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As mergers and new fears of overbuilding make real estate headlines, much of the industry is ignoring one of the most important future influences on real estate-immigration.
JPM: EYKL's new report on immigration notes that approximately 1 million immigrants a year arrived in the U.S. between 1991 and 1996. Do you see this flow continuing?
Ross: We believe that the tide will keep coming, perhaps making the 1990s the decade with the greatest amount of immigration in this century. There is a great deal of economic uncertainty throughout the world, and these periods of instability help drive immigration-whether it is Russian immigrants after the fall of Communism or Vietnamese or Indonesians from the economic woes of the Asian flu. Mexico and Latin America also will continue as a major source of new immigrants, both because of proximity and because of the unsettled nature of the Mexican economy.
Unless immigration restrictions are changed, the National Academy of Sciences estimates that immigration-driven increases in population will give the United States a population by 2050...