More Mexicans Are Leaving The USA, Study Finds

Though the new direction of Mexican migration has been noted in short-term reports in recent years, the Pew Research study released Thursday looked at a five-year pattern.

In 2007, 23 percent of Mexicans told Pew researchers that life is neither better nor worse in the USA than in Mexico. Gonzalez-Barrera said that figure might not reflect all Mexican residents expelled by USA authorities, because many Mexican deportees have said they crossed again illegally to return to families or jobs in the United States.

Between 2009 and 2014, the Mexican population in the US declined by 140,000 as 1 million left their wealthy northern neighbor to go back to their country of origin, according to the Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics (ENADID).

A new Pew Research study found that more Mexican immigrants have gone back to Mexico than have snuck across the border into the United States, creating a negative flow.

The report says illegal immigration from Mexico declined from a peak of 6.9 million in 2007 to 5.6 million a year ago, and the number of apprehensions at the border dropped to about 227,000, a level not seen since the early 1970s.

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

More Mexicans are now leaving the USA than are coming into the country. “They are getting assistance and a lot of help setting up businesses and they also get financial help”, said Arturo Sanchez, consul for economic and media affairs at the Mexican Consulate in Santa Ana.

From 2009 to 2014, more than one million Mexicans and their families left the United States for Mexico, while more than 865,000 entered the United States, Pew said. And less than half (48%) believe life would be better in the U.S.

“If people think that we are going to ship 11 million people who are law abiding, who are in this country, and somehow pick them up in their house and ship them out to Mexico, think about the families, think about the children”, he admonished. Mexicans are by far the largest nationality among undocumented immigrants.

Pew found that the main motive for the move to Mexico was the desire to either reunite families or begin one.

Farmworkers recruited from Mexico to harvest USA crops had followed the seasons back and forth across the border until 1965, when the US imposed numerical limits on Latin American immigrants for the first time, launching new waves of illegal immigration that flowed north for decades thereafter.