As I’ve said before I’m not particularly worried about mass migration from Latin America and the graph above illustrates why. The reality is that conditions aren’t what they were thirty or more years ago. Immigration is impelled both by push pressures and by pull pressures.
Thirty years ago the most important pull pressure was the U. S. economy. The U. S. at least promised to give anyone a job that wanted one. That’s no longer the case. Wages for those without high school educations have been falling here for years. We don’t really need more workers who can’t speak, read, or write English and without greater skills. And Mexicans, at least, are aware of that. Better enforcement hasn’t slowed immigration from Mexico. That job prospects in Mexico have improved while job prospects in the U. S. have worsened have done the trick.
The greatest push pressure impelling immigration has been the large numbers of young people in Mexico, Central America, and the other countries of Latin America. As the graph above illustrates that’s no longer the case, either. Our fears are overblown—most of whatever we had to fear about mass immigration has already happened. The countries of Latin America need their young people and they need to reform their societies to keep them.
The next recession will drive net immigration down further and probably to a permanently lower level. When that will happen I don’t know but gold trading is signaling an imminent slowdown, though I can’t see anything else to corroborate this.
If we can assume the majority of the migrants/asylum seekers going through the southern US border are from Central America (in particular, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua), their total population is about 36 million (comparable to Canada or California).
That’s small enough that the US could implement certain economic development policies targeted at these countries which could make a difference and not risk a monster backlash. For example, how about textiles from these countries come in tariff-free while everywhere else its 10%? Or divert some iPhone assembly from China.
Judging by the numbers of people caught, illegal immigration has been dropping at a steady rate since about 2000. By continuing the trend, Trump announces that this all due to his policies.
One thing which I suspect would help is if we could address our policies on drugs. Our War on Drugs has probably helped create a lot of the violence in Central America that is causing people to want asylum.
Steve