In today’s edition of Cato Unbound, Douglass S. Massey, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University, writes

Mexican immigrants are routinely portrayed as a tidal wave of human beings fleeing an impoverished, disorganized nation who are desperate to settle in the United States, where they will overwhelm our culture, displace our language, mooch our social services, and undermine our national security… This profile, however, bears no discernable relationship to the reality that I know as a social scientist.

Massey, drawing on his decades of research on Mexican migration, argues each element of this picture is false, and has exacerbated the problems of Mexico‑U.S. immigration.

Last year Cato published Massey’s study, “Backfire at the Border: Why Enforcement without Legalization Cannot Stop Illegal Immigration.”