A Prophecy of Immigration
Exactly Who Will be America’s Future Immigrants?
The Pew Research Center, whose work I hold in very high esteem, has a new report out quantifying immigration to the US (including with some cool tools), but also forecasting future immigration. They suggest that Asian immigration will continue to accelerate, while Hispanic immigration will continue to cool off some. Maybe. But, as they say in their Appendix B, “ Immigration has been the most difficult demographic component to forecast.” And, tellingly, they also remind a careful reader that “ Although many of the social and economic factors affecting migration trends are reasonably well-known, there is no broadly accepted theoretical framework that can be readily applied in a projections perspective.”
Thus, there‘s some real ammunition for criticism. It’s always easy to be an arm-chair critic, but my aim here is not to discredit Pew’s work. Rather, it’s to suggest an alternative perspective, and perhaps thereby encourage Pew to consider one key assumption: the fixed composition of forecast future immigration.
Pew sees declining Hispanic migration and rising Asian migration, and extrapolates it forward using forecast changes to total migration. This might happen. But I don’t think so. I suspect we will indeed see rising Asian migration, and continuing volatility in Hispanic migration, but we will also see rising African migration. But even if my Africa prediction is off base, there are better ways to make a forecast than extrapolating a fixed ratio.
The Future of U.S. Immigration
Yesterday’s Weather Will Probably Continue
The above chart comes from Appendix A of Pew’s report. As you can see, it implies that Asian migration will not only continue at its currently high levels, but in fact accelerate. Hispanic immigration will grow, as will white immigration. Black immigration will see the least growth of all.
This is weird. Pew gets these through plausible-enough sounding methods, but the results are strange. They forecast this gangbuster growth for Asians and whites, yet relatively slow growth for Hispanics, because that’s what they’ve seen for the last few years. And it’s true, Asia is huge, and rising incomes and global connectivity will enable more of them to migrate: but those same rising incomes will also lead many Asians to migrate elsewhere in Asia rather than to the US.
But there’s a weirder thing in this data: the peculiar stagnation of black immigration. But before I explain exactly why I think Pew is wrong on black immigration, we need to take a trip down migration-theory-lane.
The Future of U.S. Immigration
Key Factors for Migration
Let’s assume for a moment that just two factors determine all migration: the cost of migration (proportional to distance) and the impact of migration on family income or wellbeing. Migrants move when the returns to their family group to their migration exceed the costs of migration. This means wide income gaps around the world should lead to high migration flows.
But return to that cost: don’t think of it in dollar terms, think of it as months of family income. So for example, a $5,000 total migration cost actually costs maybe 18 months of family disposable income in Bolivia, or just 8 months of disposable income in Croatia, or 36 months of family income in Mauritania.
As a corollary, if incomes in Mauritania rise, then the cost of migration falls. The net returns to migration also fall, but think of it this way. The average Mauritanian earns about $3,500 a year (I’m using international PPP dollars here). If he moves to France, his income may rise to $25,000. That’s a net return of $21,500, with a cost of 36 months of saving family disposable incomes.
Now assume the family income doubles to $7,000. The returns to migration fall to $18,000, so a 17% decline. But the “cost” in savings falls to 18 months: it fell by 50%!
So even though our migrant’s life chances got better in their home country, they’re more likely to migrate because the gains from migration declined much less than the actual cost of migrating. All that really changed is that migration is much more feasible for our model migrant.
The Future of U.S. Immigration
Mapping the Future of Migration
The above map shows the forecast percentage growth in average purchasing power in each country, out to 2020. This shows that the fastest economic growth is forecast to be in China, Mongolia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Turkmenistan, and Ethiopia. Broadly speaking, East and Southeast Asia, as well as Sub-Saharan Africa, have the rosiest growth forecasts.
Let’s pick a threshold. Let’s say that below $5,000 in purchasing power, migration is very hard. Above $5,000, migration gets much easier. How many countries are there where 2010 income was below $5,000, but 2020 income is forecast over $5,000?
There are 17 such countries.The map below highlights them.
As you can see, most of the countries passing the threshold I mentioned are either South and Southeast Asian, or African. By population, the great majority are South Asian in India or Pakistan.
So those and other fast-growing countries are places where the price of migration is falling very quickly.
But that’s just to 2020. What countries will pass my arbitrary migration threshold sometime between 2020 and 2060?
You’re looking at a map of hardcore poverty. These are countries still not forecast to have over $5,000 in purchasing power per person as of 2020. These are countries in which the great majority of people can’t afford to migrate whether they want to or not.
So when will those countries pass my migration threshold? That requires some real forecasting. Let’s make a simple assumption that their 2000–2020 average growth rate continues to 2060.
The map above shows the year given countries will cross the $5,000 threshold. Darker means later, and the very light beige indicates 2020 or earlier. The only countries still forecast to have under $5,000 in income after 2060 are a few like the Central African Republic. The majority of Africa will move from very-low-income or low-income into lower-middle or middle-income during the next half-century. This will move literally hundreds of millions of people into a position where their aspirations can reach a wider geography, even as growth in Africa draws in migrants from other parts of the world like China, India, or former colonial powers in Europe.
The 21st Century will see a new wave of migrants to developed countries from Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
Yes, Asian migration will continue. Latin American migration to the U.S. could rise or fall depending on those countries’ conditions and U.S. immigration policy. But fundamentally, the group that I believe will confound all the expert prognostications of future U.S. immigration is Africans, and possibly Middle Eastern migrants as well. Growing economies in Africa will facilitate amplified migration, and while much of it will go to Europe, much will also go to the United States. Meanwhile, I rather suspect that Pew’s rosy estimates of growing European migration to the United States may prove ill-founded.
The Future of U.S. Immigration
Tomorrow’s Weather May Be Different
To predict migration 30 years down the road, we need to think about how the causes of migration might change. Much migration is economic, meaning that the existence of global inequality fuels migration as long as poorer nations can afford it. As more poor nations become slightly less poor, migration towards rich countries is likely to accelerate. At least some of that migration will be directed towards the U.S. Since 2005, black international inflows have risen from 150,000 in to 194,000 in 2014. Some of these inflows are temporary, or returning citizens, so Pew’s 100,000 to 150,000 number for the 2005–2015 period isn’t necessarily wrong. However, that’s a 29% growth rate across just 10 years. Given that predominantly black countries are likely to see the greatest number of people lifted out of poverty by mid-century, they are also likely to compose a growing share of migrants.
Yet Pew forecasts a lower black share of immigration than we’ve seen in recent years. This does not seem tenable.
What if we assume that African immigration into the United States will grow by about 20,000 per year instead of 9,000, as Pew projects? To be clear, that additional 11,000 increase amounts to an extremely small shift in the overall share of African emigrants headed to the U.S. As in, it’s such a small shift that it probably wouldn’t even show up in global balance sheets of migration.
And what if white migration doesn’t just keep chugging upwards? White countries in Eastern Europe and the EU don’t have huge population growth, and the number of white-majority countries with endemic poverty is shrinking. As such, it seems plausible to suggest that white migration is going to stabilize sometime soon. Now, Middle Eastern migrants could be classified as White or Asian (or African!) depending on where they’re from and how they identify, so it’s reasonable there may be at least some growth in white immigration from these groups.
If my alternative scenario is closer to the truth, then the racial makeup of migrants may be quite different than what Pew forecasts. I don’t have the tools to do the re-migration and generational analysis Pew does, but we can with a few simplifying assumptions (i.e. increasing the black immigrant population and decreasing white won’t change the in-group rates of fertility, mortality, etc), we can get a good estimate.
Overall immigration is changed fairly little: gross immigration from 2015 to 2065 changes from 81 million to 81.7 million. Whites shift from 21% of total immigrants to 19%, while blacks rise from 9% to 12%. Incidentally, blacks were 12% of total immigration from 2005 to 2010 (and may be around that level for 2010–2015 if current trends continue). With 2.5 million extra African immigrants in the United States and 1.8 million fewer European immigrants, national population balances would only shift a bit (remember, those millions are spaced out over 40 years).
If Pew has overstated European immigration and understated African immigration, as I’ve argued, then the net result would be a 2065 population that has about… 0.2 percentage points higher black population, and 0.2 percentage points lower white population.
The Future of U.S. Immigration
Conclusion
Pew Research Center has done valuable work putting together a robust, concrete forecast of future immigration trends. These trends are notoriously hard to predict, as migration has many chaotic determinants. However, Pew appears to have shortchanged one very likely eventuality: the economic uplift of Sub-Saharan Africa. Rising incomes will make migration easier for millions now trapped in poverty. This easier migration will impact the United States, with rising African immigration very likely. Pew’s own numbers seem to understate African immigrants even as of the last few years, even as European migration appears possibly overstated. But even with both of these sources of possible error, nationwide population shares are essentially unchanged. Those counting on immigration to reshape the nation’s demographic fabric must play a very, very long game, and one full of possibilities for change and reversal. Africa’s uplift will probably lead to higher inflows of black immigrants than Pew predicts, but probably not enough to substantially alter national demographics.
See my last post, on 2014 American Community Survey data.
Start my series on migration from the beginning.
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I’m a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliott School with an MA in International Trade and Investment Policy, and an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. I like to learn about migration, the cotton industry, airplanes, trade policy, space, Africa, and faith.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research. More’s the pity.
