Until now, Mexico has supplied the United States, especially California and Texas, with immigrant workers to fill low-wage jobs. That’s about to change, in the wake of an unprecedented decline in Mexican immigration and a new influx of Chinese immigrant workers who will be fleeing hopeless conditions in China. Many of them will enter the U.S. undocumented.
These developments will cast in sharp relief the inherent contradictions in the practices comprising our current immigration “policy.” These immigrants from China will likely galvanize support from millions of Chinese-Americans to rationalize the policy once and for all.
Mexican immigration — legal and undocumented — now stands at an all-time low and may have even stopped. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative,” according to Princeton’s Douglas Massey, who co-directs the Mexican Migration Project.
In China, meanwhile, an economy demanding urban manpower has precipitated what surely ranks as the largest peacetime migration in recorded human history. Since the early 1990s, millions of rural agricultural workers — men and women — have moved to jobs in the burgeoning cities on China’s east coast, filling mostly low-level construction, manufacturing, and household service jobs. They number nearly 220 million, almost half of China’s entire urban population.
Most rural Chinese move within China without official permission, as temporary urban workers known as “floaters.” They are supposed to “float” back home eventually, but most don’t. Instead, they join China’s unofficial and fiercely competitive low-wage urban labor markets, often filling jobs that permanent urban residents shun.
Urban unemployment in China, now at an all-time high, has turned the floaters’ world upside down. About 20 million floaters are unemployed (being typically first fired) and no longer can send money home. Unwilling to return home penniless and lose face, they also find themselves with little or no prospect of any livelihood in Chinese cities. Their only realistic option is to seek their fortunes abroad, reminiscent of their predecessors who sought their fortunes in California starting in the 1840s.
The Chinese in the U.S. today form a potent interest group of more than 3.3 million Chinese-Americans nationwide and nearly 1.3 million in California. The San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan region alone is home to 562,000 Chinese-Americans, second only to greater New York.
We estimate that about 50 million floaters eventually will emigrate from China, many illegally, and that ties will draw several million of them to Chinese-American enclaves in the U.S.
We have, in Massey’s words, “the seeds of an enormous … flow of immigrants (to the United States) that would dwarf levels of migration now observed from Mexico.” Those seeds today lie dormant, pending a stronger U.S. job market.
What does this shift of human resources portend? Opponents of immigration — including, understandably, jobless American workers — may not welcome more foreign newcomers. Nevertheless, established immigration networks anchored by long-standing family ties to particular destinations in California, New York, Texas and other states will facilitate their arrival, surreptitiously or otherwise.
Most Chinese immigrants will be of prime working age, and their paychecks could well fortify the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. They will be another welcome measure of human ambition from Asia.
But the question is: Can we, a nation of immigrants, welcome them as “family”?
DUDLEY L. POSTON JR., a graduate of the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, is director of the Asian Studies Program at Texas A&M University. PETER A. MORRISON is an applied demographer and president of Morrison and Associates, based in Nantucket, Massachusetts. They wrote this for this newspaper.
