The report says about 1 million Mexicans left the United States between 2009 and 2014 to return home, while an estimated 870,000 left Mexico to come live in the United States.
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“This report uses the best available government data from both countries to estimate the size of these flows”.
A new Pew Research study found that more Mexican immigrants have gone back to Mexico than have snuck across the border into the United States, creating a negative flow.
Between 2009 and 2014, 1 million Mexicans, including their US-born children, have left America.
The study found that among the most common reasons Mexicans are saying adiós to the US are a slow economic recovery here and the fact that they miss their families back home.
Last year, the number of Mexicans caught crossing the border illegally – an imperfect but still widely used indicator of overall illegal crossings – dropped to 230,000, according to official figures, the lowest level since 1971.
#4 China pushed Mexico from its perch as the top fount for new immigrants, the U.S. Census Bureau reported earlier.
Mexicans have been the largest source of migrants to the United States for decades, with 16 million Mexicans moving to the USA between 1965 and 2015.
An appeal’s court decision recently blocked a series of executive orders signed by President Obama in November 2014 that were created to protect a few 5 million undocumented immigrants from the immediate threat of deportation. This decline, according to the report, has been mostly due to the smaller number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants now living in the U.S. There were 6.9 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico living in the U.S.in 2007.
A key reason for the new pattern is that many Mexicans want to reunite with their families, Pew found.
Life now isn’t any better for them in the United States than it is in Mexico.
Angeline Echeverria, executive director of the advocacy group El Pueblo, said the law is sending a chill through the immigrant community and feeding broader discrimination.
“This is the first time that we have the actual evidence and numbers of people going back”, she said, said Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, a research associate who wrote the report. An additional 14 percent had been deported, and 6 percent said they returned for jobs in Mexico.
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One clue to the recent change in the trend is in current perceptions: today one-third of Mexicans believe their standard of living would be no higher north of the border, compared to less than one-quarter who thought so in 2007.
