Thanks to Immigration News Blog for picking up the NY Times story on Shenzhen, the vast fulcrum of China’s mammoth internal worker migration movement. There are 150 million internal migrants within China. This number compares to the 200 million estimated transborder migrants currently in the work. Assuming a labor force participation rate of 80%, this means there are 30 million more internal migrant workers in China than the entire American workforce. Internal migration provides almost all the workers for the manufacturing centers along the coast, including Shenzhen, which is near Hong Kong.
From this article:

Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing village in the Pearl River delta, next to Hong Kong, when it was decreed a special economic zone in 1980 by the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. Since then, the city has grown at an annual rate of 28 percent, though it slowed to 15 percent in 2005.

And…

Yu Di, a 19-year-old from Hubei Province with a junior high school education, said he worked in a grimy watch-casing factory, loading and unloading heavy boxes from a truck 11 hours a day, six days a week. With a salary of about $80 a month — and no benefits — Mr. Yu has to borrow money from his parents just to cover his living expenses. He lives in a dim and filthy dorm room, crammed with 12 bunk beds and mattresses made of bare springs covered with cardboard. “The only thing I regret is not working hard in school,” he said.

In the room next door, Zhou Hailin, 20, who grew up in Guang’an, the hometown of Deng Xiaoping, seems better off. Mr. Zhou, who came to the city four years ago, earns about $120 a month as a machinist in the same watch factory.

To do so, though, he must work eight-hour shifts, plus three or four hours of mandatory overtime, six days a week. A typical workday, he said, ends at 10:30 p.m., when he often goes to visit a sister who works in another factory nearby.

The complete article follows….

Continue reading 150 million internal migrants in China today

There are twenty metropolises in the world with at least one million non transient foreign born residents. The United States has more cities with foreign born populations of at least one million than any other country: eight. Asia has only two! This according to a study on migration available on the website of the Migration Policy Institute.
The study pinpoints the cities serving as magnets and ports of entry for huge waves of migration in the past several decades. Old magnets, such as Latin American cities, have become exporters of populations. And the study locates “hyper-diverse” cities, where a large share of the population is foreign born without dominance from one or two countries.
The authors did not address cities with large internally generated in-migration, such as cities in China.
The one million plus foreign born cities are:
Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore
Australia: Melbourne, Sydney
Europe: London, Paris, Moscow
Middle East: Dubai, Medina, Mecca, Riyadh
North America: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington DC.
The United States has 14 cities with between 100,000 and 249,000 foreign born, and 15 cities with between 250,000 and 999,000 foreign born. They are scattered all across the United States.
The authors of this study write that “….answering the question “What are the world’s top urban immigrant destinations?” required drilling down into existing census data from countries on every continent — data that never before had been gathered. Ultimately, data on the foreign born in 150 cities was compiled.
“The data are from a range of years, as country censuses are conducted in different years. Most of the data, however, are from the years 2000 to 2005…The cities mapped in this report are metropolitan areas of 1 million or more people with at least 100,000 foreign-born residents. Data were constructed by examining information on the foreign born for 150 cities in 52 countries.”
The authors explain why there are no Latin American or African cities in this list of twenty:
Latin American and African cities are absent from Figure 1, although they are destinations for internal and international migrants. This reflects the fact that most countries in these regions have a negative rate of net migration, meaning more emigrants leaving then immigrants arriving. Buenos Aires, a long-established immigrant destination, had fewer than 1 million foreign-born residents according to the 2001 Argentine census (approximately 920,000 foreign born), a decrease from earlier censuses. Other megacities in Latin America, such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City, attract far fewer foreign-born residents. If anything, these localities tend to be sources for immigrants to other regions of the world, including North America, Europe, and Japan. For many African countries, the data are simply not available at the urban scale. Even if the data were available, there is little evidence that African cities are attracting large numbers of foreign-born residents, with the exception of some cities in South Africa.
The one million plus cities in the middle east are there because of very large foreign worker populations. The population of Dubai is 80% foreign born.
There are “hyper-diverse cities” where one country is not dominant in the supply of foreign born residents. “Cities that meet this definition include established gateways such as New York, London, and Toronto, which together have approximately 9 million foreign-born residents. Other hyper-diverse cities include Sydney; Amsterdam; Copenhagen; Washington, DC; Hamburg; Munich; San Francisco; and Seattle. Such cities are a product of the globalization of labor that has both economic and cultural implications…..With over two million foreign-born residents, no one group dominates Toronto’s immigrant stock. Nine countries account for half of the foreign-born population, while the rest of the foreign born come from nearly every country in the world.

A columnist in the NY Times says that Mexican men coming to work in the U.S, are relatively poorly educated. “Sixteen percent of the Mexican labor force is working in the United States at any point in time, and, of course, earning higher average wages than laborers in Mexico, so the impact of American policy on Mexico is significant.” Those will more education can get better jobs back home. They are also largely unmarried. Granting legal status to these workers, per the authors, will encourage more Mexican women to come, marry, and create stable, more productive households. The author make me think more carefully about the imbalances in the Mexican and U.S. labor market and the impact on immigration policy.
A better immigration policy would tighten the border, while allowing in more legal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin countries, and require higher levels of education. Young Mexicans would see greater reason to invest in education, to the benefit of all Mexican society, not just those who cross the border. The less educated Mexicans could be some of the biggest winners from immigration reform.
In the United States, employers have a greater incentive to train legal Mexican workers and combine their labors more effectively with capital investment; when the workers are illegal, employers create only the most makeshift of circumstances. The legality and thus physical ease of immigration would also encourage the arrival of more Mexican women, thereby remedying the gender imbalance and encouraging assimilation. In the short run, the greater number of immigrant children would raise costs in the United States for education and health care, but in the longer run those children would produce goods and services and pay taxes.
The column: Economic Scene. “The Immigration Answer? It’s in Mexico’s Classrooms”

Continue reading Why poorer educated Mexican men come work in the U.S.

My thanks to Joe Paduda for alerting me to Health Affair’s articles on the nursing shortage. the shortage is real, will get worse, and is global. So any major new recruitment from abroad takes nurses from other countries. That is the message from a Linda Aiken, a professor of sociology, and director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, School of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Aiken wrote in the Health Affairs blog this month, “Currently, the United States is short an estimated 150,000 nurses. Yet over the next decade, more than 650,000 new jobs in nursing will be created. At the same time, an estimated 450,000 nurses will have retired. By 2020, the nurse shortage is expected to increase to 800,000……The nurse shortage isn’t confined to the U.S. — it’s global. Extracting nurses from other countries would simply bankrupt the international supply of nurses, affecting global health.”
In her 2004 article in Health Affairs, she wrote:
The world’s nurse supply appears insufficient to meet global needs now and in the future. Countries that use the most nurses should make the biggest investments in nursing education in both their own and the developing countries from which they recruit nurses. It is not common for developed countries to invest their international aid in nursing education, and this should change to help build sustainable nursing education infrastructures in developing countries.
Ethical recruitment guidelines provide a strategy for responsibly managing international nurse recruitment, although to date the first test case—the U.K. Department of Health guidelines—has been disappointing. Since 1999, when those guidelines were established, the outflow of nurses from sub-Saharan Africa to the United Kingdom has greatly increased, and emigration from South Africa has quadrupled. The challenge is in enforcement of the guidelines, especially considering the private, entrepreneurial character of international recruitment.
The most promising strategy for achieving international balance in health workforce resources is for each country to have an adequate and sustainable source of health professionals. A two-prong strategy is required for this to happen. First, developed countries must be more diligent in exploring actions to stabilize and increase their domestic supply of nurses and moderate demand through strategic investments. Second, even without the exodus of so many qualified health professionals to work in developed countries, most less developed countries do not have the health care workforce capacity to respond to the health problems of their citizens that also can threaten global health. Making health, especially nursing, a legitimate focus of international aid and democracy building is needed.
She addressed the limited supply of nurses trained overseas:

Continue reading The nursing shortage: real, getting worse, and global

Here is some summary data on Indians who work in the United States, which I found at this website. There are roughly 2 million persons of Indian origin in the U. S. today.
About the Asian American Hotel Owners Association
Representing over 8,300 members, AAHOA is one of the leading forces in the hospitality industry and one of the most powerful Asian American advocacy groups. Together, the members own more than 20,000 hotels, which have over one million rooms, representing over 50 percent of the economy lodging properties and nearly 37 percent of all hotel properties in the United States.
Of the hotels owned by AAHOA members, approximately 11,700 are franchised while 6,300 are independent. The market value of the properties owned by AAHOA members is estimated to be $29.9 billion in franchised properties and $8.1 billion in independent properties.
About the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin
With a constituency of over 41,000 doctors and 10,000 medical students and residents, AAPI is the largest ethnic medical association in the United States and is the largest Indian American professional association in the United States.

This study has some useful information about the size of the unauthorized population and the geographic origins. For the first time I see a figure indicating a rapid increase in the number of unauthorized Indians.
The study does not address the number of unauthorized workers. My guess is that a very high percentage of all of these immigrants are working, especially recent arrivals who probably do not come with families. For instance, the 2005 total figures for Mexicao and El Salvador are equal to 5.6% and 7.0% of their respective populations at home. I suspect that the American-based numbers represent more like 7.5% and 10% of the home workforces.
The study estimates the January 2006 figure at “nearly 11 million”, having risen by and “annual average” of 408,000 in the 2000-2004 period. The figure for January 2005 is 10.5 million.
Those within the 10.5 figure came to the U.S. in these time frames:
1980-1984 10%
1985-1989 11%
1990-1994 20%
1995-1999 30%
2000-2002 20%
2003-2004 9%
It estimates that 1/1/05 there were 27,320,000 foreign born ….10,500,000 of these being unauthorized.
Origins (figures in 000s)
Country 2005, 2000
Mexico 5970 4680
El Salvador 470 430
Guatamala 370 290
India 280 120
China 230 190
Korea 210 180
Philippines 210 200
Honduras 180 160
Brazil 170 100
Vietnam 160 160
other 2250 1950

The New Times reports on the findings of the 2005 American Community Survey. The Survey results confirm what has been discerned already: more immigrants, chief among them Mexicans, and more spread out across the country.

Two decades ago, demographers said, some 75 percent to 80 percent of new immigrants settled in one of the half-dozen gateway states and tended to stay there. Then, in the last 10 to 15 years, the pattern shifted and increasing numbers began to stay in the gateways briefly and then move. Now, they say, the pattern is that more immigrants are simply bypassing the gateways altogether.

The Times reports that the survey is intended as an annual bolster to the bureau’s constitutionally mandated census of the country’s population every 10 years. It began as a test program in 1996 and has gradually expanded to where it can now provide detailed data for nearly 7,000 geographic areas, including all Congressional districts and counties or cities of 65,000 or more.
It goes on:
“What’s happening now is that immigrants are showing up in many more communities all across the country than they have ever been in,” said Audrey Singer, an immigration fellow at the Brookings Institution. “So it’s easy for people to look around and not just see them, but feel the impact they’re having in their communities. And a lot of these are communities that are not accustomed to seeing immigrants in their schools, at the workplace, in their hospitals.”
By far the largest numbers of immigrants continue to live in the six states that have traditionally attracted them: California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois. Immigrants also continue to flow into a handful of states in the Southeast, like Georgia and North Carolina, a trend that was discerned in the 2000 census. But it is in the less-expected immigrant destinations that demographers find the most of interest in the new data. Indiana saw a 34 percent increase in the number of immigrants; South Dakota saw a 44 percent rise; Delaware 32 percent; Missouri 31 percent; Colorado 28 percent; and New Hampshire 26 percent.
“Essentially, it’s a continuation of the Mexicanization of U.S. immigration,” said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. “You would expect Mexicans to be increasing their share in places like Georgia and North Carolina, which already saw some increases, but they’ve also increased their share of the population, and quite dramatically, in states like Michigan, Delaware and Montana.”
More of America’s immigrants, legal or not, come from Mexico than any other country, an estimated 11 million in 2005, compared with nearly 1.8 million Chinese and 1.4 million Indians.

This Bremerton, WA Kitsap Sun article is about as insightful an analysis of inter-country financial flows from low wage immigrant workers as I have seen. A southern Mexico town of 30,000 is receiving about $2,000 per resident per year in remittances!
By Kevin Diaz, July 12, 2006

A pickup truck with Minnesota plates bounced down the dirt road on the edge of town, raising clouds of reddish dust. It caught the eye of a grazing Brahman bull and disappeared behind a clutch of mango trees bordering a new subdivision, where tangles of steel reinforcing bars sprouted from the roofs of unfinished concrete block houses.

Many of the new houses were paid for with money sent by a secret workforce in Minnesota. By Mayor Leopoldo Rodriguez’s estimate, almost a third of the town’s workers have crossed the border – many of them illegally – and headed north to work in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area over the past 10 years.

The money they wire back arrives daily by police escort in armored trucks. Altogether, it comes to between $4 million and $7 million a month, according to money-transfer agencies in the Twin Cities region. The cash has forged an economic link between Axochiapan and Minneapolis-St. Paul that is part of a global trend. It is changing Axochiapan, one household at a time.

Padre Miguel Franco Galicia, parish priest at the Church of San Pablo in Axochiapan…has visited Minneapolis several times to minister to his expatriate parishioners. He estimates that at least 60 percent of Axochiapan’s population receives money from family members working in the United States, most of them in Minnesota. ‘To be honest, I think there are more pluses than minuses, from an economic point of view,’ he said. ‘But the social devastation is enormous.’

Axochiapan (pronounced Ah-sho-chee-AH-pahn), a town of about 30,000 in southern Mexico, has known little but poverty for centuries. People made a living by farming, or by working in the gypsum mines outside of town. The recent flow of Minnesota money has improved life. Pizza deliveries, aerobics studios and Internet cafes, alongside tortilla shops and taquerias, now serve an increasingly cosmopolitan population.

More below….

Continue reading “Building boom in Mexican town was born in Minnesota”