Public Discourse On Migration Is Dated: The US Is Getting The Educated Immigrants It Needs

Immigration to the United States has dramatically changed in the last few years — but the way we speak about immigration has not kept up. Bloomberg View's Noah Smith sets out to correct this with two articles on the topic.

There is no wave of undocumented migrants 

Smith first shows that illegal immigration has seen a net reduction in the last decade — more unauthorized immigrants left the country than entered it. In Mexico, the main source country for unauthorized immigrants, there has been an improvement in economic conditions and a reduction in the fertility rate. Indeed, economists have argued that undocumented immigration will continue to slow to a crawl — even without Donald Trump's proposed border wall.

But the transformation goes deeper.

The US is getting the educated migrants it needs

Some authors have argued the US has as many Mexican and Central American immigrants as it is going to get. And as this wave of Latin American immigration comes to an end, it is giving way to immigration from Asian countries, with large populations and, in cases like China and India, with education systems that do a good job of identifying talent. This has provoked a continuous hike in the number of immigrants with a college degree or more education, and this group has overtaken the growth in lower-skilled migrants.

Smith says this is a rare piece of good news: "The threat of low-wage immigrant competition hurting the paychecks of working-class Americans, whether it was ever a big danger [he thinks it wasn't], will now recede to nothing, while the benefits from skilled immigration keep flowing".But for the country to take advantage of these developments in migration patterns, the US administration "shouldn’t succumb to the urge to enact draconian policies". It would be better off with a "sensible, prudent refusal to overreact to an imaginary crisis", Smith advises.