The number of immigrants in California declined last year:
Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington – More than three decades of rapid growth in the country’s foreign-born population came to a halt last year, census data show, as surging unemployment made the U.S. economy less attractive to outsiders.
In California, which has a long history of attracting immigrants, the number of foreign-born residents actually declined, shrinking 1.6%.
“This is clearly a consequence of the economy, with the biggest impact on Mexican and low-skilled immigrants,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the census figures, which are to be officially released today. “It shows that these immigrants respond to the economy.”
Nationwide, the number of foreign-born residents fell an estimated 99,000, or 0.3%, to 37.97 million.
The persistence theory is the notion that if it’s sunny today, it will be sunny tomorrow, too. It fits H. L. Mencken’s characterization of an answer that’s “neat, plausible, and wrong” nicely.
Nonetheless it remains a popular prediction tool. It’s the underpinning of statements like “the United States will be majority minority by 2050”. Reality is much, much more complicated than that. But that’s not the only problem with the persistence theory.
The problem with the persistence theory is that things change. Change is the constant.
I think that one emerges because of predictions that don’t take into account falling birth rates in Mexico in particular and Latin America in general.
My guess is that at some point in the next 10-20 years, you’ll see a major fall-off in Mexican immigration, since once the working population drops to a certain point the resulting rise in wages will be enough to keep them largely at home rather than tempting them abroad.
That said, certain states (particularly in the South and Southwest) as well as the large cities will probably become “majority-minority” (California is already there), due to their location (they’re on the American side of an economically dynamic border area, and a traditional route for hispanic immigration).