The end of the immigration spike

Mickey Kaus is still worried about immigration even after reading and partially debunking a L.A. Daily News story by Rachel Uranga:

[I]t’s worth worrying about a) the possible collapse of a common language and b) the possible Quebec-like Mexification of Southern California.

I’ve never really bought into either meme. And today, Nina Bernstein has a New York Times story that pours more cold water on this hypothesis:

For years it seemed that immigration to the United States could only rise. Now a new study, based on a year-by-year analysis of government data, shows a startlingly different pattern: Migration to the United States peaked in 2000 and has declined substantially since then…. In terms of immigrant destinations, the study confirms a long-recognized trend away from the “big six” traditionally immigrant states – California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas – which still receive 57 percent of immigrants, toward so-called new growth states like Iowa and North Carolina. The foreign-born pioneers to such states in the 1990’s now serve as a magnet for friends and relatives from abroad, especially when jobs are plentiful

Bernstein’s story is a riff on the Pew Hispanic Center’s latest report, “Rise, Peak and Decline: Trends in U.S. Immigration 1992 ? 2004.” The executive summary also observes that:

The shift of immigrant flows away from states with large foreign-born populations such as California and New York towards new settlement states such as North Carolina and Iowa accelerated during both the peak and the decline that followed.

Indeed, the report makes it clear that the shift in immigration flows to new states is a permanent and not temporary shift. Beyond allaying fears of Mexifornia, the study has two take home points. First, immigration flows follow the economy:

Rather than undergoing a continuous increase in immigrant levels as is commonly perceived, the United States experienced a sharp spike in immigration flows over the past decade that had a distinct beginning, middle and end. From the early 1990s through the middle of the decade, slightly more than 1.1 million migrants came to the United States every year on average. In the peak years of 1999 and 2000, the annual inflow was about 35% higher, topping 1.5 million. By 2002 and 2003, the number coming to the country was back around the 1.1 million mark. This basic pattern of increase, peak and decline is evident for the foreign-born from every region of the world and for both legal and unauthorized migrants. In 2004, migration bounced back to exceed 1.2 million. Whether or not this move portends further increases is impossible to predict. But even with this recent increase in migration, the most recent data show that immigration flows are at levels comparable with those of the mid-1990s and still significantly below the peak levels of 1999?2000. Both the run-up to the peak and the drop-off in immigration coincide with a variety of conditions known to influence such flows, most notably the performance of the U.S. economy. Immigration grew sharply during the rapid economic and job expansion of the 1990s and then declined as the economy went into a downturn after 2001. Measures of the change in the Mexican labor force?the largest single source of U.S. immigrants by far?follow trends closely related to the pattern of changes in U.S. immigration.

This finding probably won’t surprise many economists, but it is politically significant — because it counters the belief that immigration is some unyielding, unstoppable force. That said, the second, more disturbing take-home point is that the composition of immigration flows is changing — and not for the better:

From 1992 to 2004, the unauthorized share of immigration inflows increased and the share that was legal decreased. By the end of the period, more unauthorized migrants than authorized migrants were entering the United States. Declines in legal immigration accounted for the largest part of the drop from the peak flows at the turn of the 21st century. From the peak in 1999?2000 to the trough in 2003, over 60% of the decrease in flow is attributable to lower levels of inflows of legal permanent residents and legal temporary immigrants counted as part of the population.

This kind of study may give greater impetus to a grand bargain on immigration reform — in which legal immigration flows are expanded at the same time there is a crackdown on illegal immigration. [I thought the grand bargain involved a guest worker program–ed. Yeah, but my grand bargain would ditch that part — guest worker programs don’t have a great track record, and the dispersal of immigrants to non-border states would probably reduce its allure anyway.] Go check out the whole report.