This from esteemed commentator, Michael Barone:
“From 1980 to 2008, more than 5 million Mexicans legally entered the United States. And Mexicans account for about 60 percent of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. today.
Immigration policymakers have assumed that the flow of Mexican immigrants would continue indefinitely at this high level. But now evidence is accumulating that this vast surge of migration is ending.
The Pew Hispanic Center, analyzing Census statistics, has estimated that illegal Mexican entrants have been reduced from 525,000 annually in the 2000-04 years to 100,000 in 2010.
‘The flow has already stopped,’ Douglas Massey of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton recently told The New York Times. ‘The net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.’"
“The Pew Hispanic Center estimates the 2010 illegal population at 11.2 million, down from the 2007 peak of 12.0 million and just about the same level as in 2005. It's probably lower today.
Even more important, things have changed in Mexico. Its birth rate has fallen from 7 children per woman in 1971 to 3.2 in 1990 and 2 in 2010, barely enough to prevent population loss.”
“Mexico has finally become a majority middle-class country, former Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda argues in his recent book ‘Manana Forever?’ Mexico has more cars and television sets than households now, most Mexicans have credit cards, and there are almost as many cell phones as people.”
“The historic experience has been that countries cease generating large numbers of immigrants when they reach a certain economic level, as Germany did in the 1880s. Mass migration from Puerto Rico, whose residents are U.S. citizens, ended in the early 1960s, when income levels reached one-third of those on the mainland.”
I bring this up for two reasons:
First, this is a complete surprise to me. Everything else I have read led to believe that illegal aliens were overrunning the US from Mexico. Apparently those writers who are predicting that America will be run over by Mexicans are still stuck in 2007.
Second, and more importantly, this is a good cautionary tale for apocalyptic demographers like Mark Steyn, who take exponential trends (all demographic trends are exponential), extrapolate them into the future several decades and predict the end of the world as we know it.
As economist Thomas Sowell once noted, if you take a physical trend – any physical trend, no matter what it is – and extrapolate it linearly into the future, the result will be catastrophe. Sowell’s point, of course, is not that the world is bound to end but that linear extrapolation of physical trends beyond the very near future (i.e. nowcasting) is invalid. The world just doesn’t work like that. Sowell made this point to counter the predictions by environmentalists of widespread famine and oil shortages by the mid 1980’s.
It strikes me that when Mark Steyn predicted the Eupocalypse in America Alone, he made the same mistake that Paul Ehrlich did in his book, The Population Bomb, only in reverse. If extrapolating linearly into the future is an inaccurate technique, then extrapolating exponentially into the future is doubly bad.
I know these criticisms of Mark Steyn will get some pushback from Steyniacs in the comments section so I want to head some of this criticism off at the pass. Do not think I am a pro-immigration type. I am not. I would like to see illegal immigration eliminated and legal immigration significantly reduced (both here and in the US) in order for the melting pot to have a chance to integrate everybody into the body politic. Rather, what I am is anti-doom-mongering.
I actually enjoyed America Alone and think it serves as a good cautionary tale. My only point is that it is not a forecast. I look at it like those Congressional Budget Office projections that predict that the US federal debt will exceed the world's GDP by 2050 (or whenever). These projections are good to demonstrate the absurdity and, oh what's the word for it - oh yes, sustainability of the current trends, but most assuredly they are not accurate forecasts, mostly because the very trends they highlight will create countervailing forces that will decisively change the course of the US.
To put it another way, consider a cohort of 100 people in one generation. If those 100 people produce 99 children, we are in a demographic death spiral, and if those 100 people produce 101 children, we are in a population explosion. If we follow the extrapolation logic of both Ehrlich and Steyn, our thinking must oscillate wildly between a Steynian apocalypse and a Club of Rome apocalypse. Only if those 100 people produce 100.0 children is there no cause for panic.