The great migration surge of Mexican-born workers crossing into the United States is over — even before President-elect Donald Trump’s border wall.
That’s the conclusion of new research released Thursday by the University of California San Diego. The study by Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh of the School of Global Policy and Strategy suggests the world’s new migration hot spot will be workers moving from Northern Africa into Europe.
“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 seems to be just beginning in the European Union,” they write in “Is the Mediterranean the new Rio Grande? US and EU Immigration Pressures in the Long Run.”
The paper appears in the Fall 2016 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Hanson is the Pacific Economic Cooperation Professor in International Economic Relations, director of the Center on Global Transformation and acting dean of the School of Global Policy and Strategy. McIntosh is a professor of economics, and heads the Policy Design and Evaluation Lab.
The paper differs from previous migration research in that it links birth rates to labor supply and demand in order to predict potential migration patterns. In the 1960s, high birth rates for baby boomers in the U.S. ended, causing a sharp decline in working-age individuals 20 years later. During the same period of time in Mexico, the birth rate was more than double what it was in the U.S., which resulted in a far greater number of young Mexican workers in the late 1980s.
Mexico no longer has high birth rates, with numbers that are now comparable to the U.S. It is in parts of Africa where populations are expected to rise, and their neighbor to the north—specifically countries in the European Union—will receive the most pressure from migration.
