President Donald Trump has made it one of his key policies to try and make the US an undesirable location for undocumented immigrants, but his crackdown on immigration, which now includes the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, may be overkill. Recent economic research suggests that this task may already have been unintentionally achieved by the nation’s changing demographics and economic landscape.
The enormous rise in the number of undocumented immigrants coming to the US, which occurred between 1990 and 2007, was largely the result of socioeconomic conditions that simply no longer exist. This is according to University of California San Diego researchers, and Pew Research Center data indicate that the undocumented immigrant population of the US has slowly declined over the last ten years, to 11.3 million in 2016.
The university researchers believe that the trend is down to more than just increased border enforcement, pointing to several long-term trends that are more likely to be the cause of the fall, including the fact that low-income earners in the US are no longer earning much more than middle-class income earners in Latin America.
Also, countries in Latin America are no longer as economically volatile as they once were, with economies having stabilized since the 2008 financial crisis, and the US no longer the economically reliable beacon it once was. The fact that there are now comparatively fewer immigrants of working age in Latin America has also contributed to the decline.