The most interesting international political economy news story I have read this year

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Thursday, July 7, 2011 - 5:10 AM

Your humble blogger is off at another conference again, so blogging will be intermittent for the rest of the week. However, I wanted to highlight Damien Cave's outstanding New York Times story on the decline of illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States. The gist of Cave's story:

The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive.

A growing body of evidence suggests that a mix of developments — expanding economic and educational opportunities, rising border crime and shrinking families — are suppressing illegal traffic as much as economic slowdowns or immigrant crackdowns in the United States....

Douglas S. Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton, an extensive, long-term survey in Mexican emigration hubs, said his research showed that interest in heading to the United States for the first time had fallen to its lowest level since at least the 1950s. “No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” Mr. Massey said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.”

The decline in illegal immigration, from a country responsible for roughly 6 of every 10 illegal immigrants in the United States, is stark. The Mexican census recently discovered four million more people in Mexico than had been projected, which officials attributed to a sharp decline in emigration.

American census figures analyzed by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center also show that the illegal Mexican population in the United States has shrunk and that fewer than 100,000 illegal border-crossers and visa-violators from Mexico settled in the United States in 2010, down from about 525,000 annually from 2000 to 2004. Although some advocates for more limited immigration argue that the Pew studies offer estimates that do not include short-term migrants, most experts agree that far fewer illegal immigrants have been arriving in recent years.

The question is why.

You'll have to read the whole thing to find out the whys of this phenomenon. Cave's story is so good, however, that it's worth detailing exactly why the story is so good:

1) It's totally counterintuitive. It flies in the face of the stylized facts about immigration in the U.S. ("we can't control our borders!") as well as Mexico ("the country is falling apart!"). This story bursts every rhetorical bubble that exists in American political debate on this topic.

2) It's also counterintuitive in describing why this phenomenon has occurred. Much of it is structural -- changing economic circumstances in both countries -- but policy shifts have mattered as well. Those shifts cut across ideological lines: dramatically loosened visa restrictions, combined with tougher enforcement, appears to have had some impact.

3) Cave relies adriotly on more academic analyses from the Pew Hispanic Center and the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton to back up his interviews and other reportage.

4) From a normative policy perspective, this is a win-win story. As Doug Mataconis notes:

[T]hese are, of course, highly positive developments. That Mexico might stabilize politically and economically and become, if not as prosperous as Canada just yet, at least a far more prosperous southern neighbor than we’ve ever had is a development we should welcome and encourage. Not only because it will reduce cross-border illegal immigration, but also because a strong Mexican economy is good for the U.S. economy.

See Joe Klein and Matthew Yglesias on these points as well. Indeed, it's such good news that stories like this one might not trigger cable news debates about the dreaded (and mythical) NAFTA superhighway.

[Doesn't declining immigration into the United States foretell long-term doom for America's great power status?--ed. Immigration undoubtedly provides a dose of demographic vitality for the United States. Cave's story, however, it about illegal immigration from Mexico. The data points to high rates of immigration from other Latin American countries and an expansion of legal immigration from Mexico proper. The U.S. still remains a magnet economy.]

COMMENTS (1)

EXPLORE:GLOBALIZATION, FLASH POINTS, GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, MEXICO, MIGRATION, UNITED STATES

Voluntary human extinction in one country

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, January 3, 2011 - 9:12 AM

Back in the nineties, the Economist ran a very provocative end-of-year essay on voluntary human extinction, concluding with the notion that, "the tricky question is not whether to extinguish, but when."

While I don't think that this concept has gained much traction in most of the world, I'm beginning to wonder if the government of Japan is embracing it on the sly. I've blogged before about that country's stout resistance to immigration. Today the New York Times' Hiroko Tabuchi has another front-pager on the barriers to entry for even well-trained immigrants. Shorter Times: the situation is unchanged from 18 months ago:

Despite facing an imminent labor shortage as its population ages, Japan has done little to open itself up to immigration. In fact … the government is doing the opposite, actively encouraging both foreign workers and foreign graduates of its universities and professional schools to return home while protecting tiny interest groups.…

In 2009, the number of registered foreigners here fell for the first time since the government started to track annual records almost a half-century ago, shrinking 1.4 percent from a year earlier to 2.19 million people -- or just 1.71 percent of Japan's overall population of 127.5 million.

Experts say increased immigration provides one obvious remedy to Japan's two decades of lethargic economic growth. But instead of accepting young workers, however -- and along with them, fresh ideas -- Tokyo seems to have resigned itself to a demographic crisis that threatens to stunt the country's economic growth, hamper efforts to deal with its chronic budget deficits and bankrupt its social security system.…

Japan's demographic time clock is ticking: its population will fall by almost a third to 90 million within 50 years, according to government forecasts. By 2055, more than one in three Japanese will be over 65, as the working-age population falls by over a third to 52 million.

Still, when a heavyweight of the defeated Liberal Democratic Party unveiled a plan in 2008 calling for Japan to accept at least 10 million immigrants, opinion polls showed that a majority of Japanese were opposed. A survey of roughly 2,400 voters earlier this year by the daily Asahi Shimbun showed that 65 percent of respondents opposed a more open immigration policy.

If you talk to Japan-boosters about this issue, they'll usually respond with some equation of older workers + hi-tech robots = healthy Japan. OK, but it turns out that Japan has fewer old people than the government originally thought, and I'm worried that when the robots get too smart, Will Smith will be too old to stop them.

Seriously, this seems to fall into that set of problems, like, say, climate change, where most people recognize that there's a serious long-term problem but the short-term incentives to do something about it are close to nil.

Am I missing anything?

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EXPLORE:INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, DEMOGRAPHY, JAPAN, MIGRATION

Pick your 2100 pledge!!

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Tuesday, July 8, 2008 - 1:32 PM

Apparently the G8 leaders have pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2050. In making the pledge that does not need to be honored for 42 years, the G8 has learned its lesson from the 2005 Gleneagles summit. While in Scotland, they pledged to double aid to sub-Saharan Africa by 2010. As that date approaches, and skepticism mounts about whether they will achieve their target, suddenly the promise looks a little bit hollow. Environmentalists are unimpressed with this pledge, but as a political scientist I find these long-range promises surprisingly rare. Politicians should love making these kind of pledges, because, in theory, they can lock in preferences long after a leader has left the stage. If nothing else, breaking this kind of promise does exact some modest cost on the future leader who has to make the reversal. Readers are hereby encouraged to submit a pledge that the G8 should promise to fulfill by the year 2100. The pledge should be smart policy but such a dead-bang political loser that there is, literally, zero chance of it being implemented in our lifetime. I'll start: the G8 should pledge to remove all migration restrictions -- regardless of the country of origin -- by the year 2100.

COMMENTS (9)

EXPLORE:INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, EMPTY PROMISES, G8 SUMMITS, MIGRATION