Immigrants in the United States and the Current Economic Crisis

By Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Aaron Terrazas
Migration Policy Institute

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The current US recession is already longer than all but two since World War II and deeper than any since the Great Depression. And an avalanche of increasingly dismal economic assessments from most parts of the world points to the global economic crisis deepening during 2009 and possibly beyond.

Before 2007, the US economy had grown in 23 of the past 25 years. During this period of sustained economic growth, the United States attracted record numbers of new immigrants. The US foreign-born population quadrupled from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38.1 million in 2007.

More than 1 million immigrants have entered the United States legally each year for much of the past decade. About another half a million have typically entered illegally each year.

Immigration flows to the United States have noticeably slowed in the last year, raising fundamental questions for policymakers and analysts about the effect the current economic crisis is having on inflows and return migration. These questions appear particularly daunting because there has been no comparable crisis in recent memory.

To examine the recession's potential impact on these flows, we carefully combine analysis of the most recent data with a nuanced understanding of the motivations and likely behavior of immigrants, America's immigration history, and a degree of professional judgment. Continued...... http://www.migrationinformation.org/Fea ... cfm?id=723