Michael Barone, outlining the reasons for declining immigration into the U. S. from Mexico:
The Pew analysts hesitate to say so, but their numbers make a strong case that we will never again see the flow of Mexicans into this country that we saw between 1970, when there were fewer than 1 million Mexican-born people in the U.S., and 2007, when there were 12.7 million.
One reason is that Mexico’s population growth has slowed way down. Its fertility rate fell from 7.3 children per woman in 1970 to 2.4 in 2009, which is just above replacement level.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s economy has grown. Despite sharp currency devaluations in 1982 and 1994, its per capita gross domestic product rose 22 percent from 1980 to 2010.
which are, essentially, things I’ve been saying around here for the last eight years. For years Mexico’s economy had been seen as a sort of appendage to that of the U. S. Recently, it’s been suggested that Mexico’s growth isn’t tied to U. S. growth but to economic growth in Texas. Economic relationships go both ways. It would be interesting to analyze the importance of Mexico in Texan economic growth as well as the importance of Texas in Mexico’s.
We should not expect the remainder of Latin America and the Caribbean to make up for the immigrants that Mexico is no longer sending us. Generally speaking, they’re following a pattern similar to Mexico’s—nearly all are at or near the replacement rate (see Table 4). This has implications that I don’t think are fully appreciated.
The most obvious is the one I pointed out yesterday. Businesses, indeed industries, that have built their business models around a continuing stream of unskilled workers may find themselves in severe difficulty. That’s not limited to agriculture, the industry various commenters noted, but includes fast food and the hospitality industry more generally, meatpacking which over the last couple of decades has gone from an industry of skilled or semi-skilled workers who were reasonably highly compensated to an industry staffed mostly by immigrants who were compensated at lower rates than the workers they supplanted, any factory floor-type jobs dependent on low wage employees that may remain in the United States, and even banking. Some of these businesses will evaporate. Others will make the transition to greater automation, a transition I thought should have occurred decades ago. That is the path that Japan, a country with very little immigration, has taken.
Increasing automation may have implications of its own, particularly if the U. S. can maintain or reestablish its position as a major supplier of factory floor automation equipment.
There are political implications as well. Courting new immigrants as prospective voters may be a less appealing strategy than it has been, particularly if it must be done on a retail rather than a wholesale basis.
The United States is a natural destination for immigrants from the Latin America and the Caribbean. Europe is the natural destination for immigrants from much of Africa and West or South Asia but, honestly, I strongly suspect that mass immigration between countries will not be the economic and social factor in the 21st century that it was in the 19th and 20th centuries. That is not to ignore the greatest migration in human history, going on right now within China.
We’ll still get some immigration from Latin America, but it will be an unmitigated good. Traveling to the US from the rest of Latin America isn’t as easy as getting from Mexico to here, so we’ll get mostly migrants who are either educated or very determined (both positive traits in new workers).
That would be very cool. I expect we’d see a lot more vending machines, plus touch-screen ordering systems at fast food places. Some grocery stores are already experimenting with alternate methods of ringing up purchases (such as smartphone scanning), which would likely become even more common.
I have this mental image of a grocery store in the future where everything is done that way. All the food is sold in tagged containers, except fresh produce. There’s two guys working in the store – one guy to monitor the whole system and man the self-checkout stations (the few of them left), another guy who does the security work of stopping the teenagers who try to walk out of the store with booze that they haven’t actually scanned with their smartphones for payment.
Sure. But not to take entry level jobs doing scut work.