New wave of migrants puts US and other countries to the test
An entire generation has given up on the idea of building a better world by living in the suburbs. They’re building more cars, less space, and more money. And the results are beginning to show.
The number of people migrating to the U.S. has surged to record highs this year thanks to economic hardship worldwide and low interest rates, according to new data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The number of migrants from Mexico, Central America, Africa, and elsewhere has increased by nearly 10% since 2011, when it peaked at 4,933,000. The average annual number of migrants has since been in the 1-million range, making it one of the highest rates in recent history.
The record is driven by U.S. job growth, which has kept wages up, as well as soaring drug prices and rising home prices.
“If you look at these numbers, you see the U.S. is at the frontier of a lot of the problems we face and it’s going to come up on the border,” said John DiIulio, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. “You have young people on welfare, you have the opioid epidemic, you have people using the drug of choice, you have a lot of people who are in their 50s who are still moving.”
Despite President Donald Trump’s hardline rhetoric in favor of building a wall to protect the border, he says the economic tide is turning against illegal immigration and that he wants to get tougher. DiIulio said he’s not sure who would be tougher: a xenophobic president who may close the border to undocumented migrants or the president who’s doing everything within his power to get young people and migrants to stay.
The new numbers come on the heels of a report from the Pew Research Center, which said that last year, 4.1 million people left the U.S. for another country. The total number of Americans leaving the country has spiked in recent years.
“The trend has been going on for the last several years, but we’re now seeing it play out on a pretty substantial scale,” said DiIulio.
Even after the numbers rose last year, U.