USA-Mexico: more entrances less illegals

An extraordinary revolution is changing the face and nature of immigration in the US. The great wave of migration from Mexico that for decades has broken any sort of barrier and prohibition, increasing the percentage of workforce in the wealthy and ravenous North American economy, suddenly stopped. Between 2010 and the first months of 2011, indeed, for the first time in sixty years, the net of migration flows from Mexico to the US is equal to zero, or even negative.

This is what the expert Douglas S. Massey, from Princeton University, says. Such a change is better testified by numbers. In 2010 the number of illegal Mexican board crossers and visa violators was 100000, whereas between 2000 and 2004 it was 600000. At the same time, the statistical agencies of Mexico City registered in the country  4,000,000 citizens more than those previously assumed on the basis of the historical trends of emigration to North. What happened? And why did the doors of the biggest world vector start to open in the opposite direction? First of all, this is due to the income improvement of Mexican households (+45% compared with 2000) and to the parallel increase of national education level. Such a context reduces the “marginal utility” of migration and, at the same time, offers much more employment opportunities for trained people.

However, this phenomenon would have been much more limited, without another important element, the strong decrease of birth rate (from 6.8 children per woman in 1970 to 2 children in 2011). In order to have a clearer framework of the situation, another fundamental point must be taken into account, that regarding the new immigration policy adopted by the US Government. Instead of forbidding and punishing, as they did in the past, the US decided to reward legal immigrants through a number of initiatives such as the introduction of faster procedures for obtaining visas, the increase of immigration quotas and the facilitation of family reunions. They must have thought that, in this way, they would eliminate that pernicious mechanism that in the past obliged many people to enter into the US and stay, even illegally.