The Rise and Fall of U.S. Low-Skilled Immigration
Gordon Hanson, UC San Diego and NBER
Chen Liu, UC San Diego
Craig McIntosh, UC San Diego

August 2017
From the 1970s to the early 2000s, the United States experienced an epochal wave of low-skilled
immigration. Since the Great Recession, however, U.S. borders have become a far less active placewhen it comes to the net arrival of foreign workers. The number of undocumented immigrants has
declined in absolute terms, while the overall population of low-skilled, foreign-born workers hasremained stable. We examine how the scale and composition of low-skilled immigration in the
United States have evolved over time, and how relative income growth and demographic shifts inthe Western Hemisphere have contributed to the recent immigration slowdown. Because major
source countries for U.S. immigration are now seeing and will continue to see weak growth of thelabor supply relative to the United States, future immigration rates of young, low-skilled workers
appear unlikely to rebound, whether or not U.S. immigration policies tighten further.

We thank Janice Eberly, Adriana Kugler, Edward Lazear, James Stock, and participants in the
Spring 2017 Brookings Conference on Economic Activity for helpful comments on an earlier draft,
Daniel Leff for excellent research assistance, and the Center on Global Transformation at UC San
Diego for financial support.

Introduction
Immigration is a divisive issue in public discourse about U.S. economic policy. At the center ofthe debate is how to address inflows of undocumented immigrants. During previous decades,
inflows of illegal aliens were substantial. The Pew Research Center estimates that between 1990
and 2007, the U.S. population of undocumented residents, which as of 2013 accounted for nearly
two-thirds of the U.S. foreign-born adult population with 12 or fewer years of schooling, grew on
net by an annual average of 510,000 individuals (Borjas 2016; Passel and Cohn 2016). These
inflows contributed to a sizable increase in the U.S. supply of low-skilled, foreign-born workers(figure 1). During the 1990–2007 period, the number of working-age immigrants with 12 or fewer
years of schooling more than doubled, rising from 8.5 million to 17.8 million. Since the GreatRecession, however, U.S. borders have become a less active place when it comes to net inflows of
low-skilled labor from abroad. The undocumented population declined in absolute terms between
2007 and 2014, falling on net by an annual average of 160,000 individuals, while the overall
population of low-skilled immigrants of working age remained stable.
Viewed through the lens of the U.S. business cycle, the recent slowdown in low-skilled
immigration hardly comes as a surprise (Villarreal 2014). Construction is the second-largest sectorof employment for undocumented labor and the third-largest among all low-skilled immigrants(Passel and Cohn 2016). Because the collapse in the U.S. housing market helped precipitate theGreat Recession (Mian and Sufi 2014), it follows logically that the downturn in home building
after 2006 would have triggered a drop in new arrivals of low-skilled, foreign-born workers. Yet,
there are good reasons to believe that the Great Recession may have merely advanced forward intime an inevitable reduction in low-skilled immigration. Today, about half of low-skilled
immigrants are from Mexico and another one-quarter are from elsewhere in the Latin American
and the Caribbean countries. Because these countries had marked declines in fertility after the late1970s, they started to see slower growth in the size of cohorts coming of working age in the 2000s,
thereby weakening a key demographic push factor for emigration (Hanson and McIntosh 2010,2012). Just as relatively strong growth in U.S. GDP and Latin American labor supplies a generation
ago helped initiate the great U.S. immigration wave of the late 20th century, the reversal of these
conditions may be launching the United States into an era of far more modest low-skilled labor
inflows (Hanson and McIntosh 2009, 2016).
2

The policy dilemma facing the United States is thus not so much how to arrest massive
increases in the supply of foreign labor, but rather how to prepare for a lower-immigration future.
The pertinent issues for economists to address include how the scale and composition of lowskilled labor inflows have changed over time, whether the drop in inflows is primarily a cyclicalphenomenon or represents a secular decline, and how the U.S. economy would adjust to an
environment with modest numbers of low-skilled, foreign-born workers entering the labor force
each year. These questions guide the analysis in this paper.
We begin by summarizing trends in low-skilled immigration over the last several decades.
As is well known, supplies of less-educated, foreign-born labor increased sharply after 1970, while
their predominant national origins shifted from Europe to Latin America. Perhaps less appreciated,the demographic structure of this population has also changed, moving from younger, recent
arrivals toward an older, more-settled population. Which types of individuals select into
immigration also appear to have changed, a pattern we examine in detail for the case of Mexico,
given its outsize importance as a source country for U.S. immigrants. In 1990, those having
recently migrated from Mexico to the United States—as captured by the population censuses of
the two countries—were drawn more heavily from just above versus just below the mean ofpotential labor market earnings in Mexico (Chiquiar and Hanson 2005). This mild positive
selection weakened during the 1990s and the 2000s, such that by 2010 the population of recent
Mexican immigrants was close to a random draw of working-age individuals from Mexico, with aslight overrepresentation of individuals from the middle of the skill distribution. Althoughimmigrant selection captured in census data may be subject to measurement error associated with
undercounts of undocumented immigrants (Fernández-Huertas Moraga 2011), selection patterns
in these data are similar to those in the Mexican Family Life Survey, which appears less subject tomissing information on undocumented migrants (Kaestner and Malamud 2014). The largely
neutral selection of immigrants from Mexico in terms of skill implies that any future shock to
Mexican immigration—such as a further tightening of U.S. borders—would target middle-income
earners in Mexico, while affecting low-wage earners in the United States.
Recent changes in low-skilled immigration have occurred in a tumultuous environment for
the U.S. labor market. Even before the economic turbulence that occurred after 2006, there were
adverse changes in the demand for less-skilled labor associated with automation and increased3

import competition from low-wage countries (Autor and Dorn 2013; Autor, Dorn, and Hanson
2013; Pierce and Schott 2016; Cortes, Jaimovich, and Siu 2016). At the higher end of the labormarket, demand for young, college-educated labor has also weakened (Beaudry, Green, and Sand2016). Together, these changes have combined to create a period low-wage growth since 2000 for
all but the highest-earning U.S. workers (Valletta forthcoming).
To put recent changes in U.S. labor market conditions in a global context, we compare thelevel and volatility of U.S. income with that in major sending countries for low-skilled immigrants.
The gap between the 25th percentile of the income distribution in the United States and the 50th
percentile of the income distribution in Mexico—which approximates the expected gains inearnings for the typical Mexican migrant—was stable during the 1990s and early 2000s but shrank
noticeably after 2007. Relative volatility in income growth has also changed. The Great
Moderation heralded a period of steady U.S. GDP growth from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s(Bernanke 2004), a calm that was brought to an end by the Great Recession. In Mexico and othermigrant-sending nations of the Western Hemisphere, the pattern is roughly the opposite. The 1980s
and early 1990s were periods of high macroeconomic volatility, whereas the 2000s were a periodof steady if not spectacular economic growth. Shrinking income gaps and reduced income
volatility between the United States and major migrant-sending nations have eased pressures fornet labor flows into the United States.
Another factor contributing to the decline in low-skilled immigration is changes in U.S.
enforcement against illegal labor inflows (Roberts, Alden, and Whitley 2013). Between 2000 and2010, the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents policing the U.S.–Mexico border doubled, from8,600 to 17,500 officers, and has since remained at historically high levels. Concurrently, the U.S.
government intensified immigration enforcement in the interior of the country, which led to anincrease in deportations of noncriminal aliens—many of whom are apprehended through traffic
stops or other routine law enforcement operations—from 116,000 individuals in 2001 to an
average of 226,000 a year from 2007 to 2015. 1 Increases in border enforcement, which deter
potential migrants from choosing to enter to the United States (Gathmann 2008; Angelucci 2012),

1

Noncitizens (including legal immigrants) convicted of an aggravated felony, a drug crime, or multiple crimes
involving moral turpitude are subject to deportation upon or before completion of their prison sentence. Deportationsof criminal aliens also increased in the 2000s, from 73,000 in 2001 to an average of 156,000 per year over 2007 to
2015. See Gonzalez-Barrera and Lopez (2016).

4and in interior enforcement, which reduces the existing population of undocumented immigrants
and may also deter future immigration, appear likely to continue under the administration of
Donald Trump (Meckler 2017).
Looking toward the future of U.S. low-skilled immigration, forces are at work that arelikely to soften pressures for labor inflows and that will remain in place for the next several
decades. By the mid-1970s, the size of U.S. cohorts coming of working age was growing much
more slowly than in Mexico and the rest of Latin America, creating steady pressure for migration
to the United States. However, by the mid-2000s this demographic push factor had largely
disappeared. Because the United States’ neighbors to the south are today experiencing muchslower growth in the labor supply, the future immigration of young low-skilled labor looks set to
decline rapidly, whether or not more draconian policies to control U.S. immigration are
implemented.
If changes in global macroeconomic conditions and U.S. enforcement policy havecombined to weaken recent growth in the U.S. supply of low-skilled, foreign-born labor, what are
the implications for U.S. labor markets? As a way of answering this question, we examine the net
impact of immigration-induced changes in the labor supply on U.S. labor-market tightness. To
perform this analysis, we apply the approach of Lawrence Katz and Kevin Murphy (1992) to datafrom the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS), which involves modeling the relative hourly
earnings of more- and less-skilled labor as a function of their relative supplies and a flexible timetrend, meant to capture the evolution of labor demand. We estimate the model using earnings andemployment data for the period 1976–2007 and then project relative earnings through 2015, using
either actual labor supplies or labor supplies under counterfactual assumptions about low-skilled
immigration. If, counterfactually, the low-skilled, foreign-born labor supply had grown at the samerate during the period 2008–15 as it did from 1994 to 2007, our simple model implies that the wage
gap between more and less-skilled labor would have been 6 to 9 percentage points higher in 2015.
This finding, though while not a general equilibrium assessment of the wage effects of U.S.
immigration, illustrates the magnitude of the immigration slowdown in terms of U.S. wage
pressures. To the extent that slowing low-skilled immigration puts downward pressure on the skill
premium, we would expect firms to invest more in automation and other changes in production
techniques that reduce reliance on low-skilled labor (Card and Lewis 2007; Lewis 2011), effects
5that are likely to register most strongly in immigrant-intensive industries such as agriculture,
construction, eating and drinking establishments, and nondurable manufacturing.
Our work complements the existing literature on immigration, much of which takes
national changes in low-skilled foreign labor supply as given and examines its impact on theearnings of U.S. native-born workers. 2 As is well known, estimates of the wage effects ofimmigration vary widely across studies (Blau and Mackie 2016). Results depend on how one
defines the geographic scope of labor markets, skill groups within these labor markets, and theinterchangeability of native- and foreign-born workers on the job (Borjas 2003, 2013; Card 2001,
2009; Ottaviano and Peri 2012; Dustmann, Frattini, and Preston 2013). To explain instability inthe wage effects of immigration, the literature has studied factors that may confound empiricalanalysis, including offsetting migration by native-born workers (Borjas 2006), the location choicesof immigrant workers (Cadena and Kovak 2016), firm-level changes in technology (Lewis 2011),
occupational downgrading by immigrant workers (Peri and Sparber 2009; Dustmann, Frattini, and
Preston 2013), and measurement error in labor market earnings (Aydemir and Borjas 2011).
Relative to existing work, we offer the inverse perspective of how and why the low-skilled
immigrant labor supply has changed. Given the abundance of research on how immigration affects
U.S. wages, the factors that govern the magnitude of low-skilled immigration are understudied.
Our work helps address this gap in knowledge.

I. The Presence of Low-Skilled Immigrants in the U.S. Labor ForceWe begin our analysis with an overview of the characteristics of low-skilled immigrants in the
United States and then examine how selection into U.S. migration among individuals from Mexico
has changed over time. For the analysis in this section and the next, we focus on individuals ofworking age, defined as those 18 to 64 years of age. We utilize data from the U.S. population
censuses, the American Community Survey (ACS), and the CPS; and from Mexico’s population
census, available from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.
A. Characteristics of Low-Skilled Immigrants
2

Other literature on the effects of low-skilled immigration in the United States examines its consequences for local
consumer prices (Cortes 2008), the labor supply of high-skilled, native-born women (Cortes and Tessada 2011), local
housing prices (Saiz 2007), state GDP growth (Edwards and Ortega 2016), cultural diversity (Ottaviano and Peri
2005), and occupational employment and wages of native-born workers in local labor markets (Burstein and others2017).

6

A preliminary issue we must address is how to define low-skilled labor. When it comes tothe analysis of immigration, the literature alternatively defines low-skilled workers as those withless than a high school education (Borjas 2003) or those with a high school education or less (Card2001). 3 This difference matters, because those completing less than 12 years of schooling are anever-smaller share of the U.S. native-born population but continue to account for a majority ofadults in low- and middle-income countries. In the nations that send large numbers of low-skilledmigrants to the United States—including Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El
Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico—compulsory schooling is through grade 8 or 9, as opposed tobeing through age 16 in most U.S. states. The median worker in many sending countries thus has
well less than the equivalent of a U.S. high school education (Clemons, Montenegro, and Pritchett2008). Cross-national differences in compulsory education are manifest in the distribution of yearsof schooling among less-educated foreign- and native-born adults in the United States. In 1970,
those not completing high school accounted for just over half of U.S. native-born adults with ahigh school education or less, a share that declined to 29.4 percent in 1990 and to 16.6 percent in2015 (table 1). Among the U.S. foreign-born adult population with a high school education or less,the share with less than 12 years of schooling has also fallen but from a much higher base,beginning at 65.2 percent in 1970 and dropping to 55.0 percent in 1990 and to 44.7 percent in2015. To ensure that our analysis is robust to the definition of skill, we utilize both educationbased definitions of low-skilled labor. 4

When viewed over the sweep of the last half century, the U.S. low-skilled, foreign-born
population has transformed not just in terms of its size but also in its demographic structure. These
evolutions are evident in tables 1 and 2, which present summary statistics on U.S. low-skilled
foreign- and native-born individuals going back to 1970 using data from the U.S. census and ACS.
In 1970, when the presence of the foreign born in the U.S. population was at a historic low, lowskilled immigrants, in comparison with the native born, were relatively old and likely to be female.
3

We define high school education to mean completing 12 years of school, whether or not a degree is granted, aconvention we adopt because the meaning of a high school degree varies across countries. Throughout the paper, we
use high school education and 12 years of schooling interchangeably.
4
Education is, of course, an imperfect definition of skill. Language barriers and occupational licensing present
obstacles to foreign-born workers in integrating themselves into the U.S. labor force, which may induce some
immigrants to downgrade occupationally by taking jobs for which, based on their observable skills, they would appear
overqualified (Lazear 1999, 2007; Dustmann, Frattini, and Preston 2013).

7

This population came in its majority (52.9 percent) from Europe, was dominated by individuals
who had arrived in the United States in 1960 or earlier (66.1 percent), and had a near majority(45.6 percent) with eight or fewer years of schooling.
As the incipient immigration wave gained momentum, the composition of low-skilled
immigrants became younger, more likely to have come from Latin America, and more educated.
These changes were most dramatic between 1970 and 1990. During this period, the fraction offoreign-born people age 18 to 33 rose from 28.6 to 43.2 percent, the fraction of males rose from
41.8 to 48.8 percent, and the fraction completing 12 years of education rose from 34.8 to 45.0
percent. In terms of origin countries, among immigrants with a high school education or less, thefraction born in Mexico rose from 11.6 to 34.0 percent, the fraction born elsewhere in Latin
America (and the Caribbean) rose from 13.2 to 23.7 percent, and the fraction born in Asia rosefrom 5.7 to 16.2 percent. 5 The 1970 to 1990 increase in the shares of immigrants coming from
Mexico and the rest of Latin America is even larger among those with less than a high school
education, rising from 15.4 to 47.5 percent and from 12.6 to 21.2 percent, respectively. By 1990,
nearly 7 in 10 (68.7 percent) of the least-skilled U.S. immigrants of working age came from othernations in the Western Hemisphere.
Jorge Durand, Douglas Massey, and Rene Zenteno (2001) describe this era of U.S.
immigration as one marked by a preponderance of itinerant workers who came to the United States
to take seasonal jobs, especially on farms in the Southwest, and often returned home during periods
when labor demand was slack. During the two decades after 1970, the share of low-skilled
immigrant workers employed in agriculture did rise, from 3.2 to 5.7 percent (as compared with adecline of 3.9 to 3.0 percent among the low-skilled, native-born workers of working age), and thefraction with 10 or fewer years of residence in the United States grew from 34.0 to 45.8 percent.6
However, throughout the sample period, farm workers accounted for only a small share of lowskilled immigrant employment. During the first decades of the late 20th century immigration wave,
low-skilled immigrants spread themselves across a wide range of jobs, while concentrating more

5

Half of the 1970–90 increase in low-skilled immigration from Asia (55.1 percent) is from Southeast Asia, with muchof this inflow associated with a substantial but temporary rise in U.S. refugee admissions from the region that occurredfollowing the end of the Vietnam War.
6
The question for length of U.S. residence in the ACS reads, “When did this person come to live in the United States?”with the instruction, “If this person came to live in the United States more than once, print latest year.”8heavily, when compared with their native-born counterparts, in agriculture, construction, eating
and drinking establishments, nondurable manufacturing, and personal services.
In subsequent decades, the low-skilled immigrant population has become more mature andmore settled, at least when measured in terms of length of U.S. residence. By 2015, three-quarters(75.1 percent) of low-skilled immigrants had resided in the United States for 11 or more years,
while the share of the population age 18 to 33 had dropped to 27.2 percent. Since 1990, the fractionof low-skilled immigrants from Mexico and the rest of Latin America has continued to rise,reaching 45.1 and 27.3 percent, respectively, in 2015. Among immigrants with less than a highschool education, these shares are 59.3 and 24.9 percent, respectively, meaning that today, nearly
9 in 10 (85.2 percent) of the least-skilled, foreign-born workers are from Latin America and the
Caribbean. It is particularly important that Mexico’s dominance as a source country for low-skilled
immigrants peaks in 2005, at 48.1 percent of those with a high school education or less and 64.0
percent of those with less than a high school education. The 4.7 percentage point drop in Mexico’s
share of the least-skilled immigrant population from 2005 to 2015 is largely offset by Central
America’s jump during the same period of 3.5 percentage points. As we discuss in section III,
demographic push factors help account for Mexico’s recent relative decline and Central America’s
continuing relative gain as source regions. After Latin America, Asia remains the next mostimportant source region of low-skilled immigration, in 2015 accounting for 15.8 percent of all
low-skilled immigrants and 10.8 percent of those with less than 12 years of schooling.
Over time, low-skilled immigrants have become more specialized in particular lines ofwork. The share employed in immigrant-intensive sectors in 2015 reached 14.8 percent inconstruction (up from 7.8 percent in 1990), 11.3 percent in eating and drinking establishments (upfrom 8.7 percent in 1990), 7.2 percent in personal services (up from 6.9 percent in 1990), and 6.9
percent in agriculture (up from 5.7 percent in 1990). The one immigrant-intensive sector
registering a decline in its share of low-skilled immigrant employment is nondurable
manufacturing—which includes apparel, footwear, furniture, and textiles—industries whose
overall employment in the United States has fallen sharply in recent decades due to technologicalchange and competition from China and other low-wage countries (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson2013).

9

The transition of the U.S. low-skilled immigrant population from sojourners to settlers,
first noted by Wayne Cornelius (1992) nearly three decades ago, today appears to be largely
complete. Part of this shift is the natural result of a dynamic process of immigration in which earlyarrivals initially dominate the population, only to decline in importance as the existing stock grows
and matures (Piore 1980). However, the shift is also the result of the pronounced slowdown in
low-skilled immigration since the mid-2000s, as seen in figure 1.
Because the immigration levels portrayed in table 2 reflect changes in net immigration,
they are uninformative about whether this slowdown is the result of reduced inflows of new
immigrants, larger outflows of existing immigrants returning to their home countries, or somecombination of the two. We next summarize evidence on changing inflows and outflows ofimmigrants over time. Figure 2 gives give counts of immigrants by current age, age of arrival in
the United States (inferred from years of U.S. residence), and census year for three source
regions—Mexico, other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia—which
together account for the large majority of low-skilled immigration in the United States. To avoid
concerns about tracking individuals who educate themselves out of the low-skilled category overtime, we include all immigrants from these source regions, regardless of schooling.

Several patterns are apparent in the data. First, for most current-age groups and in mostcensus years, the largest cohorts are those arriving between 15 and 24 years of age. That is, for agiven current-age group, if we compare bars that have the same shading (thus comparing different
arrival-age cohorts in the same census year for the same current-age group), those in the 15–24
arrival-age category are the largest in nearly all cases. Second, between 2000 and 2010, there aresubstantial declines in the sizes of given arrival-age or birth-year cohorts. For individuals from
Mexico arriving in the United States between age 5 and 14, the number who are age 15–24 in 2000
is much larger than those who are age 25–34 in 2010. We see similar declines in the number of
Mexican immigrants who are age 25–34 in 2000 and the number who are age 35 to 44 in 2010,
both for the cohort arriving between age 5 and 14 and the cohort arriving between age 15 and 24.
Similar patterns hold for immigrants from other countries in Latin America and from Southeast
Asia. Declines in cohort size, as measured in the census, may result from mortality, return
migration, or changes over time in the fraction of individuals in a cohort who are enumerated in10the census. Given the youth of the cohorts considered, mortality seems unlikely to explain thisdecline. Moreover, given that we expect enumeration rates to increase with length of residence inthe United States, declines in enumeration seem an unlikely explanation, which leaves return
migration as the most likely cause for the decline in measured immigrant cohort sizes between
2000 and 2010.
The net impact of these changes is that the size of immigrant cohorts in 2010 is skewed
heavily toward individuals who have more than 10 years of residence in the United States. For
immigrants from Mexico in 2010 (indicated by the darkest shaded bars), those with fewer than 10
years of U.S. residence are the smallest cohort among all current age groups, a pattern that holds
for other countries in Latin America and for Southeast Asia as well.
B. The Presence of Low-Skilled Immigrants in the U.S. Labor ForceTo consider how the presence of low-skilled immigrants in the U.S. labor force haschanged in recent years, we focus on movements at annual frequencies using data from the CPS.
Because the CPS only begins asking questions about nativity in 1994, our use of these data is forthat year forward. We use two measures of the working-age population: raw data on body counts;
and these values expressed in terms of productivity-equivalent units (PEUs), following theweighting procedure used by David Autor, Lawrence Katz, and Melissa Kearney (2008).
Consistent with the post-1970 rise in low-skilled immigration seen in figure 1, figure 3
shows that the presence of low-skilled, foreign-born workers in the U.S. working-age populationrose steadily from 1994 to 2007 but has been stable since. The left panel of figure 3 plots fourmeasures of low-skilled immigration. The top line gives the share of the foreign born with a highschool education or less among all working-age individuals in the United States. This fraction rosefrom 6.5 percent in 1994 to 9.1 percent in 2007, before stabilizing in subsequent years, settling at
8.8 percent in 2015. Just under half these foreign-born individuals were born in Mexico (43.1
percent in 1994; 47.3 percent in 2015). When, alternatively, we define low-skilled immigrants
more narrowly as those with less than 12 years of schooling, we also see a growing immigrantpresence in the U.S. working-age population, rising from 3.6 percent in 1994 to 4.5 percent in
2007, and showing little change thereafter. Individuals born in Mexico account for a high fractionof the foreign-born population with less than a high school education (61.1 percent in 1993, 64.4
percent in 2014).
11

Body counts of low-skilled immigrants overstate their presence in the U.S. labor force tothe extent that these individuals have low labor productivity relative to the average U.S. person ofworking age. To measure the population in terms of PEUs, we apply the approach taken by Autor,
Katz, and Kearney (2008), which involves reweighting individuals by their projected relative
earnings. 7 Specifically, the weight attached to an individual is the ratio of the average weekly wage
among full-time, full-year workers in his or her race, gender, education, and labor market
experience cell to the average weekly wage for white, male, high school graduates with 8 to 12
years of potential work experience. 8 Population shares expressed in terms of PEUs appear in theright panel of figure 3. These shares are naturally smaller than in the left panel, owing to the factthat low-skilled immigrant workers have low earnings relative to other U.S. workers. Using the
productivity-adjusted measure, foreign-born individuals with 12 or fewer years of schooling reach
6.5 percent of the U.S. working-age population in 2007, a share that declines slightly to 6.3 percent
in 2015. 9
Low-skilled immigrants tend to have high rates of labor force participation andemployment when compared with similarly skilled native-born workers (Borjas 2016).
Consequently, the population shares shown in figure 3 may give an incomplete characterization of
the presence of the low-skilled, foreign-born workers in the effective U.S. labor supply. Figure 4
reports the shares of low-skilled immigrants in total hours worked, both using raw hours (leftpanel) and productivity-adjusted hours (right panel). The share of total hours worked byimmigrants with 12 or fewer years of schooling rose from 5.2 percent in 1994 to 8.4 percent in

7

When applying wage-based weights to the entire population, we assume that nonworking individuals would earn thesame average wage as full-time workers who share their age, gender, race, education, and nativity profile. Because
employment rates increase with potential earnings, this assumption may lead our productivity-adjusted shares of the
low-skilled immigrant population to overstate the shares one would calculate based on “true” wage weights. This
problem is partially ameliorated when we examine the share of low-skilled immigrants in total hours worked, as we
do in figure 4.
8
We construct these weights as follows. First, we divide workers into labor market groups broken down by gender,
two education categories (less than 12 years of education, exactly 12 years of education), and eight experience
categories (0–4, 5–9, 10–14, 15–19, 20–20, 25–29, 30–34, and 35–39 years of potential labor market experience).
Then, for each gender-education-experience group, we calculate the weight as average weekly earnings in each year
(for full-time, full-year workers, defined to be those working at least 35 hours per week and 40 weeks a year) divided
by average weekly earnings for white, male, high school graduates with 8 to 12 years of labor market experience.
9
The number of Mexican-born workers in the United States increased by more than 350,000 per year over the 20
years from 1980 to 2000. Negative net migration of 160,000 per year subsequent to 2007 therefore represents a dropof half a million people per year relative to the prior trend, enough to constitute a noticeable change in the foreignborn population when cumulated over a decade of low migration.

12

2007, before falling modestly to 8.0 percent in 2015. When expressed in PEUs, these shares are
3.6, 5.8, and 5.5 percent, respectively.
Because undocumented immigrants account for a large share of the low-skilled immigrant
population, and because the large majority of these individuals come from Mexico and Central
America, low-skilled, foreign-born labor accounts for a relatively high fraction of employment in
the states along the U.S. border with Mexico. Figure 5 plots the share of low-skilled immigrants
in hours worked for the four U.S. border states (Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas),
again in terms of both raw hours and productivity-adjusted hours. Among these border states, theshare of foreign-born workers with 12 or fewer years of education in total hours worked rose from
11.9 percent in 1994 to 16.2 percent in 2005 and then dropped to 14.1 percent in 2015.
Given the propensity of low-skilled immigrants to concentrate in particular sectors, it is
not surprising that, in selected industries, they have come to account for a substantial fraction of
total employment. As seen in table 3, in 2015 immigrants with 12 or fewer years of schoolingaccount for 29.3 percent of total hours worked in agriculture (up from 3.9 percent in 1970), 21.8
percent in personal services (up from 6.4 percent in 1970), 20.3 percent in construction (up from
3.9 percent in 1970), 16.8 percent in eating and drinking establishments (up from 8.3 percent in1970), and 13.5 percent in nondurable manufacturing (up from 5.9 percent in 1970), as comparedwith just 5.8 percent of employment in all other industries. For these immigrant-intensive
industries, future changes in low-skilled immigration matter immensely.
C. Who Chooses to Migrate to the United States?
Is the increase in low-skilled immigration in the United States the result of increasing
immigration from countries that are relatively abundant in low-skilled labor or the result of lowskilled labor being relatively likely to select into international migration? One cannot answer thisquestion by examining U.S. data alone. Differences in educational attainment across countries
would make the average worker from, say, Mexico appear to be low skilled in the U.S. labormarket, whereas at home he or she would fall in the middle of the earnings distribution.
In seminal research, George Borjas (1987) derived the conditions under which immigrants
are negatively or positively selected in terms of skills. Conditions favoring negative selection—
meaning that immigrants are drawn disproportionately from the bottom half of the skill
distribution—are high returns to skills in the sending country relative to the receiving country, and13

migration costs that are proportional to worker productivity (for example, costs that have an
iceberg form), which combine to give less-skilled workers a relatively strong incentive to migrate.
Migration costs that are fixed in nature and a marginal utility of income that is not strongly
decreasing favor positive selection of immigrants in terms of skills (Grogger and Hanson 2011),
in which case immigrants are drawn more heavily from the top half of the skills distribution.
Whether immigrants are negatively or positively selected in terms of skills matters for how
labor movements affect the distribution of income in sending and receiving countries and for theease with which immigrants from low-income countries integrate themselves into the labormarkets of high-income countries. If, for example, immigrants from Mexico are negatively
selected in terms of skills, shocks that contribute to a positive net flow of labor from Mexico to
the United States would tend to decrease Mexican wage inequality—by reducing Mexico’s relative
supply of low-wage workers—and to increase U.S. wage inequality—by expanding the U.S.
relative supply of low-wage workers. Further, immigrants who are negatively selected in terms ofskills may face greater challenges in assimilating economically in the U.S. labor market and may
be more likely to be a net drain on public resources (Borjas 2016).
To examine the composition of low-skilled immigration in the United States from thesending country’s perspective, we focus on the case of Mexico, which is by far the largest source
country for U.S. labor inflows, accounting for nearly half of all U.S. low-skilled immigrants andnearly two-thirds of those with less than 12 years of schooling. We extend forward in time theanalysis of Daniel Chiquiar and Gordon Hanson (2005), which utilizes the methodology of John
DiNardo, Nicole Fortin, and Thomas Lemieux (1996) for constructing counterfactual wage
distributions. 10 To examine differences in the distribution of skills between Mexican residents (thatis, nonmigrants in Mexico) and Mexican immigrants, we compare the actual wage density in
Mexico for Mexican residents with the counterfactual wage density that Mexican immigrants in
the United States would obtain if they were paid according to Mexico’s prevailing wage structure.
This comparison reveals from where in Mexico’s wage distribution migrants to the United States
are drawn. Because this analysis projects U.S. immigrants onto Mexico’s wage distribution basedon workers’ observable skills, it ignores the role of unobserved characteristics in migration and

10

Also on the selection of immigrants from Mexico in terms of observable skill, see Feliciano (2001), Orrenius andZavodny (2005), Mckenzie and Rapoport (2007, 2011), and Akee (2010).

14

earnings. And because it takes Mexico’s current wage distribution as given, the analysis is silent
about the equilibrium impact of immigration on U.S. or Mexican wages.
Let 𝑓𝑓 𝑖𝑖 (𝑤𝑤|𝑥𝑥) be the density of wages 𝑤𝑤 in country 𝑖𝑖, conditional on observed characteristics

𝑥𝑥, ℎ(𝑥𝑥|𝑖𝑖 = 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀) be the density of observed characteristics among workers in Mexico, andℎ(𝑥𝑥|𝑖𝑖 = 𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈) be the density of observed characteristics among Mexican immigrants in the UnitedStates. The density of wages that would prevail for Mexican immigrants in the United States ifthey were to be paid according to the price of skills in Mexico is given by,(1)

𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀 (𝑤𝑤)= � 𝑓𝑓 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀 (𝑤𝑤|𝑥𝑥)ℎ(𝑥𝑥|𝑖𝑖 = 𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈) 𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑.
𝑔𝑔𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈This quantity corresponds to the counterfactual distribution of wages that arises from projecting
the skill distribution of Mexican immigrants in the United States onto the current wage structureof Mexico. Although this distribution is unobserved, we can rewrite it as(2)

𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀 (𝑤𝑤)
𝑔𝑔𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈= � 𝜃𝜃𝑓𝑓 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀 (𝑤𝑤|𝑥𝑥)ℎ(𝑥𝑥|𝑖𝑖 = 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀) 𝑑𝑑𝑑𝑑,

where Mexico’s conditional wage distribution 𝑓𝑓 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀 (𝑤𝑤|𝑥𝑥) and the skill distribution of its resident
population ℎ(𝑥𝑥|𝑖𝑖 = 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀) are observed, and where
(3)

𝜃𝜃 =

ℎ(𝑥𝑥|𝑖𝑖 = 𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈).
ℎ(𝑥𝑥|𝑖𝑖 = 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀)

Hence, we can obtain the counterfactual wage density that we desire in equation 1 simply byapplying the appropriate weight 𝜃𝜃 to the existing distribution of wages in Mexico. To compute thisweight, one can use Bayes’s theorem to write

(4)

and

ℎ(𝑥𝑥) =

(5)ℎ(𝑥𝑥) =ℎ(𝑥𝑥|𝑖𝑖 = 𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈) Pr(𝑖𝑖 = 𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈)
Pr(𝑖𝑖 = 𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈|𝑥𝑥)ℎ(𝑥𝑥|𝑖𝑖 = 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀) Pr(𝑖𝑖 = 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀).
Pr(𝑖𝑖 = 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀|𝑥𝑥)

Combining equations 4 and 5, we obtain an expression for 𝜃𝜃 that is the ratio of theconditional probability that a Mexican-born worker resides in the United States,

Pr(𝑖𝑖 = 𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈|𝑥𝑥)⁄Pr(𝑖𝑖 = 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀|𝑥𝑥), to the unconditional probability that a Mexican-born worker

resides in the United States, Pr(𝑖𝑖 = 𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈)⁄Pr(𝑖𝑖 = 𝑀𝑀𝑀𝑀). We estimate these probabilities via a logit
15

model, use the estimates to calculate 𝜃𝜃, and apply the 𝜃𝜃 weights to estimate the counterfactual
wage density in equation 2. 11

We construct actual and counterfactual wage densities for males and females, separately,in the years 1990, 2000, and 2010. Earnings are annual labor income for individuals age 18–64.
We estimate the logit regressions used to predict whether an individual born in Mexico resides in
the United States separately for men and women as a function of education (seven categories,
based on years of schooling: 0–4, 5–8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13–15, 16+) and age (46 categories, one foreach year in the range 18–64). The population is all working-age individuals in Mexico and
Mexican immigrants in the United States who have resided in the country for 10 or fewer years.
Results are similar when we expand the analysis to include immigrants with 20 or fewer years of
U.S. residence, who constitute the large majority of working-age Mexican immigrants in the
United States. Wage densities are plotted relative to mean log earnings for workers in Mexico ofa given gender in a given year, such that actual wage densities are centered on zero. Figure 6
presents the results, where in each plot the dashed line is the actual wage density for Mexico andthe solid line is the counterfactual wage density in Mexico for current Mexican immigrants.
For the case of males, shown in the left-side panels of figure 6, we see that in each year,
the actual and counterfactual densities are very similar to each other, suggesting that the observableskills of Mexican immigrants match closely those of individuals who have not migrated abroad.
In 1990, the counterfactual wage density lies slightly to the right of the actual wage density,
indicating that Mexican immigrants are mildly positively selected in terms of observable skills.
This difference is more defined in figure 7, which plots the difference between counterfactual andactual wage densities. In 1990, this difference, as seen in the top-left panel, has a negative massjust below zero and a positive mass just above zero, indicating that male immigrants areunderrepresented among those who would earn slightly less than mean earnings in Mexico andoverrepresented among those who would earn slightly more than mean earnings in Mexico. The
slight rightward shift in the counterfactual relative to the actual wage density is also present in

11This method for constructing weights ignores differences in labor force participation rates in the two countries.
Whereas labor force participation among male residents of Mexico and male Mexican immigrants in the United States
are similar, labor force participation is higher among immigrant Mexican women than among nonmigrant Mexican
women. Not accounting for these differences would tend to overstate negative selection among immigrants. See
Chiquiar and Hanson (2005) for details and for methods to account for cross-national differences in labor force
participation.

16

2000 and 2010. However, the difference between actual and counterfactual densities becomes lesspronounced over time, such that in the top-left panel of figure 7, the negative hump below zeroand the positive hump above zero are smaller in 2000 than in 1990 and smaller still in 2010 relative
to 1990. These changes are also seen in the top-right panel of figure 7, which reports the double
difference in densities: counterfactual relative to actual wage densities in 2010 relative to thisdifference in either 1990 or 2000. The double difference using 2010 and 1990 is larger than thatfor 2010 and 2000, indicating a lessening of positive selection over time. By the time that we arrivein 2010, working-age Mexican immigrants who reside in the United States appear to be close to arandom draw on the population of working-age individuals in Mexico.
The three right-side panels of figure 6 repeat the analysis for women. Among women, we
see evidence of stronger positive selection in 1990 and 2000 when compared with men. In eachyear, the rightward shift of the counterfactual wage density relative to the actual wage density ismore pronounced than the corresponding density difference for males. As with males, the strengthof positive selection diminishes over time, such that by 2010 the counterfactual and actual wage
densities for women are very similar. We conclude that by 2010, the selection of immigrants from
Mexico is close to neutral in terms of observable skills. As mentioned above, these results are
silent about the pattern of immigrant selection in terms of unobservables.
One concern about the results shown in figures 6 and 7 is that we use census data to evaluate
immigrant selection. Any undercount of the Mexico-born population in either Mexico or theUnited States that depends systematically on an individual’s age or education could result in biased
estimates either of the wage density for Mexico or of the counterfactual wage density that weconstruct for Mexican immigrants in the United States. There is a long-standing belief among
demographers that the U.S. census undercounts undocumented immigrants in the United States(Warren and Passel 1987). To address this undercount issue, some studies evaluate immigrant
selection using data exclusively from Mexico (Ibarraran and Lubotsky 2007). In noteworthy work,
Jesús Fernández-Huertas Moraga (2011) uses data from Mexico’s national employment survey(Encuesta Nacional de Empleo, ENE), which follows households for five consecutive quarters andincludes in the survey questions about whether household members have migrated to the UnitedStates during the period since the last survey was conducted. Distinct from Chiquiar and Hanson(2005), Fernández-Huertas Moraga (2011) finds that Mexican immigrants are negatively selected17

in terms of skills, as captured by residuals from Mincerian wage regressions. The ENE, however,has measurement problems of its own. It suffers from high rates of attrition by households fromthe sample within the five-quarter survey window, which a recent by the National Academies of
Science, Engineering, and Medicine concludes makes it problematic as a data source for evaluating
Mexican migration to the United States (Carriquiry and Majmundar 2013).
Fortunately, there is a source that provides longitudinal data on households in Mexico andthat tracks information on individuals who migrate to the United States. The Mexican Family Life
Survey (MxFLS) has been conducted in three waves—2002, 2006, and 2009—with a recontact
rate of respondents between each wave of 90 percent. Of particular importance, the survey follows
household members who migrate to the United States between waves. Robert Kaestner and Ofer
Malamud (2014) use data from the first two MxFLS waves to analyze the selection of immigrants
according to various measures of skills. Similar to what one sees in census data, migrants to theUnited States in the MxFLS are more likely to be young. In terms of education, both male andfemale migrants are more likely to have middle levels of schooling (4–9 years for men, 4–12 years
for women) than to have low levels of schooling (0–3 years). For men, but not for women, migrants
are less likely to have very high levels of schooling (more than 12 years) than to have very low
levels (0–3 years). The MxFLS also provides a measure of cognitive ability in the form of aRaven’s Progressive Matrices test score (Raven, Raven, and Court 2000). Although cognitive
ability is a frequently discussed source of skill in the analysis of earnings (Heckman and Vytlacil
2001), few data sources provide evidence of how cognitive skills relate to migration decisions.
Among both men and women, Kaestner and Malamud (2014) report no difference between
migrants and nonmigrants in terms of their Raven scores, suggesting that the two populations havea similar distribution of observable cognitive abilities. Following Fernández-Huertas Moraga(2011), Kaestner and Malamud (2014) also examine migrant selection in terms of observable andunobservable characteristics using Mincerian wage regressions. Their analysis shows that workers
with the highest predicted earnings or the highest residual earnings in the first MxFLS wave—
meaning those among the top quintile of predicted or residual wage earners—are less likely to
migrate but that there is no pattern of selection among lower-wage individuals.
Despite problems with possible undercounts of undocumented migrants in census data,
they provide a characterization of immigration selection that is comparable to that based on high18

quality longitudinal micro data. Immigrants from Mexico to the United States are overrepresented
among individuals whose skills place them in the middle of Mexico’s wage distribution and mildly
underrepresented among individuals who would be very low-wage or very high-wage earners intheir home country. When we examine U.S. immigration from other source countries, evidence of
positive selection in terms of observable skills such as education is even more pronounced(Grogger and Hanson 2011). In nearly all source countries for U.S. labor inflows, immigrants are
relatively likely to come from among the more educated. 12
D. Summary
The U.S. population of low-skilled immigrants has gone through an epochal half centuryof growth, transforming from a small cadre of older immigrants from Europe to a large populationof immigrants from Latin America and Asia who are nearing middle age and who have now lived
in the United States for an extended period of time. Immigrants from Mexico, who account for
one-half to three-fifths of the low-skilled foreign born population, depending on the definition ofskill, are preponderantly individuals who would be middle-income earners in their birth country.
As the United States looks forward to an era of weakened incentives for low-skilled immigration
due to changing labor demand and labor supply conditions at home and abroad, it will be shocks
to middle-wage workers in migrant-sending countries that matter disproportionately for who
migrates. Efforts to reduce the existing population of low-skilled immigrants, such as throughincreased deportations of undocumented immigrants, would target a population that appears tohave a long tenure of residence in the United States.

II. Labor Demand, Labor Supply, and Low-Skilled Immigration
In this section and the next, we examine factors affecting the net flow of low-skilled immigrants
into the United States. We begin in this section by describing recent changes in conditions
surrounding low-skilled immigration, including income differences between the United States andmajor migrant-sending countries, U.S. immigration policy, and relative labor supply growth in the
United States and major sending countries. We then analyze for the case of Mexico the contributionof labor demand and labor supply shocks to migration to the United States.

12

One exception to this pattern is Puerto Rico, which as an unincorporated territory of the United States is not subject
to the same barriers to U.S. immigration as foreign nations (Borjas 2008).

19

A. Income Differences between Countries
Perhaps the simplest manner in which to evaluate the incentive for immigration is tocompare income between countries. Beginning with Larry Sjaastad (1962), economists havemodeled immigration as an investment decision, in which the upfront cost of migration yields anincome flow over time equal to the difference in earnings between the home and foreign
economies. There may be considerable heterogeneity in the time horizon over which individuals
consider migration (Dustmann 2003). Seasonal workers may focus on income differences between
countries no more than a few months in advance, other individuals may be uncertain about their
desire to relocate permanently and so put weight on the income differences they expect to besustained over the next several years, and still others may treat migration as a long-term decisionand therefore evaluate the expected discounted difference in income streams over their fullworking lives. To examine high-frequency changes in the incentive for immigration, we abstract
away from such heterogeneity and consider point-in-time income differences between the UnitedStates and migrant-sending countries, an approach taken in the large body of literature that uses
the gravity model to analyze bilateral migration flows (Karemera, Oguledo, and Davis 2000; Clark,
Hatton, and Williamson 2007; Bertoli and Fernández-Huartas Moraga 2013).
Even in making point-in-time income comparisons, one faces many choices for how tomeasure income. One approach is to evaluate earnings for individuals with similar observableskills who were born in the same country and now live in different countries. Using data from the
U.S. and Mexican population censuses, Hanson (2006) reports that in 2000 the average hourly
wage for a 28- to 32-year-old male with 9 to 11 years of education is $2.40 in Mexico and $8.70
among recent Mexican immigrants in the United States (these income values, like those we report
below, are adjusted for purchasing power parity in terms of 2000 dollars). At a labor supply of 35
hours per week and 48 weeks per year, this would yield annual income gain of $10,600. Combining
data from Mexico’s national survey of income and expenditures with data from the U.S. census,
Michael Clemens, Claudio Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett (2008) obtain similar results,
estimating that in 2000 the annual income gain to migration for a 35-year-old Mexican male with
9 to 12 years of education is $9,200.
Comparing migrants with nonmigrants is problematic if there are unobserved
characteristics that affect both the migration decision and an individual’s income-earning ability.
20

An alternative approach is to use longitudinal data for the same individual, which allows
comparisons of income before and after migration. Mark Rosenzweig (2007) uses data from the
New Immigrant Survey to estimate the change in income for new U.S. permanent legal immigrants
in 2003. He checks their current U.S. earnings against earnings in the last job they held in theircountry of origin. For a legal immigrant from Mexico with 9 to 12 years of education, the averagegain in income is $15,900 (at 35 hours a week and 48 weeks a year). Comparing the same
individual in two countries corrects for selection into the migration associated with unobserved,
time-invariant individual characteristics but may introduce other complications. If, in preparing tomigrate, individuals reduce their labor supply in a manner that diminishes income (or if negative
shocks to income precipitate migration), this approach may overstate the income gains tomigration. 13
Evaluating how the incentive to migrate to the United States has changed across countries
and over time is complicated by the fact that few countries produce annual household survey data,and census data are amassed infrequently. Our approach is to construct income differences
between countries by combing annual data on average income from national accounts with dataon the variance in income as inferred from summary statistics on income inequality. Althoughstatistics on income inequality, such as the Gini coefficient, are often constructed at a less than anannual frequency, they tend to change slowly from one year to the next (Solt 2016), which permitsinterpolation of their values to create an annual series. Under the assumption that income is lognormally distributed across households, which is approximately consistent with data for many
countries (Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin 2009), one can use the Gini coefficient to calculate thevariance of income across individuals and then combine this value with average income toconstruct income at different percentiles of the distribution (Grogger and Hanson 2011). 14 Given
the neutral selection of immigrants from Mexico in terms of observable skills, the 50th percentile(equal to $8,800 in 2000) is a natural choice for the reference income of a prospective Mexican
migrant. To select the reference income in the United States for a typical immigrant from Mexico,
we choose the percentile of the U.S. income distribution that yields an income gain to migration
13

Since Rosenzweig (2007) examines legal immigrants, his figures are not directly comparable to those of Hanson(2006) or Clemens, Montenegro, and Prichett (2008), whose samples include all immigrants.
14
Suppose log income is normally distributed with mean 𝜇𝜇 and variance 𝜎𝜎 2 . Given an estimate of the Gini coefficient
𝐺𝐺, the standard deviation of log income is 𝜎𝜎 = √2Φ−1 ([𝐺𝐺 + 1]⁄2). The value of log income at the 𝛼𝛼 quantile is then2𝜇𝜇𝑒𝑒 �𝜎𝜎𝑧𝑧𝛼𝛼−𝜎𝜎 ⁄2� , where 𝑧𝑧𝛼𝛼 is the 𝛼𝛼th percentile of 𝒩𝒩(0,1).

21

in 2000 that is approximately equal to the average income gain for migrants as described by
Hanson (2006); Clemens, Montenegro and Prichett (2008); and Rosenzweig (2007). The 25th
percentile of the U.S. income distribution ($20,100 in 2000) serves this purpose.
In the left panel of figure 8, we report the ratio of the 50th percentile of the Mexican income
distribution to the 25th percentile of the U.S. income distribution, where we construct these values
using Gini coefficients from UNU-WIDER’s World Income Inequality Database, and per capita
GDP, adjusted for purchasing power parity, from the World Bank’s World Development
Indicators. 15 This ratio is stable in the 1990s and early 2000s, averaging 0.44 between 1990 and2007. During this period, a middle-income earner in Mexico who chooses to become a low-income
earner in the United States would see his or her real earnings increase by a factor of 2.3. After theGreat Recession, the U.S.–Mexico income difference compresses, with the ratio of the 50th
percentile of Mexican income to the 25th percentile of U.S. income rising to an average of 0.53
between 2008 and 2015 and to 0.58 during the later period of 2011 to 2015. In the right panel of
figure 8, we report the corresponding ratio of the 50th percentile of the sending country’s income
to 25th percentile of U.S. income for a composite of other countries in Latin America and the
Caribbean. We choose the next-largest sending countries for which data on Gini coefficients areavailable—Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, andJamaica—and we weight each country’s income by its relative share of working-age, low-skilled
immigrants in the United States in 2000.16 The time path of relative income is similar to that for
the U.S.–Mexico comparison, though the absolute income gap is larger. The income ratio is stablefrom 1990 to 2007, averaging 0.22, and then rises after the onset of the Great Recession, averaging
0.30 from 2008 to 2015. Since 2007, relatively slow U.S. income growth and rapid growth in

15

Because Gini coefficients are not available in all years, we interpolate values for missing years. The series on Gini
coefficients ends in 2012 in some countries and in 2013 in others. We assume that Gini coefficients in later years equal
those in the last year for which data are available.
16
In 2000, the share of U.S. low-skilled, working-age immigrants accounted for by these countries is 15.0 percent (4.1
percent for El Salvador, 2.8 percent for the Dominican Republic, 2.3 percent for Guatemala, 1.7 percent for Jamaica,
1.6 percent for Colombia, 1.3 percent for Honduras, and 1.1 percent for Ecuador). Gini coefficients are unavailable
for Cuba and Haiti (2.5 and 1.5 percent of U.S. low-skilled immigrants in 2000, respectively), leading us to leave themout of figures 8 and 9. Significant sending nations for U.S. low-skilled immigrants outside the Western Hemisphere(and their shares of this population in 2000) include Vietnam (4.1 percent), the Philippines (2.2 percent), China (2.1
percent), South Korea (1.5 percent), Germany (1.4 percent), Italy (1.2 percent), Canada (1.2 percent), India (1.2
percent), and Poland (1.1).

22

neighboring countries have compressed the income gap between the United States and migrationsending nations, presumably weakening incentives for immigration.
In forming expectations about future income differences between countries, prospective
migrants are likely to consider not just the level of income but also its variance. Over short time
horizons, higher perceived variance in income in the sending country relative to the receiving
country may add to the incentive for migration. At a monthly frequency, changes in attempted
undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States, as captured by apprehensions at the
U.S.–Mexico border, are strongly sensitive to changes in the dollar–peso real exchange rate, withattempted entry surging during periods following currency crises in Mexico (Hanson andSpilimbergo 1999; Monras 2015). When expanding data to include countries throughout theWestern Hemisphere, emigration rates to the United States are larger for cohorts subject to a higher
incidence of financial crises in their home country (Hanson and McIntosh 2012).
To characterize changes in U.S. income volatility relative to that in migrant-sending
economies, the left panel of figure 9 reports the standard deviation in quarterly real GDP growthin Mexico and the United States for rolling eight-quarter windows covering the period 1990:Q1–
2016:Q1. Throughout this time span, volatility in GDP growth is higher in Mexico (average eightquarter standard deviation of 3.7 percent) than in the United States (average eight-quarter standard
deviation of 2.0 percent). However, there are evident changes in relative volatility over time. Afterthe 1995 peso crisis, volatility spiked in Mexico while remaining low in the United States. During
the ensuing 10 years, volatility remained uniformly higher in Mexico, though well below theelevated levels of crisis periods. With the onset of the global financial crisis of 2008–10, volatility
jumps in both economies, declining thereafter to roughly equal levels. Reduced differences
between Mexico and the United States in income volatility reflect the improved execution ofmonetary and fiscal policies in Mexico—which, as in much of Latin America, has helped lower
inflation, reduce government debt, and stabilize GDP growth (Edwards 2009). In the right panelof figure 9, we compare volatility in quarter-to-quarter GDP growth in the United States with thesame migrant-sending countries examined with regard to relative GDP levels in figure 8. Hereagain, we see that volatility in GDP growth in migrant-sending nations has decreased relative to
the United States, which has presumably dampened pressures for cross-border labor flows.
B. U.S. Immigration Policy
23

Low-skilled immigrants enter the United States through three channels: with permanent
legal residence visas (green cards), with temporary work visas, and as undocumented entrants.
During the 2000s, the U.S. government engaged in a massive buildup in border enforcement
efforts, with most newly committed resources allocated to the U.S. border with Mexico. To
understand how changes in immigration policy may have affected incentives for low-skilled
immigration, we review recent adjustments in U.S. policy mechanisms.
LEGAL IMMIGRATION The vast majority of low-skilled immigrants who obtain green
cards do so through family sponsorship, for which visa eligibility derives from having a relative
who is a U.S. citizen or legal resident, or as refugees or asylees (Rosenzweig 2007). The numberof U.S. green cards and the policies governing their allocation have been stable since 1990. In thatyear, the Immigration Act set the annual number of family-sponsored visas at 480,000, the annual
number of employer-sponsored visas (which go primarily to skilled workers) at 140,000, and theannual number of diversity visas (allocated via lottery to countries that have historically low
migration to the United States) at 55,000. Visas available to immediate relatives of U.S. citizens
are uncapped, though applications for these visas may be subject to processing delays. The numberof green cards given to refugees and asylees, though having no set cap, shows no trend over time,
having fallen from 114,000 per year in the 1990s to 83,000 per year in the 2000s, before rising to
109,000 per year during the 2010–15 period. 17 Any increase in low-skilled immigration via
permanent legal visas thus cannot have occurred through expanded quotas for green cards. It must
instead have occurred through increases in the number of low-skilled immigrants qualifying for,
applying for, and receiving visas from the annual allocation of visas. 18
Qualifying for a green card under family sponsorship requires having an immediate relative
who is a U.S. citizen—which gives one access to visas that are not subject to numerical limit—ora more distant relative who is a U.S. citizen or legal resident—which allows one to apply for the
fixed annual allocation of green cards. Because the number of new applications exceeds the annual
cap on green cards, and has for many years, there is often a substantial lag between the time of
17

A refugee is a foreign resident who is unable or unwilling to remain in his or her country of nationality because offear of persecution based on race, religion, social group, or political opinion; an asylee is a foreign national who meetsthe conditions of a refugee and is already in the United States. A refugee is eligible to apply for a green card after one
year of U.S. residence. At the beginning of each fiscal year, the president, in consultation with Congress, sets aworldwide ceiling on refugee admissions.
18
All data on legal immigration are from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Yearbook of Immigration
Statistics (https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics).

24

application and the time of visa receipt, with waiting times of several years in length being
common. The waiting time depends in part on one’s visa preference category, which is a functionof how closely related one is to a U.S. resident, and in part on the number of green card applicantsfrom an individual’s country of birth who are higher up in the visa queue.
Family sponsorship for green cards makes immigration a self-reinforcing process. As thenumber of permanent legal immigrants from a sending country increases, so too does the numberof residents of that country who are eligible for a green card. For example, permanent visas
awarded to residents of Mexico rose from 64,000 per year in the 1970s to 166,000 per year in the
1980s and to 225,000 per year in the 1990s, before dropping to 169,000 per year since 2000. 19
Visa growth from the 1970s to the 2000s partly reflects the growing population of Mexican
residents who have family members who are legal U.S. residents, which has expanded the pool of
eligible green card applicants. However, idiosyncratic changes in immigration policy are also atwork. The 1990s blip in green cards awarded to residents of Mexico was partly a result of thelegalization of undocumented immigrants under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986,
which delivered green cards to undocumented residents who met eligibility requirements on a onetime basis. The recent slowdown in low-skilled immigration is evident in green card allocations.
Green cards awarded to Mexican residents declined from 175,000 per year during the 2001–05
period to 140,000 per year during the 2011–15 period. Because more residents of Mexico were
eligible for green cards in 2010 than in 2000, the slowdown in green cards issued must be due toa decrease in demand for U.S. visas, which may be due to improved economic conditions in
Mexico relative to the United States.
Another form of legal immigration available to low-skilled, foreign-born workers is atemporary work visa. These visas permit a non-U.S. resident to work in the United States for aperiod of less than one year. The H-2A program provides work permits to agricultural workers,
while the H-2B program gives work permits to nonagricultural workers, often for seasonal jobs inconstruction or tourism. The number of H-2 visas has risen over time—H-2A visas from 46,000
in 2006 to 284,000 in 2015, and H-2B visas from 97,000 in 2006 to 120,000 in 2015. However,
because these visas permit stays of less than one year and are nonrenewable, they account for no19

Regarding admission of permanent legal residents from nations in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean,
green cards issued have risen from 50,000 per year in the 1970s, to 180,000 per year in the 1980s, to 205,000 per year
in the 1990s, and to 250,000 per year since 2000.

25

more than a small share (less than 3 percent) of the over 17 million low-skilled, working-age
immigrants who resided in the United States as of the mid-2010s. 20
UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRATION The most significant recent changes in the UnitedStates’ policy governing low-skilled immigration pertain to how the country monitors and enforces
its borders and ports of entry. Undocumented immigrants gain entry to the United States either byoverstaying their legal immigration visas or by crossing a U.S. border or entry point illegally. 21
The United States has substantially expanded the resources it devotes to preventing undocumented
labor inflows (Roberts, Alden, and Whitley 2013). Figure 10 plots the number of U.S. Border
Patrol agents stationed at the U.S.–Mexico border and other entry points. In 2016, 85.9 percent ofagents were stationed in the Southwest, a share similar to that in 1992. The expansion in personnel
at the border—which increased by a factor of 4.8 by 2016—encompasses only part of the buildup.
There have also been substantial investments in infrastructure at the border and changes in how
those caught attempting undocumented entry are treated.
To comprehend the dimensions of these changes, consider how the environment along the
San Diego–Tijuana segment of the U.S.–Mexico border today compares with that in 1992, before
the modern enforcement buildup began. In 1992, there were 1,009 Border Patrol agents assigned
to the San Diego region, which stretches from the Pacific Ocean for about 60 miles east, amongthe 3,555 agents stationed along the entire U.S.–Mexico border. Barriers at the border itself were
insubstantial, consisting in many areas, including those adjacent to the heart of urban Tijuana, of
no more than a chain-link fence, in which large holes were frequently cut. In 1992, the Border
Patrol apprehended 545,000 individuals in the San Diego sector, representing 542 apprehensions
per agent. Across the entire U.S.–Mexico border, there were 1,134,000 apprehensions,representing 319 apprehensions per agent. Agents spent much of their time chasing down migrants
as they attempted to run into the United States and find cover in San Diego neighborhoods. Morethan 95 percent of those apprehended were Mexican nationals, and nearly all were subject to“voluntary removal,” under which they face no legal sanction for being apprehended. After
capture, most were bused across the nearest border crossing, leaving them free to attempt entry
20

That is, if a current H-2 visa holder desires to return on an H-2 visa in the following year, he or she must return tohis or her country of residence and seek admission out of the following year’s visa allocation.
21
As of the mid-2000s, approximately 45 percent of undocumented immigrants in the United States appeared to bevisa overstayers (many of whom do not remain in the United States in the longer term). See Pew Research Center(2006) and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2016b) for estimates of annual overstay rates by country.

26

again soon thereafter (Hanson 2007). Thus, as of the early 1990s, the U.S.–Mexico border was
porous, the enforcement presence was unsophisticated and lightly resourced, and sanctions against
migrants attempting illegal entry were weak.
Today, the San Diego–Tijuana border, as with much of the U.S.–Mexico border, is a muchdifferent place. The number of Border Patrol officers in San Diego has grown to 2,325, among the
17,026 stationed along the entire border. San Diego and Tijuana are now separated by multiple
layers of border barriers, which include rows of closely spaced, vertically mounted steel beams
that reach 18 feet in height. These barriers constitute part of the 650 miles of fencing along the
U.S.–Mexico border, 600 miles of which were constructed between 2006 and 2010 (Roberts,
Alden, and Whitley 2013), which cover nearly all the U.S–Mexico border that does not coincidewith the Rio Grande, a river that spans the near entirety of Texas’s border with Mexico. The San
Diego–Tijuana border is patrolled by Border Patrol agents in SUVs, who traverse groomed roads
constructed between each layer of border fencing, with manned and unmanned aircraft surveillingfrom above. Night-vision-capable video cameras posted every few hundred yards provide acontinuous feed to Border Patrol stations nearby. In 2015, apprehensions in the San Diego sector
were down to 26,000 (11 apprehensions per agent) and down to 337,000 for the U.S.–Mexico
border as a whole (29 apprehensions per agent). Whereas, in the past, the Border Patrol spent muchof its time physically apprehending migrants, today its job is to serve as a deterrence force against
those who would consider illegal entry. In fiscal year 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security spent an estimated $7 billion on salaries and benefits for Border Patrol agents andCustoms and Border Protection officers (whose employment numbers are roughly equal); $3.6
billion on Coast Guard efforts to maintain the security of U.S. ports, waterways, and coastal areas;$2.9 billion on the detention and removal of deportable aliens; and $410 million to maintaininfrastructure and purchase communications equipment related to border security (U.S.
Department of Homeland Security 2016a).
Sanctions against undocumented immigration have also changed. The era of voluntary
removal is over, replaced by a Consequence Delivery System (Argueta 2016). The disposition of
those apprehended is conditional on their previous crossing activity and other circumstances. Since
2000, nearly all those apprehended at the border (meaning within 100 miles of a border and 14
days of entering the United States) have been fingerprinted and recorded in a digital database.
27

Consequences depend on whether the apprehension is the first ever or a repeat event. Since theearly 2010s, the large majority of those apprehended (more than 85 percent) have been subject at
a minimum to “expedited removal” (or “reinstatement of removal,” if they have been removed
before), which is a formal and immediate removal order that carries the considerable penalty ofmaking the individual ineligible for legal U.S. immigration during the subsequent 10 years(enforceable via an individual’s fingerprint record). Those with multiple prior apprehensions may
be subject to a “warrant of arrest” and misdemeanor prosecution. Roughly one-third of thosedeported are now repatriated to a port of entry far from their attempted crossing point, which
disrupts smuggling operations in which individuals pay smugglers for multiple attempts to crossthe border (as a hedge against the risk of apprehension). 22 Since the enactment of the Consequence
Delivery System, recidivism rates have dropped. During the 2005–07 period, 25 to 30 percent of
those apprehended were caught within the same year. Recidivism began to decline in 2009, when
the consequence program was rolled out, and in 2015 it stood at 15 percent.
The intensity of immigration enforcement has also increased in the U.S. interior. 23 U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the government agency tasked with locating andremoving “deportable aliens” in the U.S. interior, meaning all immigrants whose criminal
activities—whether related to immigration or nonimmigration infractions—warrants deportation.
By working more closely with local law enforcement agencies, ICE agents have expanded thedeportations of individuals accused of minor infractions, including those driving without a licenseor driving under the influence of alcohol or other substances (Thompson and Cohen 2014). Thesechanges in part account for the increase in the deportations of noncriminal aliens (that is, those
whose nonimmigration crimes alone do not warrant deportation) from 112,000 per year during thefirst three years of the George W. Bush administration (2001–03) to 223,000 per year during thefirst three years of the Barack Obama administration (2009–11). Deportations of criminal aliens—
those whose nonimmigration crimes do warrant deportation—has also increased, from 77,000 per
year in 2001–03 to 164,000 per year in 2009–11, which may reflect a combination of an expanding

22

The Alien Transfer Exit Program repatriates Mexican nationals through geographic areas different from theirattempted point of entry (Argueta 2016).
23
Changes in interior enforcement are important, in light of the fact that about two-fifths of undocumented immigrants
may have entered the country on legal visas, which they subsequently overstayed (Passel and Cohn 2016). By
increasing border and interior enforcement simultaneously, the Department of Homeland Security may reduce
incentives for border crossers to become visa overstayers.

28

population of criminal aliens and increased efforts by ICE to locate and remove these individuals
when they finish their prison terms. The Department of Homeland Security’s ICE budget in fiscal
year 2017 was $6.2 billion (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2016a).
What have these changes in policy meant for undocumented immigration? One indicationof the impact of border enforcement is movements in the price for smuggling services. Most of
those attempting to cross the U.S.–Mexico border hire a smuggler, known as a coyote, to serve asa guide through the desert and mountain regions of Arizona and Texas, where most undocumented
immigrants now attempt to cross the border. Measures of coyote prices are available from theBorder Patrol, which asks a subset of those apprehended whether they hired a coyote and the pricepaid; from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), which surveys individuals in Mexico about
their previous border-crossing experiences; and from the Survey of Migration on the Northern
Border of Mexico (Encuesta sobre Migracíon en la Frontera Norte de México, EMIF Norte), whichsurveys migrants returning from the United States at bus stations and other transportation points
in Mexico.24 None of these sources are free of measurement problems. Border Patrol data are only
available from those apprehended and questioned about their behavior, while the MMP and EMIF
Norte are based on the selected sample of migrants who have returned to Mexico. Although
average coyote prices differ across these sources, their time trends are similar (Roberts and others2010). Border Patrol data show smuggler prices rising from $1,000 in 1999 to $1,600 in 2008 (in2007 dollars). Using data from the MMP, Christina Gathmann (2008) estimates that a 10 percent
border-wide increase in enforcement (measured in man-hours) increases the average smuggler
price by 4.9 percent. Using this elasticity, the increase in Border Patrol manpower on the U.S.–
Mexico border from 2007 to 2015 of 27.6 percent would have increased smuggler prices by 13.6
percent.
The cumulative effect of the U.S. enforcement buildup is hundreds of miles of new fencing,
the rollout of technologically sophisticated border surveillance, a near quintupling of Border Patrol
agents since the early 1990s, and the criminalization of illegal border crossings since the late
2000s. These changes combine with the recent compression in income differences between the
United States and major sending nations to weaken incentives for low-skilled labor inflows.

24

For the methodology of the Mexican Migration Project, see http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu/research/design-en.aspx;
and for EMIF Norte, see http://www.colef.mx/emif/eng/bases_metodologicas.php.

29

C. Demographic Pressures for U.S. Immigration
In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, macroeconomic shocks and relatively low incomes in
Mexico and the rest of Latin America helped trigger labor flows to the United States. Whatsustained these flows over time was rapid growth in the relative labor supplies of these countries(Hanson and McIntosh 2012). Whereas the U.S. baby boom came to a halt in the early 1960s, Latin
America’s baby boom did not abate until two decades later. Differences in the timing of the U.S.
and Latin American demographic transitions mean that though the sizes of U.S. cohorts comingof working age began to slow in the early 1980s, they kept growing in Latin America until the
2000s, fueling pressures for emigration.
The relationship between labor supply growth and changes in U.S. migration appears infigure 11, which charts, for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the percent change inmigration rates to the United States from 1980 to 2015 against the percent change in national birthcohort sizes over this interval. A strong positive relationship is evident, with the R2 on the
population-weighted linear fit equal to 0.45. As noted, the most important origin countries in termsof absolute number of current migrants residing in the United States are Mexico, El Salvador,
Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras. Mexico stands out in this group, with roughly
10 times the number of U.S. immigrants in the 15–40 age group as the next largest origin countryin Latin America (figure 12). Mexico also stands out in terms of having the largest drop in
migration between 2010 and 2015. Although most countries in Latin America see some decreasein the number of immigrants in this age group between 2010 and 2015, the number of Mexicanborn individuals age 15–40 residing in the United States fell by more than 1.1 million over these
five years. 25
The durability of the decrease in migration from Mexico to the United States depends
strongly on the reason it occurred. If the slowdown is due primarily to earlier shifts in population
growth (Hatton and Williamson 2011), then given projected near constant U.S.–Mexico labor25
Our data indicate that the total number of Mexican-born individuals in the United States of all ages fell by 272,000
from 2010 to 2015, roughly in line with the estimate from Gonzalez-Barrera (2015) using data from the Mexican
National Survey of Demographic Dynamics (Encuesta Nacional de la Dinámica Demográfica, ENADID) that theUnited States lost 141,000 Mexican-born individuals from 2009 to 2014. This muted change relative to the populationage 15–40 indicates both that the young are more sensitive to changes in conditions than the old, and foreshadows theresults later in this section that the population of older Mexicans will continue to grow even once the number ofyounger individuals starts to fall (Giorguli-Saucedo, García-Guerrero, and Masferrer 2016). Due to how mortality
increases with age, our measure of net migration (differences between migrant numbers and birth cohort size) becomesless reliable as cohorts become older.

30

supply ratios, we may expect large-scale Mexican emigration to be a thing of the past. If the recent
border enforcement buildup plays a significant role in the immigration slowdown (Gathmann2008; Amuedo-Dorantes, Puttitanun, and Martinez-Donate 2013), then the pace of immigrationfrom Mexico may be effectively in the control of the U.S. government. 26 Alternatively, if labordemand shocks are primarily responsible for the immigration slowdown (Villarreal 2014), thehiatus in high levels of immigration may end once the U.S. economy recuperates more fully.
To understand the causes of the decline in Mexican migration to the United States, we turnto data from the Mexico population census. We exploit variation in labor supply and per capita
GDP across Mexican states to explain emigration. This analysis updates the work of Hanson andCraig McIntosh (2010) to the 2000–10 period. 27 We count the base size of Mexican state-agegender birth cohorts when they are first seen in the data, and use successive censuses to count the
number of individuals remaining in Mexico each year. Because more than 95 percent of emigrants
from Mexico go to the United States (Passel and Cohn 2009), and because we study young cohorts
in which mortality is low, these numbers provide a usable estimate of net emigration to the UnitedStates from each Mexican state. To form our dependent variable, we aggregate individuals into
three-year birth cohorts, and then calculate decadal changes in the percentage of the cohort thathas emigrated, as measured by the change in its size. To investigate the role of labor supply inemigration, we include as a regressor the log ratio of the Mexican state birth cohort size to the U.S.
birth cohort size. We restrict the analysis to individuals age 15–40, which is the age range during
which most migration occurs. The regression specification is(6)

𝑁𝑁𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖
𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖16
𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝐶𝐶
� + 𝛾𝛾2 log �
�
+
𝛾𝛾
log
�
𝑑𝑑𝑚𝑚𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 = 𝛽𝛽0 + 𝛾𝛾1 log �
316𝐶𝐶 � + 𝛼𝛼𝑖𝑖 + 𝜇𝜇𝑔𝑔 + 𝜂𝜂𝑐𝑐
𝑁𝑁𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈+ 𝜌𝜌𝑡𝑡 + 𝜀𝜀𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 ,where 𝑑𝑑𝑚𝑚𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 is the change in the emigration rate for Mexican state 𝑖𝑖, birth cohort 𝑐𝑐, gender 𝑔𝑔,

and census year 𝑡𝑡. To focus on low-skilled immigration, we take the log of the ratio of the Mexican

state birth cohort size 𝑁𝑁𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 to the current U.S. native-born population with less than a high school
26

Other factors driving migration from Mexico to the United States in recent decades include Mexican policy reforms
in the 1990s that privatized land rights, which allowed rural residents to sell their land, or to leave for urban areas
without fear of relinquishing their claim to communal land (de Janvry and others 2015).
27
Although the 2015 Mexican micro census Conteo de Poblacion y Vivienda should permit a similar exercise to be
conducted, we found the resulting population estimates to be too noisy to use. Hence, the analysis uses data only
through 2010.

31

education 𝑁𝑁𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈 . Because we may be concerned that education decisions among U.S. natives areendogenous to Mexican immigration rates, we instrument for this ratio using the log ratio of the
Mexican birth cohort to the entire respective U.S. birth cohort. Labor demand shocks are capturedby the log ratio of GDP per capita in a Mexican state to the United States in the year that a cohort
16
was age 16, 𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖16 ⁄𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈, as well as the log ratio of contemporary GDP per capita in a Mexican𝐶𝐶state to the United States, 𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝐶𝐶 ⁄𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈. We select age 16 because it is a common year for entry

into the labor market in Mexico; relative income in this year indicates prevailing economic
conditions at a time when individuals first make choices about labor supply. To express labordemand factors in terms of deviations from trend changes in economic activity, we use residuals

from a regression of the log ratio of Mexican state GDP per capita to U.S. GDP per capita on statespecific intercept and slope terms. To control for confounding shocks on migration, we include
fixed effects for the Mexican state (𝛼𝛼𝑖𝑖 ), gender (𝜇𝜇𝑔𝑔 ), birth cohort (𝜂𝜂𝑐𝑐 ), and census wave (𝜌𝜌𝑡𝑡 ).

The regression specification in equation 6 is motivated by the migration model presented

by Borjas (2006), in which differences in relative labor supply combine with shocks to labordemand to create the incentive for the movement of labor between economies. Adjustment costs
prevent migration from quickly equilibrating wages between regions, meaning that initialdifferences in labor supply—in particular, at the time a cohort enters the labor market—contributeto continuing pressure for migration in subsequent periods as a cohort ages. Hence, the migration
rate is a function of initial labor supply and labor demand conditions, as well as subsequentinnovations to labor demand.
The results of this analysis, presented in table 4, confirm a prominent role for labor supply
in driving migration from Mexico to the United States. Column 1 shows the pooled results using
all available census waves including 2010, column 2 excludes 2010, column 3 shows the results
for males only, and column 4 shows the results for females only. In all cases, the log Mexico–U.S.
labor supply ratio is positive and strongly statistically significant. The coefficient in the firstcolumn implies that a 10 percent increase in relative labor supply would translate into a 1.4
percentage point increase the decadal flow of net migration. The relationship is slightly weaker
among women, with a coefficient approximately 70 percent as large as for men, but still very
precisely estimated (t value of 9.1). The coefficient of 0.1441 in column 1 of table 4 combinedwith the doubling of the labor supply ratio between Mexico and the United States from 1970 to32

2000 can more than explain the rise in the decadal net migration rate from 2.5 to 8.3 percent during
this period. Now that U.S. cohorts are growing more rapidly than their Mexican counterparts, ourresults suggest that the drop in the average log labor supply ratio for a Mexican state to the UnitedStates, from –3.82 in 2000 to –3.73 in 2010, is responsible for more than four-fifths of the observed
decrease in the decadal average net migration rate to the United States during that time interval(from 8.3 to 6.6 percent).
The effect of labor demand, as measured by the log ratio of GDP per capita for a Mexican
state to the United States, is weaker and less stable. Contemporaneous GDP ratios are neversignificant and alternate in sign across specifications, while the GDP ratio at age 16 is consistently
negative but significant only in the specifications that pool men and women. Surprisingly, it
appears that this relationship becomes less pronounced during the Great Recession; when we
exclude 2010, the fit becomes significant at the 1 percent level and the coefficient is almost fourtimes as large in absolute value. 28 The relatively large swings in Mexican GDP during this period,
as well as the fact that the recession occurred close to the end of the decade, may have dampened
the sensitivity of migration to shocks during this interval. Nevertheless, positive income shocks to
Mexican states (or negative income shocks to the United States) clearly have the overall effect ofslowing migration.
How much of the migration slowdown can be attributed to the Great Recession? In trying
to understand the labor demand effects of the Great Recession shock on migration, we conduct a
simple simulation exercise. We use the marginal effect from the model estimated in column 2 oftable 4—for the period preceding the Great Recession—to ask the out-of-sample question as towhat would have happened to Mexico–U.S. migration if the United States had not experienced theGreat Recession. We simulate the counterfactual log GDP ratios that would have occurred if theUnited States had remained on its long-term trend of GDP per capita. Because it is the GDP-atage-16 variable through which income changes primarily affect migration, GDP shocks operateby altering the initial labor supply choices of individuals when they first enter the labor force: toseek work in Mexico or to move to the United States. The left panel of figure 13 shows the timeseries projection of U.S. GDP in the absence of the recession, and the right panel shows the actual
28

Villarreal (2014) also finds declining trend migration and a weak discontinuous effect of Mexican and U.S. GDP
on migration during the Great Recession. His analysis suggests that migration tracks U.S. employment rates quite
closely during this time period, but due to endogeneity concerns we do not pursue this control for economic conditions.

33

and counterfactual log labor demand ratios that would have resulted. The right panel shows thatthe difference in log GDP ratios from actual versus predicted in 2010 opens up to about 0.06 =1.25 – 1.19 log points, or 6 percentage points. This indicates that the total predicted effect on the
migration rate for cohorts turning 16 after 2007 is 0.0042 = 0.06 × 0.07 log points, or roughly ahalf percentage point decrease in the decadal migration rate. Using the 2010 age cohort sizes andmigration rates, there were 22 million Mexican-born individuals between the age of 15 and 25,
and we would have expected 1.9 million of them to migrate to the United States. Adjusting thedecadal migration rate downward by 0.5 percent for the decade that transpired between the GreatRecession and the 2015 ACS, we would have expected a decrease in the total stock of migrants of

109,000 arising from the labor demand shock to those exposed to the Great Recession shock when
16 or younger. Given the results in the previous section illustrating that the stock of migrants inthis age group fell by more than 1.1 million between 2010 and 2015, it would appear that labordemand shocks as captured by GDP per capita can explain only a modest portion of the reversal
in migration flows.
To what extent are other factors, such as the ramp-up in enforcement at the border,
responsible for the decreases in Mexico–U.S. migration between 2007 and 2015? We attempted toinvestigate the role of border enforcement using an instrumentation approach that first calculated
the share of migrants from each Mexican state apprehended in each Border Patrol sector in theearliest available year, 1999. We then multiplied this sector- or state-specific enforcement
incidence by an index of overall Border Patrol effort, the number of Border Patrol “linewatch”
hours per year. The resulting instrument proved to be strongly positively correlated with Mexican
state emigration rates, indicating that despite our effort to exogenize enforcement, it may be sostrongly endogenous to migration that one cannot estimate a credible long-term impact of borderenforcement on successful crossings. Our compromise, reduced-form approach described aboveomits direct measures of enforcement, whose effect on migration may therefore be absorbed byother covariates. How may the exclusion of enforcement affect our results? One possibility is thatthat enforcement responds endogenously to relative GDP ratios, in which case it is captured by the
reduced-form relationship between GDP per capita and migration (Hanson and Spilimbergo 2001).
A second possibility is that enforcement is orthogonal to our core explanatory variables, and hence
remains in the residual. A third possibility is that omitted enforcement variation is incidentally34

correlated with changes in labor supply, in which case its effects load onto this variable. In any
case, it appears clear that the push factors driving migration from Mexico to the United States haveabated sharply during the past decade, and hence the marginal effectiveness of border enforcement
spending in terms of prevented crossings is falling.
Taking our results at face value, the analysis suggests that labor supply shocks play a majorrole in driving low-skilled immigration flows in the United States. This fact, combined with therelatively predictable nature of future population growth, provides an opening for predictive
analysis. We therefore turn next to a forecasting exercise using data from all the Latin American
sending countries to assess U.S. immigration pressures decades into the future.
D. Summary
From the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, there were robust pressures for low-skilled
immigration in the United States. U.S. incomes for low-skilled workers far exceeded those inmigrant-sending nations; the U.S. macroeconomy was considerably more stable than Latin
America’s; and enforcement against illegal entry, though not entirely lax, permitted large inflows
to occur. These conditions changed abruptly after the Great Recession. Gaps in the level andvolatility of income between the United States and migrant-sending nations have compressed,
while there has been an extensive buildup in U.S. immigration enforcement. Despite these recentchanges in the pattern of relative income growth, it appears that changes in relative labor supply
growth have mattered the most for current trends in U.S. immigration.

III. Low-Skilled Immigration in the Long Run
It may be tempting to view the period since the Great Recession as a temporary pause in the U.S.
immigration wave that began in the 1970s. After all, U.S. incomes for low-wage labor are stillroughly twice those in Mexico, and are even larger when compared with those of other sending
nations in Latin America. Should not high levels of immigration resume once the U.S. economy
returns to a period of normal growth? Such a perspective downplays both the recent increase in
U.S. enforcement and the demographic determinant of recent U.S. labor inflows from the Western
Hemisphere. Looking forward, demographic pressures for U.S. immigration are set to weaken
significantly. In this section, we construct a model of long-run changes in U.S. immigration, which35we use to project U.S. labor inflows in coming decades. We then characterize how changes in lowskilled immigration may affect labor market conditions in the United States.
A. A Predictive Analysis of Future Migration from Latin America to the United States
To evaluate the effects of future demographic change on U.S. immigration, we turn to thenational level and incorporate the long-term population growth forecasts for countries in theWestern Hemisphere provided by the United Nations’ World Population Prospects. 29 We examine
how immigration from Latin American countries may have changing effects on U.S. labor inflows
in coming decades. Recognizing that future migration episodes will also be driven by unanticipatedeconomic and political shocks, differential demographic growth estimates for the next 15 years
provide one of the clearest lenses on the future that is available. Labor supply provides a uniquely
forecastable component of migration pressures: The cohorts that will enter the labor force in thenext 16 to 20 years have already been born, and changes in cohort sizes for the next two decades
can be predicted relatively accurately using current trends in fertility. 30
A simple visual perspective on the issue is given in figure 14, which plots observed andprojected population relative to the United States for major sending countries from 1980 to 2040,
where we normalize 1980 values to 1. The most striking demographic transition is in El Salvador;having reached a peak in relative labor supply in 2010, its population relative to the United States
is projected to decline rapidly in the future, reaching 1980 levels again by 2050. 31 Mexico follows
a similar temporal pattern, but with a slower future decline. Guatemala and Honduras have seen
similarly steep increases in relative labor supply, reaching roughly 250 percent of their 1980 values
by 2015. The future experiences of these two Central American countries diverge strongly, with
Guatemala’s relative labor supply continuing to grow almost linearly for another 25 years, whereas
Honduras’s supply commences to decline immediately. Continuing robust labor supply growth in
Guatemala may allow it to partially replace diminished U.S. migrant inflows from other Latin

29

To avoid circularity in studying how future population growth will drive migration from countries whose population
will in turn be determined by migration, we use the UN’s “no migration” population forecast, which ignores as-yetunobserved future migration in its projected population estimates.
30
Many migration episodes, such as the recent surge of Syrians into Europe and the arrival of Vietnamese immigrants
in the United States in the late 1970s, were driven by shocks other than labor supply. Some shifts in labor supply, suchas the rapid fertility decreases in Catholic Southern Europe and Latin America, were not forecasted. Nonetheless,given our lack of ability to anticipate future income shocks, demographic differentials remain an attractive way of
predicting medium-term migration trends.
31
Because the U.S. population is growing, declines in these relative-population-size ratios do not imply absolutedeclines in the populations of origin countries.

36

American countries. However, given Guatemala’s small size—its 2015 population was 16 million,
compared with Mexico’s population of 127 million—its migrant-sending capacity is limited.
To use population forecasts as the basis for a predictive model of future U.S. immigration,
we first calculate five-year birth cohort ratios in the historical (census) and future (United Nations)data in the same manner, and project future GDP based on growth forecasts from the International
Monetary Fund so as to be able to take log GDP per capita ratios. Using data for the 25 available
countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, we estimate the model using observed migration
rates from 1980 to 2015, as summarized in table 5, and use the resulting parameters to project agegender-country–specific migration rates through 2040. In order to capture the dramatic shift inimmigration enforcement that occurred between 1990 and 2000, we estimate a trend-break modelthat fits piecewise linear time trends to the “low enforcement” era preceding 2000 and the “highenforcement” era starting in 2000. 32 Because we want to estimate effects for the full age
distribution of immigrants in the United States, we use all available age cohorts and not just thoseof young workers. The estimating equation is(7)

𝑚𝑚𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 = 𝛽𝛽0 + 𝛾𝛾1 log �

𝑁𝑁𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖
𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖
� + 𝛾𝛾2 log �� + 𝛼𝛼𝑖𝑖 + 𝜇𝜇𝑔𝑔 + 𝜂𝜂𝑐𝑐 + � 𝛼𝛼𝑖𝑖 𝛿𝛿2𝑡𝑡
𝑁𝑁𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑖𝑖+ � 𝜑𝜑1𝑡𝑡 𝛼𝛼𝑖𝑖 𝑡𝑡2 + 𝜀𝜀𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 .
𝑖𝑖Here, 𝑚𝑚𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 is the net migration rate to the United States for source country 𝑖𝑖, age cohort

𝑐𝑐, and gender 𝑔𝑔, at the time of census wave 𝑡𝑡. Regressors include the log ratio of the origin-country
birth cohort to the U.S. birth cohort (𝑁𝑁𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 ⁄𝑁𝑁𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈 ) and the contemporaneous log GDP ratio of theorigin-country’s GDP per capita to U.S. GDP per capita (𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 ⁄𝐺𝐺𝐺𝐺𝑃𝑃𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈𝑈 ). We include fixed effects
for the origin country (𝛼𝛼𝑖𝑖 ), the age cohort (𝜂𝜂𝑐𝑐 ), and gender (𝜇𝜇𝑔𝑔 ). We let time trends (and trend

breaks) be specific to the origin country by allowing each country to have separate intercept andtime trend terms within the low-enforcement and high-enforcement eras. First, we interact thecountry fixed effect with a dummy variable indicating the year 2000 and later (𝛿𝛿2𝑡𝑡 ), then weinteract the fixed effect with a 1980–90 trend (𝑡𝑡1 ), and finally with a second trend term picking up
the high-enforcement 2000–15 time trend (𝑡𝑡2 ). We predict over the interval 2020–40, meaning that
32

These trend breaks (which we allow to be country-specific) are consistent with the inclusion of time period fixed
effects in the first-differenced model in equation 6. We move from first differences in equation 6 to levels in equation
7 to accommodate forecasting immigrant stocks.

37

we forecast for the same number of periods as are used to estimate the post-enforcement trend. In
using a broad set of age cohorts (age 2–67), we partition the regression to estimate separate
coefficients for the young (age 2–37) and the old (age 42–67), given the divergent migration
trajectories of these two groups.
The parameter estimates for the central parameters in the cross-country regression for Latin
America and the Caribbean are given in table 5, where we suppress the large number of countrylevel intercept and slope interactions. The regression results contain several noteworthy features.
First, the strong push factor of large cohort size is experienced entirely before age 40, after which
there is no significant relationship between the log birth cohort ratio and net migration rates.
Second, the effect of GDP ratios flips across ages; for the young cohorts, high income in the origin
country has no effect on migration, whereas for the older cohorts, high origin-country income
accelerates migration. This latter result is consistent with gravity model estimates of bilateralmigration (Clark, Hatton, and Williamson 2007). It could be explained by migration costs being agreater constraint to migration across Latin America as a whole than in Mexico, with positive
income shocks enabling migration by credit-constrained individuals (Mckenzie and Rapoport
2007).
Having estimated the model on decadal changes in the migration rate, we then predict the
net migration rate for future decades, using the International Monetary Fund’s GDP forecasts andUN population growth forecasts for future decades. We maintain the time trends estimated on datafor 2000 and later, such that we presume the strong immigration enforcement regime stays ineffect. The results are shown in figure 15. With this predicted future migration rate in hand, we
multiply these by the UN-projected future birth cohort sizes to calculate predicted migrant counts
for each cohort. These values are then summed up to obtain migration totals for each country ineach year.
As seen in figure 15, this empirical structure predicts declining net migration rates from
Mexico over the coming decades, with other major Latin American destinations seeing roughly
constant rates. Figure 16 shows that Mexican-born migrant stocks in the key age 15–40 group are
predicted to drop to less than half their current level by 2040. Rather than showing that the GreatRecession has caused a temporary pause in an ongoing wave of immigration from Mexico, theselong-term trends suggest that the 1990–2007 housing boom may have caused a temporary surge38in migration, arresting a demographically driven long-run slowing. 33 Given the strong role that
demographic factors play in our estimation model, convergence in fertility rates across theAmericas removes a powerful factor pushing workers across borders. We find little support for theidea that Latin American immigration will surge again as the U.S. economy recovers.
Our focus on the declining population of migration-age individuals overlooks an importantrole that Mexican-born individuals will play in American demographics. In a manner even more
pronounced than for Mexico itself—which has recently undergone a rapid demographic transition(Tuiran and others 2002)—the U.S. Mexican-born population will age very quickly. We can draw
frequencies of Mexican-born individuals in our data, starting with the observed numbers in 1980
and 2015, and then plot the predicted values in 2040, as shown in figure 17. Whereas the modal
Mexican-born resident in the United States was 20 years old in 1980 and 40 years old in 2015, heor she will be almost 60 years old by 2040. Rapid aging arises from the confluence of declining
fertility in Mexico and the demographic amplifier of emigration, which pushes a larger share oflarger cohorts into the United States and therefore accentuates the implications of Mexico’s
demographic transition for the age structure of the Mexico-born population on the U.S. side of theborder. A large elderly population of undocumented immigrants is a policy challenge that theUnited States has hitherto not faced.
Stepping back to examine the age distribution of all Latin American immigrants, we see
broad evidence of an aging population in the United States. Table 6 illustrates that the total Latin
American–born population under 40 in the United States by 2040 will be only 56 percent of its
current size (4.9 million versus 8.8 million), while the foreign-born population over 40 will be 235
percent of its current size (22.9 million versus 9.8 million). The model predicts a negative net
migration rate for some counties of origin in 2040 (negative values are not possible in practice;
but in our linear predictive model, they indicate a phenomenon that could be interpreted as net
migration pressure out of the United States). 34 The main policy question posed by first-generation
immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean thus appears likely to shift from one of the33

Despite using a much longer panel and a different estimation structure than that used by Hanson and McIntosh(2016), these results confirm these previous predictions that new inflows of working-age Mexicans will drop
substantially by the middle of the 21st century.
34
Negative net migration rates are an artifact of the linear model used to forecast future flows. Our model predicts
only 14 percent of the dyads to have negative net migration in 2020, but future decreases in population growth insending countries drive the share of predicted negative dyads to 24 percent by 2040.

39

labor market effects of large-scale labor inflows to one of the cost of social programs and healthcare for an elderly immigrant population with relatively low incomes (and relatively low rates ofnaturalization when compared with high-skilled immigrants).
B. Changes in Low-Skilled Immigration and U.S. Labor Market Tightness
We have seen that incentives for low-skilled immigration in the United States have changed
markedly since the early 2000s, and that already-manifest demographic pressures are likely tocompress migration inflows in coming decades. How will these developments affect the U.S.
economy? A reduction in the relative supply of low-skilled labor, by putting upward pressure on
wages for these workers, may operate directly by causing changes in the U.S. wage structure(Borjas 2003). Alternatively, wage pressures may induce firms to alter their production techniques
in a manner that mitigates the wage effects of shocks to the relative labor supply by generating
endogenous changes in labor demand (Lewis 2011). Whichever form labor market adjustments
take, the magnitudes of these adjustments are likely to be determined by the implicit pressure ofchanges in immigration inflows on U.S. wages, which we analyze next.
As a final exercise, we consider how the United States’ demand for and supply of labor
have evolved over time and how the supply of low-skilled, foreign-born workers meshes with thesechanges. Our approach employs the methodology of Katz and Murphy (1992), as applied by Autor,
Katz, and Kearney (2008), to examine the relative earnings of more- and less-skilled workers. The
exercise we perform allows us to translate the recent slowdown in low-skilled immigration into
implied pressures on the wage premium enjoyed by skilled workers.
Consider a production function with constant elasticity of substitution that takes as its
arguments the employment of low-skilled and high-skilled workers, where within each skill group
we treat native-born and foreign-born workers as perfect substitutes, as is consistent with recent
evidence (Borjas, Grogger, and Hanson 2012). 35 From the first-order conditions for firm profit
maximization, we obtain an expression for the relative wages of high-skilled and low-skilled labor,(8)log(𝑤𝑤ℎ𝑡𝑡 ) − log(𝑤𝑤𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙 ) = 𝛾𝛾0 + 𝛾𝛾1 [log(𝑁𝑁ℎ𝑡𝑡 ) − log(𝑁𝑁𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙 )] + 𝛾𝛾2 𝑋𝑋𝑡𝑡 + 𝜀𝜀𝑡𝑡 ,where log(𝑤𝑤ℎ𝑡𝑡 ) − log(𝑤𝑤𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙 ) is the log U.S. wage for high-skilled workers relative to the log U.S.
wage for low-skilled workers, log(𝑁𝑁ℎ𝑡𝑡 ) − log(𝑁𝑁𝑙𝑙𝑙𝑙 ) is the log U.S. supply of high-skilled workers
35

The fact that the CPS does not include measures of nativity until 1994 makes this assumption a necessity if we areto estimate equation 6 based on time series variation.

40

relative to the log U.S. supply of low-skilled workers, and 𝑋𝑋𝑡𝑡 is a vector of controls that capturelabor demand shocks. 36 Each skill group is made up of a combination of native-born and foreignborn labor. By taking the difference in earnings between skill groups in equation 8, we remove
from the specification labor demand shocks that are common to high-skilled and low-skilledworkers (for example, aggregate changes in labor demand associated with recessions, and growth
in total factor productivity). Following Autor, Katz, and Kearny (2008), within each skill group
we measure wages as average weekly earnings—holding constant the age, gender, and racialcomposition of workers—and we measure employment in terms of labor supplies expressed in
PEUs. High-skilled workers are those with at least a college education, whereas low-skilledworkers are those with a high school education or less. We estimate equation 6 with annual datafrom the CPS for the period 1963–2007, and we use the results to predict relative earnings for theperiod 1963–2015, which includes the out-of-sample range 2008–15.
In our baseline specification for equation 8, which includes a time trend as the only
additional covariate, the coefficient estimate for 𝛾𝛾1 is –0.42 (with a t value of 9.9) when we define

the low-skilled group to be workers with a high school education or less; and it is –0.18 (with a tvalue of 8.0) when we define the low-skilled group to be workers with strictly less than a highschool education. Consistent with the theory underlying equation 8, increases in the relative supplyof skilled labor drive down the wage premium for skill. These estimates change little when we
expand the period from 1963 to 2015 or include the following additional covariates: a quadratic
time trend, the aggregate unemployment rate, and the log real federal minimum wage. 37 The firstcoefficient—for the impact of relative labor supply on the wage gap between college- and highschool–educated workers—compares in value with the estimates given by Autor, Katz, andKearney (2008) of –0.40 to –0.62, depending on the covariates included, for the period 1963–2005,
suggesting that our coefficient estimates are at the low end of those obtained in previous empirical
work.

36
This estimation approach makes the strong assumption that labor is freely mobile across occupations. See Bursteinand others (2017) for an analysis that uses a Roy (1951) model in the analysis of how immigration affects labor market
outcomes at the occupation level.
37
The time trend carries a positive coefficient, indicating a positive trend in the relative demand for skilled labor; theunemployment rate carries a negative sign but is imprecisely estimated; and the minimum wage enters negatively,
indicating that a higher minimum wage compresses the skill premium. The assumption that the time trend for relativelabor demand is linear over the course of several decades is of course quite strong. Nevertheless, allowing for aquadratic time trend has minimal impact on the estimate of 𝛾𝛾1 .

41

Figure 18, which presents the results, shows three series for relative earnings: the actual
skill premium for the period 1963–2015; the projected skill premium for 1963–2015 based onequation 6, using coefficients estimated on data for 1963–2007; and a counterfactual projection of
the skill premium, where we again use the estimation results for equation 8, but now replace therelative labor supplies we feed into the projection with a counterfactual series in which we assume
that the number of low-skilled immigrant workers grows at the same rate from 2008 to 2015 as it
does for 1994 to 2007. For the out-of-sample period 2008–15, the first projection is based on
observed changes in the relative supply of skilled labor (which embody actual changes in both
high-skilled and low-skilled immigration), whereas the second projection is based on the observedlabor supply through 2007 and the counterfactual supply thereafter (which suppresses the
slowdown in low-skilled immigration).
In constructing the counterfactual projection, it is worth noting that inflows of both lowskilled and high-skilled immigrants slowed after 2007. Our counterfactual labor supply series, by
imposing continued growth for low-skilled but not for high-skilled immigration, thus understates
the post-2007 growth in the relative supply of skilled labor. The resulting counterfactual projectionof the skill premium therefore corresponds to an artificial setting, which we view as useful for
describing the magnitude of the low-skilled immigration slowdown in terms of wage pressures but
not for evaluating the impact of immigration on earnings during this period. 38
For low-skilled workers defined to be those with less than a high school education (the left
panel of figure 18), the actual skill premium is flat from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, rises
steadily from the late 1970s to the mid-2000s, and is flat again thereafter. During the within-sample
period 1963–2007, the predicted skill premium rises more slowly than the actual skill premium inthe mid-1970s, suggesting that the relative demand for skill rises more slowly than the linear trend
would indicate, and rises more rapidly than the actual skill premium from the late 1970s to the late
1990s, suggesting growth in the demand for skill that exceeds the linear trend during this interval.
Turning to the out-of-sample period 2008–15, the post-2007 slowdown in immigration
tempers growth in the supply of low-skilled labor, causing the predicted skill premium to rise more
slowly after 2007 than before. Replacing actual relative labor supplies with the counterfactual

38

For analyses of the impact of immigration on earnings, see Card (2001); Borjas (2003); Ottaviano and Peri (2012);
and Dustmann, Frattini, and Preston (2013).

42

series that assumes sustained growth in low-skilled immigration (that is, a 2007–15 annual growthrate equal to the 1994–2007 annual growth rate), the projected path of the skill premium naturally
lies above the projected path based on observed data. If low-skilled immigration had not slowed
after 2007, the relative supply of skilled labor would have grown more slowly, which in turn would
have mandated a larger increase in relative earnings for skilled labor. The difference between thetwo projected wage series in 2015 is 8.6 log points, which indicates that the magnitude of theslowdown in low-skilled immigration—holding all else equal, including high-skilled
immigration—is consistent with a decrease in the skill premium of 1.1 percent a year during the
2007–15 period. To put this magnitude in context, the observed increase in the wage premium forcollege-educated workers versus workers with less than a high school education during the 1980–
2007 period of rapidly rising wage inequality is 1.6 percent a year. Again, we do not take this value
to be the true change in wages due to the immigration slowdown (because we are not addressingchanges in high-skilled immigration), but rather as an indication of the magnitude of theimmigration-induced change in the labor supply expressed in terms of wage pressures.
When we instead define low-skilled workers to be those with a high school education orless (right panel of figure 18), the broad patterns for the actual skill premium are similar, though
the flattening in the premium during the 2000s is less pronounced and the absolute premium issmaller. For the out-of-sample period 2008–15, it is again the case again that the projected skill
premium based on actual labor supplies lies above the observed skill premium, indicating an
increase in the demand for skill that is less than the linear trend. Comparing this projected skill
premium with that which obtains when using counterfactual labor supplies (involving no post2007 slowdown in immigration), the latter exceeds the former by 6.1 log points in 2015, or adifference of 0.8 percent a year during the period 2007–15. To put this magnitude in context, theobserved increase in the wage premium for college-educated workers versus workers with a highschool education or less for 1980–2007 is 1.1 percent a year. Because low-skilled immigrants area smaller share of the skill group with a high school education or less than of the skill group withstrictly less than a high school education, the implied wage pressures of the immigration slowdown
are weaker when we move to this more expansive definition of being low-skilled. Similar patterns
are observed when we restrict the sample from all industries (figure 18) to low-skill industries(figure 19).
43

C. Summary
The U.S. immigration wave of the late 20th century was enabled to a substantial extent by
the rapid growth of the labor supply in Latin America and the Caribbean relative to the UnitedStates. Because labor supply growth in migrant-sending nations is slowing and will continue toslow, the demographic push for U.S. immigration is abating. Abetting these demographic forcesis the substantial increase in U.S. immigration enforcement, which thus far has been maintained.
Absent economic or political crises in the Western Hemisphere that reignite internationalmigration, standard migration models predict that migration rates from major U.S.-sending nations
will drop sharply in coming decades. Indeed, the weakening of these migration pressures began in
the early 2000s, and may have been masked by the temporary labor demand boost provided by the
U.S. housing boom. The resulting post-2007 slowdown in low-skilled immigration is of amagnitude consistent with a decrease in the wage gap between high-skilled and low-skilled U.S.
labor of 6 to 9 percentage points. If, as predicted by demographic forces, low-skilled immigration
continues to decline in future decades, U.S. firms—especially those located in U.S.–Mexico borderstates and in the immigrant-intensive industries of agriculture, construction, eating and drinking
establishments, and nondurable manufacturing—are likely to face pressure to alter their production
techniques in a manner that replaces low-skilled labor with other factors of production.

IV. Looking Forward
From the early 1970s to the early 2000s, the United States experienced an epochal wave of lowskilled immigration, which was the combined result of relatively high U.S. incomes, relatively
stable U.S. GDP growth, relatively slow U.S. labor supply growth, and moderately permissive
immigration enforcement. Since the mid-2000s, each of these drivers has attenuated. The U.S.
macroeconomy is no longer so stable relative to migrant-sending countries; U.S. labor supply
growth is now similar to that in much of the Western Hemisphere; and the U.S. borders, having
been heavily fortified, are much harder to cross without a visa.
The future of low-skilled immigration thus appears to be less about streaming inflows ofyoung workers from lower-income nations and more about the needs of an aging population oflower-income adults that is settled in the United States. Those within this group who are
undocumented—somewhere between one-half and three-fifths—do not qualify for most federally
44

funded welfare benefits, including Medicare and Medicaid. In recent decades, the primary fiscal
effects of low-skilled immigration were the cost of primary and secondary education for thechildren of immigrants, and, to a lesser extent, for publicly funded health care for the subpopulationof this group that was born in the United States (Blau and Mackie 2016). Judith Treas and Zoya
Gubernskaya (2015) document that 51 percent of the foreign-born population is covered by someform of public insurance, as compared with 35 percent of the native born, suggesting that the costsof caring for the foreign born are likely to fall disproportionately on publicly funded programs.
Given our estimates of an increase of 13 million (134 percent) in the population of foreign-born
immigrants over the age of 40 by the year 2040, there may be considerable growth in the demand
for safety net programs as a result of past and future immigration. Under existing financing rules,
U.S. states and localities would be the entities primarily responsible for shouldering these costs.
In light of the changing demographics of migrant-sending nations, and the apparent effectsof the existing immigration enforcement surge, the current emphasis of the U.S. government onfurther intensifying immigration enforcement is puzzling. One interpretation of the planned
enforcement buildup is that it is driven by politics. Having lived through the great immigration
wave of the last 35 years, some native-born voters may be upset by the laxity of past enforcement
and willing to reward politicians who are seen as atoning for these transgressions. Supportingstronger enforcement may be a way for politicians to signal their disapproval of earlier policy
choices. Such signaling would come at a substantial cost, however, given that the U.S. immigration
enforcement budget now exceeds $20 billion a year. Another interpretation is that intensifying
enforcement is an effort to forestall future claims on public resources. The aging of the low-skilled,foreign-born population means that by increasing deportations today—when many low-skilled
immigrants are approaching middle age—the United States may avoid demand for social spending
in the future. If U.S. voters oppose providing public benefits to low-skilled immigrants—and if
the U.S. government cannot credibly commit to deny benefits to low-income, elderly, foreign-born
residents down the road—then expanding current deportations may reduce the expected drain on
U.S. public coffers in later decades. 39 The cost of these extra deportations—beyond theincremental spending on enforcement—includes reducing the supply of workers who are in their
39

This characterization of political support for immigration enforcement is roughly consistent with the frameworkused by Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly (1999), in which enthusiasm for public spending is diminished by increased
ethnic and racial diversity in a jurisdiction.

45

prime earning years, who have accumulated substantial U.S. labor market experience, and who arewell established in their communities.
Changes in U.S. immigration policy affect not just the U.S. economy but also theeconomies of migrant-sending nations. To the extent that immigration enforcement has played adominant role in the recent slowdown in migration, improvements in the welfare of U.S. workers
come in part at the cost of potential migrants who forgo higher wages, and their nonmigrantcompatriots, who now face more crowded labor markets at home. Because the modal immigrantfrom Mexico would be a middle-income earner at home, expanding deportations and tightening
border security would tend to expand labor supplies and depress earnings in the middle of
Mexico’s wage distribution (and from higher quantiles of the wage distributions in other sending
countries for migrants). From the perspective of those born in sending countries, wages take a hit
from immigration restrictions whether or not workers decide to migrate.
Mexico, by virtue of its status as a transit country for undocumented immigrants, is doubly
exposed to changes in U.S. immigration enforcement. Many Central Americans planning to enterthe United States traverse Mexico illegally on their way north. Stronger U.S. enforcement may
have the indirect consequence of increasing the supply of undocumented Central Americans
seeking to live and work in Mexico. Given that Guatemala is the one major U.S. migrant-sending
nation in the Western Hemisphere that will continue to experience high rates of labor supply
growth in coming decades, Mexico faces the real possibility that continued tightness in U.S.
immigration policy would increase its supply of low-skilled, foreign-born residents.
Taking immigration controls as a means to improve the plight of low-skilled U.S.–bornworkers, how would we expect the incidence of benefits to stack up against alternate policies? An
increase in minimum wages may benefit those with jobs that pay equilibrium wages above a higher
wage floor, at a cost to consumers who purchase labor-intensive goods and services and to workers
excluded from the labor market. Investments in skill development and retraining may target nativeborn workers more finely, but the effectiveness of such programs is in question (LaLonde 1995).
The attractiveness of immigration restrictions relative to these alternative policies also depends onthe extent to which we take the welfare of the foreign-born into account. Immigration controls
therefore appear to be a prolabor instrument that comes at a high cost to consumers and foreignborn workers relative to alternate potential policies.
46

It may be premature to declare that the most recent episode of high U.S. immigration isover. Many factors could cause the population of low-skilled immigrants in the United States tobegin growing again. Prime among these is increased economic or political instability in theWestern Hemisphere. Indeed, heightened insecurity in Central America, due in large part toviolence associated with organized crime, appears to have increased recent labor outflows fromthe region. Mexico, for its part, has not had a financial crisis since 1995. The reform of thecountry’s electoral laws in 1997 created political process that is competitive and free of the voterigging that marred the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s 70-year rule during the 20th century.
However, the openness of Mexico’s economy leaves it vulnerable to external shocks, in particularin the United States, which is the destination for more than 80 percent of its exports. At least in
the short to medium runs, the U.S. government itself seems to be in a position to determine—whether through its trade or its immigration enforcement policies—the potential supply of lowskilled immigrants.

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55

Figure 1. U.S. Foreign-Born Population, Age 18–64, 1970–201556

(a) Mexico(b) Other Latin America(c) Southeast Asia
Figure 2. Number of Working-Age Immigrants by Arrival Age, Current Age, and Year of
Arrival, 1980–201057

Figure 3. Percentage of Low-Skilled, Foreign-Born Workers in the U.S. Working-Age Population,
1993–2014

Figure 4. Percentage of Low-Skilled, Foreign-Born Workers in Total Hours Worked, 1993–2014
58

Figure 5. Percentage of Low-Skilled, Foreign-Born Workers in Total Hours Worked for
the U.S. Border States with Mexico, 1993–2014 \a59

Figure 6. Actual Wage Density in Mexico and Counterfactual Wage Density for Mexican
Immigrants in the United States
60

(a) Males: migration selection evaluated at 1990 wage(b) Males: double difference(c) Females: migration selection evaluated at 1990 wage(d) Females: double difference

Figure 7. Selection of Immigrants from Mexico in Terms of Observable Skills

61(a) Mexico(b) Other Major Sending Countries in Latin America

Figure 8. The 50th Percentile of Income in the Sending Country Divided by the 25th Percentile ofIncome in the United States, 1990–2015(a) Mexico(b) Other Major Sending Countries in Latin America

Figure 9. Volatility of GDP Growth, 1993:Q2–2016:Q3 \a62Figure 10. Number of U.S. Border Patrol Agents, 1992–2016

Figure 11. U.S. Labor Supply Growth versus U.S. Migration Changes from Latin America and the
Caribbean, 1980–2015
63

Figure 12. Migration Rates and Migration Counts for Age 15–40, 1980–2015\a(a) College and above/Less than high school(b) College and above/high school and lessFigure 13. Actual and Simulated GDP per Capita in the Absence of the Great Recession, 1960–2015

64

ActualProjected

Average ratio of Origin/US birth cohort size for all native born ages 15-40, 1980=1

Figure 14. Relative Labor Supply Ratios by Origin Country for Age 15–40, 1980–2050

ActualActualProjected
Projected

Figure 15. Migration Rates by Origin Country for Age 15–40, 1980–2040
65

ActualProjected

Figure 16. Stock of Foreign-Born Migrants by Origin Country for Age 15–40, 1980–2040

Figure 17. Age Frequencies of Mexican-Born Immigrants in the United States, by Year66

(a) College and above/Less than high school(b) College and above/high school and lessFigure 18. Skill Premium for All Industries, 1962–2015(a) College and above/Less than high school(b) College and above/high school and lessFigure 19. Skill Premium for Low-Skill Industries, 1968–2015

67

Table 1. Characteristics of Native-Born and Foreign-Born U.S. Working-Age Population with High School Education orLess, 1970–2015 \a
1970
1980
1990
2000
2015
Native- ForeignNative- ForeignNative- ForeignNative- ForeignNative- Foreignborn
born
born
born
born
born
born
born
born
born
Sex
Male
46.4
41.8
46.6
44.4
48.6
48.8
50.3
51.2
54.3
51.2
Female
71.6
75.8
63.9
69.1
59.1
64.1
56.8
63.9
46.2
60.5
Age
18–33
34–49
50–64

38.1
33.5
28.5

28.6
34.9
36.5

43.4
28.1
28.5

40.2
33.0
26.8

41.6
31.7
26.6

43.2
34.5
22.3

36.4
37.9
25.6

42.2
38.2
19.6

38.2
27.9
33.8

27.3
42.3
30.5

Years of schooling
0–8
23.5
9–11
27.2
12
49.2

45.6
19.6
34.8

14.3
24.5
61.2

39.2
19.0
41.7

8.6
20.8
70.6

38.2
16.8
45.0

4.9
15.8
79.3

33.7
16.5
49.8

4.0
12.6
83.4

29.6
15.1
55.3

Industry, share of labor force
Agriculture
3.7
3.2
Construction
6.8
6.1
Eating and
2.9
5.8
drinking

2.9
6.8
3.8

4.0
5.7
6.8

2.8
8.0
4.8

5.7
7.8
8.7

2.1
9.1
5.3

5.5
10.8
9.2

2.3
9.2
7.6

6.9
14.8
11.3

establishments
Nondurable
manufacturing
Personal
services
Other
industries

10.0

14.5

8.9

13.0

7.6

9.5

5.5

7.5

4.3

5.8

4.8

7.0

3.2

5.8

3.3

6.9

2.9

6.3

2.9

7.2

67.2

58.7

66.6

56.8

65.2

51.6

67.6

52.1

63.9

47.9

Unemployment
4.6
4.6
7.8
7.8
8.4
9.8
7.5
8.6
9.7
6.1
rate
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, decennial census, American Community Survey.
a. All values are expressed as percentages. The sample is restricted to individuals age 18–64 with 12 years of education or less.

68

Table 2. Summary Statistics for Foreign-Born U.S. Working-Age Population with High School
Education or Less, 1970–2015 \a
1970
1980
1990
2000
2005
2015
Years of residence in the United States
0–5
19.2%
23.2%
24.2%
22.8%
21.8%
11.9%
6–10
14.8%
18.4%
21.6%
19.1%
18.4%
13.0%
11+
66.1%
58.4%
54.2%
58.1%
59.9%
75.1%
Age of arrival in the United States
0–14
22.1%
15–25
28.0%
26+
44.0%

13.6%
34.8%
51.4%

14.7%
42.4%
43.0%

19.1%
47.5%
33.4%

18.1%
47.3%
34.3%

20.2%
45.0%
34.4%

Country or region of origin, less than high school education
Mexico
15.4%
33.3%
47.5%
Central America
1.6%
3.5%
8.7%
Caribbean
8.4%
10.7%
9.2%
South America
2.6%
3.6%
3.3%
Southeast Asia
1.7%
4.6%
6.6%
Other Asia
3.3%
5.4%
5.6%
Africa
0.4%
0.5%
0.4%
Middle East
1.6%
1.5%
1.2%
Europe
51.6%
25.9%
11.4%
Other
13.5%
11.0%
6.2%

60.6%
10.8%
7.2%
3.4%
5.8%
4.7%
0.7%
0.9%
5.0%
0.9%

64.0%
12.4%
5.7%
3.2%
4.7%
4.0%
1.0%
0.8%
3.5%
0.7%

59.3%
15.9%
6.0%
3.0%
4.8%
6.0%
1.6%
0.9%
2.0%
0.5%

48.1%
10.1%
8.8%
6.1%
6.9%
7.0%
2.2%
1.4%
8.0%
1.6%

45.1%
12.2%
9.4%
5.7%
6.9%
8.9%
3.0%
1.6%
5.8%
1.3%

Country or region or origin, high school education or less
Mexico
11.6%
23.2%
34.0%
44.4%
Central America
1.6%
3.3%
7.7%
9.3%
Caribbean
8.6%
11.1%
10.8%
9.9%
South America
3.0%
4.4%
5.3%
5.8%
Southeast Asia
1.7%
4.9%
7.5%
7.8%
Other Asia
4.0%
7.1%
8.7%
7.7%
Africa
0.5%
0.8%
0.9%
1.7%
Middle East
1.8%
1.8%
1.6%
1.4%
Europe
52.9%
30.9%
16.5%
10.2%
Other
14.4%
12.5%
7.2%
1.8%
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, decennial census, American Community Survey.

Table 3. Percentage of Foreign-Born Workers with a High School Education or Less, by Industry, 1970–2015
Industry
1970
1980
1990
2000
2015
Agriculture
3.9%
7.0%
13.5%
21.4%
29.3%
Construction
3.9%
4.4%
6.9%
12.0%
20.3%
Eating and drinking establishments
8.3%
8.5%
11.4%
15.6%
16.8%
Nondurable manufacturing
5.9%
7.1%
7.9%
11.2%
13.5%
Personal services
6.4%
8.9%
12.5%
17.7%
21.8%
Other industries
3.0%
3.3%
3.7%
5.1%
5.8%
69

Table 4. Analysis of Net Migration at the Mexican State Level(1)(2)
Dependent variable:
Decadal change in net migration
Labor supply with less than a highschool education

(3)

(4)

Pooled0.1441***(0.010)Excluding2010
0.1643***(0.011)Men
Women
0.1733*** 0.1190***(0.015)(0.013)Innovations to GDP per capita
at age 16–0.0197*(0.010)–0.0735***(0.016)–0.0262(0.017)–0.0134(0.012)Innovations to GDP per capita
in census year

0.022
(0.020)–0.0472(0.039)0.0234(0.034)0.0187(0.024)

No. of observations
R2

3,328
0.122

2,432
0.175

1,664
0.108

1,664
0.189

Notes: Unit of analysis is the three-year Mexican State/gender birth cohort. Mean Change in net migration over the whole sample
is .0619, Mexican state cohort size is fixed at its initial value; the number of native US high school dropouts is contemporaneous.
GDP refers to GDP per capita. In IV regressions, log(MX state birth cohort size/US birth cohort size) is used as an instrument forlog(MX state birth cohort size/US HS dropouts). Regression in all tables use robust SEs clustered at the cohort level and areweighted by birth cohort size. Standard errors in parentheses, *significant at 10%**significant at 5%, ***significant at 1%.

Table 5. Results of the Prediction Regression
Dependent variable
Log birth cohort ratio for origin country to United States
Log birth cohort ratio × under 40 years old
Log GDP ratio
Log GDP ratio × under 40 years old
FemaleFemale × under 40 years old
Covariates
No. of observations
R2
Notes: Unit of analysis is five-year origin/gender birth cohort, analysis isconducted on 25 Latin American countries’ net migration rates to theUnited States over the years 1980–2015. Robust standard errors inparentheses are clustered by birth cohort and weighted by birth cohort size.
Statistical significance is indicated at the ***1 percent, **5 percent, and*10 percent levels. Covariates included but not reported are: (i) five-year
age cohort dummies; (ii) country fixed effects; (iii) a country dummy forthe year 2000 and later; (iv) a country-specific linear time trend for the
low-enforcement era of 1980–90; (v) a country-specific time trend for thehigh-enforcement era of 2000–15; and (vi) the interactions between allthese covariates and being under 40 years old.
70

Net migration rate
0.7716(0.760)3.9292***(0.734)
1.9581***(0.518)–1.4201*(0.798)0.3558***(0.116)–0.7988***(0.116)
Yes
3,310
0.842

Table 6. Thousands of Foreign-Born Residents in the United States
1980
2015

2040 projected

Country
Antigua and Barbuda
BahamasBarbados
BelizeBolivia
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Dominican Republic
EcuadorEl Salvador
GrenadaGuatemala
GuyanaHaiti
Honduras
Jamaica
MexicoNicaragua
PanamaParaguay
Peru
Trinidad and Tobago
Uruguay

Youngerthan 40
2.8
7.8
16.5
10.0
9.6
24.5
101.5
101.5
115.1
61.3
74.5
4.6
49.3
37.0
63.0
25.3
123.3
1,574.7
28.6
39.4
2.2
38.8
46.9
8.8

Older
than 40
0.8
4.0
8.3
3.6
3.5
10.3
40.2
40.2
43.8
24.0
17.8
2.2
12.6
11.6
25.2
10.1
59.9
452.3
12.1
16.6
0.7
15.6
17.1
4.7

Youngerthan 40
4.4
13.7
8.9
15.3
30.3
32.2
253.0
37.3
439.0
186.7
650.2
5.5
557.1
81.1
256.0
369.0
227.0
5,299.0
95.0
25.5
7.0
157.4
73.8
13.7

Older
than 40
10.9
18.5
33.1
25.4
36.6
54.4
374.6
40.0
536.9
222.3
655.7
19.1
346.1
164.7
349.9
211.7
391.8
5,663.8
138.0
60.2
7.0
248.5
131.6
23.3

Youngerthan 40
6.8
4.5
1.1
3.7
-61.4
-29.4
-83.7
-38.0
402.1
22.8
594.1
0.2
813.5
55.9
205.0
488.0
151.0
2,707.0-69.7-35.4-167.8
-81.0
22.8
-4.5

Older
than 40
8.9
47.1
28.1
33.5
86.7
73.4
782.5
50.3
1,104.4
281.0
1,601.7
19.5
1,102.3
186.2
967.7
698.1
539.8
14,146.0
336.2
50.3
45.3
536.7
150.1
54.3

Total

2,485.5

805.1

8,838.1

9,764.1

4,907.7

22,930.1

Sources: authors’ calculations.
a. Negative values are an artifact of the linear model used to forecast future flows, and are notpossible in practice. See the text for interpretation, specifically note 34.

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