Among the many revolutions that have taken place in 2011, one was almost ignored: for the first time in the last sixty years the illegal migration flow towards the U.S. of Mexicans came to a halt. We discuss it with Douglas Massey, Professor of Sociology at the Priceton University and unanimously recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on immigration.
According to your last survey, between 2010 and the first months of 2011, the migratory net balance between Mexico and USA fell to zero for the first time in 60 years. It is by no mean an exaggeration then, to think that USA is not a centre of attraction for neighbour Mexicans anymore. Might we register a turnaround that will last for many years?
It is just illegal migration that has fallen to zero, partially because new opportunities have opened up in the legal system. Guestworker entries from Mexico are running at 300,000 per year and legal immigration is running between 150,000 and 200,000 per year. So it’s not that migration has stopped altogether. But I do think the huge boom in migration we saw from 1970-2000 is probably over. Mexican fertility rates are declining and the relative size of cohorts entering the Mexican labor force is shrinking.
Among other things, how much this trend was influenced by the new US migration policy? In a different way from the past, this policy, rather than forbidding and punishing, is assisting regulars immigrants. Indeed, it allows bureaucratic facilitation for getting the visa, it increased the entrances quota and moreover it facilitates familiar reunion. Did Washington realize that the continual coming and going could be a solution for the pernicious mechanism that in the past forced many to come in order to stay, even illegally? Is it a feasible solution?
The increase in border enforcement and internal enforcement continue, but their effect on migration has been counterproductive, decreasing rates of return migration to Mexico rather than decreasing rates of departure from Mexico. Once migrants have faced the significant costs and risks of border crossing, they hunker down and stay rather than returning home at the end of a work season, so they don’t face even greater costs and risks next year. The government hasn’t learned a thing. Although Congress has quietly increased guestworker migration, it continues to accelerate enforcement both internally and at the border. The increase in permanent resident visas has occurred because Congress has stripped away legal rights and social privileges from legal immigrants, prompting millions to naturalize and thus acquire rights to sponsor the entry of certain relatives without numerical limitation.
If your answer to the later question is yes, is it then possible to extend the US migration policies to the whole world? In others words, as it happened with the free circulation of commodities, after so many worries and reluctances, is it come the time for enforcing the same logic with people?
We have a long way to go before we get to this point in North America.
If you had the chance to give an advice on migration policy to the European Union, what would it be?
Repressive policies don’t work; they usually backfire with negative consequences for all concerned. The right approach is to figure out ways to legally accommodate flows that arise naturally out of expanding relations of trade, investment, and economic integration and to encourage circulation rather than settlement while realizing that some settlement is always going to occur and making provision for it.
Does exist a common point between new European and American populists? At least within the Old Continent one of the reasons that lead this groups to political success lies in the fears and concerns about immigrants felt by the lowest classes. What’s in your view the reason of these fears?
Xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment surge during periods of economic insecurity and social change, both of which are now in abundance on both sides of the Atlantic. Feeling economically and ideologically insecure and fearful, people look for easy explanations and political entrepreneurs are happy to offer up immigrants and other out-groups as scapegoats, and the press is pleased to fan the flames in order to gain readers, listeners, and viewers and thus make more money.
On the inside: