“But certainly this is a topic area that the candidates have been talking about”, he said, adding that several of the Democratic candidates in recent debates have referred to a 2012 Pew report that found the net migration from Mexico to the US had reached zero.
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[Photo by John Moore / Getty Images]The Pew study comes at a time when the subject of Mexican immigration has become one of the hot button issues this election cycle. Only 6 percent said they left to change jobs or find employment and 14 percent said they were deported.
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. Less than half of Mexicans (48 percent) said that life in the U.S. is better now.
Most Mexicans leaving the United States are doing so voluntarily to reunite with their family or to start one, the report by the Pew Research Center showed.
Many Mexicans who had previously come seeking jobs in the US came illegally, partly because of restrictions on Mexican immigration put in place by 1965 immigration reform.
The study used both Mexican and U.S. government census data to calculate the migration flow between their borders. The ENADID survey identified that the importance of family is the primary reason for migrating back to Mexico.
A new study of immigration to the United States shows that more Mexicans have returned home than have arrived here since 2009.
While the United States 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.
The number of Mexicans living in the USA has dropped by more than a million in less than a decade, marking a historic shift: more Mexican migrants now leave the States than enter. 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. “That’s the reason we’re not expecting the level will go back to what it was”, Gonzalez-Barrera said.
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All this talk of a wall between the USA and Mexico has tainted the discussion about immigration in the USA – so much so that it’s made us forget about a few pretty simple facts. However, a growing number (33 percent in 2014) believe that life is no better in the US than in Mexico; the number who believed that in 2007 was only 23 percent. But it remains important for those of us fighting for the human rights of undocumented immigrants and refugees to stay grounded in the factual.
