Is the Demographic Fit With Mexico Ending?

Damien Cave of the New York Times has pieced together evidence that the net flow of undocumented migrants from Mexico to the US may have dropped to zero or even have reversed itself. That does not mean that no one is crossing the border heading north, but the flow is considerably lower than it used to be, and may be matched by people heading back to Mexico from the US. Elizabeth Aguilera of the San Diego Union-Tribune has also pulled together a similar story. 

The evidence comes collectively from the latest round of data collected by the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University (which interviews migrants in Mexico about their experience in the US), the calculations of undocumented migration by the Pew Hispanic Research Center, which are based especially on the Current Population Survey, by Border Patrol apprehension data, and by organizations such as the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC, San Diego which regularly track data from selected communities in Mexico.

Is the Demographic Fit With Mexico Ending?

Damien Cave of the New York Times has pieced together evidence that the net flow of undocumented migrants from Mexico to the US may have dropped to zero or even have reversed itself. That does not mean that no one is crossing the border heading north, but the flow is considerably lower than it used to be, and may be matched by people heading back to Mexico from the US. Elizabeth Aguilera of the San Diego Union-Tribune has also pulled together a similar story. 

World Bank Opens its Data Vault

If you are new to research that involves comparisons between countries, you may not appreciate how important it is that over the past year or so, the World Bank has made its huge international database increasingly available to the public over the internet. 

Created in 1944 and, by custom, headed by an American, the World Bank initially helped finance the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Since then, it has extended many trillions in loans for a wide variety of projects, be they institutions like schools and hospitals, infrastructure like roads or, controversially, environmentally unfriendly projects like coal-fired power plants and hydroelectric dams. Along the way the World Bank, like the I.M.F., has tinkered with entire economies, sometimes with disastrous results.

In the process of handing out gobs of money, the World Bank has collected gobs of data and until very recently parsed it out sparingly and usually only for a fee. That approach began to change when Robert Zoellick became head of the Bank four years ago.

“As opposed to some imperious bureaucracy in Washington, we’re making things open and accessible to people,” he says. “That makes for better performance, it makes for a more open system, it makes for people having a different attitude about the World Bank.”

This has been a very welcome change and I encourage you to explore the data available online at www.worldbank.org.