Question

Discuss the economic factors to emigration to the United States. (Minimum 200 words).

Answer 1

For most immigrants to the US, the main incentive is the opportunity to make much more money. Throughout Mexico, Honduras, or Guatemala, a middle-income worker has a lower income than even a relatively poor person in the US. (Latin American countries make up the majority of undocumented workers in the United States.) However, this gap is slowly declining. Before the global financial crisis, Mexico's median income was just over 40% of what the U.S. 25th percentile earner did. It was closer to 60% in 2015. Many Latin American countries, generally poorer than Mexico, which are major contributors to US immigration, have seen a similar increase

Mexico's economies and other Latin American countries sending immigrants to the US were much more turbulent than the US in the 1990s and early 2000s. Striking recessions will follow cycles of strong GDP growth. An extreme example of this happened in Mexico during the 1994 peso crisis, which in 1995 culminated in a 6% GDP contraction. The US economy's relative equilibrium was appealing to prospective immigrants. Yet Latin American economies have recovered since the financial crisis of 2008, and the US is no longer such a relative beacon of economic stability.

Although the baby boom in the United States ended in the 1960s, the baby boom in Latin America continued through the 1980s. One result of this is that there was a huge supply of young workers in Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s and tremendous competition for such jobs in the United States. Researchers at the UC San Diego claim that this supply glut sent a number of Latin Americans across the border. We explain this by demonstrating that larger birth cohorts in a state contributed to increased immigration from that country to the US within Mexico, even when states had similar economic conditions.