Vanishing Third World Emigrants?

Timothy J. Hatton, Jeffrey G. Williamson

NBER Working Paper No. 14785
Issued in March 2009
NBER Program(s):   DAE

This paper documents a stylized fact not well appreciated in the literature. The Third World has been undergoing an emigration life cycle since the 1960s, and, except for Africa, emigration rates have been level or even declining since a peak in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The current economic crisis will serve only to accelerate those trends. The paper estimates the economic and demographic fundamentals driving these Third World emigration life cycles to the United States since 1970 -- the income gap between the US and the sending country, the education gap between the US and the sending country, the poverty trap, the size of the cohort at risk, and migrant stock dynamics. It then projects the life cycle up to 2024. The projections imply that pressure on Third World emigration over the next two decades will not increase. It also suggests that future US immigrants will be more African and less Hispanic than in the past.

(118 K)

This paper is available as PDF (118 K) or via email.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX