More Mexicans Leaving the United States Than Arriving

A new report from the Pew Research Center reveals for the first time in more than four decades, more Mexican immigrants are returning back to their native homeland than entering the United States.

Analysis of government data from Mexico and the USA suggests that migration between the two countries is at the lowest level in at 15 years.

More Mexicans are leaving the United States than migrating into the country, marking a reversal of one of the most significant immigration trends in USA history.

Between 2009 and 2014, 870,000 Mexicans crossed the border into the US, Pew reports. As a result, the US saw a net loss of 20,000 Mexican immigrants in this time period. Pew said there were 11.7 million Mexicans living in the US last year, down from a peak of 12.8 million in 2007.

Pew has been tracking flows for about 15 years, said Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, a research associate who wrote the report.

Mexicans have always been considered the largest proportion of immigrants in the US, although it now seems that the Asians are becoming the most dominant share of the immigrant population.

As Donald Trump vows to shield America from a deluge of Mexican migrants, he may be a bit flabbergasted by this fact: More Mexicans have actually left the States than entered it in recent years. China is pulling up to Mexico, but Pew found that it was not clear from current data whether China has become the leading immigrant country.

It looks like the need for a 1,954-mile wall along the USA border with Mexico that a few GOP candidates have been proposing is out, unless the presidential hopefuls want it to keep the Mexicans who are here from leaving. Over 16 million Mexicans immigrated to the USA between 1965 and 2015, accounting for 28 percent of immigrants. But here’s the clincher: By 2065, Pew projects that there will be 441 million people living in the United States, and an astonishing 88% of that growth will be attributed to future immigrants and their offspring.

About 6-in-10 (61 percent) of those who reported living in the USA but then returning to Mexico said that they had done so to reunite their families, while 14 percent said they were deported.

It blamed heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the “growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings”, a long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rate that reduced the pool of potential migrants, and the USA job and housing construction markets, which had been weakened by the Great Recession. But strikingly, an increasing number of Mexicans interviewed for the study said that life north of the border was no better or worse than in Mexico itself.