The issue of immigration in the United States is of the highest orders of importance. There is much that immigration does to affect a country. Setting an immigration policy that is followed allows countries to make decisions regarding who can come to their shores. But when a country has a policy that is not followed, they are unable to influence immigration. Immigration is of the field of economics because it affects economies and economic conditions are one of the biggest drivers of immigration. In this essay the analysis centers on why the current policy fails and what are the beliefs about what should be done to fix it. Because immigration is controlled by economic conditions, a policy that does not recognize these conditions will be likely to fail. This is why the current immigration policy is failing. There is a labor market for immigrant jobs that Mexican and Central American immigrants are willing to work. Germany has a similar issue but does not have the same problems as the US since their policy of a guest worker program recognizes the economic realities that drive citizens of one country to move to a next country for work. There are many ways to look at immigration, and in the media the coverage is usually from a sociological perspective. But by only looking at it in narrative, the mathematical significance, which illuminates this issue, remains in the darkness. Policy determination should always include a workable model about how immigration works numerically. But while this is helpful, it is always important to only use models to help and to know their limitations. There is not one model that can account for all of the strangeness of human behavior.
“Immigration is an issue of first-order policy importance” (Egger and Nelson, 107). These authors showed surprise that it was not more discussed more in economic worlds. Gastarbeiter is a German word that means Guest work. Germany’s current program takes into effect that labor will always moved across borders no matter what. This is inline and cohesive to the mathematical models of migration as proposed by Ivan Aleshkovski and Vladimir Iontsev. This theory looks at immigration while it takes into account the important variables as understood by modern immigration theory—demographic, economic, ethnologic, geographic, political and social processes. ( Aleshkovski and Iontev, 1). These many areas might explain why the issue of migration, while it is of first-order policy importance, has been limited in extensive scientific study. There are many variables to track.
Milo Bianchi has developed a model that he believes will be helpful in making policy determinations. He looks at both “Supply and demand sides in a unified framework because of a well-known fact” (Bianchi, 2). It is very important to look at immigration from both the supply and demand side. Consider Cuba. Cuba is only 90 miles from The United States. There are many people in Cuba who only have very basic things. There is a huge supply of workers who would be willing to work in the states. There is a giant labor market in the states. Under a normal model this should mean that there would be widespread migration. However, restrictions on freedom in Cuba due to their government there prevent their citizens from migrating in larger numbers.
One important element of policy determinations is self-selection. Self-selection is that term that means there are “rational actors” who determine who gets to migrate. In the model there are two countries, a sending country and a receiving country. The model looks at the interaction of workers in the country that sends to look at what would cause them to want to migrate (Bianchi, 5). With Bianchi’s model he believes that to set the best policy for a country that receives bust be able to predict the type of skills that migrants will have. Countries know that sometimes there is an economic advantage for them to have a class of workers that will do service labor tasks. But they also do not want to just let anyone to come within their borders. But if they can predict the sorts of workers who will be coming into the country, then they will be able to make policy decisions that either make it easy for them to participate in the economy, or make it difficult for them to come.
Bianchi walks the reader through a number of hypothetical examples. His theory is a good model framework to add to the equation of migration. There are other things than clean mathematics that affect immigration and immigration policy. Openess of a people and national sentiment is also a very important variable to take into account when considering how these numbers play into the immigration question. Right now, many of the immigrants have come to the United States and the question is what to do about them. Mathematics cannot solve this question entirely, but ethics should be part of the decision-making process.
Works Cited
BIANCHI, MILO. "MMIGRATION POLICY AND SELF-SELECTING MIGRANTS." A Journal Of Public Economic Theory. Print.
Autor, David. "Self-Selection — The Roy Model." Economics Mit. MIT, 1 Jan. 2003. Web. 19 Nov. 2014. <http://economics.mit.edu/files/551>.
Egger, Peter. "Ntroduction to Immigration Special Issue of The World Economy." The World Economy. Print.
Iontev, Vladimir. "Mathematical Models of Migration." EOLSS. Web. 19 Nov. 2014. <http://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c15/e1-26-09-06.pdf>.
