More Mexicans Leave US Than Arrive in Country

More than a million Mexicans and their families left the United States from 2009 to 2014 while 870,000 came in, a net outflow of 140,000. The slow recovery of the US economy after the Great Recession may have made the USA less attractive to potential Mexican migrants and may have pushed out a few Mexican immigrants as the USA job market deteriorated.

The full report is available from Pew Research Centre.

“This is something that we’ve seen coming”, Lopez said.

Mexico’s middle class is emerging strong and growing at a rapid rate, nearly 11 percent in the past decade. In other words, contrary to popular narrative, the U.S.-Mexico border is not wildly insecure or out of control, and building a wall there is unlikely to do anything productive (talking to you, Donald Trump!).

The number of unauthorized immigrants crossing into Arizona from Mexico has continued to drop, research showed.

“I would not say that Mexico has more of a pull”, Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, author of the study, tells the Los Angeles Times. Troncoso said more families trying to reunite, stricter border guidelines and the Great Recession have been contributing factors to the drop in migration. Mexicans are still the largest immigrant group in the country. “It’s been miserable for everyone”. Also, its economy has improved from the 1980s and ’90s, when lack of work caused many young people to migrate north, he added. So it used a national household survey and two national censuses in Mexico and migration estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau to come up with the figures. A separate question targets more recent emigrants—people who left Mexico.

Auto manufacturers, including Volkswagen, Ford and GM have built plants in central and northern Mexico, creating thousands of jobs.

“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.

Despite talk of bigger border fences and mass deportation during the current election cycle, more Mexicans are leaving the country than entering.

Interestingly, a few of these 1 million were US citizens born in this country to undocumented parents, whom the nativist right derides as “anchor babies”. The number of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. peaked in 2007 at 12.8 million. The Obama administration has deported more Mexicans than any other president.

Pew said that their results confirm a tendency toward less Mexican migration and more such nationals returning home. Pew said their median age was 39 years in 2013, compared to 29 in 1990.