To reach their conclusion, Pew researchers looked at numerous sources of available data, including a Mexican national household survey, two Mexican censuses and U.S. Census data.
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Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for lower amounts of illegal and legal immigration, said it’d be a mistake to see the slow down in Mexican migration as the United States’ immigration boom’s ending. Over the past decade, more immigrants have come to the United States from Asia – mainly China, India, Korea, Philippines, and Vietnam – than from any other region in the world, now making Asians the fastest growing immigrant population in the United States. The findings counter the narrative of an out-of-control border that has figured prominently in United States presidential campaigns, with Republican Donald Trump calling for Mexico pay for a fence to run the entire length of the 1,954-mile frontier.
Life now isn’t any better for them in the United States than it is in Mexico.
The number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants has declined, too.
Tougher US immigration crackdowns have “led to an increase in the number of Mexican immigrants who have been deported from the US since 2005”. Pew found that from 2009 to 2014 about 1 million Mexicans and their families left the US for Mexico. A separate question targets more recent emigrantspeople who left Mexico. Many of them stayed, as the Pew study indicates that the number of Mexican nationals living in the United States hit a peak of 12.8 million in 2007, at which point the number began to fall.
Whilst 48% of Mexicans believe life in the U.S. is better, Pew Research Centre’s study also showed the changing attitudes of Mexicans to this claim.
The ENADID survey also indicated that family ties had played a large part in the rising numbers of Mexicans moving back south of the border: six in 10 of those who said they had lived in the USA five years ago but were back in Mexico as of last year cited reunification with loved ones as the main reason.
A new study has found that a longstanding flow of immigration has been reversed – more Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than migrating there.
“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. A majority said they returned of their own accord, with 61% saying they did so to reunite with family. Mexico’s population is aging, he said, which means there’s less competition for jobs.
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She says Mexican migration is in a new phase, and it will not return to the levels it once had.
