As tide of illegal immigrants goes home, will US economy suffer?

The illegal immigrant boom has fizzled; and as Mexican migrants go home, the question is whether it will drain the labor pool and hurt the US economy.

The steady stream of immigrant workers who used to line up at Tim Dunn's Arizona farm, ready to pick vegetable seed crops like black-eyed peas and garbanzo beans, has mostly dried up.

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"We just don't see people walking up, looking for jobs like they used to," he says. Now he has to pay a labor contractor to find enough people to tend his 2,200 furrowed acres under the harsh Sonoran sun near Yuma, in the southwestern corner of Arizona.

The dwindling supply of labor available to Mr. Dunn illustrates a significant shift in migration from Mexico, which has caused illegal immigration to drop to its lowest levels.

Even as states loudly debate new immigration restrictions ? including Arizona's proposed armed, all-volunteer state militia to keep Mexicans from sneaking across the US-Mexican border ? research suggests the illegal immigration has slowed.

The migration explosion that since the 1970s had pushed millions of men, women, and children into the United States has fizzled, says Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton University and codirector of the long-term, binational Mexican Migration Project. "We're at a turning point, and what unfolds in the future remains to be seen. But I think the boom is over."

Mr. Massey's research shows that after the US recession hit, the illegal population fell from about 12 million to 11 million, where it has hovered since 2009. (About 60 percent of the illegal population is Mexican.)

Similarly, Homeland Security estimates released in March suggest that while the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the US grew 36 percent between 2000 and 2011, from 8.5 million to 11.5 million, that growth plateaued in 2010 and 2011.

"With no change in either direction, we're roughly at a net zero," says Massey, and adds that it's something unseen since the late 1950s.

The 2004 movie "A Day Without a Mexican," in which the state of California grinds to a halt when Mexican laborers suddenly disappear, satirized a thesis that is now a subject of real-life debate among experts.

What if the workers that farmers, hotels, and restaurants have relied on for decades don't come back? Will crops rot, beds stay unmade, and dirty dishes pile high in restaurants? Those sectors can't outsource labor; so will they slow, downsize, and will that create ripple effects across the already straitened US economy?

Experts agree that illegal immigration has declined sharply in recent years and cite the overall lack of work as the main reason many Mexicans choose to stay home.

But the big debate is how permanent the trend is. Most experts expect the flow to return once the US economy rebounds. But some say there are other factors at play that could keep Mexicans home, including more access to legal US work visas, border enforcement efforts on the US side and drug-war insecurity on the Mexican side, demographic shifts in Mexico, and growing economic incentives there.

The shrinking labor pool already is having an impact in agricultural fields scattered throughout the US, some say. For example, a University of Georgia report projects that, when 2011 figures are tallied, the state economy will show a $391 million loss due to farm labor shortages. Georgia is one of several states that ? following Arizona's footsteps ? recently passed laws aimed at illegal immigration. Farmers across the country are experiencing near-term crop losses and scaling back operations, confirms Libby Whitley, president of Mid-Atlantic Solutions in Lovingston, Va. Her company handles visa applications for 600 employers who use temporary legal workers, mostly from Mexico.

miracle andy whitfield kennedy demi moore roy oswalt kevin martin 2012 senior bowl