….or so claim some ostensible experts. But I tend to respect Michael Barone and I agree with his assessment that the pressures that were causing the huge exodus of Mexicans into the US are disappearing fast – to whit, large excess population and lack of economic opportunity in Mexico. Mexico’s birth rate has plummeted to US levels and their economy has outperformed the US economy by a wide margin (damning with faint praise……) over the past few years. Bishops and democrats hardest hit:
Net illegal immigration from Mexico has fallen to zero, reports Amanda Peterson Beadle in a blogpost at the left-wing Think Progress. She cites Douglas Massey, founder of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University, and Agustin Escobar, a demographer at a university in Guadalajara, Mexico. I don’t regard these findings as definitive, but I suspect they’re very much in the ballpark. Massey cites the Census Bureau estimate that the illegal immigrant population within the United States fell from 12 million to 11 million between 2008 and 2009 and then opines that there has been a zero net balance of illegal immigration from Mexico since then. Escobar is cited for the proposition that migrants, legal and illegal, leaving Mexico dropped from 1 million in 2005 to 368,000 in 2010.
It’s been apparent for some time that immigration from Mexico and Latin America fell off sharply during the 2007-09 recession and has not rebounded since. Illegals from Mexico are apparently continuing to self-deport (to use Mitt Romney’s term) and their numbers are not being replenished by illegals from that country. As I have frequently argued that we are probably at a turning point, and will never again see immigration from Mexico at the huge rates that prevailed from 1983 to 2007. Among the reasons: Mexico has been growing more prosperous, its birth rates declined sharply two decades ago and it now has a middle class majority (as former Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda argues in his 2011 book Mañana Forever?). For some years I feared that Mexico could not achieve higher economic growth than the United States since our economies have been tied so tightly together by NAFTA since 1993. But in the past two years Mexico’s growth rate has been on the order of 5% to 7%. It’s looking like Mexico’s growth rate is tied not to that of the United States but to that of Texas, which has been a growth leader because of its intelligent public policies which have prevented public employee unions from plundering the private sector economy. [Wow – great analysis] Anyway, looking ahead, anyone seeking changes in our immigration laws should keep in mind that immigration in the future is not likely to look like immigration in the recent past.
I doubt the episcopacy will heed that message. Michael Voris, among others, has argued that it at least appears that the bishops endorse unlimited hispanic immigration (we don’t hear them talking about immigration for animists from Africa) because it helps cover the collapse in Church attendance and other disastrous statistics. That may be a somewhat harsh assessment, but the immigration rhetoric from some in the episcopacy has been at times just blatant pandering. I don’t think it implausible that there is some level of self-interest there. Definitely, the democrats had looked to a constantly exploding hispanic population as electoral insurance to help make up for the fact that much of the democrat base refuses to reproduce. Without that influx, they’ll have to rely even more on indoctrination through the schools and media to create new leftists – that could lead to increased pressure against homeschooling.
What all this could mean – strictly a hypothesis – is that in 50 years the electoral landscape in this country could look radically different. I have stated here on this blog that immigration from Latin America was going to fall off because those countries are not producing the excess population they used to. Mexico is at replacement rate, as is almost all of Latin America. So, they’re barely going to have enough people to sustain themselves, let alone export many to other countries. Many of those trends, predicting a virtual reconquista of the American Southwest, may have been rather exaggerated.
We’ll see.
h/t culturewarnotes