Neil Howe Richard Jackson () (Center for Strategic and International Studies)
Abstract
In recent years, policy experts worldwide have come to understand the importance of demographic projections in their efforts to think strategically about long-term challenges, from national security to retirement security. Much progress has been made in improving the fertility and longevity modules of the demographic projection puzzle. Little progress, however, has been made in dealing with cross-border migration or (more specifically, from the point of view of most developed countries) immigration. Official immigration projections, both in the United States and abroad, remain largely ad hoc and judgmental. Some projection-making agencies simply assume that net immigration will stay constant at the current level throughout the projection period. Most of the rest trend the current level until it reaches a “target” or “ultimate” level, which is typically based on the historical average over some recent period. A few agencies explicitly build their projections around current national immigration policy. When describing how they make assumptions, most agencies offer little more than a vague reference to “expert opinion,” “national policy,” or “historical experience.” Few if any use assumptions that are justified by any explicit reference to a theory of how or why immigration happens. The rudimentary state of immigration projections is a cause for concern. Over the past few decades, net immigration rates in most developed countries have surged, more than doubling in the United States and Western Europe as a whole since the 1960s. This surge has occurred, moreover, during a period in which both public opinion and immigration policy in most countries have grown increasingly restrictive. With undocumented or “illegal” entry growing faster than any other type of immigration, policy experts are no longer confident that total immigration is still subject to the effective control of national policy. The range of plausible assumptions regarding long-term immigration rates is therefore widening. Unbounded by any consensus projection method, this widening range can generate a similarly widening and often dramatic variety of long-term population outcomes. The spread between the “low” and “high” immigration variants for the U.S. Census Bureau projection for the national population in 2100, for example, is 417 million — from a total of 438 million in the low variant to a total of 854 million in the high variant (see Figure 1). This is a very significant difference from any policy perspective. The poverty of current projection practice contrasts sharply with the wealth of insights offered by the large and growing theoretical and empirical literature on the causes of international migration. On a theoretical level, researchers have identified a variety of dynamic social and economic processes that may explain migration. On an empirical level, they have come to some solid conclusions about which causal drivers ultimately matter and which probably don’t. This Issue in Brief describes a new “driver based” approach to projecting long-term international migration flows that draws on this rich literature. It begins with a general discussion of why, despite widespread pessimism, improvements in long-term immigration projections are indeed possible. It next explains how research into the causes of international migration could be harnessed to create a superior projection model based on relationships between immigration behavior and other projectable social and economic conditions, such as multinational trends in population growth, age distribution, wages, education, and market orientation or “globalization.” Finally, it describes how the proposed projection model could be used to help answer important public policy questions.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Center for Retirement Research in its series Issues in Brief with number
ib2006-49.