This is not entirely surprising given how hostile the US has been to Mexicans recently. The fact that one of the top contenders for President is so anti-Mexican pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
The drop started with the economic downturn in '08 -- long before Trump's anti-immigration tirades.
An equally silly reading of the data is that Mexicans wanted to live in the US because Bush was president, but they hate Obama so they stopped coming and started leaving.
All signs point to this being economically driven.
It's quite feasible that other criteria (taxes, job creation, etc) contribute more to a candidate's popularity.
Isn't the economy now better than when Bush was the president?
But neither has done much immigration enforcement.
The Mexican economy has done very well over the past 30 years. It started very backwards but finally passed the US economy for the first time in opportunities for many people in 2007. That was partly because of the US crisis. Mexico has continued to grow since then.
That's an extraordinarily precise date for meeting a very vague threshold ("passed the US economy...in opportunities for many people"). What does this mean in concrete terms, and where is the evidence supporting that it was achieved in 2007.
There was a recent NPR/PRI piece discussing how the only reason the dairy industry in Wisconsin is still afloat is due to immigrant labor being paid below legal wage limits. Its not what I'd call "quality of life" for these folks, and when you're badly hurt in a farming accident (did you know that farming is one of the most dangerous professions in the US? neither did I), you've got to take care of it yourself.
Undocumented immigration is an easy problem to solve. If you're a company employing non-citizens without legal approval, the penalties start at $1 million/employee.
That's not going to happen though, because consumers want services and products at extremely low prices (which would be pushed up by more expensive labor) and businesses want to stay in business (who probably couldn't if they had to pay wages dictated by law).
http://wisconsinwatch.org/2009/11/a-delicate-existence-undoc...
http://wisconsinwatch.org/2009/11/immigrants-now-40-of-state...
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/31/140086117/e-verify-rattles-ner...
The entire point is to bankrupt the company immediately. If the fine can be included as a cost of doing business, its not effective.
The question is, can you devise a method where if the employer does everything right in verifying someone's right to work in the country, they won't be held liable? That's the trick. To squeeze out any chance of fraud on either side, with damning consequences for breaking the rules (I'd also accept criminal liability for those involved in lieu of bankrupting a concern).
A fine that is equal to the wages saved should create an incentive to pay at least that wage. Perhaps also give half of the fine to anyone, including an undocumented worker, who chooses to report the violation.
Again, I don't believe that's going to incentivize legal behavior. It's too low.
10x wages saved, directly paid to the undocumented worker might be the way to go.
If they're taking personal risks and spending their own money to get to places like that, perhaps it is better than what they left behind.
A few men from a village would take the long trek to El Norte, work for a few dollars an hour at backbreaking work for eight months and come home. They'd be rich and buy new pickup trucks. Pretty girls would marry them. They'd run out of money and go back on the dangerous trip to El Norte. Kids would be growing up without fathers and the local economy would collapse because Gringo money was driving up the price of homes and supplies above what you could earn on local farms. More and more men had to join them on the way to El Norte for eight or ten months a year in cold or steaming hot dorms crowded, hurting, vermin infested, saving cash to come home. You had to send your menfolk just to survive.
It was a permanent exploitation scheme, hurting everyone but rich Gringo businesses.
I'd build a wall and enforce the border in a second if I could, just for the good of the migrants. I'm glad more are putting down their buckets where they are and making good. Too bad about the Guatemalan villages the Gringos are draining now in the same way.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/mexico/gdp-growth
GDP has not changed significantly in the past 10 years. With oil supplies running low, the government is going to have increasing pressure on finding money.
My hunch is that its a combination of this, along with things getting "worse" comparatively speaking in the US.
Would that have an impact on the behavior of a rational business? Let's do some math, admitting that this is kinda a Fermi problem.
So if you are running a limited-service restaurant that employs poor people, and you have an employee working a 40-hr workweek at 7.35/hr, their yearly pay is $15,288. On top of that, you have an additional 15.3% ($2,329.88) [1] to pay for the employer's portion of social security and Medicare tax, $420 for unemployment tax[2], and employer portion of federal income taxes[3] of 10% on the first $11.525 ($922.50) and $15 on the rest ($555.45). And payroll for that employee costs $19,455.83. For a limited service restaurant, payroll overall costs 25%-30%[4] of gross revenue. So (making the unjustified simplifying assumption that revenue comes from employees roughly proportional to their payroll costs.) for each such employee, the business makes $64,852.78-$77,823.34 in net revenue per employee. Or, $45,396.94-$58,367.50 in revenue per employee after payroll but before other cost (goods, equipment, utilities, rent, etc) which we will all assume are fixed. So, if a business is risk-neutral, all costs other than labor don't effect decision-making, and we don't account for the possibility of going out of business then your policy is a bad idea if the probability of accidentally hiring an illegal immigrant and getting caught is 4.54%-5.84%.
What is the probability of hiring an illegal immigrant if a business hires someone who, to them, looks Hispanic?
If there are 11 million[5] illegal immigrants in the US. Let's say 7.35 million[6] of them are Hispanic/Latino in appearance (I'm talking about racial discrimination here, so the diversity of Hispanic peoples gets reduced to one question: Does a business owner think they "look Hispanic"?). One source[7], whose neutrality I doubt, claims that 75% of illegal immigrants have forged documents like social security cards. It would make sense that they would want to obtain documents that allow them to work, so lets assume that's true. So than means 5.5 million Hispanic people with forged documents. There are 55 million[8] Hispanic people living in the U.S. That means that 10% of them are people with forged employment documents. Accounting for the fact that illegal immigrants are more likely to be in the low-income workforce than Hispanic citizens, it's probably higher.
What is the probability of getting caught? I'm on a phone and too tired to continue this calculation and I'm on my phone. But if it was 0.45-0.58, then it would be prohibitively expensive for a risk-neutral rational business whose only cost was labor to hire someone who looked Hispanic. That sounds to like economic conditions that are unfavorable to poor Hispanic people.
Of course, you could fix this by adding a Mens Rea component to your proposal.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15.pdf, page 31
[2] ibid, page 35
[3] ibid, page 46
[4] http://smallbusiness.chron.com/percentage-should-restaurant-...
[5] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/24/5-facts-abou...
[6] ibid: 5.9 million from Mexico; pulled out of my ass: 1.45 million from elsewhere in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. I'm fudging the fact that there are black people and white people from those regions. Better numbers welcomed.
[7] I doubt it's neutrality but it does make sense that illegal immigrants would want forged documents. How hard it is to counterfeit? I don't know. http://cis.org/IdentityTheft
[8] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/25/u-s-hispanic...