Mexicans not returning home, 'fallacy, crazy to leave'

9/23/16 10:19 AM


A protester against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves a flag of Mexico. A former top Mexican
official dismissed reports that Mexicans are returning home. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Mexico's former foreign secretary dismissed U.S. reports that Mexican illegals are rushing home, creating a "net-zero" immigration situation, offering a bounty if one "returnee" can be found.

"If somebody can find me a single Mexican in the U.S. who has a job, doesn't want to retire, and who wants to go back to Mexico, I'll build a monument or statue in his honor," said Jorge Castañeda, who served as Mexico's secretary of foreign affairs from 2000 to 2003, and who is currently a professor at New York University.

"If you know any Mexican who is crazy enough to leave the job he has here and voluntarily leave and to home to that, please let me know," he said at the Hudson Institute this week.




Several research centers and pundits have made the claim that just as many Mexicans are returning to their home as entering the United States.

But Castañeda said they are manipulating data to make it look like deportations are voluntary returns, calling the net-zero argument "a fallacy" and "nonsense." Explaining, he said, "Obama deported about 2.3, 2.4 million people back to Mexico and Central America over his eight years, which about 1.5 million were Mexicans. If you consider those to be 'voluntary returns,' yes, then you have net zero."

But he said there is no evidence that Mexicans with jobs in the United States are going home voluntarily to make far less in a much worse economy.



"Even just one guy, I don't need more, just one. There is no such person. You have to be absolutely nuts if you're already here and making $10, $12, $15 bucks an hour and go back to Mexico to make, if your well-paid, maybe $300 bucks a month. That's well-paid. Seventy percent of all Mexicans make less than $300 dollars a month," he said.

He explained that an auto worker is at the top salary scale when making $300 a month. He said that farm workers make $6 a day in Mexico.

"This nonsense I hear from so many people, even serious people, 'Mexicans are returning to Mexico, the U.S. economy is doing terribly, and the Mexican economy is booming, so they all want to go back.' Like, where do they live? The U.S. economy will grow this year about 50 percent more than the Mexican economy," said the former top diplomat in comments first reported by reported by the Weekly Standard's Ethan Epstein.

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