More Mexican immigrants returning home

The study found that the main reason for Mexicans going back to their home country is to reunite with their relatives. U.S. Census data showed the number of Mexican national coming into the United States at 870,000.

T he migration flow of Mexicans to the USA is at its lowest level since the 1990s, a study released by Pew Research Centre showed on Thursday.

A majority of the Mexican immigrants who left the US for Mexico between 2009 and 2014 did so on their own, according to a Mexican survey cited in the Pew report. The findings are based on U.S. Census Bureau surveys that measure immigrant inflow from Mexico along with data from the National Survey on Demographic Dynamics (ENADID) conducted by Mexico’s chief statistical agency (INEGI) to measure migration back.

Overall, the Mexican-immigrant population in the US – both legal and undocumented – was approximately 11.7 million in 2014, a loss of about a million people from its peak of 12.8 million in 2007.

During the same time period, the PRC found that about 1 million people went the opposite way, returning to Mexico from the US, a net minus. Other reasons include lack of jobs in the US – courtesy of the Great Recession, an improving economy in Mexico and tighter border security.

Mexican immigration to the United States held steady through the first half of the 20th century, but it began to rise sharply in the 1950s and 1960s, and then shot up dramatically starting in the 1970s. The Obama administration has deported more Mexicans than any other president. Immigration activists and Latino groups had dubbed him “deporter-in-chief” for the high deportation rate. “People are pouring into our country”. The latest effort has been blocked in the courts by Republican governors.

These conditions made the USA a much less attractive destination for Mexican migrant workers than it had been before, Pew reports. In 2007, this number stood at 6.9 million.

Mexicans who remain in the USA seem more detached from their homeland than before.

So why are they leaving?

The U.S. saw a net decrease in Mexican residents from 2009 to 2014, a report by the Pew Hispanic Center reveals. Not only is their reasoning flawed, but the numbers also don’t add up. And an additional 100,000 were children under the age of 5 who had been born in the US and were living in Mexico in 2014.

The new migration pattern “stands in very stark contrast to the rhetoric we’re hearing in the presidential primaries”, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of political science at UC Riverside.