45 posts categorized "Immigration"

The new government of President Otto Perez Molina has initiated a program called “Hunger Zero” to combat chronic malnutrition in Guatemala.  Despite being a so-called Middle Income Country (a rung above the poorest countries, as measured by the size of the national economy), chronic malnutrition remains a persistent problem, with rates in certain areas as high as those in the poorest countries in Africa.

According to the head of the Food and Nutritional Security Secretariat (SESAN), Luis Enrique Monterroso, the project will begin in the hardest-hit municipalities and then expand to all 166 municipalities affected significantly by hunger. Included in the Hunger Zero program are nutrition interventions focused on the 1,000 Days "window of opportunity," from pregnancy until a child's second birthday. The government has also created the Dignity Triangle program, which focuses on food availability, access, and nutrition education.

Bread for the World is a strong supporter of the 1,000 Days Partnership and the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement, which advocate for improved nutrition in pregnant women and children during this critical period. At this stage of life, the effects of malnutrition can cause irreversible damage to brain development, cognitive abilities, and resistance to diseases. Guatemala is also a supporter of these initiatives, which share key objectives with the new government’s anti-hunger programs.

The recently appointed head of SESAN happens to be a friend of Bread for the World! When Bread hosted the SUN Civil Society Working Group meeting that followed our 2011 National Gathering, Luis Enrique was there representing his country. His skills and commitment to ending hunger and malnutrition in Guatemala were evident to Otto Perez during his election campaign. He was asked to head this very important office, which is responsible for coordinating the efforts of 13 government ministries and reports directly to Guatemala's Vice President.

Todd Post, editor of Bread for the World Institute's Hunger Report, and I recently traveled to Guatemala and were able to meet with Luis Enrique in his new capacity. He is excited about the challenge before him and expressed his thanks for Bread for the World's support in giving him the opportunity to learn about SUN, which is just getting started in Guatemala.  He has already set an ambitious goal: reducing hunger by 10 percent within four years. He has also begun to work on Hunger Zero by identifying the 166 most malnourished of the country's 366 municipalities.

Guatemala is a country that faces many challenges – social, political, and economic. It is also a country that has correctly identified addressing the root causes of malnutrition as key to its future success.  Let’s follow the developments there and wish “our man in Guatemala” great success!

    Scott Bleggi is a senior international policy analyst with Bread for the World Institute.

Net migration is the net total of migrants during the period, that is, the total number of immigrants less the annual number of emigrants, including both citizens and noncitizens. Source: World Bank

 The H-2A agricultural guest worker program, although dysfunctional, will probably grow. The beginnings of a framework exist that envisions the H-2A program as a way to benefit both growers in the United States and sending communities in Mexico.

An interactive data timeline on net migration accompanies this excerpt from the 2012 Hunger Report on the relationship between migration and development:

Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) works on guest worker recruitment, education, and training issues on the Mexican side of the border—but it doesn’t address the impact of the United States’ H-2A agricultural guest worker program on the Mexican communities that send these workers. In fact, this is one of the most under-analyzed parts of the H-2A program. It is rare for anyone, including the Mexican government, to raise the concerns of sending communities. The reasons Mexicans leave home to become farm workers in the United States are often not part of this or most other discussions of immigration reform.

But there are the beginnings of a framework that envisions the H-2A program as a way to benefit both growers in the United States and sending communities in Mexico. The bi-national Independent Agricultural Workers’ Center (CITA by its Spanish acronym) is pioneering such a model; it plans to integrate the H-2A program with Mexican rural development efforts. 

Farm worker advocate Chuck Barrett founded CITA along the Arizona-Mexico border in 2007 to serve as a “matchmaker” between prospective Mexican guest workers and U.S. growers. For the past several years, CITA has been focused on helping workers on both sides of the border: in Mexico with the recruitment process, and in the United States with disputes between workers and growers.

CITA helps growers recruit workers in Mexico and assists in getting growers’ H-2A applications—which Barrett says are notoriously onerous—through the Department of Labor and other agencies. It also provides services to Mexican guest workers, including financial literacy information, low-interest loans to pay for guest worker visas, psychological counseling, and education on the guest worker system. In addition to the fees it earns from growers, CITA is supported by organizations such as Catholic Relief Services and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

Barrett is hoping to expand the CITA model to become self-sustaining in rural communities throughout Mexico, saying that this expansion would help Mexican migrant-sending communities obtain “some beginning of control over migration, replacing illegal out-migration with legal migration.” According to this model, communities would be trained to facilitate worker recruitment, prescreen workers, and expedite the visa process—all tasks for which U.S. growers now pay CITA a fee. “Because they would be doing the training and passport process … they [Mexican rural areas] will get a portion to be used by the community to fulfill their own development objectives,” Barrett said. 

While Barrett—like almost everyone else—said that the H-2A program is dysfunctional, he also believes that its use will increase. “Whether people like it or not … H-2A is going to be a growing process,” he said. “Every version of AgJOBS includes an expansion of H-2A. I see the next couple of years as a window of opportunity to find alternatives … that are fairer for the workers and more effective for the employers, and also lend themselves … to connecting the migration process to the development process.”

CITA’s concept of connecting its H-2A employer services to rural development in migrant-sending Mexican rural communities is still on the drawing board. But based on the relationships they’ve forged through their outreach to growers and services to workers, Barrett and CITA executive director Janine Duron said that the program can be extended to the source of the immigrant farm worker issue—the poor Mexican communities that provide U.S. growers with both unauthorized and H-2A farm workers. “It’s an amazing relationship that can be built if you have reconciliation rather than adversity,” said Duron.

Reducing migration pressures will require development and job creation throughout Mexico, but poverty and migration are particularly concentrated in the countryside. Although about a quarter of all Mexicans live in rural areas, 60 percent of Mexico’s extremely poor people are rural, and 44 percent of Mexican immigrants come from rural communities. Immigration reform and development assistance need to be linked, particularly for rural Mexico.

After decades of declining support, agriculture and rural development is now re-emerging as a vital development focus. The World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture for Development, states, “Agriculture continues to be a fundamental instrument for sustainable development and poverty reduction.” Research has also found that agriculture is one of the best returns on investment in poverty-reduction spending. Each 1 percent increase in crop productivity in Asia reduces the number of poor people by half a percent. This correlation also holds for middle-income countries such as Mexico.

+ Read more from the 2012 Hunger Report on the issue of Farm Workers and Immigration.

Kate Hagen is Hunger Report project assistant at Bread for the World Institute.

The 2012 Hunger Report executive summary is Bread for the World Institute’s overview of the state of hunger.

Tomorrow night, President Obama will deliver his 2012 State of the Union address, laying out his national priorities based on current conditions in the United States.

Will he discuss the 15 percent of Americans who wonder whether they will have enough to eat this month? Will he say it’s a top priority to make sure that no child goes to bed hungry?

2012 is a particularly important year for hungry people in the United States because Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the farm bill, which will define U.S. farm policies for the next five years. The bill shows exactly how much our country values nutritious food for all as a goal of our farm policies.

Bread for the World Institute’s 2012 Hunger Report recommends effective ways for the U.S. government to respond to the agriculture and nutrition challenges of 2012 and beyond. Read an excerpt from the executive summary of the 2012 Hunger Report: Rebalancing Act: Updating U.S. Food and Farm Policies to learn what we hope President Obama will say in the 2012 State of the Union:

The global agricultural system faces many daunting challenges. Seven billion people currently inhabit the Earth, and the population is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2050. Food production must increase as climate change puts additional stress on natural resources. Nearly one billion people around the world suffer from hunger, and in the United States one in four people participate in a federal nutrition program. U.S. food and farm policies absolutely need to be aligned.

The 2012 Hunger Report recommends ways for the federal government to better respond to the agriculture and nutrition challenges of today and tomorrow. Normally change in food and farm policy occurs incrementally. The 2012 Hunger Report calls for bolder, more determined thinking about how U.S. food and farm policies can meet the global and domestic challenges of the 21st century.

Farm policies should significantly increase production of healthy foods. But farm policies alone can’t automatically improve access to nutritious foods for low-income families. Strengthening the nutrition safety net is also critical. Nutrition programs need to do more than provide food for hungry people; they must ensure that healthy food is available to all.

The 2012 Hunger Report recommends ways for U.S. development assistance and food aid programs to work together more efficiently. Food aid programs should follow the lead of Feed the Future—the new U.S. Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative—by focusing more deliberately on improving nutrition outcomes for the most vulnerable people, especially pregnant and lactating women and children under the age of 2. This will help achieve the strongest possible nutrition outcomes with the limited resources available.

On the eve of 2012, Congress is negotiating dramatic cuts in the federal budget. Cuts to programs designed to overcome the effects of poverty are in neither the short- nor the long-term interests of the nation. The recommendations in the2012 Hunger Report are all the more relevant because the budget decisions are so urgent.

+To read more, download the executive summary of the 2012 Hunger Report: Rebalancing Act: Updating U.S. Food and Farm Policy.

Kate Hagen is Hunger Report project assistant at Bread for the World Institute.

Migrant workers rest after picking cucumbers in Blackwater, Virginia. Photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl.

2011 was a record year for U.S. farmers, with farm income topping $100 billion. This includes sales of $22 billion in fruits and nuts and $21 billion in vegetables and melons – crops that rely on immigrant farm labor.

But even as U.S. farmers prospered in 2011, those working on farms had less to celebrate.

The nation’s agricultural mecca – Fresno Country, California – had the state’s highest agricultural sales ($5.9 billion) and its highest poverty rate – 27 percent. More than 36 percent of the county’s children were poor, also the highest rate in the state. As one agricultural expert puts it, “High farm sales and high poverty rates often go together.”

Low wages, the seasonal nature of agricultural work, and, for many, unauthorized immigration status make it difficult for farm workers and their families to escape poverty. Farm workers’ high poverty rates aren’t totally attributable to immigration status, but it’s certainly one of the causes: 71 percent of all hired farm workers in the United States are immigrants, and about half of them are in the country illegally.

Poverty among farm worker families has decreased greatly since the mid-1990s, when more than half of all farm worker families were poor. Today 23 percent of farm workers nationally live below the poverty line.

Although many farm worker families have escaped poverty, their wages have increased slowly. Between 1989 and 2009 the value of U.S. agricultural exports rose 250 percent while average hourly farm worker wages increased 18 percent ($1.52) from $8.55 to $10.07. 

In addition to not adequately sharing in the profits of agriculture, farm workers face increased threats on other fronts.

In October 2011, the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced its highest-ever number of removals: 396,906 for fiscal year 2011.

About 55 percent of all individuals removed had been convicted of felonies or misdemeanors. Although most of us can agree that all unauthorized immigrants convicted of serious crimes should be removed from the United States, removing those who are guilty of petty traffic violations, or have no criminal history at all, damages families and doesn’t serve the country.

Of ICE’s almost 400,000 removals for FY 2011, only 6,967  – or about 2 percent – were deported for crimes such as homicide or sexual assault.  

For the 45 percent of deportees with no criminal record, they were guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There are no easy answers to the predicament of many immigrant farm worker families. But any solution should include some sort of legalization.

Immigrant farm workers need assurance that an I-9 audit won’t destroy their livelihoods and legalization would facilitate immigrants’ deeper integration into rural communities, since they could then invest in their new homes and neighborhoods.

Legalization wouldn’t completely solve the problem of poverty among immigrant farm workers, but it would be a step in the right direction.  

Andrew Wainer is Immigration Policy Analyst at Bread for the World Institute. To learn more about farm workers, read Bread for the World’s 2012 Hunger Report and Bread for the World Institute’s briefing paper on farm workers.  

Rebalancing Act: Updating U.S. Food and Farm Policies, the 2012 edition of Bread for the World Institute's annual Hunger Report, was released today, November 21. This is the Institute's 22^nd annual report. Few of them have been as timely, considering the looming budget cuts Congress is negotiating.

The report argues that U.S. farm policies need to shift toward production of healthy foods. We say bluntly that current farm policies are doing a poor job of contributing to a healthy food system. There is too much support for ingredients used to produce cheap junk foods, and not enough support for foods that promote good health.

The greater share of government support to the farm sector goes to the biggest producers. Smaller producers and producers of healthy foods — i.e., fruits and vegetables — get little or no support. It's been this way for decades, but Americans are expressing more concern than ever about what we're eating and what we're getting for our tax dollars to the farm sector. The local food movement, with its emphasis on "smaller is better," is helping to reshape the farm policy debate. Farm policies are not solely to blame for Americans' low consumption of fruits and vegetables — but U.S. farms don't even produce enough healthy foods for our population to get its recommended daily allowances of vitamins and minerals. We need to ask, what are farm policies really trying to accomplish?

The report is not a diatribe against large-scale farming. We recognize the value of production agriculture in lowering food costs. The biggest beneficiaries of low food prices are low-income people – the people most vulnerable to hunger, who are therefore Bread for the World's main concern. Food production could also be a key component of the country's economic recovery strategy, a potential source of jobs. In tough times with so many people out of work, the hobbling U.S. economy simply can't afford to ignore these possibilities. 

The greatest economic challenge facing the United States, bar none, is the rising cost of health care. Obesity as a contributor to these costs is getting more attention as the problem affects more and more Americans. Hunger, on the other hand, is often overlooked as a health issue—but hungry people are by definition in poor health. Together, the costs of obesity and hunger run into the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This calls for a much stronger tie between the foods government encourages farmers to produce and the foods government should be encouraging people to eat.

Much of the report is focused on nutrition programs, which should be serving more healthy foods to more than 30 million children (two-thirds of them low-income) who eat school lunch as well as offering incentives for the nation's 45 million SNAP (formerly food stamps) participants to purchase more fruits and vegetables. Farms are, after all, businesses that respond to consumer demand. With some help from government policies, people who would eat healthier if they could afford to could provide farmers with a much larger market to supply.

There are plenty of large-scale fruit and vegetable farmers, but the report doesn't argue that government should transfer to them the support that now goes to large corn and soy farmers. What large-scale fruit and vegetable farmers need is rational U.S. immigration policies. Most of the people who pick the fruits and vegetables we eat are unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and Central America. This is low-paying, backbreaking work that few Americans show an interest in doing. The report looks at the situation of farm workers, emphasizing how much of the food we eat—and should be eating more of—depends on a steady flow of immigrant labor. That labor pool is at risk of vanishing if the federal government doesn't intervene to halt the trend toward repressive state-level immigration policies.

Finally, the report discusses U.S. food and farm policies that affect emergency food aid and agricultural development assistance overseas. Again, the focus is largely on nutrition, particularly for vulnerable groups such as young children and pregnant and nursing women. Good nutrition during the "1,000 Days" period between pregnancy and age 2 is critical to a person's lifelong health and ability to learn. This reality has gotten much more attention in the past few years, as have the simple, cost-effective nutrition actions that can make all the difference – things like promoting exclusive breastfeeding for six months and providing fortified food aid to young survivors of humanitarian disasters. Supporting women's agricultural work is another essential component.

Normally, changes in food and farm policy are made incrementally. Given everything that is going on, though, we need bolder, more determined thinking about how policies can better meet the needs that the world is now facing. The 2012 Hunger Report has plenty of ideas to move us in the right direction.

 +View or order the 2012 Hunger Report at www.bread.org/hungerreport.

Todd Post is senior editor with Bread for the World Institute.

The U.S. agriculture system is heavily dependent on immigration labor. One of the repercussions of increasingly hostile conditions against unauthorized immigrants has been a shortage of farm labor. Photo Credit: Laura Elizabeth Pohl

Almost three-fourths of all U.S. hired farm workers are immigrants, most of them unauthorized. The U.S. food system—particularly fruit and vegetable production—depends on immigrants more than any other sector of the U.S. economy.

Immigrant farm workers fill low-wage jobs that citizens are reluctant to take. Attempts to recruit citizens for farm worker jobs have failed; without immigrant farm workers, our country’s production of fruits and vegetables could decrease. The Bread for the World Institute will address the complicated issue of immigrant farm workers and the U.S. food system in our 2012 Hunger Report, Rebalancing Act: Updating U.S. Food and Farm Policy.  

In spite of their key role in feeding the American population, unauthorized immigrant farm workers labor under increasingly hostile conditions. In addition to stepped-up pressure from immigration enforcement, immigrant farm workers’ unauthorized legal status, low wages, and inconsistent work schedule contribute to a precarious economic state. Due to their immigration status and socioeconomic challenges, America’s food producers sometimes struggle with food insecurity.

Migrant workers from Mexico pick cucumbers in Blackwater, Virginia, in July 2011. Many farmers say that without migrant labor, their crops would never get picked. Photo Credit: Laura Elizabeth Pohl

The Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits and Security bill (AgJOBS) was developed in 2000 by farmers and farm worker advocates to regularize the status of workers in the agriculture sector. Public concern about unauthorized immigration has held up prospects of enacting the bill into law.

Immigrant farm workers should have a legal means of being in the United States. The approximately 1.1 million unauthorized immigrant farm laborers in the United States do work that citizens will not perform and that farmers need.

The current system separates immigrant families and leaves farmers with an unstable workforce. In addition to fair enforcement of immigration laws, the United States needs a way to legalize farm workers and reform our agricultural guest worker programs to support both immigrant families and farmers.  

+The 2012 Hunger Report will be released at www.hungerreport.org on Monday, Nov. 21.

Andrew Wainer is an immigration policy analyst with Bread for the World Institute.

An immigrant worker on a small farm in Duffield, VA, picks tomatoes during the summer of 2011. Bread for the World Institute's 2012 Hunger Report focuses on the need to update U.S. food and farm policies, including providing support to small- and medium-sized farmers. (Photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl)

Next Monday, Nov. 21, we will release our 2012 Hunger Report, Rebalancing Act: Updating U.S. Food and Farm Policies. The release of the report is timely for many reasons -- among them, the imminent reauthorization of the U.S. farm bill.

Many Bread members worked to improve the farm bill the last time it was revamped in 2007 to 2008. One of our main messages back then -- "The farm bill is important to everyone who eats" -- is just as true now. The farm bill allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to shape our country’s food production system. It has an even greater impact on hungry and poor people than on the rest of the U.S. population because it contains the budget for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (formerly food stamps).

The 2012 Hunger Report, then, provides information and policy recommendations to support Bread members in working to make the next farm bill a better tool for reducing hunger and poor nutrition in America. Unlike our 2007 Hunger Report, which was called Healthy Food, Farms, and Families, this year's report places far more emphasis on aligning farm policies with achieving better nutrition outcomes for all Americans.

U.S. farm policy needs to ensure a safe and affordable food supply, protect the natural resources that agricultural production depends on, and produce nutritious foods. A cursory look shows that the goal of producing nutritious foods is badly in need of attention. In fact, the United States does not produce enough fruits and vegetables for Americans to meet the recommended daily allowances (RDAs) of vitamins and minerals. Current policies favor production of calories, not nutrients. Thus, a rebalancing towards the production of healthy foods is vital.

Rebalancing Act is largely focused on bringing food and farm policies into alignment, especially in ways that could reduce hunger and malnutrition in low-income households. For example, policies that support small and medium-size farmers in supplying school meal programs with healthier foods could help both farmers and the millions of low-income students who depend on school meals for a large share of their nutrients.

Our 2007 work to reform farm policies was an uphill struggle.  The budget environment is much different this year. I said that this report is timely. Two days after its release, in fact, the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, aka the “Super Committee,” is due to present its recommendations to the rest of Congress.  Its mandate: to identify $1.2 trillion over 10 years in U.S. budget cuts. Any plan to find that much in “savings” is highly unlikely to spare farm bill funding from cuts. This time around, the House and Senate agriculture committees may be forced to restructure farm programs.

As Bread gears up to raise questions about hunger and the role of the farm bill in reducing it, I hope you’ll take a good look at the 2012 Hunger Report. I worked on both the 2007 report and on this one, and I think this new edition will be every bit as useful to anyone interested in improving the next farm bill.

+The 2012 Hunger Report will be released at www.hungerreport.org on Monday, Nov. 21.

Todd Post is senior editor at Bread for the World Institute.

Marvin Garcia Salas, a farmer in Chiapas, Mexico, twice migrated to the United States to do farm work before returning home for good. (Photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl)

Bread for the World and Church World Service released a joint fact sheet today calling for integrating U.S. development assistance work in Latin America with domestic immigration policy reform.

The lion’s share of unauthorized immigration to the United States comes from Latin America. And according to the World Bank, “the main motivation for Latin American migration is economic – most people migrate in order to provide better economic conditions for their families.”

But U.S. development policy in Latin America and our domestic immigration policies are not synchronized. As the fact sheet states:

“In order to have a balanced foreign assistance agenda with Mexico and other migrant-sending countries in Latin America, the United States must increase its focus on addressing poverty as one of the causes of migration. These efforts should include poverty reduction and job-creation projects targeted to migrant-sending communities—particularly in rural zones, where poverty is concentrated.”

The analysis for the fact sheet was drawn from a Bread for the World Institute Briefing Paper, “Development and Migration in Rural Mexico.”

 
Migrant workers rest after picking cucumbers all morning on the farm of Ricky Horton (center) in Blackwater, Virginia, July 2011. Photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl/Bread for the World

The 2007 Census of Agriculture reported that the average farmer age was 57 and that 93.5 percent of farmers are white.

But while U.S farm operations are the domain of white, male Baby Boomers, the face of hired farm labor in America is Latino. Only 2.5 percent of farm operators are Hispanic but at least 71 percent of all hired farm laborers in the United States were born in Mexico or Central America. They are also a full two decades younger than farm operators with an average age of 36.

The Department of Agriculture states, “The U.S agricultural population is poised to make a dramatic change – half of all current farmers are likely to retire in the next decade.”  According to the Nebraska-based Center for Rural Affairs (CRA), “Farmers under the age of 35 are fast becoming an endangered species.”

Who is going to replace this cohort of retiring farm operators? One possibility is the approximately 1.1 million hired farm workers currently working in U.S. agriculture and livestock, some of whom have decades of experience working on U.S. farms.

There are a variety of barriers for all prospective farmers: entry costs are high and training is scarce. Due to these barriers, farmers sometimes discourage their own children from succeeding them.

For immigrant farm workers interested in becoming farm managers and operators there’s an additional barrier: Many of them are in the country illegally.

Although they grew up on farms in Mexico, work on farms in the United States, and are accustomed to agricultural work, about half of all U.S. hired farm labor workers are barred from an agricultural career ladder due to their immigration status.

While some unauthorized immigrants would not choose to stay in agriculture – even in a managerial or supervisory role – certainly some would choose to continue on the farm and could be a key source of agricultural human capital renewal if there was a career path they could access.

The Center for Rural Affairs is exploring the issue of Latino farmers in Nebraska, many of whom are immigrants who have regularized their status. One CRA reports states that Latino farmers, “learned farming and/or ranching skills while being raised on a farm. This knowledge was passed on to them through family and cultural heritage.”

Mexican immigrants come disproportionately from rural communities and many of them were small farmers in their home countries. As farming has becomes less accessible and attractive to American youth, we have a source of human capital renewal already working on U.S. farms.

The only question is whether we’ll be foresighted enough to try to benefit from it.

Note: Bread for the World has not taken a legislative position on the issue/issues covered in this blog post.

Demographic shifts in Mexico mean that over the long-term fewer young people – like these high schoolers in San Miguel Huautal, Oaxaca - are entering the workforce. This also means that fewer young Mexicans who can't find jobs will choose to go to the United States. Photo credit: Laura Elizabeth Pohl

While Washington has focused on jobs and the budget this summer, there’s been a subtle but undeniable shift in the national immigration discussion.  

Traditionally, the United States has focused on two poles in its immigration discourse:

1) How do immigrants damage or enhance the economy and culture?

2) How do we either keep unauthorized immigrants out, or better integrate them into our economy and society?

We don’t see as much meaningful analysis of the international causes of unauthorized immigration or of the links between underdevelopment in Mexico (the source of almost 60 percent of all unauthorized immigration) and migration to the United States.

But that’s changing.

In July, The New York Times launched a series, “Immigration Upended,” whose first article argued that a mix of factors in Mexico—including lower birthrates and better educational and economic opportunities—have significantly slowed the flow of immigrants to the United States. The article states that in 2010, fewer than 100,000 unauthorized immigrants from Mexico settled in the United States, down from more than 500,000 per year in the 2000s.

It may be difficult to envision in the current political climate but one day the flow of unauthorized immigration from Mexico is going to end or at least decline steeply. And the cause may not be a U.S. legislative change. It certainly won’t be border enforcement. Demographic changes are already playing a significant role, helped along by moderate improvements in Mexican poverty rates.

As recently as the 1970s, Mexican women were having an average of seven children. In 2010, the average was less than two children. Because population growth is slowing, the population is aging. There are fewer Mexican young people entering the workforce—so there are also fewer who can’t find adequate jobs and therefore choose to go to the United States.

If Mexican demographic trends continue, in 20 or 30 years the United States may be negotiating how to entice Mexican laborers to supplement our own shrinking workforce.

But we are not there yet.

When it comes to the causes of the decrease in unauthorized immigration, the Times article underestimates the impact of the current U.S. recession and overstates the impact of economic development in Mexico over the past 10 to 15 years.

Mexico has been successful in decreasing poverty rates since 2000, but about 40 percent of the population (roughly 50 million people) continues to live in moderate or severe poverty. There is still a large group of potential immigrants waiting in Mexico for the U.S. economy to improve.

We will know whether changes in Mexico have truly had a significant effect on immigration flows only when more low-skill jobs become available in the U.S. economy. If immigration doesn’t begin to increase again once there are unfilled jobs in the United States; that will better indicate the actual impact of factors within Mexico.

It is the combination of negatives in the United States (the recession, anti-immigrant laws) and socioeconomic improvements in Mexico (decreased poverty, increased education, lower birthrates) that have eased migration pressures.  

But it’s great that publications like The New York Times are paying attention to socioeconomic changes in Mexico and their impact on immigration rather than focusing only on the domestic debate.  Over the long run – and independent of powerful demographics trends – significant, sustainable reductions in poverty in Mexico have the potential to slow unauthorized immigration.

Note: Bread for the World has not taken a legislative position on the issue/issues covered in this blog post.

+Watch a video on migration and poverty in rural mexio on the Bread Blog.