In Ecological Economics, 59(2):226-230, November. 12, 2006.
Immigration Reduction Offers Chance for Softer Landing
Virginia Deane Abernethy
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
ABSTRACT:
Stakeholders to consider when evaluating mass immigration include the immigrants themselves, various socioeconomic sectors in the receiving countries, and those remaining in the developing countries that migrants leave. This paper suggests that those remaining will be harmed because emigration stimulates fertility.
Continuing high fertility is an obstacle to the saving and investment that are needed for even modest rises in the standard of living. The fertility opportunity hypothesis, illustrated in this paper, suggests that perceptions of economic opportunity control fertility rates.
Fertility rises or stays high if people perceive that opportunity is expanding. If the emigration option creates the impression of vast opportunity, fertility is likely to stay high in countries that emigrants leave. This result is detrimental in the long run, and overwhelms the immediate benefit of remittances and opportunities enjoyed by immigrants themselves.
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Introduction
Immigrants themselves usually benefit from immigration. Both the numbers that choose to escape from their native country and studies showing benefits (often inversely related to the costs born by residents of destination countries) reveal the attractiveness of immigration. In fact, mass immigration results in very large wealth transfers to immigrants from the poor and middle class of immigrant-receiving countries [Rubenstein, July 2004].
Immigrants themselves usually benefit from immigration. Both the numbers that choose to escape from their native country and studies showing benefits (often inversely related to the costs born by residents of destination countries) reveal the attractiveness of immigration. In fact, mass immigration results in very large wealth transfers immigrants the poor and middle class of immigrant-receiving countries [Rubenstein, July 2004].
A remaining component in evaluating costs and benefits is the effect of emigration from undeveloped countries on those who remain at home. The vast number of those who might like to emigrate will never have that opportunity. How do global mass flows of migrants affect them?
Answers build on the premise that rapid population growth retards saving and capital accumulation and, therefore, perpetuates poverty. I further suggest that emigration has counter-intuitive effects, actually perpetuating population pressure in the long run. By acting as an escape valve for excess population, emigration contributes to perception of rising economic opportunity, thus tending to raise the fertility rate or, at the least, prevent it from falling.
Now, those last clauses are controversial. Although the fertility opportunity hypothesis is empirical [Abernethy 1979; etc.] and has been significantly supported in a prospective, controlled test [Abernethy and Penaloza 2002], it contradicts received wisdom.
Inge Ropke summarizes conflicting demographic theory. "By now the knowledge of what is needed to bring down population growth in developing countries is well founded: first of all, better education and more independence for women, higher income and a more equal income distribution, good access to contraception, better welfare arrangements" [p. 3 of the manuscript, "Migration – an Issue for Ecological Economics"]. Who would not endorse this wish list?
The fertility opportunity hypothesis is, by contrast, a bitter pill. It states that couples relax their vigilance and allow additional births when opportunity appears to be expanding. On the other hand, people who perceive diminished opportunity tend to exercise caution in undertaking additional family responsibilities. Childbearing tends to be delayed compared to the pace expected in an optimistic environment.
Anything that encourages belief in economic expansion - including the option of emigrating - retards fertility decline. The departure of a fraction of the population opens up employment niches. And immigrants often send relatives a significant fraction of their pay, confirming the signal that prosperity is literally over the horizon. In 2004, remittances from the United States to Latin America reached $30 billion, [IADB 2004].
The following examples show that the fertility opportunity hypothesis explains fertility trends in a wide variety of developed and developing societies. Even when perceptions are shortsighted or misguided, they are key to behavior.
Emigration Prolongs High Fertility Rates
Historical records from Great Britain and, recently, the Caribbean show that the prospect of emigration tends to spur childbearing. Ann Brittain reports a positive correlation, by district, between emigration and marital fertility rates in present-day St. Vincent/Grenadines. The more emigration, the higher the fertility rates [1991].
Brittain cites supportive studies, including Friedlander [1983], who compared economically depressed, nineteenth-century English and Welsh districts. Those with high rates of emigration showed prolonged, high marital fertility, whereas fertility declined rapidly in communities where the young were painfully absorbed into the local economy.
The question arises: Would Mexican fertility rates, 2.8 children per woman in 2004 [PRB 2004], be falling faster if an estimated 10 percent of the Mexican population were not in the United States?
Frontier Mentality Prolongs High Fertility Rates
Even after the 1990s massacre of its Tutsi population, Rwanda, , in Central Africa, remains one of the most densely populated countries of the continent. Belgium, colonial power until 1962, and successor indigenous governments recognized population pressure as early as the 1960s but, states demographer John May, projected an image of expansionary opportunity until the 1980s.
The governments’ principal responses to population pressure after World War II were agricultural intensification and population dispersal. Dispersal entailed offering land in empty paysannats within Rwanda and in less congested territories in neighboring countries. Relocation became "by far the most important policy response ever adopted in Rwanda to cope with rapid population growth" [May 1995, p.329].
May speculates that dispersing the population to relatively empty lands created a frontier mentality – an image of opportunity – and that these expansive expectations may have raised the fertility rate: "In fact, the relative availability of land…might have been conducive to higher fertility levels" [p.329].
Parenthetically, the early-1970s Guatemalan decision to open virgin forests to "settlement and exploitation" also created a frontier mentality. Unsurprisingly, average family size among the pioneers soared to nearly 8 children per woman [Moffett 1994].
The mid-1980s Rwandan fertility rate was 8.5 births per woman, soon making Rwanda "the most densely populated country of continental sub-Saharan Africa" [May 1995, p.333], quadrupling between 1950 and 1993 [Bouvier 1995]. Belatedly, international aid became contingent on the government’s encouraging family planning. Fertility began to decline and, by 1990, arrived at 6.2 children per woman.
The declining fertility rate could be attributed to the new availability of modern contraception except that, by 1992, only 12.9 percent of married, reproductive-age women used modern methods. May states that the most visible contributor to the Rwandan fertility decline was later marriage.
Expecting a difficult future, couples very commonly delay marriage – enough to move the average age of marriage by three, four, or a dozen years. See historic Irish [Drake 1963-64; Connell 1968], Indian [Dyson 1991a; b] and more recent German [Conrad 1996; Eberstadt 1994] and Yoruba [Caldwell 1992] examples.
Unlike Rwanda, Malawi, on Africa’s Southeast coast, moved quickly after World War II to stop rapid population growth. The disproportionate number of young people created momentum, nevertheless, which more than doubled the population between 1966, the first census, and 1995.
Anthropologist Ezekiel Kalipeni suggests that the 85 percent of Malawians who are subsistence farmers had three options for dealing with population pressure on limited arable land. They could work harder on existing holdings; migrate to available but marginal lands; or limit family size to avoid having to further subdivide already small farms [1996].
The hard work of agricultural intensification on existing plots seemed most promising in the early stages of land scarcity but did not keep ahead of the momentum of population growth. Migration to infertile marginal land was unattractive, leaving only the option of limiting family size.
Kalipeni found that the fertility rate was not significantly related to education, infant mortality, or urbanization in either 1977 or 1987 data. However, regression of 1987 data revealed a statistically significant inverse relationship between the fertility rate and population density: the denser this rural population, the lower the fertility rate.
Observing that "the fastest fertility decline is occurring in the region of highest population density …[and] areas that are experiencing intense environmental pressure are also beginning to go through a fertility transition," Kalipeni suggests that land hunger was the central stimulus driving a more cautious approach to childbearing [pp. 299-300].
Parenthetically again, economist Richard Easterlin found that population density explained declining rural fertility in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereas education made little difference [1971].
Parenthetically again, economist Richard Easterlin found that population density explained declining fertility in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereas education made little difference [1971].
Redistribution Accelerates Population Growth
In both China and Cuba, revolution and the redistribution of wealth to people who had formerly been among the poorest in the society blasted fertility rates into a higher orbit.
From the traditional 4 births per woman [not much above replacement in high mortality regimes], China’s fertility rate reached approximately 6 births per woman during the 1952-57 heyday of Communism. Judith Banister attributes China’s baby boom to war’s end and the 1950-51 government policy of redistributing land to poor peasants and tenant farmers [1987].
Cuba’s 1959 revolution had strikingly similar demographic results. Demographers Diaz-Briquets and Perez explain that fertility rose from moderate to significantly higher levels after Fidel Castro expropriated wealthy landowners, promising to redistribute plots to the masses. They write that the cause of the fertility increase is "straightforward….. The main factor was the real income rise among the most disadvantaged groups brought about by the redistribution measures of the revolutionary government. The fertility rises in almost every age group suggest that couples viewed the future as more promising and felt they could now afford more children" [1981, p.17].
Fertility Up on Perceived Opportunity; Down on Deteriorating Future
Demographers Youssef Courbage (1995) and Philippe Fargues (1995; 1997) suggest that fluctuations in the household economy drive changes in the fertility rate. In both Morocco and Egypt, flows of new, broadly distributed wealth were followed by rising fertility. Conversely, economic retrenchment marked by increasing disparity between aspirations and reality were linked to falling fertility.
Morocco’s demographic experience after 1957 paralleled that of other countries in the region. Fertility rose in the wake of achieving independence from a colonial power, strong world prices for its principal export (phosphates), and the government’s use of export profits to subsidize social programs. The total fertility rate [TFR] reached approximately 7 by 1960, and 7.4 children per woman by 1973.
Late 1974 and 1975 were watershed years, however. Phosphate prices collapsed and declining revenues forced the government to both scale back subsidies for health care, education and other social spending and raise personal income taxes. Government now took more than it gave. As family self-reliance became a renewed imperative, many women – although mostly illiterate - entered the workforce.
The sudden reversal in family economics was immediately followed by a "sharp drop in fertility, which diminished by 20 percent from 7.3 to 5.9 children in just four years" (Courbage 1995, p.89). By 1997, the Moroccan TFR was 3.3 children per woman (World Population Data Sheet (WPDS) 1997).
Whereas Moroccans were cast on their own resources after 1974, Egyptian families received significant subsidies until approximately 1985 (Fargues, 1995). After being stuck at upwards of 6 children per woman for decades, the Egyptian TFR sank to approximately 5.0 in 1988, and had declined by 1997 to 3.6[WPDS 1997]. In both Moroccan and Egyptian examples, the fertility decline tracked families’ increasing need to make do with their own resources.
Courbage notes that the fertility rate in Middle Eastern Muslim countries has never been reliably associated with women’s education, infant mortality rates, healthcare or other "traditional explanations of the demographic transition" (1995, p. 84; 1996). Fewer than 40 percent of Moroccan women of childbearing age were literate when that country’s fertility decline started. Female literacy of approximately 60 percent in Egypt was going backwards when the fertility decline accelerated there. And rich countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had very high fertility rates through 1990, although most women were educated; social benefits including healthcare were generous; and infant mortality rates were low.
Ethnic Group Fertility Rates Track Opportunity
Fertility rates by ethnic group closely tracked access to resources after the British exited Malaysia in 1957. In the beginning of the period, Malays were rural, least educated, and at the bottom of the income pyramid and had the lowest fertility rate.
Thirty years later, Malays had voted themselves both economic and political power, gains made at the expense of Indian and Chinese minorities. Newly empowered and well-educated Malays now had highest fertility [5 to 6 children per woman] whereas Indian fertility declined steadily from nearly 8 children per woman in 1957 to about 3 in 1987. In the same period, the Chinese rate fell from over 7 to 2.5 children.
Demographers Govindasamy and DaVanzo suggest that a sense of relative deprivation among Chinese and Indian citizens contributed to the decline in their family size (1992, p.250). The disproportionate obstacles in the way of their own and their children’s advancement appeared to explain reproductive caution. This divergence among ethnic groups that have been differentially impacted politically and economically is entirely congruent with the fertility opportunity model.
Hearing from the Grass-Roots
Readers who prefer prospective, statistical tests are referred to my 2002 publication with Roberto Penaloza. But here, I turn to the micro-level. First person statements consonant with the fertility opportunity hypothesis are ubiquitous. See these examples:
Journalist George D. Moffett interviewed dozens of persons in developing countries and observes that in Cairo, for example, "[H]ousing shortages have forced thousands of couples to delay marriage, sometimes for years." In Thailand, "Sam Ruang would like to have one more child, but he understands that that is beyond his means." In Mexico, a 32-year old mother of two defends her use of contraceptives to the village priest, saying that "‘[T]hings are difficult here. A majority… are having hard times. Jobs are hard to come by.’" When the Kenyan government eliminated subsidies for education, "faced with the need to shoulder the costs of education alone, many parents have responded by embracing family planning and having fewer children."
Similarly, the NigerianYoruba began to avoid childbearing in the aftermath of five years of a faltering economy and diminishing international aid. Interviews revealed that "Two thirds of all respondents claimed that the major force behind marriage postponement and the use of contraception to achieve it was the present hard economic conditions." Most also "believed that child mortality had risen over the previous five years of economic difficulty" [italics added] [Caldwell et al. 1992, pp. 226, 229].
Motives do not change. Historian Michael Drake quotes an early-nineteenth century visitor to Norway who questioned a peasant about the discrepancy in ages between himself and his wife: "‘Tell me, Nils, how was it possible that such an active boy as you could go out and take such an old person as a wife?’ … Nils replies, ‘I thought that when I took such an old woman the crowd of young ones would not be so great, for it is difficult for one who is in small circumstances to feed so many’" [1969, p.140].
Conclusion
Much of the developing world is mired in poverty. Prosperity proves elusive so long as population growth out-runs resources and investment. Thus, a challenge – met with painstaking effort in much of Asia and South America – is matching new entrants into the labor force with opportunities for productive work. If fertility rates decline, job creation gradually whittles away the army of unemployed.
By means of a few examples [of the many documented], I have tried to show that letting the population bear the weight of a contracting economy, so that they perceive that opportunity has diminished, is the path to rapid fertility decline and eventual population stabilization. The present may be painful but the future is not hopeless because prosperity can build from a platform of demographic stability.
Fertility rates fall where children are perceived as a burden. But humanitarians everywhere struggle with the moral dilemma of watching as the economy does its work upon the human psyche.
If developed countries act as safety valves for excess population in high-fertility countries, the expected fertility response will not operate efficiently. Several examples above show how fertility rates stay high when people perceive that emigration is the solution to local pressures.
This paper concludes with brief observations about immigration’s effect on the receiving country. First note that the low U.S. fertility rates suggest that most Americans do not view the future as holding great opportunity for themselves or their children. White Americans have had substantially below-replacement level fertility since the 1970s. Black Americans have recently experienced a rapid fertility decline to almost exactly replacement level. Only recent immigrants, particularly Hispanics, maintain high fertility rates (Camarota 2005).
The perceptions apparently correspond with reality. Scholars including George Borjas (1999, 2004), Stephen Camarota (2000, 2004), Donald Huddle (1994,1997), John Attarian (2003) and others show how mass immigration from less-developed countries undermines the job market, disposable income, social services including healthcare and educational opportunity, and the Social Security prospects of most persons in developed countries.
Average native-born Americans have been losing real, inflation-adjusted income since approximately the first oil embargo of 1974-75, and immigration accounts for much of the continuing decline. Economist George Borjas observes that immigration depresses wages and displaces Americans from jobs, costing native-born working Americans $195 billion annually (1999; 2004).
Steven Camarota analyses Census Bureau data, finding that "between March 2000 and March 2004, the number of adults working actually increased, but all of the net change went to immigrant workers" {2004). Andrew Sum and his colleagues at Northeastern University concur. Since 2000, immigrants have taken more than 100 percent of new jobs, that is, both capturing new jobs and displacing Americans from existing jobs (Sum 2004).
Borjas and Freeman find that the loss is born disproportionately by poorest Americans (1996). As political scientist Frank Morris, then-Dean of Graduate Studies and Urban Research at Morgan State University testified before Congress, "It is clear that America’s black population is bearing a disproportionate share of immigrants’ competition for jobs, housing and social services" [1990]. Immigration harms America and harms most those who are in greatest need of their countrymen’s compassion (Rubenstein 1997).
Only now are losses creeping up from the most disadvantaged Americans into the middle class. It appears that the introduction of H1B visa programs added computer analysts, engineers, and medical researchers to the losers column (Zibel 2003, p.1).
In summary, immigration mainly helps the immigrants themselves and employers who profit from cheap labor. As a driver of continuing high fertility rates, immigration harms people remaining in countries from which immigrants come.
Perhaps immigration should be taken in small doses. Mass immigration is a dangerous phenomenon, one that should be seen as a threat to the wellbeing of societies worldwide.
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Virginia Deane Abernethy is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry (Anthropology) at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She has published widely in both scholarly journals and popular media and is the author of Population Politics and other books. For ten years until 1999 she was editor of the ecological journal, Population and Environment. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an MBA from Vanderbilt University. Her interdisciplinary perspective has evolved from study in economics, political science, sociobiology, history, and the social sciences. She was born in Cuba and raised in Central and South America. |
