The Borjas Blog

Trends in Illegal Immigration

The Pew Hispanic Center has an interesting report on the illegal immigrant population in the United States. The Los Angeles Times emphasizes one particularly interesting tidbit:

After years of rapid growth, illegal immigration is slowing down in California, with the state's share of the nation's estimated 11.9 million undocumented migrants dropping to 22% from 42% in 1990, the study showed.

That's quite a drop in California's magnetic attraction for illegal immigrants. The Pew study uses data for March 2008--so whatever is going on has nothing to do with the current economic crisis. Moreover, I don't think California took any actions making it more unpleasant for illegal immigrants to work in that state in recent years (as neighboring Arizona did). So a very interesting question arises: why exactly has the proportion of illegal immigrants living in California dropped from 42% to 22%?

Maybe the very large number of low-skill immigrants in California reduced economic opportunities for this group so much that the more recent flows of illegal immigrants decided they could be better off elsewhere. That's a shocker: Maybe the laws of supply and demand work after all.

Smearing CIS

I've been following the work of the Center for Immigration Studies since the mid-1990s. They regularly publish empirical research on immigration, and I happen to be friends with both the head of the center, Mark Krikorian, and its research director, Steve Camarota. So it is with bizarre fascination that I watch from afar as the Southern Poverty Law Center attempts to tarnish what CIS does.

In fact, CIS has made it possible for me to disseminate my technical research to a much wider audience. At least two or three times, I have taken some of my technical work, rewritten it in English, and this readable version has been distributed as a CIS backgrounder. It seems to me that the smearing effort's objective is simply to silence a group that has been an influential critic of current immigration policy.

A labor economist friend--who is very well known in the profession--was once doing some research and asked me if I knew of any other credible data on a particular topic aside from the one that had been published in a backgrounder authored by Steve Camarota. He then added that he trusted the factual evidence that CIS publishes in its internally produced backgrounders. Why, I asked. For a very simple reason, he said: there were tons of people out there trying to discredit CIS and it would really help their cause if CIS was sloppy in its empirical work. So he was pretty sure that the empirical evidence went through far more layers of check and double-check than the stuff that regularly comes out in academic journals.

Even if one disagrees with how CIS interprets the evidence, their research is credible, reliable, and in no way anti-Hispanic. In fact, I think it helps to inform the immigration debate. What's wrong with letting a thousand flowers bloom?