More Mexicans leaving USA than arriving

Authors of the study analysed USA and Mexican census data and a 2014 survey by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

After historic high numbers of northward migration, more Mexicans appear to be returning home than arriving in the United States, spurred on by family values and declining economic expectations, says a new analysis by the Pew Research Center.

The study found that between 2009 and 2014, 870,000 Mexicans left their country to move to the United States, while 1 million Mexicans left the United States to return home.

About 900,000 Mexican immigrants returned to Mexico from the USA between 2009 and 2014, many taking about 100,000 U.S.-born children under age 5 with them.

Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the center, said the net decline in Mexicans was driven by the Great Recession in the United States that made it harder to find jobs, an improving economy in Mexico and tighter border security.

According to the census data, 61 percent of Mexicans reported returning to Mexico to reunite with their families, but other researchers have suggested that the U.S.’s sluggish economy could have impacted immigration as well.

He said: “This is something that we’ve seen coming”.

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

Today, an estimated 11.7 million Mexicans live in the US, down from 12.8 million in 2007. (Pew admits it’s “challenging” to measure migration flow between the United States and Mexico, but explains quite a bit about how it gets the best possible estimates here.) Why?

Mexico is the largest birth country among the US foreign-born population – 28 percent of all USA immigrants came from there in 2013. In 2007, 42% of Mexicans surveyed by Pew said they kept in contact with friends or family in the United States. But the Great Recession and weak recovery has caused a reversal in the U.S.-Mexico immigration relationship, with more heading south than traveling north.

When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump launched his campaign this summer, he did so with a call to stem immigration from Mexico, which he said had exploded. That’s a big change from the 1990s, when many people entering the workforce felt they had no choice but to migrate north of the border, Myers said.

Fear is just one of the reasons representatives at Raices here in San Antonio say many of their Mexican clients have expressed going back to Mexico. 2014 resulted in the fewest number of apprehensions at the border since 1971 – indicating an overall drop in crossing attempts.