Vanishing Third World Emigrants?

Abstract

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