More Mexican Immigrants Leaving Than Coming To The United States — Republicans Wrong Again

Pew said that their results confirm a tendency toward less Mexican migration and more such nationals returning home.

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

The researchers noted that measuring migration flows between the two countries is challenging, mostly because there is no official process for measuring how many Mexican immigrants leave or enter the US each year, so the researchers looked at census data from both countries to draw the most accurate conclusion. Between 2009 and 2014, an estimated 870,000 Mexican nationals came to the United States from Mexico-but a million Mexicans went back the other way. Six in ten (roughly 61 percent) of these immigrants have said that they are leaving the U.S.to be reunited with their families.

That figure includes 5.6 million living in the U.S. illegally, down from 6.9 million in 2007. 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.

“We know that crossings are definitely down and we also know it is much more hard and costly to cross now than it used to be”, Pew research associate Ana Gonzales-Barrera told the NY Times. Over the past 50 years, the total United States population has grown from 193 million to 324 million. For reasons not entirely clear, that message struck a chord with the country’s less-informed citizens, prompting a few laughably ridiculous but also kind of terrifying quotes from Trump and a variety of his peers about the future of immigration. The net gain – for Mexico – was about 140,000 people, ending a half-century that saw more than 16 million Mexicans move to the United States (last year, 11.7 million were living here, compared with a peak of 12.8 million in 2007). According to a previous Pew report, border apprehensions in 2014 fell to a 1971 level, indicating that relatively few Mexicans were even trying to cross. Many other Republican candidates, including retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and Texas Senator Ted Cruz have followed Trump’s lead in ginning up anti-immigrant hysteria.

But Jose Arellano Correa, a 41-year-old Mexico City taxi driver, told the AP that, although he was able to help his family by sending money from the United States, “Family comes before money”.

Interestingly, in the 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney supported “self-deportation” as immigration policy. The rest left on their own accord. He lost to Obama in part because he captured only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.

#4 China pushed Mexico from its perch as the top fount for new immigrants, the U.S. Census Bureau reported earlier.