Thread: Why fewer Mexicans are leaving their homeland for the U.S.

Why fewer Mexicans are leaving their homeland for the U.S.



Nigel Duara Contact Reporter

To its southern neighbor, the United States once represented hope, safety and prosperity. But with the effects of the Great Recession still lingering and tougher enforcement along the U.S. border, fewer Mexicans see a reason to leave their homeland.

Workplace raids by immigration agents, nose-diving birthrates at home and the economic slowdown north of the border have convinced nearly half of Mexicans surveyed that life in their native country is as good or better than what would await them if they crossed into the U.S., according to findings released Thursday by the Washington-based Pew Research Center.

In 2007, 23% of Mexicans told Pew researchers that life is neither better nor worse in the U.S. than in Mexico. By 2014, 33% made the same assessment.

“I would not say that Mexico has more of a pull,” said study author and Pew research associate Ana Gonzalez-Barrera. “But the United States isn’t as attractive.”

The report echoes studies that had recorded drops in illegal immigration, but it delves into the reasons driving the trend and contrasts the drop with the number of Mexicans who leave the United States.




According to census numbers from the U.S. and Mexico, since 2005 Mexican nationals have begun to leave the U.S. in greater numbers than at any point in history, and the largest share of those who return to Mexico are immigrants who had been in the country illegally.

The number of people leaving the U.S. began to fall off in 2010. By 2014, fewer Mexican nationals were leaving the U.S. than a decade earlier, but even fewer were entering the country from Mexico. The result, Gonzalez-Barrera argues, is the first modern instance of the migration scales tipping: More Mexican nationals are leaving the U.S. than the number of Mexicans entering the country.

“We haven’t seen that since the 1930s,” Gonzalez-Barrera said.

The report focused on migration of Mexicans, not other nationalities. Last year and this fall, U.S. immigration authorities detected an uptick in illegal immigration from Central America.

Mexico has not become more alluring, Gonzalez-Barrera said, despite the presence of more jobs in the country — and fewer births means fewer people in the labor pool.

But the image of the U.S. has been tarnished among Mexicans, according to opinion polling cited by Pew.


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About half of all adults in Mexico still think those who have left Mexico for the U.S. lead better lives than those left behind, but the growing share who don’t see much of a difference is the key to understanding the most recent cycle of immigration.

In the 1990s, Mexico was slammed by an economic downturn, and a tremendous number of people born in the 1970s was finally entering the labor pool. Seeking a way to earn money, children and adults younger than 30 made up 50% of immigrants into the U.S. from Mexico in 1990, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and its American Community Survey.

The North American Free Trade Agreement also led Mexicans out of their country’s farm sector, Gonzalez-Barrera said, and the U.S. border was so porous that there was little disincentive to stay in Mexico. “Anybody who could come across could get in,” she said.

A border fence cuts through the desert that separates Nogales, Ariz., from Mexico. A new report says migration from Mexico has dropped while more Mexican in the U.S. have returned to their homeland.
(John Moore / Getty Images)


In the 2000s, the U.S. began to change its border policy. It now criminalizes people who cross the border more than once. Highly publicized workplace raids that rounded up scores of unauthorized workers — for example, at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa — reinforced the idea of a more watchful federal government.

From 2005 to 2009, census data from the U.S. and Mexico cited by Pew showed about the same number of Mexican nationals entering the country as leaving.

Those who are still coming to the U.S. are doing so for the money, Gonzalez-Barrera said.

“U.S. wages are still attractive to migrants,” she said.

“There is still much more to be earned here than in Mexico.”


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The Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics found that the pull of family factors most into Mexicans’ desire to return home. The survey, conducted in 2014, found that 6 in 10 Mexicans who moved to the U.S. after 2009 and returned to Mexico before 2014 said they returned to reunite with family or start a family of their own.

Far smaller shares said they had been deported (14%) or returned to look for work (6%).

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...118-story.html

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Study finds more Mexicans leaving the US than coming

United States, reversing the flow of a half-century of mass migration, according to a study published Thursday.

The Pew Research Center found that slightly more than 1 million Mexicans and their families, including American-born children, left the U.S. for Mexico from 2009 to 2014.

During the same five years, 870,000 Mexicans came to the U.S., resulting in a net flow to Mexico of 140,000.

The desire to reunite families is the main reason more Mexicans are moving south than north, Pew found.

The sluggish U.S. economic recovery and tougher border enforcement are other key factors.

The era of mass migration from Mexico is "at an end," declared Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew's director of Hispanic research.

The finding follows a Pew study in 2012 that found net migration between the two countries was near zero, so this represents a turning point in one of the largest mass migrations in U.S. history.

More than 16 million Mexicans moved to the United States from 1965 to 2015, more than from any other country.

"This is something that we've seen coming," Lopez said. "It's been almost 10 years that migration from Mexico has really slowed down."

The findings counter the narrative of an out-of-control border that has figured prominently in U.S. presidential campaigns, with Republican Donald Trump calling for Mexico pay for a fence to run the entire
length of the 1,954-mile frontier.

Pew said there were 11.7 million Mexicans living in the U.S. last year, down from a peak of 12.8 million in 2007. That includes 5.6 million living in the U.S. illegally, down from 6.9 million in 2007.

In another first, the Border Patrol arrested more non-Mexicans than Mexicans in the 2014 fiscal year, as more Central Americans came to the U.S., mostly through South Texas, and many of them turned themselves in to authorities.

The authors analyzed U.S. and Mexican census data and a 2014 survey by Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

The Mexican questionnaire asked about residential history, and found that 61 percent of those who reported living in the U.S. in 2009 but were back in Mexico last year had returned to join or start a family.

An additional 14 percent had been deported, and 6 percent said they returned for jobs in Mexico.

Dowell Myers, a public policy professor at the University of Southern California, said it's lack of jobs in the U.S. — not family ties — that is mostly motivating Mexicans to leave.

Construction is a huge draw for young immigrants, but has yet to approach the levels of last decade's housing boom, he said.

"It's not like all of a sudden they decided they missed their mothers," Myers said. "The fact is, our recovery from the Great Recession has been miserable. It's been miserable for everyone."

Also, Mexico's population is aging, meaning there's less competition for young people looking for work.

That's a big change from the 1990s, when many people entering the workforce felt they had no choice but to migrate north of the border, Myers said.

While the U.S. economic recovery is sluggish, Mexico has been free in recent years from the economic tailspins that drove earlier generations north in the 1980s and 1990s.

While many parts of Mexico suffer grinding poverty and violence, others have become thriving manufacturing centers under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Automakers including Volkswagen AG, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. have built plants across central and northern Mexico that employ thousands, spawning auto-parts plants and other ripple effects.

Highways and rail lines that connect to the world's largest economy north of the border have attracted more investors.

"The main reason for my return is family," José Arellano Correa, a 41-year-old Mexico City taxi driver who came back from the U.S. in 2005. "I could help them while I was there, but family comes before money."

Farmworkers recruited from Mexico to harvest U.S. crops had followed the seasons back and forth across the border until 1965, when the U.S. imposed numerical limits on Latin American immigrants

for the first time, launching new waves of illegal immigration that flowed north for decades thereafter.

A federal law passed in 1986, four years after Mexico's economy convulsed, led to a more fortified border and legal status for millions of migrants.

Policies toughened even more after 9/11, with the Border Patrol doubling in size and the U.S. erecting hundreds of miles of fences, and Arizona led a backlash in state capitols as Mexicans moved

beyond traditional destinations like Los Angeles and Chicago, settling in towns throughout the South and Midwest.

Many Mexicans in the U.S. have become frustrated and fearful as efforts to overhaul immigration laws stalled in Congress and President Barack Obama deported roughly 2 million people during the first

five years of his administration.Obama's 2014 order shielding many others from deportation remains blocked in court.

Mexicans who remain in the U.S. also seem more detached from their homeland than before. Pew said their median age was 39 years in 2013, compared to 29 in 1990.

More than three in four had been in the U.S. for more than a decade, compared to only half in 1990.

And only 35 percent of adults in Mexico say they have friends or relatives they regularly communicate with or visit in the U.S., down 7 percentage points from 2007, Pew found.

Guadalupe Romo, 49, has lived in Fresno, California, for 26 years and has no plans to leave.

"We have our life here," she said at Fresno's Mexican consulate. "There's no point in going back to Mexico."

Study finds more Mexicans leaving the US than coming | www.wftv.com

I'll believe this when I start hearing English in the stores in my town. Sometimes I just get hungry to hear English if you know what I mean.

More Mexicans returning home, fewer coming to U.S.


04-23-2012