Immigration and Demography

Andres Oppenheimer has a column arguing that to understand immigration, we should forget economists and political scientists, and listen to demographers instead. He’s half right—we should listen to political scientists and demographers together. Coincidentally, the paper I presented at LASA, and which will soon be sent out to a journal, was co-written with my dad, a demographer in the Dept of Geography at San Diego State University (though unfortunately my parents couldn't make it to Puerto Rico with me) . We argue, in a similar vein to Oppenheimer, that understanding the immigration issue requires an analysis combining political science and demography. We’ve been in the middle of what we call a “demographic fit” between the U.S. and Latin America, where we had a need for labor (i.e. we had an aging population), and Latin America had more young people than their economies could sustain. The thing is, this fit is soon ending, because fertility rates are dropping in Latin America, while in the U.S. we’ve been seeing an increase in the number of young people (i.e. 15-24) so our labor needs will more likely be filled from within in the future. We argue that the political debate (and even the timing of the debate) cannot be understood without the demographic angle.