What Fundamentals Drive World Migration?

migration, poverty, demographic economics, emigration, immigration

Vanishing Third World Emigrants?

This paper documents a stylized fact: the Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current economic crisis will serve only to accelerate those trends. The paper estimates the economic and demographic fundamentals driving these emigration life cycles to the United States since 1970 – income and education gaps between the US and the sending country, poverty traps and the size of the cohort at risk in the sending country, and the migrant stock in the US. It then projects the life cycle up to 2024. The projections imply that pressure on Third World emigration over the next two decades will not increase, after which it will decline. It also suggests that future US immigrants will be more African and less Hispanic than in the past.Third World, emigration, development, life cycle

What Fundamentals Drive World Migration?

OECD governments note rising immigration with alarm and grapple with policies aimed at selecting certain migrants and keeping out others. Economists appear to be well armed to advise governments since they are responsible for an impressive literature that examines the characteristics of individual immigrants, their absorption and the consequences of their migration on both sending and receiving regions. Economists are, however, much less well armed to speak to the determinants of the world migrations that give rise to public alarm. This paper offers a quantitative assessment of the economic and demographic fundamentals that have driven and are driving world migration, across different historical epochs and around the world. The paper is organized around three questions: How do the standard theories of migration perform when confronted with evidence drawn from more than a century of world migration experience? How do inequality and poverty influence world migration? Is it useful to distinguish between migration pressure and migration ex-post, or between the potential demand for visas and the actual use of them?

Demographic and Economic Pressure on Emigration Out of Africa

Two of the main forces driving European emigration in the late nineteenth century were real wage gaps between sending and receiving regions and demographic booms in the low-wage sending regions (directly augmenting the supply of potential movers as well as indirectly making already-measured employment conditions less attractive). These two features are even more prominent in Africa today, but do or can Africans respond to them with the same elasticity as in the days of 'free' migration? Our new estimates of net migration and labor market performance for the countries of sub-Saharan Africa suggest that exactly the same forces are at work driving African across-border migration today. Rapid growth in the cohort of young potential migrants, population pressure on the resource base, and poor economic performance are the main forces driving African migration. A century ago, more modest demographic forces in Europe were accompanied by strong catching-up economic growth in the low-wage emigrant regions, followed by a slowdown in already-modest demographic growth. Yet, migrations were still mass. In Africa today, economic growth has faltered, its economies have fallen further behind the high-wage OECD leaders, and there is a demographic speed up in the making. Our estimates suggest that the pressure on emigration out of Africa will intensify, manifested in part by a growing demand for entrance into high-wage OECD labor markets.

International Migration in the Long-Run: Positive Selection, Negative Selection and Policy

Most labor scarce overseas countries moved decisively to restrict their immigration during the first third of the 20th century. This autarchic retreat from unrestricted and even publicly-subsidized immigration in the first global century before World War I to the quotas and bans introduced afterwards was the result of a combination of factors: public hostility towards new immigrants of lower quality public assessment of the impact of those immigrants on a deteriorating labor market, political participation of those impacted, and, as a triggering mechanism, the sudden shocks to the labor market delivered by the 1890s depression, the Great War, postwar adjustment and the great depression. The paper documents the secular drift from very positive to much more negative immigrant selection which took place in the first global century after 1820 and in the second global century after 1950, and seeks explanations for it. It then explores the political economy of immigrant restriction in the past and seeks historical lessons for the present.

Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Policy in Europe

The number of refugees worldwide is now 12 million, up from 3 million in the early 1970s. And the number seeking asylum in the developed world increased tenfold, from about 50,000 per annum to half a million over the same period. Governments and international agencies have grappled with the twin problems of providing adequate humanitarian assistance in the Third World and avoiding floods of unwanted asylum seekers arriving on the doorsteps of the First World. This is an issue that is long on rhetoric, as newspaper reports testify, but surprisingly short on economic analysis. This paper draws on the recent literature, and ongoing research, to address a series of questions that are relevant to the debate. First, we examine the causes of refugee displacements and asylum flows, focusing on the effects of conflict, political upheaval and economic incentives to migrate. Second, we examine the evolution of policies towards asylum seekers and the effects of those policies, particularly in Europe. Finally, we ask whether greater international coordination could produce better outcomes for refugee-receiving countries and for the refugees themselves.

What Determines Immigration's Impact? Comparing Two Global Centuries

Can history shed light on the modern debate about immigration%u2019s labor market impact in high wage economies? This paper examines the relationship between migration and capital flows in the age of mass migration before 1914, the so-called first global century. It then assesses the effects of immigration on wages and employment with and without international capital mobility in first global century and today, that is, the second global century. The paper then explores the links between these economic relationships and immigration policy. It concludes with an explanation for the apparent difference in immigration%u2019s impact in the two global centuries, and thus on policy.

Explaining US Immigration 1971-1998

In this paper we develop and estimate a model to explain the level and source country composition of immigration to the United States since the early 1970s. The model incorporates ratios to the US of source country income and education, and demographic structure, as well as relative inequality as suggested by the Roy model applied to migrant selection. In addition we incorporate the 'friends and relatives effect' as reflected in the stock of previous immigrants and a variety of variables representing different dimensions of the immigration quotas set by policy. We estimate our immigration model on a panel of 81 source countries for the years 1971 to 1998. The results strongly support the influence of economic and demographic variables and geographic characteristics as well as policy variables. We use the results to shed light on the factors that influenced the composition of US immigration by source region. And we provide a further check on its plausibility by simulating the effects of the key changes in immigration policy since the late 1970s.

Where Do U.S. Immigrants Come From, and Why?

The United States has experienced rising immigration levels and changing source since the 1950s. The changes in source have been attributed to the 1965 Amendments to the Immigration Act that abolished country-quotas and replaced them with a system that emphasized family reunification. Some believed that the Amendments would not change the 'traditional' sources of US immigrants. Given this view, it seems all the more remarkable that the sources of immigration changed so dramatically. This paper isolates the economic and demographic fundamentals that determined immigration rates by source from 1971 to 1998 -- income, education, demographic composition and inequality. The paper also allows for persistence - big US foreign-born stocks implying a strong 'friends and neighbors' pull on current immigrant flows. Specific policy variables are included which are derived directly from the quotas allocated to different visa categories. Parameter estimates from the panel data are then used to implement counterfactual simulations that serve to isolate the effects of immigration policy as well as source-country economic and demographic conditions.

Mass Migration, Commodity Market Integration and Real Wage Convergence: The Late Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy

As part of a process that has been at work since 1850, real wages among the current OECD countries converged during the late 19th century. The convergence was pronounced as that which we have seen in the post World War Il period. This paper uses computable general equilibrium models to isolate the sources of that economic convergence by assessing the relative performance of the two most important economies in the Old World and the New -- Britain and the USA. It turns out that between 1870 and 1910, the convergence forces that mattered were those that generated by commodity price convergence, stresses by Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin, and mass migration, stressed by Knut Wicksell. It turns out that offsetting forces were contributing to late 19th century divergence, a finding consistent with economic historians' traditional attention to Britain's alleged failure and America's spectacular rise to industrial supremacy. The convergence forces, however, dominated for most of the period.