Migration from Mexico levels off
The United States has experienced several large waves of migration over the past few centuries: Irish and Germans, Chinese and Vietnamese, Poles and Ukrainians.
The most recent and longest-lasting wave was composed largely of Mexicans — more than 16 million immigrated to the U.S. between 1965 and 2015.
That wave, however, has all but subsided since cresting in 2007. And there doesn’t appear to be a new wave of immigration on the horizon, according to a new model from economists at the University of California at San Diego.
If the forecast proves true, it could dramatically alter the nation’s political and economic landscape.
The authors of the working paper, Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh, look at global population growth trends as the primary driver of cross-border migration. Population growth in the once-burgeoning nations of Latin America has leveled off, while rapid growth has continued in Northern Africa and the Middle East. Migration is most common across shared borders and between countries that have a historical colonial relationship, like Ethiopia and Italy, or Spain and Morocco.
For that reason, Hanson and McIntosh argue, the largest immigrant flows will move in the direction of Europe, rather than America.
“The era in which immigration levels are rising in a way that can feel out of control appears to be coming to an end in the United States, while it is be just beginning in the European Union, despite current political debates over immigration in the two domains that are quite similar,” Hanson and McIntosh write. “In the decades to come, America will find itself to be an island of slow population growth, insulated by the Atlantic Ocean.”
It’s important to note that all immigration forecasts are tenuous, subject as they are to changes in immigration policy, the availability of jobs and national sentiment.
The latest projections from the Pew Research Center, for example, show increasing migration from Asia replacing migration from over the southern border.