Posted on 06/21/2008 1:03:02 AM PDT by hereandnow78
With nearly six million Mexicans living illegally in the United States, some Americans, particularly those in border states, are greatly worried about the costs of illegal immigration and have demanded that more be done to stem it. Modern-day "minutemen" patrol the border. Voters pass measures limiting the rights of illegal immigrants, and senators debate legislation to establish guest-worker programs. Certain elected officials and pundits focus on the perils of illegal immigration to score political points.
Imagine that you’re the White House and your own supporters aren’t buying the immigration nonsense that you’re shoveling. You say the law can’t be enforced — and the Republican rank and file (and a lot of others) respond that we’ve never even tried. You insist that work won’t get done without immigrants, and critics ask how the beds get made in Pennsylvania. You plead that Mexico is our blood brother, yet anyone who can read the newspaper sees that Mexico shields thousands of fugitive murderers, and undermines American cohesion by vigorously promoting dual citizenship.
Solution? Pretend immigration will go away on its own!
This apparent new strategy made its debut in Monday’s New York Times in an op-ed by Republican pollster and spinmeister Matthew Dowd. A gifted political strategist not previously known for expertise in demography, Dowd claims that falling birthrates in Mexico will lead to “a substantial decrease in illegal immigration from Mexico in the next 20 years.”
It’s true that Mexico’s “total fertility rate” (the number of babies the average woman will have in her lifetime) has fallen from nearly 7 in the 1950s to 2.5 in 2003, according to the United Nations, and will actually drop below the U.S. rate within a few years. This is part of a trend of falling fertility in virtually every nation of the world; as Ben Wattenberg wrote in his recent book Fewer, "never have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, in so many places, so surprisingly."
But if you were to look at how fertility trends and immigration overlap, you might well reach the opposite conclusion from Dowd. In 1970, when Mexico still had a total fertility rate of well over 6, the Mexican immigrant population in the United States was less than 800,000. Over the next 30 years, Mexico’s fertility fell by more than half, yet its immigrant population grew more than ten-fold. In itself, this doesn’t disprove Dowd’s claim, but it sure muddies it up.
And as it happens, Mexico’s census agency actually examined this question in a 2001 report (summarized here), and found that under any set of economic assumptions, mass immigration to the U.S. would continue for at least a generation, with between 3.5 and 5 million people per decade moving north. Even the most wildly optimistic scenario projected that annual immigration would be higher a generation from now than it is today.
This is true because Dowd’s facile Malthusian idea that high birthrates are the primary driver of emigration turns out to be false. Sure, if a country’s birthrate fell far enough, for long enough, mathematics alone would dictate that there would be no one left to emigrate. But such a reductio ad absurdum tells us nothing about the real world.
Russia, for instance, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world and yet continues to send large numbers of immigrants to the United States. Congo, on the other hand, has one of the highest fertility rates in the world, and sends few immigrants anywhere. Japan and South Korea both have extremely low fertility, and yet one sends lots of immigrants while the other doesn’t. Or how about Brazil, whose fertility rate has fallen to about the U.S. level, but is only now becoming a major immigrant-sending country.
The reality is that immigration may begin for a variety of push or pull reasons — poverty and social disorder at home, greater economic opportunity and social and political freedom abroad — but it continues because of the social networks that are created by immigration, which connect potential immigrants in the sending country with family and friends in the receiving country. It’s not quite a version of Newton’s law, that an immigration process in motion will stay in motion, but it’s pretty close. Immigration from Europe, for instance, didn’t stop because there was no one left who wanted to leave, but rather because the networks were disrupted, by World Wars I and II, the Depression, and most importantly by U.S. policy that changed the immigration rules.
So until we do something to interrupt the immigration networks that bring people out of Mexico — like vigorous enforcement of the immigration law, reductions in legal immigration, and avoiding a new guestworker program — we’re going to see continued mass immigration during the lifetime of everyone reading this article. And immigration may actually increase — a lot — if the narco-anarchy in parts of Mexico spreads more widely, or if the left-wing populist mayor of Mexico City is elected president of the country next year.
More than 15 years ago, a high-immigration activist said during a radio debate with me that Mexico would soon stop sending people north, once a demographic bulge worked itself out. This assertion was followed soon after by the biggest wave of Mexican immigration ever.
Let’s hope Matt Dowd’s prediction of an end to Mexican immigration doesn’t portend the same kind of deluge.
If Obama wins, it won’t be long before Americans are sneaking across borders to mow lawns in Mexico and Canada.
It will decrease.
Fresh piece on Mexico as a failed state along with comments on California as a failed US state by Willie.....this is a detailed piece supportive with more detail on the current situation in Mexico...http://news.goldseek.com/GoldenJackass/1213983840.php
An excerpt:
Violence has spread widely across Mexico. Murders and attempts of police officials are increasing, especially in the northern state of Nuevo Leon. Cease fires between warring drug lord groups are being violated, such as between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels. Kidnap rings are in operation, with successful tactics. High value targets to date in the Baja and Tijuana have only involved Mexican citizens. A splinter group from the Peoples Revolutionary Army has attacked oil pipeline explosions in the past. That represented a change in tactics, shifting from online anti-government manifestos to actual bomb attacks. They have successfully hit multiple energy targets. Numerous incidents were reported in past months of dead bodies found along roads and in fields, arms tied behind the back, shot in the head. Police have in several cases found stolen police and army uniforms. Even US journalists have been threatened.
A failed nation state is the likely outcome south of the US border. Energy network attacks, growing poverty and inequality, inadequate government services, growing power of organized crime, corruption & desertion of police forces, assassination of judges and officials without consequences, and growing farmer bankruptcy are contributing to a failed system in Mexico. The current farm product price changes have resulted in tremendous additional disruption, losses, and disruption to Mexican agriculture businesses. Needs of people, upheld laws, tax structures, allegiance to authority, and sense of urgency all seem to be in breakdown mode, and have been for several months. Remarkably, the US press networks refuse to cover the stories that form long links in an ugly chain. The division between rich and poor is stark, and growing worse. Furthermore, the system is geared to aggravate that division. The failed state of Mexico will be evident from the top down, from the financial deterioration of its federal government, from the decline in their squandered energy business. Gigantic federal deficits will be the next major story coming from Mexico, along with energy strangulation by labor unions and drug lords who will continue to hold oil pipelines hostage.
That is the biggest bunch of bull crap on Mexico I have seen in a long time.
The middle class constitutes over half the population now, about 53% and growing. This makes it seem like Haiti. Mexico is a middle income country with a better income distribution than Brazil but worse than Costa Rica.
Housing starts have gone up 25% yearly of the last 5 years due to low inflation for about 12 years. New car sales increase average about 8% over the last five years due to expansion of credit due to that same low inflation.
Washington DC is more of a failed state than Mexico.
Bombing of pipelines happen about every two years, mostly communists student/professors from UNAM in Mexico City. It has been going on since the 70’s. Gets repaired in a couple of weeks and back to normal.
The OK City Bombings and Waco are more likely to bring down the US Federal government than these left-wing university types bringing down the Mexican Federal government.
The drug violence up in Northern Mexico and Mexico City is no worse than mob/alcohol violence in NY and Chicago in the 30’s.
I travel extensively through Mexico and overall the situation improves yearly. The Mexican economy grows 5-7% per year and adds about 350k jobs yearly but about 700K youngsters enter the workforce every year.
That is the surplus that heads North.
6 Million Illegals from Mexico, give me a break. What a POS paper.
Most demographers see it different from Dowd.
As the demographic shift described by Dowd occurs, not only will there be a reduction in the number of Mexicans seeking to enter the US legally and illegally, legal and illegal immigrants in the US will begin returning to Mexico.
It is also anticipated the some US citizens will relocate to Mexico. One example is Punta Colonet. As the port there develops, the village will become a city of 250,000 and many Americans will be working in port activity.
Yeah, right. Mexico is the new wonderland.
The drug violence up in Northern Mexico and Mexico City is no worse than mob/alcohol violence in NY and Chicago in the 30’s.
There's a ringing endorsement. You almost sound proud of that fact.
If we can't reduce their numbers we can start pulling ridiculously low estimates from out of our nether regions, can't we?
the media’s illegal number
keeps dropping.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.