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

Abstract

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.

Migration and the Demographic Shift

“…In other words, the younger the potential migrant, the larger the net gain from migrating and thus the higher the probability of moving. Hence, migration will be affected by the share of young individuals in the source country: the larger it is, the higher emigration will be for a given wage differential, net of costs (Clark et al, 2002). In addition, high fertility (thus a high supply of young labor) and generational crowding, combined with low local labor demand, also stimulates emigration.…”

Too many, too fast? Dynamics of net migration in OECD, 1984–2001

“…To gauge the differences between short-and long-term consequences of a given stimulus for migration, we simulate the results of a given scenario (see Clark et al, 2002 for a similar study). The scenario we have chosen assumes a simultaneous one-off one-SD increase in relative income, employment and labour force participation, and a decrease in the lagged birth rate.…”

“…The dependent variable is the net migration rate calculated according to Eurostat's (2004) methodology. 2 The covariates include a selection of variables used in previous studies on the topic (Hatton and Williamson, 1998, 2003Rotte and Vogler, 1998;Clark et al, 2002;Fertig, 2001;Pedersen et al, 2004;Mayda, 2004), such as relative income, employment opportunities, immigrant population and demographic variables. We find that migration indeed tends to overreact to changes in economic conditions.…”

An Empirical Test of a Neo-Malthusian Theory of Fertility Change

“…Data on international migration, needed to test the second hypothesis, are notoriously difficult to get. The best data exist on migration to the US, for which Clark, Hatton and Williamson (2002) Testing the third hypothesis is in some sense impossible. This is because according to Abernethy (1999) what matters are subjective perceptions of prosperity and these are of course next to impossible to measure.…”