US Immigration from Latin America in Historical Perspective

Produced by: 
National Bureau of Economic Research
Available from: 
November 2022
Paper author(s): 
Gordon H. Hanson
Pia Orrenius
Madeline Zavodny
Topic: 
Demographic Economics - Migration
History and Economics
Year: 
2022

The share of US residents who were born in Latin America and the Caribbean plateaued recently, after a half century of rapid growth. Our review of the evidence on the US immigration wave from the region suggests that it bears many similarities to the major immigration waves of the 19th and early 20th centuries, that the demographic and economic forces behind Latin American migrant inflows appear to have weakened across most sending countries, and that a continued slowdown of immigration from Latin America post-pandemic has the potential to disrupt laborintensive sectors in many US regional labor markets.

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