There’s a huge asterisk to this selection effect, though: illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America.
We can replace "illegal immigration" in the above statement with any other illegal activities and it will still hold true.
Or your home country just needs to be significantly worse.
If these countries are really significantly worse, and that is the only factor pushing normal people to relocate, then we should be seeing massive population movements all the time. Instead, only the extremely motivated with a sizable risk appetite take the chance. And, one could argue that those two factors combined qualifies that group of people as non-standard.
Because we [rightfully, as this thread suggests] restrict border crossings.
>Or conversely, why haven't tons of the homeless in the US made their way to Mexico?
Because homeless people understand that the minimum protections and niche lifestyle they have here are orders of magnitude better than a violent third world country.
>then we should be seeing massive population movements all the time. Instead, only the extremely motivated with a sizable risk appetite take the chance. And, one could argue that those two factors combined qualifies that group of people as non-standard.
Considering the difficulty of illegally crossing the border for a poor South American, we are seeing just that. There's another selection bias here - those who are competent are less likely to risk illegal entry because they understand life as an illegal immigrant is difficult.
That never stopped anyone.
>Because homeless people understand that the minimum protections and niche lifestyle they have here are orders of magnitude better than a violent third world country.
Not everyone in a country actually hates it enough to leave. There are lots of high class people like CEOs, managers, software developers even if they are the minority they clearly live a reasonably good life. You are also underestimating how much people are fond of their home country and the associated culture. All your family and friends are there. Your mother tongue is probably only spoken there. The food that you used to eat as a child is there. Maybe you had a plot of land and you built your own house there, sure it isn't as comfortable as one in the USA but it was yours and in the USA you have nothing except a cramped apartment you share with room mates.
The idea that a country would lose its entire population if the USA lifted border controls is absolutely insane.
We see plenty of illegal immigration. So much so that some people want to build a wall, as if that is a meaningful control. If all it takes is a country to be worse than the US like the parent states, then we should expect much higher rates of legal immigration applications and significantly higher rates of illegal immigration. The argument was that it only takes one metric to convince a regular person to move, and I reject that notion.
> Because homeless people understand that the minimum protections and niche lifestyle they have here are orders of magnitude better than a violent third world country.
Again, this is in response to the idea that all it takes to convince a person to relocate is for a situation to be worse than another situation. Theoretically, due to cheaper cost of living and less focus on technology/high skill jobs, Mexico or Central America would provide a homeless person more opportunity to at least survive compared to the US. But, since that is not the only factor in relocating, people don't do that en masse.
> Considering the difficulty of illegally crossing the border for a poor South American, we are seeing just that. There's another selection bias here - those who are competent are less likely to risk illegal entry because they understand life as an illegal immigrant is difficult.
And this brings us back to the beginning, where I don't think all it takes is a place to be sufficiently bad enough compared to the US to get them to move. It takes a host of factors, and some of those factors are personal drive and aspirations, and a fairly high tolerance for risk. Both of those align with an entrepreneur, which is basically the American Dream.
Thus, we then see upward mobility from these same demographics.
No, this is not at all the argument I made. I was pointing out that built-in appetite for risk (or being a go-getter or whatever) is not the only explanation for why someone would come to the U.S. illegally. That the conditions in their home country shift the risk-reward equation so that more people are willing to immigrate than would otherwise.
If everything were simply about appetite for risk (or being a go-getter), then you would expect immigration from Canada to take place at similar rates as immigration from Mexico (since incomes in the U.S. are significantly higher than in Canada). But you don't see that, because the delta between Canada and the U.S. is way smaller than it is between Mexico and the U.S., and so the risk/reward equation doesn't work out for nearly as many Canadians.
I would bet that if there were no barriers to immigration then you would see a significantly higher Hispanic population in the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hispanic_and...
Another group of people came along and decided that was enough of that. The land belongs to them now and put up a border after what Ulysses S. Grant called "the most unjust war" ever waged. Please correct me here if I'm wrong.
As recently as 1940, Hispanics made up only 1.5% of the US. Population. As of 2010, they made up 16.3% of the U.S. population (about 50 million people). As a point of reference, Canada has a population of about 37 million people and the UK has a population of 63 million people. So we have imported roughly an entire Canada/UK's worth of people from Latin America. As far as I am aware, immigration of this scale is basically unprecedented in human history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
In my opinion, this is probably what explains the vast divergence between the professions that immigrants from Latin American end up in vs. the professions that immigrants from Asia end up in.
This is not true, because the socioeconomic status of people in a given country is not a flat line. Many Mexicans live what Americans would describe as comfortable, middle class lives. But, because Mexico is less prosperous than the U.S. per capita, there is a whole arm of the Mexican income distribution that is shifted into what Americans would recognize as extreme poverty. The Mexicans occupying this part of the income distribution are the ones leaving.
We don't see high numbers (let's say, above 50%) even when the push is high enough and their movements are legal.
The majority of the Syrian population is still inside Syria as an example.
Because it's hard to do it, legally or illegally. Only people that are driven and open to accepting the high risk of relocating are willing to do so. Therefore, it at least says something about the people immigrating to the US; They are driven individuals who are willing to take chances for success. Thus better numbers in terms of upward mobility.
I observe this in my (upper middle class) son: he thinks he's set for life, and doesn't put in _any_ effort whatsoever. I told him he's on his own when he's 19, he's a mere 3 years away from that mark, and it hasn't yet sunk in. He thinks he will always have upper middle class existence he's currently enjoying, no matter what, even though with his current grades there's no way he will get into a decent college.
I personally was under no such illusion ever in my life, so I worked super hard to get to where I am today.