Mexican immigration to the US bodes well for the American economy. This is a politically inconvenient phenomenon—one of correlation and not causation—but when Mexican migration to the US increases, the US economy grows and unemployment ebbs. The most prominent example is the decade after passage of the NAFTA. Amidst howls of a “giant sucking sound” of lost jobs and a shrinking manufacturing sector the United States experienced its most vibrant economic growth since the post-War boom. Unemployment dipped below 5% for much of this time, a historic low in the US. Simultaneously, this era witnessed dramatic increases of Hispanic immigration, primarily from Mexico, to the US.
Given this, the steep decline of Mexican immigration to the US reaffirms the severe contraction of the US economy. Since August 2008, Mexican immigration to other countries (the vast majority head to the US) is down 25%, about 226,000, according to a front-page story in Friday’s New York Times. The logic is simple. “If jobs are available people come,” states Jeffrey Passel, a researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center, “If jobs are not available, people don’t come.” The US economy represents the single largest “pull factor” in world migration: people are drawn to the dynamism of the world’s largest economy.
Anecdotal evidence is also portentous. Shelter houses along the Mexican side of the border, patronized by those looking to sneak into the US, are largely vacant. On the American side, Border Patrol excursions are returning to their base in Calexico, California, empty. Young Mexicans are migrating to parts of northern Mexico only to turn back, weary and dejected. One 17-year-old boy interviewed for the story traveled from the West Coast state of Michoacán to a shelter house only to hear that that his prospective job in Washington State fell through. He opted to stay in Mexico: “There is work back home, but it doesn’t pay anything.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean Mexicans already living in the US are chompin’ at the bit to return. Roughly 11 million Mexicans live in the US, and in 2008 some 450,000 returned to Mexico, about the same number that reverse migrated in 2007. Given the enormous socioeconomic problems facing Mexico those already in the US seem contented to stay. “There may be a crisis in the United States,” reckons the director of one Mexican research institute, “but…we have been in an economic crisis in Mexico for many years.” The persistence of drug wars, a lack of advancement opportunities in many parts of Mexico, exorbitant prices demanded by ‘coyotes’ for passage across the border, not to mention the recent toll of H1N1—all combine to make roughing out a recession in the US the lesser of two limbos.
If enhanced border security plays a role in this trend the data is less clear, perhaps because deterrence is hard to quantify. In March, various news outlets, including The Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post, reported that Border Patrol arrests are at their lowest point since the 1970s. As quoted in The Los Angeles Times, Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, believes “The information they (migrants) are getting basically says there are no opportunities here.” Recent high-profile arrests of drug kingpins have kept the border in the news but the day-to-day story is one of economics trumping risk.
