Top Story – More Mexicans are now leaving the United States than arriving, a Pew Research Center report released on Thursday revealed.
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One of his rivals for the GOP nomination, billionaire Donald Trump, would like a wall, too, and he also wants to create a massive “deportation force” that would, um, “humanely” remove more than 11 million undocumented immigrants from the United States. Wanting to be with family members was the main reason cited for returning to Mexico, with 61 percent of those responding to a questionnaire citing that as their primary motivation.
Another telling statistic: 35 percent of adults in Mexico say they have friends or relatives they regularly communicate with or visit in the USA, a Pew survey this year found. That’s down 7 percentage points from 2007. The survey, conducted in 2014, found that 6 in 10 Mexicans who moved to the US after 2009 and returned to Mexico before 2014 said they returned to reunite with family or start a family of their own.
The Pew Center found that 47 percent of Mexican nationals surveyed believe that life in their native country is just as good or even better than what they would find across the border. 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.
It seems the endeavor of migrating simply isn’t worth it to more and more Mexicans, with a growing share saying life in the U.S.is neither better nor worse than it is in Mexico.
While the USA economy has struggled to recover, Mexico has been largely free of the economic slumps which drove generations of people to the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s for work.
The decline in the flow of Mexican immigrants to the U.S.is due to several reasons The slow recovery of the USA economy after the Great Recession may have made the US less attractive to potential Mexican migrants and may have pushed out a few Mexican immigrants as the USA job market deteriorated. Unfortunately, the press rarely mentions that, and so the lie persists in US political discourse. “I would not say that Mexico has more of a pull”, Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Pew research associate and author of the study, told the Los Angeles Times.
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“It’s interesting that migration from Mexico appears to now be turning towards Mexico at the same time that migration from Asia seems to be on the rise”, Lopez said. But apprehensions of non-Mexican migrants, mostly from Central America, totaled 253,000, the first year that border agents caught more non-Mexicans than Mexicans. It’s the lowest flow of Mexican migrants into the USA since the 1990s.
