Suarez-Orozco on the Largest Migratory Wave in History
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

After relocating to New York recently, the directors of the Harvard Immigration Projects this year founded New York University’s Institute for Globalization and Education in Metropolitan Settings. A director of the institute, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, spoke with The New York Sun’s Daniela Gerson about why more people than ever are on the move and how that affects New York.
Q. The number of foreign-born people in America is at a record high. How does immigration to the country compare with global trends?
A: Immigrants in the United States are over 35 million people. That’s the largest number in the history of our country; it’s also larger than the entire Canadian population. While immigration peaked in the 1990s, we continue to have very large numbers of immigrants coming to our cities. What remains very, very interesting and has become kind of an enduring problem in the new immigration, is that while overall numbers have declined, the number of undocumented immigrants has remained stable. Since the 1990s, the United States has been receiving about a million people every year – that’s legal and illegal – but now probably more undocumented immigrants come to the United States than documented immigrants.
Immigration today is part of a global phenomenon. The best estimates suggest that we have between 175 and 185 million immigrants worldwide. This is the largest migratory wave in human history. For the first time, all regions of the world are involved in large-scale migration.
What is driving the record migration today?
Love and work and war explain why people migrate. By love, I mean family reunification. If you look at the million people who came to the United States last year, roughly two-thirds of them came through the family reunification mechanism. … Work is wage differentials, and the economic issues that drive the new immigration are so powerful. The average wage differential today between, say, North Africa and Europe is in the order of 15 to one. The average wage differential between Mexico and the United States today is probably nine or 10 to one. So there are huge economic incentives for immigration. … By war I mean human-made catastrophes, in addition to of course natural catastrophes, have been huge and central to global migration patterns in this century.
What’s the primary difference in the needs of the members of the current wave of immigrants and those who swept the city in the last great wave?
One hundred years ago, millions of Eastern Europeans, Irish, Italians, and Germans were coming into our city in huge numbers. … Through floor-shop mobility you could get good jobs and you could move up the socioeconomic hierarchy even if you had very little schooling. Huge proportions of immigrants 100 years ago – some estimates suggest that up to 80% of all Italians – never went to school. Yet across generations they became relatively successful, middle-class citizens. Today, because of the global economy, formal education is much more important.
Washington has been promoting a guest-worker program, which would provide temporary visas to foreign workers to do jobs Americans are unwilling to do, as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package. Do you sense that policymakers in Washington understand the challenges of immigration reform?
My sense is that the political class see immigration as a very difficult problem to manage, and I’m not sure they fully understand the kinds of complex processes that get established once you bring in thousands and thousands of workers even on a so-called temporary basis. Immigration tends to generate momentum, and more often than not, that momentum sustains itself.