A majority of the Mexican immigrants who left the USA for Mexico between 2009 and 2014 did so on their own, according to a Mexican survey cited in the Pew report.
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The report echoes studies that had recorded drops in illegal immigration, but it delves into the reasons driving the trend and contrasts the drop with the number of Mexicans who leave the United States. However, data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that immigrants from China – not Mexico or Central America – are the largest group that is now immigrating to the United States.
The study attributes the decline in net immigration to several factors, including the U.S.’s slow recovery from the recession, an increase in border security and and uptick in deportations.
In addition, stricter enforcement of U.S. immigration laws, particularly at the U.S.-Mexico border may have contributed to the reduction of Mexican immigrants coming to the U.S.in recent years.
While the US economy has struggled to recover, Mexico has been largely free of the economic slumps which drove generations of people to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s for work.
Mexicans have always been considered the largest proportion of immigrants in the US, although it now seems that the Asians are becoming the most dominant share of the immigrant population. About 6 percent said they had found jobs there. A desire to reunite with family members is another. The Obama administration has deported more Mexicans than any other president. By 2014, fewer Mexican nationals were leaving the us than a decade earlier, but even fewer were entering the country from Mexico.
According to Pew’s findings, a growing percentage of Mexican adults see life in the United States as no better than living in Mexico. Still, unauthorized immigrants from Mexico account for about half of all USA unauthorized immigrants. Those anchors apparently aren’t enough to hold those families in the United States. Pew Research Center estimated that in 2014 there were about 5.6 million Mexicans residing in the U.S. illegally. In 2007, 42% of Mexicans surveyed by Pew said they kept in contact with friends or family in the United States.
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.
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What all of this suggests, of course, is that the illegal immigration “problem” is widely overblown and that the rhetoric from Trump and others is, at this point, nothing but opportunistic nonsense built on fear, half-truths, ignorance, and xenophobia.
