The Five Billion, Updated

I pointed out last summer that almost five billion people (4,976,000,000) live in countries with lower per capita GDPs (purchasing power parity) than Mexico. That has implications for immigration that almost nobody is thinking about as of yet.

In the long run, the OTM (Other-than Mexican) immigration problem will dwarf the Mexican immigration problem.

I reran the numbers using the latest figures on the CIA World Factbook, and this year the total population of people living in countries poorer than Mexico is up to 5,043,000,000. That's 77% of the world's 6,525,000,000 population.

Almost three billion people (2,965,000,000), or 45% of the world, live in countries with less than half of Mexico's $10,000 per capita GDP.

An extraordinary 85% of the world's children ages 0-14 live in countries poorer than Mexico (1,528,000,000 out of 1,789,000).

Compared to Mexico's 33 million children ages 0-14, countries poorer than Mexico have 47 times as many children.

India has ten times as many children, China eight times as many, and Pakistan three times as many. Indonesia has almost twice as many children, Nigeria 1.7 times as many, and Bangladesh and Brazil 1.7 times as many. Ethiopia, the Congo, and the Philippines have almost exactly the same number as Mexico.

It's likely that you have to be fairly close to as rich as Mexico to get a big flow of illegal immigrants going, as Brazil has begun recently. Of course, if the Senate's guest worker program passes, we'll start seeing a big influx from places like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, followed by illegal immigrants coming to stay with their legal relatives.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer