New York Times
By Eduardo Porter
September 1, 2015
When
Donald Trump was reaching adulthood in the mid-1960s, the United States
was a less diverse place. By 1970, the share of the population born
overseas had shrunk to
4.7 percent, the slimmest on record. Only about 0.4 percent of the
population had been born in Mexico.
The
core constituency of Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner — white,
older voters like him who are more likely to believe that immigrants
take Americans’ jobs, housing
and health care than accept that they contribute to the economy — came
of age largely at that stage in history, from the 1950s through the
early 1970s.
“It
was a unique period of rapid economic growth, when the children and
grandchildren of Europeans were blending into a homogeneous mass,” said
Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton
sociologist. “That world is gone.”
This
transformation provides the most convincing explanation of the runaway
popularity of Mr. Trump’s proposition to kick out the estimated 11
million immigrants living
illegally in the United States today and close the door to future
migrants with a 2,000-mile border wall.
To
these voters, a country where 13 percent of the population was born
abroad and where 17 percent identify as Latino is a scary place. But
what is most paradoxical about
that belief is that Mr. Trump’s central proposition — that illegal
immigration into the United States remains a critical problem — is
actually wrong. Mr. Trump, as Mr. Massey succinctly put it, “is beating a
dead horse.”
Since
the housing bubble burst and construction jobs dried up, more
unauthorized immigrants have left the United States than have come in.
Careful estimates by the Pew
Research Center show that the number of undocumented Mexicans living in
the United States shrank by roughly 1.1 million by 2012, from its peak
in 2007.
Illegal
immigration could rebound as the American economy recovers further. But
Mr. Massey and others argue that a more powerful force is pulling in
the other direction:
demographics, which has significantly shrunk the population of Mexicans
interested in crossing the border.
“I
don’t see Mexicans coming back in any great number,” said Pia M.
Orrenius, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas who has
studied patterns of illegal immigration.
“The cohorts of working age men are much diminished, so you don’t have
the push.”
Indeed,
15- to 24-year-olds, those most likely to consider going north, shrank
to 18 percent of the Mexican population in 2015 from 22 percent in 1990.
They are expected
to drop to 16 percent of the population in 2025.
The
great migration boom from Mexico from the 1980s through the first half
of the last decade was the consequence of “a perfect storm,” said Gordon
Hanson, an economics
professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Even
as the United States experienced solid growth through what came to be
known as the Great Moderation, Mexico suffered three currency crises in
13 years. And while
growth in the American-born labor supply slowed after the last of the
baby boomers entered the work force, Mexico’s working-age population was
still expanding fast.
“This period won’t be repeated,” Professor Hanson said. “The great Mexican migration wave has crested.”
Perhaps
the strangest thing about Mr. Trump’s appeal is that his main weapon —
the border wall — is already well established. It has proved, at best,
pretty much irrelevant.
At worst, it backfired badly.
Border
Patrol personnel have doubled since 2004, to more than 21,000. More
than 650 miles of fencing have been built, festooned with sensors and
backed up by drones.
These
days, immigration enforcement takes up half the nation’s entire law
enforcement budget. The border patrol’s budget alone has increased more
than tenfold since 1970,
to nearly $4 billion.
Recent
research by Professor Hanson, Scott Borger of the Department of
Homeland Security and Bryan Roberts of Econometrica, based on data from
the Department of Homeland
Security, suggests that the most recent step-up of border enforcement
may have had a bigger effect than previous efforts, accounting for
one-third of the downturn in illegal immigration from 2003 to 2010.
Yet the expansive border buildup has also had perverse effects, promoting the very pattern it was supposedly intended to curb.
“Enforcement
increases the cost of crossing the border but also increases the
payoff, because it raises the wage of those who get through,” because
there are fewer of
them, Ms. Orrenius noted. “So you can return to the market equilibrium
that you had.”
Soon-to-be-published
research by Professor Massey, Karen A. Pren of Princeton and Jorge
Durand of the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, based on tens of
thousands of
interviews with migrants from nearly 150 Mexican communities, concluded
that the odds of a prospective immigrant ultimately making it illegally
into the United States remained above 95 percent until 2008.
The
probability declined to 75 percent after 2008, but by then economic and
demographic forces had pushed net illegal immigration down to about
zero.
The
border buildup did change immigration patterns, Professor Massey
argued, but mostly in undesired ways. It didn’t stop immigrants from
making it in. But the rising
cost of entry to the United States — the richer smugglers’ fees, the
higher odds of dying on the way — ensured that those who made it through
stayed in the United States.
What
was once a pendular flow of Mexican men coming north to do seasonal
work in a handful of states and returning to Mexico in the winter became
a permanent community
of full-fledged families that settled across the 48 contiguous states.
Mr.
Trump could blame the browning of America at least in part on the wall.
In a cheeky bit of counterfactual analysis, the three researchers
estimated that the tightening
of border enforcement since 1986 actually added four million people to
the population of immigrants living illegally in the United States in
2010.
Nostalgia, of course, has no place for analysis. Analytical quibbles are unlikely to sway Mr. Trump or his followers.
They
might even take comfort from examples in history of nearly impregnable
walls. East Germany managed to close itself off from West Berlin from
1961 to 1989 with an
effectiveness of 95 percent.
It
was expensive, though. It took nearly 30,000 guards to defend a
boundary less than half the length of the Mexico-United States border.
Border guards used land mines
and shot to kill. They got help from the Stasi, monitoring every aspect
of East Germans’ lives.
This seems like a high price to pay to stop a trickle of illegal immigrants that is falling on its own to zero.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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