I blogged on this two posts ago, but it’s worth re-emphasizing. And this time Dr. Massey got to broadcast the message on NPR!
That’s one of the great paradoxes of immigration today. The more porous you make the border and the easier you make it for people to come and go, the fewer people actually settle in the country of destination. So if you have a more flexible immigration policy and you admit that, well, Mexico, the United States are in fact integrating economically under the North American Free Trade Agreement, and allow for legitimate cross-border movements as a result of that integration, you’ll end up with fewer migrant populations actually settling in the United States and a smaller rate of undocumented. Or you would not even have undocumented migration, and you’d have a smaller rate of immigrant population growth.
Full NPR interview available here.
