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 Editorials | Issues | October 2007 
Falling Mexican Fertility Rate May Cut Immigration
 David Gaddis Smith - San Diego Union-Tribune
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 |  | What's that mean for future migration? Is Mexico going to share so many of its workers with us?
- Dowell Myers |  | |
San Diego, California – The United States is going to need an infusion of immigrants in the coming decades to keep its economy humming and Mexico will probably be providing fewer of those workers because of its falling fertility rate, a demographer told UCSD's Center for Comparative Immigration Studies last week.
In 1970, Mexican mothers had an average of 6.8 children. Today, the fertility rate has fallen to 2.4, said Dowell Myers, professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California.
“What's that mean for future migration? Is Mexico going to share so many of its workers with us?” Myers asked.
He told scholars at the University of California San Diego that Mexico was likely to retain a great percentage of its workers for its own economy.
Myers said that could put the United States in competition with other nations in need of immigrant workers.
A fertility rate of 2.0 keeps a population at a more or less constant level.
Myers said countries that are not producing enough babies to support their older residents in the long term include Japan, with a fertility rate of 1.2; Korea, 1.2; Italy, 1.3; and Germany, 1.3.
The United States' fertility rate is around 2.0, but Myers said the United States is going to be hit by a retirement crisis because of the aging baby boom generation.
Myers' recent book, “Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America,” says baby boomers are going to need immigrants in order to pay the tax revenues for government entitlements. He said boomers will even need immigrants to buy boomers' homes when they retire and move.
In California, a large percentage of homebuyers are Latino. “Who is going to buy your house? How are they going to afford it?” he asked.
He said one of the best investments baby boomers could make is in young people's educations.
Myers said that after Latino immigrants have lived in California 20 years, their home ownership average is 51 percent, while the state average is 58 percent.
Latino immigrants who have lived in the state 30 years have a home ownership average of 60 percent, “breaking the state average,” he added.
California, long seen as a promised land for immigrants, has lost some of its luster, Myers said. While California attracted 37.6 percent of U.S. immigrant newcomers around 1990, that number fell to 20.9 percent around 2005.
Myers said that after California's recession in the 1990s, immigrants discovered North Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas and other states not nearly as expensive as California. “Now they know there are jobs and cheap housing” across America, Myers said. |
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