Posted on 06/10/2006 2:44:12 PM PDT by bkwells
By Sandra Dibble STAFF WRITER
June 10, 2006
Could Mexico's plunging birthrate and growing economy end illegal immigration to the United States?
Mexican President Vicente Fox says they could. As soon as 2015, Mexico will be using “100 percent of its work force,” he said, and his countrymen won't need to cross the border in search of jobs.
But demographers, economists, business analysts and others who follow migration and Mexico's economy have been quick to challenge the president's upbeat assessment. His comments last week followed the release of economic figures showing the best growth period of his administration and came just weeks before the country's July 2 presidential election.
A range of factors playing out on both sides of the border will affect the northbound flow in the coming years, and the lower birthrate and state of the Mexican economy are but two elements in a complex equation.
The lure of higher paying U.S. jobs, the pull of cross-border family ties, and the deep-rooted tradition of migration in many Mexican communities are not going to go away. They are among the factors likely to influence Mexican emigration in the coming decade.
“What sustains it are the income gaps between the United States and Mexico,” said Rodolfo Tuirán, former director of Mexico's National Population Council and currently a researcher at the Autonomous National Technological Institute in Mexico City. “That gap is not going to close in the next ten years.”
Nobody is disputing that Mexico's demographic makeup is changing. The birthrate has dropped dramatically, and the annual population growth rate has fallen from 3.5 percent to 1 percent during the past 30 years. Mexico's population is also getting older, and the pool of young workers who make up the bulk of the border crossers will shrink.
During the coming decade, fewer Mexicans overall will be entering the job market. Tuirán estimates the numbers will fall from 1.2 million today to around 700,000 in 2015.
Fox, who took office in December 2000, has largely failed to live up to his promises to create millions of new jobs and foment economic growth for his country of 103 million people. An estimated 400,000 Mexicans cross into the United States each year.
But figures from January through March of this year show an encouraging upswing in Mexico's economy, as output grew by 5.5 percent. The Mexican president has seized on these figures and the decline in population growth to show that migration could fall dramatically as Mexicans find opportunities at home.
“By 2015, Mexico will be needing 100 percent of its work force . . . to support our economy and our retirees,” Fox said in an interview last week in Ensenada. He also said Mexico must create more jobs, “so that the only people who leave are those who want to go, and not out of necessity.”
Still, the 2015 time frame “is a totally unrealistic date,” said Andrés Rozental, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States and director of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. “The migration issue to the United States obviously relates to employment, but employment is not the sole issue.”
Most migrants had jobs in Mexico before deciding to cross, studies show, but the lure of higher pay – workers can make about 11 times more here than in Mexico – is a powerful magnet.
“The real problem, on the Mexican side, is that the new jobs being created there don't pay enough to enable most families to lift themselves out of poverty,” said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UCSD.
Studies suggest that the powerful incentive to migrate for purely economic reasons would decrease only if “you get that ratio down to about four to one,” said Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City.
Decreasing that wage gap depends on factors inside and outside Mexico. Damian Fraser, head of Latin American equities strategy with the banking group UBS Warburg in Mexico City, says Mexico needs to address a range of issues hindering its productivity: improving education, rethinking agricultural policy, splitting up monopolies, strengthening the legal system and overhauling a bureaucracy that inhibits investment and growth.
“To be more productive, Mexico needs to have a more competitive economy,” Fraser said. “That lack of competition inhibits investment.”
If Mexico is able to sustain its 5.5 percent growth rate, that may create enough jobs for new workers. But that does not address the huge numbers working off tax rolls in the informal economy – about half the work force, Tuirán said. To offer those people formal sector jobs that have benefits and require income tax, he said, “we're going to have to grow even more rapidly.”
There are also external factors that influence Mexican migration to the United States, experts agree, and the state of the U.S. economy is a crucial one.
Mexicans workers won't cross if there are no jobs to fill in the United States, said Carlos Angulo, an attorney with Baker & McKenzie in Mexico City and member of the Phoenix-based Border Trade Alliance.
“If the economy of the United States has the need for this type of work force, if there are going to be jobs for this type of person, that's one of the first things to consider,” he said.
A healthy U.S. economy is also crucial if Mexico's economy is to grow, and create jobs, said UCSD's Cornelius. The North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1994 between the United States, Canada and Mexico, has tied economic growth in Mexico “much more closely than in the pre-NAFTA era to the health of the U.S. economy,” Cornelius said. “Economic recessions in the U.S. will translate inevitably into less job creation in Mexico during those periods.”
Huh? Oh yeah.... they are sneaking across our border to give birth! Birthrates among Hispanics are growing very rapidily in the U.S.
I don't believe most of what's in this article. Besides, by 2015, at the rate they are going, all Mexicans will be in the U.S.!
ping
The trouble is that no one quite sees that the very best thing we could do for Mexico is to send their now well trained citizens home.
Suddenly Mexico would have a skilled workforce who knew something about how a world class country worked.
Think these folk would propel a great leap forward for Mexico?
I do.
There's something more.
I follow water desalination research pretty closely. While water desalination costs have dropped to about a third of what they were 15 years ago--the rate at which prices will drop over the next seven years will accelerate considerably. imo in even the next five years we will see desalination costs drop to 1/10th of today's costs.
Basically, the foundations are being laid today to make it economically feasable to to turn all the world's deserts green. (The proper way to look at this is to recall that cars, tv's and computers were at first rich men's toys but when prices came down they changed the world. Desalinised water is still relatively speaking -- a rich man's toy. But when the price drops sufficiently--desalinised water will change the world--because most deserts are right beside the ocean.)
imho cheap desalinised water will do for the republicans (if they can get this on their agenda) what the great dam building projects & the tva of the 1930's &40's did for democrats because 1/3 of the US is deserts. We would increase the habitable size of the USA by 1/3.
Dirt cheap desalinised water will also do things like make it possible to double the habitable size of Mexico.
And desalinated water in tandem with repatriation of now skilled Mexican citizens would propel Mexico into being a world class country.
If the leadership in Mexico was as adept at finding a way to get their economy moving as they are whining and complaining about what we do with our border, we'd be in business.
there's a BIG reason why there is illegal immigration from MEXICO and not Canada.
People follow the money.
They are not leaving to seek jobs...they leave to seek high paying jobs, in relation to ones in Mexico, coupled with a vastly higher quality of life and freedom that can be found in the US.
It's not just economy, it's also going to take political reforms and reduction in corruption in Mexico.
Nice. I think you're on the right track.
There are still people in Mexico???
Gee wiz, I wonder how many in the decreasing statistic wound up being born in the USA.
Also, it sounds like Fox must be getting worried with this spin that an Mexican economic boom is just around the corner to solve all of our concerns about illegals. Mexico is not going to have economic boom with birth rate stats like above, more than likely they will get in even deeper trouble.
It's been some years since I have been in the interior of Mexico (ther border towns aren't really representative of the whole) but I doubt it has changed much. Mexico, for all of it's potential is a 3rd world country. I stil remember being shocked seeing huge alfalfa fields being harvested by hand and transported on donkeys.
There is virtually no middle class. You are either rich or poor. The country has been economically repressed by it's elite class who live in walled enclaves.
Mexico has the natural resources and population to be a first class nation but has been held back by its leaders who are toys of the rich elite. To believe that it will change is crazy. There is no incentive to change as long as those with a desire to better their circumstances are allowed to migrate to the US. If those who have that desire were forced to stay in Mexico, there would be pressure to change. The porous US border is effectively a safety valve to siphon off those who would eventually force a change in their society and create a true middle class. To close our borders would force Mexico to address it's faults from within.
Good idea. Unfotunately however, the Mexicans would probably run the water works plants like they do Pemex.
Ping
Basically the ruling class in Mexico will not change of its own volition. But it can be forced to change.
The shock troops for that would be the 12 million repatriated Mexican citizens. Having seen what a well run country looks like they would not want to be stuffed back in the old wineskin.
DUH.
Now, after five months of Democrats and Republicans. Our president. Senators. Media socialists. Seemingly every so-called "opinion leader" in our Republic deliberately lying to the American public about the proposed Amnesty. After five months of blaming the people who most complete did NOT cause the problem. After five months - finally Fox says perhaps Mexico should do something on their end?
Dios Mio. Surely this is a sign of the end times.
/sarc
The Mexicans in the USA have had the picture of what a well run country looks like tatooed on the back of their eyeballs. And they'll have an idea of how to get there. Send them back to Mexico and they'll get a revolution in Mexico that'll do that country some good.
Mexico will be using 100% of it's workforce? You mean the few people that will be left down there after the rest sneek across our border?
10 percent of his country is now in the United States.
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