Approximately 870,000 people arrived to the US from Mexico, but it’s the largest dip since mass migration to the USA began in the 1970s, according to the study.
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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.
Although the Pew study indicates there has been a net loss in migrants between the United States and Mexico, with more Mexicans leaving than coming in recent years, the numbers involved are still very large.
A new Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from both countries showed that the desire to reunite with families was the main reason behind the trend.
Some Mexicans have chosen to leave the USA for economic reasons, but tougher border security has also reduced the flow of illegal immigrants.
There are also some shifting perceptions in Mexico about living in the USA, according to a PRC poll done in Mexico, with 33 percent of respondents saying, “Life is neither better nor worse north of the border”. The Pew Center report released Thursday notes that the result has been a drop of over 1 million unauthorized Mexican immigrants from 6.9 million in 2007 to about 5.6 million 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.
But the ones who’ve really got their knickers in a knot are immigration hardliners who are panicked by a Mexican invasion that isn’t. Of those who said they had lived in the United States in 2009, 61 percent said they returned to their native country to rejoin or start a family. The Obama administration has deported more Mexicans than any other president.
What’s more, half of the immigrants from Mexico in the United States in 1990 had been here for 10 years or less.
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The number of Mexicans deported through heightened ICE enforcement has spiked. A year ago and this fall, USA immigration authorities detected an uptick in illegal immigration from Central America. What is significant, she said, is that there hadn’t been any evidence to show that the net flow from Mexico to the US was negative until now. But here’s the clincher: By 2065, Pew projects that there will be 441 million people living in the United States, and an astonishing 88% of that growth will be attributed to future immigrants and their offspring. Over the past 50 years, the total U.S. population has grown from 193 million to 324 million.
