Category: Demographics

Collapse of migration to the Mexican U.S. border

The Darién Gap: In March 2025, only 194 migrants—primarily from Venezuela, Colombia, and Nepal—crossed from Colombia into Panama through the jungle, down from nearly 37,000 in March 2023. (cbpdata.adamisacson,com).

At the U.S.-Mexico border: Encounters between formal ports of entry fell 94% in February 2025 compared to peak levels. In FY2023, over 2.4 million individuals were encountered at the southern border, with over one million crossing illegally between ports of entry, a record volume. In early 2024 irregular entries began to decline significantly due to Biden Administration disincentives to cross illegally. The CBP One App was cancelled on January 20. That app had been used by upwards one million persons to apply for asylum at legal ports of entry.

Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino attributes the drop to aggressive enforcement measures on the Darien Gap.  Its crackdown on the Darien Gap routes and deportations of non-regional migrants has been pivotal. Mexico, under U.S. diplomatic pressure, has reinforced checkpoints, restricted internal transit, and escalated deportations. Bilateral agreements with Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Honduras have improved coordination and data sharing.

Military to meet a non-existent threat

The Trump Administration’s intent on using the military to counter border crossing has become both pointless and a matter of constitutional controversy. A January 20 executive order directed officials to report back about the propriety of using the Insurrection Act at and along the border. That report is due today, April 20. Trump authorized on April 11 the military to take control of federal land along the U.S.-Mexico border. Per Steve Vladeck, that move “seems designed to allow the military to arrest non-citizens trying to enter the country unlawfully on the ground that they are trespassing on military property. The President’s power to use the military for domestic law enforcement is a big deal—and has, historically, been a matter of substantial controversy.” (Go here).

 

Education and age disparities between foreign-born and U.S. born

J.D. Vance has argued that immigration has worked to the disadvantage of American workers. This argument can be easily made with respect to the wave of Latin American immigrants between the 1980s and the financial crisis of 2007-2008. A very high percentage neither had a high school degree nor spoke English proficiently. This created a very vulnerable workforce of perhaps 8 million workers.

The argument weakens significantly with respect to more recent immigration. I cannot find overall figures of the educational status of immigrants by date of immigration. But with the shift of most migration coming from Latin America to coming from elsewhere, the median educational status of recent immigrants has probably gone well above 50%. We see that in profiles of immigrants from China, India, and Nigeria.  A typical foreign-born worker with a college degree today earns more and a U.S. born worker with a college degree, Simple comparisons of this sort are becoming less meaningful as second generation immigrants increasingly occupy jobs. Keep in mind that immigration is a long game, of multiple generations.

High School Completion Rates 2000 vs 2020

In 2000, foreign-born adults were far less likely to have finished high school than U.S.-born adults. Only about 67% of foreign-born persons age 25+ had completed high school, meaning roughly 33% lacked a high school diploma, compared to just 13% of U.S.-born in that year. By 2020, this gap had narrowed but persisted. Around a quarter of immigrants did not have a high school diploma (approximately 25%), versus under 10% of U.S.-born adults (around 7–8%)

College Degree Attainment 2000 vs 2020

In 2000, about a quarter of foreign-born Americans held a college degree or higher, which was only slightly lower than (and in some cases on par with) the native-born rate. By 2020, immigrants had greatly improved in higher education: roughly 35% of foreign-born adults had a bachelor’s degree or more, comparable to 36% of U.S.-born adults. As noted above, Asian immigration since about 2010 has significantly included higher educated persons, as well has Nigerian immigration been higher – education oriented.

Median Wage Disparities 2000 vs. 2020

In 2000, immigrant workers earned roughly 77% of natives’ median wage around 2000. Two decades later, the gap persisted but narrowed. In 2020, the median usual weekly wage was $89%.  Higher education reduces the gap: immigrants with a college degree actually  surpass natives, about $1,492/week vs $1,409 for native born in 2020.

The importance of sector differences

The wage disparity, of course is partly explained by industry/sector differences. Immigrants are disproportionately employed in certain lower-paying sectors (like agriculture, hospitality, and some manufacturing roles) and underrepresented in some higher-paying occupations.

 

 

CBO: without immigration total population to decline in 2033

The Congressional Budget Office makes a new population forecast (revising one in 2024, here) which says that without immigration, the country’s population will begin to decline in 2033. A revised rate of population growth generally slows over the next 30 years, from an average of 0.4% a year between 2025 and 2035 to an average of 0.1% a year between 2036 and 2055.  This is due in part a lower of the fertility rate from 1.75 noted in the 2024 forecast to 1.6 on the long run. Net immigration, projected at 1.1 million a year, becomes an increasingly important source of population growth period without immigration, the population would shrink beginning in 2033.

This forecast makes immigration, which is more concentrated in working ages than the existing population (due to fewer children coming in), even more important in the growth of the working population. The prime age (25-54) population has been declining since about 2020. Only with immigration, which I have estimated addd 600,000 persons to the workforce, is the working age population increasing.

More detail:

The CBO estimates that pre-Biden the net immigration rate was about 920,000 per year. After three explosive years under Biden, when net immigration averaged 2.9 million (most of humanitarian parole and asylum applicants), and two last years averaging 1.75 million, the CBO projects for 2027 – 2055 at 1.1 million immigratns. This 1.1 million estimate, like past ones, are the sum of a complex sorting out of new and revised legal status, netting out to a round number of the net number of persons from abroad expected to live here indefinitely.

How much do immigrants impact the total workforce?

I recently posted an estimate that permanent (green card) immigration adds roughly 720,000 new employed persons to the workforce.  How much do they contribute to the flow of all persons entering into and exiting employment (due to death and retirement)?

To sum up: Current immigration contributes to new worker growth and to total worker growth net of retirements.  Not as dramatically as some conjecture. However, if it is important to keep the working age population growing, then new immigrants every year are very important.

First, let’s look at new entrants.  Think of streams of persons entering into the job market.

In 2025, about four million U.S. born persons will turn 18. As a lifetime cohort group, at any time in prime working age, about 80% will be employed, or about 3.2 million. Thus one can say that they will add 3.2 million to employment rolls.

On the surface, today, first time immigrant workers (720,000) are about 22% of new these U.S. born workers. but there are expected fewer U.S. born persons turning 18 in 2035, and fewer new workers – 2.9 million. If we keep immigration at the same level, in 2025 immigrant workers will be about 25% of new job holders.

If you look at the contribution of new immigrants to the total stock of workers, the contribution of new immigrants soars. U.S. born workers are retiring in hordes due to aging-out, resulting in there being an annual net decline of all U.S. born workers of about 200,000. This net loss will increase, part to aging, part to low fertility.  Thus, 730,000 new foreign born workers compensate for an overall decline of U.S. born workers.

However, consider that foreign born workers are also aging. The net change in immigrant workers (720,000 new entrants less many retiring due to aging) is most likely probably slightly or moderately positive. This will continue to be positive, as today new immigrants are more into working age than U.S. born persons.  But before too long that will not be the case as the foreign-born population ages overall.

The Census expects the total workforce to grow by about 500,000 a year – about one third of one percent a year. This increase is due in part to people expected to work later in life. For example, Census expects that the number of 65+ working will increase from 2022 to as soon as 2032 by about on average 400,000 a year. This shows that there is more than immigration and young entrants to the growth of our workforce.

 

 

How Many American live outside the US?

Estimates of the number of Americans living outside the United States are very rough and quite varied. Heitor David Pinto delved into the complex way in which one would define and an American (see note below). He does not take into account how many in his estimate may be spending part time abroad and part time in the United States. Overall, he estimates that there are about 5.5 million U.S. citizens who are living outside the country.  1.2 million citizens per his estimate live in Mexico and one million live in Canada. About 300,000 live in the United Kingdom. 280,000 live in Isreal, the equivalent to about 3% of the non-Arab population of Isreal.

Note that the organization promoting Pinto’s estimate, the Associations of Americans Resident Overseas, is most likely to favor a high estimate

How Pinto came to his estimate

The United Nations estimates that about 3 million American live outside the U.S. (go here).

Pinto started from data compiled by the United Nations for 2020 from the most recent census of every country, and updated it with U.S. census data for 2022 and with census data for the years 2010 – 2023 from some individual countries. The census data of each country shows the number of people residing there who were born in each other country so, in the case of Americans abroad, it means only people born in the U.S. Pinto then took the more detailed census data from some countries showing parents’ place of birth to estimate the number of Americans born there from a parent who was born in the U.S., and applied it to all other countries proportionally.

His analysis presents the number of U.S. citizens living abroad as people born in the U.S. plus those born abroad with at least a parent who was born in the U.S. (so it includes the so-called “accidental Americans”). He also included naturalized citizens, assuming that they have the same emigration rate from the U.S. as the rest of the U.S. population. This analysis is an admitted simplification, as it includes some people who are not U.S. citizens (those born in the U.S. from foreign diplomats, or born abroad from American parents who didn’t reside in the U.S. for enough years to transmit U.S. citizenship, or those who renounced U.S. citizenship). But there is no data available to estimate these particular cases and their numbers are thought to be relatively small. Mr. Pinto’s estimate does not include military personnel or their families.

Indians in the US: a thriving and growing community

Today there are about 3 million persons in the United states who were born in India, compared to one million in 2000.  That is a compound annual rate of growth of 5% and that does not take into account the children whom first generation indians are producing. (The annual growth rate for the entire popution was about 0.9%).

Here are some facts, drawn from 2023 by the Migration Policy Institute. They capture how Indians have a distinct advantage over other immigrants and even native born persons in terms of thriving economically.  It is very interesting that Indian immigrants are now quite visible among Republican Party ranks, just as they are among Conservative Party ranks in the United kingdom.

The distinctive profile of Indian immigrants in America today is influenced by several factors that are not readily apparent. The surge in their arrival matched the growing demand for STEM talent. As with most other recent immigrants, they have come well educated and at prime working age. In very different specific ways they are similar to the arrival of German Jews in the 1930s whose talents in science and the arts were quickly absorbed.  Who are the Einsteins and Billy Wilders among our 3 million Indians?

The educational head start: Among persons 25 years or older, 81% of Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 35% of all immigrants and 36% of native born. This means that the second generation of Indians grow up in an educated household.

Income is higher: In 2023, households headed by an Indian immigrant had a median annual income of $166,200, compared to $78,700 for all immigrant-led and $77,600 for native-led households. Indian immigrants were roughly half as likely to be in poverty (6 percent) as immigrants overall (14 percent) or the U.S. born (12 percent). Poverty is an income below $30,900 for a family of four in 2023. I suspect that many Indians in poverty are actually students.

Indians have better health insurance coverage: In 2023, just 4 percent of immigrants from India were uninsured, compared to 6 percent of the native born and 18 percent of the overall foreign-born population. Indian immigrants were more likely to be covered by private health insurance than the overall foreign-born and U.S.-born populations, reflecting their strong labor force participation and employment in high-skilled jobs that often come with employer-provided health insurance.

The intergenerational factor: In 2023 their median age was 42 years old, compared to 47 for all immigrants and 37 for the native-born population. This is due to the high number of working-age adults: 81 percent of all Indian immigrants were ages 18 to 64 and 58 percent of the native born.  Behind these figures is that high number of children born to immigrants and who are now counted, of course, as native born.  Immigration is a multi-generational phenomenon – immigrants being more of working age tend to produce relatively more children.

Immigrant parents have higher educational expectations for their children

A study done in 2016 sought to compare the K-12 education experience of children of foreign-born parents with children of U.S. born parents.

The base line economic profile of these households shows that immigrant households overall have lower economic status (though there is the hour glass effect of relatively many immigrant households with little formal education and at the other end a concentration of highly educated immigrants).

The proportion enrolled in charter schools was twice as large among students of immigrant parents as among those with native parents: 12% versus 6%. On the other hand, the proportion enrolled in private schools was only about half as large: 6% versus 10%.

The proportion of students earning “mostly A” grades was 51% among students with immigrant parents and 48% among those with native-born parents. The proportion of parents contacted by their child’s school, due to a learning problem the child was having, was 16% in the immigrant group, versus 22% of U.S.-born parents who had been similarly contacted. The proportion of students diagnosed with a psychological or physical disability was 14% in the immigrant parent group, versus. 24% so diagnosed in the native-born parent group. The study notably did not address if immigrant parents were more concerned about stigmatizing their children.

The proportion of parents contacted by their child’s school, due to a conduct or disciplinary problem the child was creating, was 12% in the immigrant group versus 17% of U.S.-born parents who had been similarly contacted. The proportion of students who had ever been suspended or expelled from school was 4% versus 7%.

The study reported that immigrant children are more likely to live in two parent households.

91% of immigrant parents expected their children to get a college degree, which was significantly higher than the 72% of native parents.  57% of immigrant parents expected their children to get graduate or professional degrees, versus 36% of native parents. Students with immigrant parents who expected them to get graduate or professional degrees were more likely to get A’s in school than those whose parents had lower expectations (57% versus 34%). This was the case even after adjusting for the parents’ education level and family income, the student’s grade level and sex, and whether the student lived with two married birth parents.

Lant Pritchett and rotational migration

Lant Pritchett challenges us to think radically about the global allocation of workers over the next 100 years. He wants us to think about huge numbers of temporary workers. This idea now is completely off the table in the United States. But it’s an idea whose time may be coming.

He is currently Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics in the School of Public Policy and the co-founder and Research Director of Labor Mobility Partnerships. He is a long-time advocate for easing the barriers to global mobility.

I’ve addressed the imbalance between rich and emerging country workforce demographics. Part of the picture is the rise in formal education in the emerging countries, which allows their workers to be more productive.

Among industrialized countries, production of goods and services and the financing of retirement has during the 20th century required much more working age persons as a ratio of older persons.

Rich, industrialized countries will experience shrinking labor forces and increasing elderly populations, while poorer regions, particularly in Africa and South Asia, will see substantial growth in their labor force-aged populations. ​

Pritchett sees these demographic differences as creating a massive opportunity for “age arbitrage,” where young workers from labor-abundant countries can move to labor-scarce, ageing societies through expanded legal pathways, including rotational labor mobility. ​ by 2050, there could be 130 to 300 million people working in rich countries on a rotational basis, depending on various assumptions about labor force participation and migration policies. ​

He argues that with the right legal and administrative arrangements, rotational labor mobility can be implemented in a safe, orderly, and rights-respecting way, benefiting all parties involved. ​

Per Pritchett, a “well-regulated and orderly system for rotational labor force mobility” threads the three-fold political needle facing rich societies by acknowledging three questions about who can legally reside and work in their country:

(1) Who is the “future of us”—who is to be allowed to live and work in our country on a direct expected pathway to citizenship and hence participate in the shaping of the future of “our” society and culture and politics,

(2) Who will we admit as “movers of distress”—how will our country act with respect to refugees, asylum seekers, and those fleeing intolerable conditions (a category which will expand with climate change), and

(3) Who will we allow to legally reside and work in our country on a fixed term basis, and under what terms and conditions (including restrictions on occupations, sectors, regions), in order to help us meet our labor force needs?

One aspect of very large temporary worker flows is who captures the retirement contributions of these workers, the host country or the sending country?

Some facts: From 2020 to 2050 the population 65+ in Italy will grow by 5.4 million (39%) but the population 15-64 will fall by 12.4 million (33%). The projected ratio of the labor force to those 65+ will fall to less than one worker for every person 65+. This is an extreme case of demographic change. In the United States, the demographics are relatively young due to immigration. The ratio between the 15-64 cohort and 65 + shows this trend: 1950, 7.75; 2000, 5.17; 2022, 3.82; 2050, 2.8.

Fertility rates of some countries

Data as of 2023. The replacement rate is 2.1. The global fertility rate of 2.41 is over 2.1 due to African and Middle Eastern countries. The American fertility is elevated by immigration in that recent immigrants are more concentrated in child-bearing years than is the U.S. born population (Immigrants as birthing factory).

Nigeria                  5.13

The World          2.41

Indonesia           2.11

India                       2.0

Russia                   1.82

United States    1.78

China                     1.70

France                   1.68

Brazil                      1.66

UK                           1.44

Germany             1.35

Canada                1.26

Italy                         1.21

 

Latino resentment about surge of temporary immigrants

Propublica reports, “Across the U.S., Latino immigrants who’ve been in the country a long time felt that asylum-seekers got preferential treatment. “Those of us who have been here for years get nothing,” said one woman from Mexico who has lived in Wisconsin for decades.

“ProPublica interviewed dozens of long-established Latino immigrants and their U.S.-born relatives in cities like Denver and Chicago and in small towns along the Texas border. Over and over, they spoke of feeling resentment as they watched the government ease the transition of large numbers of asylum-seekers into the U.S. by giving them access to work permits and IDs, and in some cities spending millions of dollars to provide them with food and shelter.”

The report summarizes well the problem which the Biden administration created:

In the months leading up to the presidential election, numerous polls picked up on the kinds of frustrations felt by Rosa and her family. Those polls indicated that many voters considered immigration one of the most pressing challenges facing the country and that they were disappointed in the Biden administration’s record.

Biden had come into office in 2021 promising a more humane approach to immigration after four years of more restrictive policies during the first Trump administration. But record numbers of immigrants who were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border began to overwhelm the system. While the Biden administration avoided talking about the border situation like a crisis, the way Trump and the GOP had, outspoken critics like Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott amplified the message that things at the border were out of control while he arranged to bus thousands of immigrants to Democrat-controlled big cities around the country. In Whitewater, hundreds of Nicaraguans arrived on their own to fill jobs in local factories, and many of them drove to work without licenses, putting a strain on the small local police department with only one Spanish-speaking officer.

While the Biden administration kept a Trump expulsion policy in place for three years, it also created temporary parole programs and an app to allow asylum-seekers to make appointments to cross the border. The result was that hundreds of thousands more immigrants were allowed to come into the country and apply for work permits, but the efforts didn’t assuage the administration’s critics on the right or left.