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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

It's possibly the middle class Mexican citizens who have the resources to make the journey across the border in the first place.

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Middle class Mexican citizens can live good lives in Mexico, so they don't need to risk dangerous border crossing to end up a poor illegal immigrant in the US.

Happy and reassuring to have my conjecture rejected.

That's incorrect. As domestic wages rise in a poor nation, emigration rises because the burgeoning middle class is better able to leave. That's why the US saw such a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America since 1980, as wages have soared (relatively) there. The US now sees more immigration from Latin America every ten years, than it did in a century from 1880-1980. The desperately poor aren't the primary source of emigration around the world, they're mostly unable to move from their location. It's overwhelmingly not the Chinese or Indian poor (a billion people earning sub $5 per day) that are emigrating to the US, it's their middle class and higher - the truly poor can't move from their spot.

One of the most obvious examples of this - for generations, health care professionals in low-development nations have been emigrating, seeking higher incomes in the developed world. That's despite the fact that they're almost always middle class or higher in their own country. You could see this in action over the last 50 years across poor nations in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Currently the middle class is flooding out of various poor Eastern European nations, seeking a better life in eg Britain.

There were about a dozen articles posted on HN about this concept when the Syrian refugee crisis was peaking.

Thanks for this perspective. I didn't know about this.

Right. When millions were starving in Ethiopia in mid-1980's there was no movement of migration towards Europe. People couldn't afford it, they didn't even know of the theoretical possibility.

Increased wealth and better access to information and information technology in African and Asian countries is what's pushed the recent migration towards Europe (via Turkey, Libya or Morocco) on the move.

I disagree with regard to Eastern European part. Most of the emigration was unskilled labor. They were not below poverty line, they could organize move to UK, but they were never middle class in Poland, etc, and they usually aren't middle class in the UK. The second batch of emigrants is graduates entering the job market sometimes with degrees irrelevant in current market. So they decide to start their career in another country, because they don't have much to lose. In another country they focus on climbing up, often in a career not related to their education or previous aspiration.

The doctors, etc are a minority. A visible minority, because their move harms their country of origin more than a loss of a builder from a social perspective but still a minority.

What you say is mostly true in the UK and what OP said is mostly true for the USA. The USA gets better immigrants.

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