There’s a study over at the Pew Hispanic Center you might find interesting:
About three-quarters (76%) of the nation’s unauthorized immigrants are Hispanic. The majority of undocumented immigrants (59%) are from Mexico. Significant regional sources of unauthorized immigrants include Asia (11%), Central America (11%), South America (7%), the Caribbean (4%) and the Middle East (less than 2%).
This underscores a point I’ve been making here for some time. We don’t have an illegal immigration problem here in the United States. We have a problem with illegal Mexican immigration and the problem needs to be negotiated and dealt with bilaterally.
Any policies put into place need to take Mexico’s issues into account and in the best case would be steps in resolving them. Most especially whatever we do shouldn’t exacerbate Mexico’s manifest problems. Let’s stop kicking the can down the road.
To the best of my knowledge the United States is the only country in the world that shares a 1,500 mile land border with a country that has a per capita GDP a quarter of its own. That poses special challenges to our political, health care, social and education systems that are not factors anywhere else in the world and trying to generalizing the experience of the French or Swedes (for example) to our own situation is an exercise in futility.
“To the best of my knowledge the United States is the only country in the world that shares a 1,500 mile land border with a country that has a per capita GDP a quarter of its own.”
Thought-provoking! China and Mongolia, maybe. But isn’t Mexico’s GDP more like one-tenth of ours?
Per capita GDP. GDP divided by the population of the country. Mexico’s is about a quarter of ours. No, Mongolia’s per capita GDP ($3,200) is about half China’s ($6,000).
There’s a magic number IIRC around 30% at which immigration from the poorer to the richer country becomes a serious matter. That’s why raising Mexico’s per capita GDP (and improving Mexico’s Gini coefficient, a measure of equality of distribution) should be a priority of our foreign policy. It will reduce the likelihood of social upheaval in both countries.
Targeting the employers who hire illegal immigrants en masse (that means southwestern agricultural producers, etc) is probably the key underpinning an effort towards slowing and/or halting illegal immigration. Mexican workers ultimately come because there are people willing to pay them significantly higher wages than what they’d make in Mexico, and because once they are here, the above allows them to eventually establish themselves barring being caught by the INS or other law enforcement. When the demand for that labor weakens (such as in a recession), usually the illegal immigration has dropped off; in the past year, for example, the estimated arrivals of illegal immigrants dropped due to the flagging economy.
But that tends to be politically difficult to do, since those businesses happen to be well-connected (particularly the agricultural industry), and they’ll turn around say things like “Do you want agriculture here or in Mexico?” and so on and so forth.
In any case, if you look at the history of Mexican migration to the US, you see an interesting pattern. Back in the period from 1967 (when the Bracero Labor program finally broke down) to 1985 (when major reforms were put in place for illegal immigration, particularly significantly higher border protections and the like), you had something like 28 million Mexicans come to the US – but 23.5 million of them went home. “Circularity”, so to speak.