drama were Mexico and the United States. The US baby boom came to an abrupt

halt in the early 1960s, causing growth in native-born labor supply to slow sharply

two decades hence, once the baby-boom generation had fully reached working age.

In Mexico, birth rates declined much later. High fertility in the 1960s—when Mexi-

co’s fertility rate (the number of births per woman of childbearing age) averaged

6.8, versus 3.0 in the United States—meant that Mexico’s labor force was expanding apidly in the early 1980s, just as a severe financial crisis hit. This crisis, and the decade

and a half of economic instability that ensued, unleashed a great wave of Mexican

migration to the United States (Hanson and McIntosh 2010). Encouraging this flow

was steady US economic growth during the “Great Moderation” period from the

mid-1980s up through 2007 (Bernanke 2004). In a pattern common to migration

events stretching back into human history, early migrants eased the transition for later

arrivals by offering advice on how to find jobs and housing, opening familiar stores

and restaurants, and creating enclaves in which Spanish was spoken alongside English

(Massey, Alarcón, Durand, and Gonzalez 1987; Munshi 2003).

The Mexican migration wave to the United States has now crested. Fertility

rates in Mexico, at 2.3 births per woman of childbearing age, are only modestly

above those in the United States, at 1.9 (World Development Indicators, data for

2013). Labor-supply growth in the two countries is projected to be roughly the

same in coming decades. Although living standards in Mexico remain well below

US levels, Mexico has tamed the macroeconomic volatility it experienced during

the 1980s and 1990s. Net US immigration from Mexico plunged after the onset of

the Great Recession in 2007 and has been slightly negative every year since (Villar

-

real 2014; Gonzalez-Barrera 2015). Absent a significant new economic or political

crisis in Mexico, or unexpectedly robust US economic growth, it is unlikely that

Mexico-to-US migration rates will again reach the levels witnessed between the early

1980s and the mid-2000s.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.30.4.57

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3884248&forum_id=2#35333883)