s crashed and burned as an effort launched by President Bush together with Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain in 2006 imploded in the face of grassroots opposition.

Why didn't it work? Simpson argues that the "guts" were taken out of the bill before it could be passed. The visas for agricultural workers--essentially a guest-worker program to replace the earlier Bracero program--were viewed as being dangerously close to a national ID card, to which people on both the political right and left objected. Without this in the bill, employers couldn't know who they were hiring and could thus be accused of hiring undocumented immigrants.

Three decades later, Simpson sums up where we currently stand with undocumented immigrants:

“They (critics of reform) think these people are expendable,” says Simpson. “If you think America is good to them, you’re crazy as hell. They’re used and exploited and they work for four bucks an hour. It’s a pretty sick country that uses human beings like this. They sit on corners waiting for some guy to come by to get the gardening done at his estate. It’s a sad situation; it’s not pleasant to watch.”

Also not pleasant, as I noted yesterday, is that living in fear is not good for women and their babies, either. 

Laws Threatening Immigrants Can Affect Birth Outcomes

My thanks to Professor Rubén Rumbaut for linking me to a paper just accepted for publication (and now available online) in the American Journal of Epidemiology. The paper is titled "Restrictive Immigration Law and Birth Outcomes of Immigrant Women," and its authors--Florencia Torche and Catherine Sirois--are at Stanford University. The paper examines what happened to pregnant women in Arizona when that state passed a very aggressive anti-immigration law (SB 1070) back in 2010. The short answer is that the probability increased that an undocumented woman would give birth to a low-weight baby.

Prenatal exposure to the bill resulted in lower birthweight among Latina immigrant women, but not among US-born white, black, or Latina women. The decline in birthweight resulted from exposure to the bill being signed into law, rather than from its (limited) implementation. The findings indicate that the threat of a punitive law, even in the absence of implementation, can have a harmful effect on the birth outcomes of the next generation.

The low birthweight data are especially noteworthy because many of us have over time demonstrated that Hispanic women in the United States tend to have better outcomes than non-Hispanic Whites. To be sure, Professor Rumbaut and I published research on this more than 20 years ago:Rubén G. Rumbaut and John R. Weeks, "Unraveling a Public Health Enigma: Why do Immigrants Experience Superior Perinatal Health Outcomes?" Research in the Sociology of Health Care, 13(B): 337-391, 1996. So, when the results show that birth outcomes are worse, not better, we know that something is going on. This is a case where correlation is apt to be showing causation.

As the authors point out, these children are now U.S. citizens and will be tomorrow's workers and voters. It was reckless and pointless to have harmed their health during pregnancy. These are among the many, many reasons why Congress needs to get together and craft a genuine immigration reform bill.

Is 60 the New 50? Chronological vs. Biological Aging

CNN posted a very relevant demographic article a couple of days ago comparing biological aging with chronological aging. The focus was on the research of Morgan Levine at Yale Medical School:

Essentially, everyone has two ages: a chronological age, how old the calendar says you are, and a phenotypic or biological age, basically the age at which your body functions as it compares to average fitness or health levels.

People with a biological age lower than their chronological age have a lower mortality risk, while those aging older from a biological standpoint have a higher mortality risk and are potentially more prone to developing the diseases associated with the higher age range. 

But perhaps what's most important here -- unlike results from genetic testing -- is that these are measures that can be changed. Doctors can take this information and empower patients to make changes to lifestyle, diet, exercise and sleep habits, and hopefully take steps to lower the risk and improve their biological age.

This is very important and useful work, since very few of us want to experience a longer life expectancy that involves many more years of disability. Indeed, researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington have given us Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) that attempt to take into account the difference between biological and chronological aging (see Chapter 5 of my text for a discussion). The article didn't mention that. 

However, the most important omission in the CNN article was not mentioning that Dr. Levine's work is being done in collaboration with Dr. Eileen Crimmins and her colleagues at the University of Southern California. Earlier this year the two of them published an article in the journal Demography titled "Is 60 the New 50? Examining Changes in Biological Age Over the Past Two Decades." And a clue to how important this is to demographers is the fact that Dr. Crimmins has just been elected President-Elect of the Population Association of America.