Immigration problem may solve itself
While Congress finds other things — almost any unimportant thing that pops up — to do rather than deal with immigration reform, the stream of illegals from Mexico has slowed to a trickle.
Douglas Massey, co-director of the Mexican Immigration Project at Princeton, said the interest in Mexico in heading north has fallen to its lowest level since at least the 1950s.
“No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” he said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a bit negative,” he told a New York Times reporter.
Massey and other immigration researchers cite several factors, including expanding economic and educational opportunities in Mexico, rising border crime, shrinking families and immigrant crackdowns in the U.S.
What’s happening should come as no surprise to Iolans. About 150 of Iola’s jobs went to Monterrey, Mexico last year. Which helps explain why Angel Orozco, an 18-year-old in a family with a long history of heading north for a better job, is staying in Mexico. He is a student in a new technological institute where he is earning a degree in industrial engineering.
All of his classmates in a recent graduating class there said they were better educated than their parents — and that they planned to stay in Mexico rather than go to the United States.
Angel may wind up in Monterrey at a Haldex desk.
The change in the immigration scene is not small. The Pew Hispanic Center shows that fewer than 100,000 illegal border-crossers and visa-violators settled in the U.S. in 2010 — down from 525,000 annually from 2000 to 2004.
ANOTHER IMPORTANT factor is that Mexican families are shrinking. Birth control has pushed down the fertility rate to about two children per woman from 6.8 in 1970. Mexico is producing about 800,000 job-seekers a year rather than 1,000,000 and the number is expected to drop to 300,000 by 2030. By then there is every reason to believe that those jobs will be there in Mexico, itself.
In the meantime, should Alabama, Arizona and the U.S. Congress be given credit for tightening border security, cracking down on the employers of illegals and the stepped up prosecution of employers who hire illegals?
Sure. The atmosphere for illegals has gotten much tougher. But the fact is that those who want to come to the U.S. usually get here, papers or not. While illegals are more likely to be picked up and sent back than they were a few years ago, the fact is that 92 to 98 percent of those who try to cross eventually succeed.
Immigration policies have not been uniform, however. While some states have declared war on illegals, the federal government has made it easier for many job seekers to get papers and come in legally. Under a program known as H-2a, farm workers can come in by the tens of thousands to pick cotton, harvest fruit and do the other kinds of back-breaking work few others will do.
Across the board, U.S. immigration officials are working with immigrants who want to come to the U.S. to take jobs in agriculture and construction that go begging otherwise.
Demographers point to the tens of thousands of baby boomers who are retiring every year and say the United States will be importing workers for years to come.
Put all these things together and the immigration crisis may solve itself in a combination of happy ways, leaving, like the Cheshire cat, its dimming smile as a reminder that it once was here.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
